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<\/figure>\n\n\u2018The whole history of Palestinian struggle has to do with the desire to be visible.\u2019<\/p>\n
Edward Said<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
On the evening of March 3rd, 1991, Rodney King, a 25-year-old Black American, was pulled over by LAPD officers after a high-speed chase. What followed was recorded by George Holliday on a handheld camera. The grainy footage showed four officers\u2014Laurence Powell, Timothy Wind, Theodore Briseno, and Stacey Koon\u2014brutally beating King with punches, kicks, tasers, and batons. In 85 seconds, King was struck 56 times. The video, aired by CNN, went viral, triggering global outrage and leading to a criminal case against the officers. This was the first time a court had access to such clear and visual evidence of police brutality against a young Black man. The video became the trial\u2019s central piece of evidence.<\/p>\n
Having unprecedented confidence in this piece of evidence, the prosecutor opened his case by saying: \u2018What more could you ask for? You have the videotape that shows objectively, without bias, impartially what happened that night. During the closing argument, he played the video once again and asked the jury:\u00a0\u2018Now, who do you believe, the defendants or your own eyes?\u2019<\/em>\u00a0Yet, the jury acquitted the officers.<\/p>\n
During the trial, the defense, instead of discrediting the footage, decided to use the footage and instead discredit what people saw in it. To begin with, they claimed that the\u00a0technological footage cannot speak for itself. It needs\u00a0to be talked for. Then, they presented the short video not as a continuous event, but as slow-motioned, cut-outs of 56 single blows. Isolating each kick, punch from the preceding and the ensuing one.\u00a0\u00a0Then,\u00a0they placed each cut-out in a professional discourse<\/a>\u00a0associating escalation or de-escalation of force (i.e., beating or pausing) to corresponding signs of aggression or submission (i.e., different movements in Rodney King\u2019s body). A cramping leg, a moving hip, or a raised hand was tagged as signs of aggression and therefore legitimating the escalation of violence by police. Lying flat, motionless, almost lifeless under the blows of batons and kicks was read as submission and explaining a pause in beating. Through a mixture of technological reordering of the events and professional discourses, the defense team convinced the jury that what the whole world saw as objective evidence of brutal police violence was, in fact, a measured, textbook application of the law.<\/p>\n
This case illustrates that although sight is a physiological and objective act, seeing, as a basic act necessary for making sense of the evidence and meaningfully making the distinction between categories, here, of (un)lawful use of force, is in fact socially situated and technologically mediated. As such, technological seeing, that is, slow-motioned, replayed, re-ordered, separated vision, enables another mode of representation, where new meanings are produced in places where such meanings otherwise did not exist. In Rodney King\u2019s case, what seemed to anyone as agony, cry, and struggle of a body under attack, was presented as signs of aggression, which justifies more attack.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This reconfiguration of meanings through visual mediation opens the law to contestation and uncertainty over the truth of an event and hence the distribution of its protective categories. This social permeability of law allows for its categories to be continuously exposed to reconfiguration in ways otherwise unimaginable in exposure to new technologies of vision. This case tells us something about the law too, that is, the sources of law are not just to be searched in the law books, cases, norms, or rules of interpretation, but that law finds its sources in the relationships and social formations. Formations that are sometimes made through technological operations.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This dynamic extends to another form of state violence: War.\u00a0On 3 April 2024, the Palestinian-Israeli magazine\u00a0+972 and The Local Call<\/a>\u00a0revealed the Israeli military\u2019s use of an AI target-generating system called Lavender in its ongoing military campaign in Gaza.<\/p>\n
Put simply, Lavender processes data on Palestinians to algorithmically generate human targets. Accordingly, \u2018During the first weeks of the war \u2026 Lavender \u2026 clocked as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants \u2014 and their homes \u2014 for possible air strikes.\u2019\u00a0In observation of the outrageous death toll brought by Lavender, we may see the problem to be one of a lack of regulation and oversight, a remedy to which would be more human supervision and regulatory control. But lavender, like its American predecessor, the Disposition matrix \u2013 used in Iraq and Afghanistan \u2013 signals a deeper problem if we unpack the laws of war\u2019s relationship with technologies of visualization.<\/p>\n
The key to understanding the impact of advanced visual technology of targeting,\u00a0I propose<\/a>, requires acknowledging how the laws of war themselves produce an \u2018order of visibility\u2019 in order to legitimize lethal violence. The fundamental principle of the laws of war that draws the difference between lawful and unlawful modes of wartime killing is the principle of distinction. When broken down to its operative elements, this principle is simply\u00a0an order of visibility,<\/a>\u00a0a modality of visuality if you will. That is the organization of a field of vision through strict regulation of modes of appearance for people and places, as well as the sense that is to be made of them, and finally authorizing the use of force against some modes of wartime visual appearances and prohibiting it against others.<\/p>\n
It is for this reason that the Geneva Conventions contain numerous rules about appearances, dressing, perfidy, camouflage, or the use of color, and patterns on buildings, signs, flags, vehicles, etc. Soldiers must signal hostility through the wear of a distinct military uniform or signs visible from a distance, protected vehicles must be painted white, signs signifying civilian status must be painted in a specific size on specifically measured flags with material visible from a distance and in the dark, and so on and so forth.\u00a0\u00a0The battlefield in the eyes of the Geneva Conventions is a visually distinct and ordered field in which every sign, color, and pattern has a stable meaning.<\/p>\n
Problems arise in asymmetric warfare. Non-state or insurgent fighters forgo the visual markers. Such illicit\u00a0invisibility<\/em>then explains, but does not justify, the reliance on technologies that generate targets based on digital visualizations.<\/p>\n
Militaries like the US and Israel\u00a0have adopted technological solutions that combine hyper-visualisation and surveillance of the battlefield with algorithmic analytics referred to as pattern-of-life analysis.\u00a0The US army defines pattern-of-life analysis as<\/a>\u00a0\u2018an extensive, intelligence-oriented activity that establishes a physical, visualised, and tangible infrastructure of relations in the environment of operation by \u2018connecting the relationships between [observed] places and people.\u2019 The ultimate function of such analysis is to make the invisible enemy networks \u2018visible and vulnerable\u2019, thus negating \u2018the enemy\u2019s asymmetric advantage of denying a target.\u2019 Everything that is recorded by surveillance technologies, including everyday activities, movements, patterns of purchases, regular visits to different locations, or regular meetings or online\/ phone contacts with other individuals, is analysed to produce a visualised network of relations between people and places, and determines their degree of targetability.<\/p>\n
These tools visualize the battlefield as an array of networks in which nodes are identifiers (IP address, phone number) and links are their interactions. A node\u2019s importance, then, is determined by the intensity or frequency of the interaction it has with other nodes. These factors, in addition to the overall character of the observed network, in turn determine the value of each node (individual) as a probable target.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In the Israeli context, these links are referred to as\u00a0features<\/em>.\u00a0Lavender processes surveillance data to identify Palestinians with similar behavioural patterns to previously defined features of an enemy target. The result is assigning a risk value from 1\u2013100 to the observed population. The allocated risk determines the individual targetability.<\/em>\u00a0Lavender and Disposition Matrix are essentially tools for providing alternative modes of visibility, in the form of patterns and networks that compensate for the insurgents\u2019 intentional invisibility.<\/p>\n
The stakes extend beyond questions of legality or temporal and spatial expansion of wartime violence. In reenacting the law\u2019s requirement of visibility for legitimation of violence, these technologies are rewriting the very idea of legitimate violence in ways otherwise unimaginable.\u00a0What is happening is a great perversion of the laws of armed conflict in producing enemy targets in terms of resemblance, approximation, and association, as opposed to the hostile actions of politically motivated agents. As such, rendering as targets whoever is in proximity of whatever that resembles an enemy feature. In this sense, the digital technologies of targeting are tools for recasting as targets an otherwise civilian population. Thus, the new modes of representation (i.e., creating visibilities and meanings associated with those visibilities) facilitated by these technologies are attempts to produce new forms of wartime legality.<\/p>\n
Industrial Scale of Killing<\/strong><\/p>\n
Target-generating technologies are often described as factories of targets. This is so because the politics of representation enacted by these machines has a concrete impact not only on the people who are observed and targeted, but also on those who survive. These machines do not operate in a vacuum. The lives that are constantly monitored, those that are taken by missiles and bombs, and those who survive these attacks share an ecosystem \u2013 a platform of affecting and being affected by \u2013 with the very technologies that monitor and target them. As Lavender targets patterns of lives and features, the targeted population in turn adapts their lives to patterns that, they come to understand, do not trigger the lethal algorithms of these machines. This is to say that as bombs strike certain patterns of life,\u00a0they eventually produce, favour, or impose other features as normal and unthreatening ones<\/a>. Then deviations from these newly imposed patterns, in turn, signify new anomalies and, as such, create new possibilities for lethal targeting. It is in this sense that these automated machines become self-perpetuating, industrial-scale killing machines that can produce new targets out of patterns of life that they initially did not consider bearing that meaning.<\/p>\n
Can You Be Palestinian and Look at This?<\/strong><\/p>\n
Technologies of vision entangled with state violence often involve and provoke another politics of vision, that is, politics of witnessing and evidencing. In an essay titled:\u00a0\u2018Can you be BLACK and Look at This?\u2019<\/a>\u00a0the poet Elizabeth Alexander reflects on the political, social, and interpersonal consequences of the viral circulation of images such as that of Rodney King. She asks how the constant circulation of footage of Black bodies in pain consolidates the category of Black? She explores the formation of self and collective identity in the midst of the constant circulation of images of Black people as victims of extreme violence for public consumption. And asks, \u2018How can this photograph exist?\u2019 It is perhaps fair to ask similar questions in the context of Palestine and the ongoing genocide.\u00a0Can you be Palestinian and look at this?<\/em><\/p>\n
Reflecting on a similar set of questions but in the context of Palestinian occupation and its representation in films and documentaries made by Palestinians as well as Israeli filmmakers, Gil Z. Hochberg raises different questions, one that engages us, the onlookers, as well.<\/p>\n