Books by Rebecca Stein
Stanford University Press, 2021
In the last two decades, amid the global spread of smartphones, state killings of civilians have ... more In the last two decades, amid the global spread of smartphones, state killings of civilians have increasingly been captured on the cameras of both bystanders and police. Screen Shots studies this phenomenon from the vantage point of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. Here, cameras have proliferated as political tools in the hands of a broad range of actors and institutions, including Palestinian activists, Israeli soldiers, Jewish settlers, and human rights workers. All trained their lens on Israeli state violence, propelled by a shared dream: that advances in digital photography—closer, sharper, faster—would advance their respective political agendas. Most would be let down.
Drawing on ethnographic work, Rebecca L. Stein chronicles Palestinian video-activists seeking justice, Israeli soldiers laboring to perfect the military's image, and Zionist conspiracy theorists accusing Palestinians of "playing dead." Writing against techno-optimism, Stein investigates what camera dreams and disillusionment across these political divides reveal about the Israeli and Palestinian colonial present, and the shifting terms of power and struggle in the smartphone age.
The Israeli feminist organization Gun Free Kitchen Tables (GFKT) is an initiative working to decr... more The Israeli feminist organization Gun Free Kitchen Tables (GFKT) is an initiative working to decrease small arms proliferation in the Israeli public sphere and to eliminate the violence facilitated by easy access to firearms. In March 2017, they issued “Loose Guns: Israeli Controlled Small Arms in the Civil Sphere.” Rebecca L. Stein sat down with Rela Mazali, a founding member of GFKT and veteran feminist anti-occupation activist, to discuss the report.
Israel's occupation has been transformed in the social media age. Over the last decade, military ... more Israel's occupation has been transformed in the social media age. Over the last decade, military rule in the Palestinian territories grew more bloody and entrenched. In the same period, Israelis became some of the world's most active social media users. In Israel today, violent politics are interwoven with global networking practices, protocols, and aesthetics. Israeli soldiers carry smartphones into the field of military operations, sharing mobile uploads in real-time. Official Israeli military spokesmen announce wars on Twitter. And civilians encounter state violence first on their newsfeeds and mobile screens.
Across the globe, the ordinary tools of social networking have become indispensable instruments of warfare and violent conflict. This book traces the rise of Israeli digital militarism in this global context—both the reach of social media into Israeli military theaters and the occupation's impact on everyday Israeli social media culture. Today, social media functions as a crucial theater in which the Israeli military occupation is supported and sustained.
Duke University Press, Jan 1, 2006
The Struggle for Sovereignty: Palestine and Israel, 1993-2005. Rochelle Davis Journal of Palestin... more The Struggle for Sovereignty: Palestine and Israel, 1993-2005. Rochelle Davis Journal of Palestine Studies 36:22, 92, 2007.
Published Essays by Rebecca Stein
International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2021
Over the course of the first two decades of the twenty-first century, within the occupied Palesti... more Over the course of the first two decades of the twenty-first century, within the occupied Palestinian territories, photographic technologies and image-oriented politics would grow increasingly central as activist and human-rights tools of bearing witness to Israeli state and settler violence. This essay investigates the Israeli right-wing and international Zionist response to these Palestinian visual archives and their perceived threat. In particular, it tracks the rise and normalization of a repudiation script that impugned the veracity of these images, arguing that they were fraudulent or manipulated to produce a damning portrait of Israel. Drawing on post-colonial and settler-colonial studies, as placed into dialogue with digital media studies, the essay focuses on three cases studies of repudiation (2000, 2008, 2014, respectively) to consider how the long colonial history of repudiation in the Israeli context would be progressively updated by right-wing Israelis and their international supporters to meet the challenges posed by the smartphone age. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the script had become an increasingly standard Zionist response to viral images of Palestinian death or injury at Israeli state or settler hands. Repudiation was thus marshaled as a solution to the viral visibility of Israeli state violence by bringing the otherwise damning images back into line with dominant Israeli ideology, a process of shifting the narrative from Palestinian injury to Israeli victimhood. The story of the "false" image of Palestinian injury endeavors strips the visual field of its Israeli perpetrators and Palestinian victims, thereby exonerating the state. Or such is the nature of this digital fantasy in the Israeli colonial present.
This paper is an ethnographical exploration of the growing importance of photographic technologie... more This paper is an ethnographical exploration of the growing importance of photographic technologies within the contemporary political theater of Israel's military occupation studied from the vantage of Israeli actors and institutions. My ethnography focuses on the Israeli military's growing investment in cameras as public relations technologies and how Israeli human rights groups are employing camera technologies against the military in unprecedented ways and degrees. Both institutions are now laboring to translate their work into visual registers, recognizing that political claims making depends on networked cameras and viral images as never before. My analysis focuses on what I term the " analytics of lapse " —instances in which photographic technologies, images, and associated infrastructures break down, lag, or otherwise fail to deliver on their ostensible communicative promise. Lapse provides a mean of thinking against cyber-utopian theories of new media even as it provides a way of unsettling enduring Israeli colonial logics of technological modernity.
Journal for Cultural Research, 2012
Anthropological Quarterly, 2012
Journal of Palestine Studies, 2005
GLQ: Gay Lesbian Quarterly, 2010
International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2009
International Journal of Middle East Studies, Nov 2008
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Books by Rebecca Stein
Drawing on ethnographic work, Rebecca L. Stein chronicles Palestinian video-activists seeking justice, Israeli soldiers laboring to perfect the military's image, and Zionist conspiracy theorists accusing Palestinians of "playing dead." Writing against techno-optimism, Stein investigates what camera dreams and disillusionment across these political divides reveal about the Israeli and Palestinian colonial present, and the shifting terms of power and struggle in the smartphone age.
Across the globe, the ordinary tools of social networking have become indispensable instruments of warfare and violent conflict. This book traces the rise of Israeli digital militarism in this global context—both the reach of social media into Israeli military theaters and the occupation's impact on everyday Israeli social media culture. Today, social media functions as a crucial theater in which the Israeli military occupation is supported and sustained.
Published Essays by Rebecca Stein
Drawing on ethnographic work, Rebecca L. Stein chronicles Palestinian video-activists seeking justice, Israeli soldiers laboring to perfect the military's image, and Zionist conspiracy theorists accusing Palestinians of "playing dead." Writing against techno-optimism, Stein investigates what camera dreams and disillusionment across these political divides reveal about the Israeli and Palestinian colonial present, and the shifting terms of power and struggle in the smartphone age.
Across the globe, the ordinary tools of social networking have become indispensable instruments of warfare and violent conflict. This book traces the rise of Israeli digital militarism in this global context—both the reach of social media into Israeli military theaters and the occupation's impact on everyday Israeli social media culture. Today, social media functions as a crucial theater in which the Israeli military occupation is supported and sustained.