Good Fences Make Good Neighbors: Visualizing Order and Emergency in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

• In Event: Settler Militarism: Order and Precarity

Abstract

Encounter Point (2006) and Budrus (2009) are two recent documentaries that depict representations of Israeli-Palestinian nonviolent peace-building initiatives with an express emphasis on small victories and the hyper-local. Both films have also been produced by American NGOs primarily for the American marketplace and potential donors. Determined to highlight a constructive depiction of communities succeeding through nonviolent co-operation in the midst of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, both documentary films stress to American audiences how courageous individuals make a difference in the lives of one village, one school, or one neighborhood.

This paper will complicate the ostensibly progressive representations of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as narrativized through such documentary films through an analysis of how their emphasis on small triumphs at the hyper-local level redefine how order, disorder, and states of emergency are recognized and visualized. I term this approach, “broken windows humanitarianism.” In policing, the broken windows theory outwardly communicates security and order through the optics of cleanliness and aesthetics, and argues that once smaller violations are reduced within a community, serious crime will not take root. By “broken windows humanitarianism,” I refer to a likewise disproportional emphasis on the small victories achieved through humanitarian and benevolent tactics. In this paper, I advance that the documentaries’ emphasis on small victories suggests a similar relationship in causality: the reduction in small-level conflict leads to an overall decrease in violence at a macro level as affected individuals learn to recognize each other’s humanity. By using nonviolent methods to fix the occupation’s “broken windows,” these tactics allow the corresponding NGO projects to render the humanity of Palestinians, and likeminded Israelis, visible to American viewers and donors alike through their appeals to liberal and universal values.

Author

• Jennifer Varela, New York University