Palestine Symptome Hope

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Palestine as Symptom, Palestine as Hope: Revising Human Rights Discourse
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Palestine as Symptom, Palestine as Hope:
Revising Human Rights Discourse
Ariella Azoulay
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was signed in

1948 by the then-member states of the United Nations. In the absence of an
established international apparatus of enforcement, various means were
implemented in order to make the language and principles of the declara-
tion well understood and widely known, if not enforceable. The decla-
ration, though proclaimed as universal, could not be disseminated,
internalized, and regarded as universal without extensive educational
efforts promoting these particular kinds of rights.1 The document itself was
carefully designed to echo the official, minimalist design of other binding
agreements such as charters and other declarations (fig. 1).2 To promote
the declaration, photographs of people such as Eleanor Roosevelt, a well-
known and respected figure, and pictures of anonymous people attentively
reading the publicity poster for the declaration were produced together
with photos of heads of state signing the document.3 The UDHR was in-
A first draft of this paper was presented at the conference “Capture 2012: Photography,
Nature, Human Rights,” organized by Laura Vexler, James Silk, Itamar Mann, and Noam Gal
at Yale University, October 2012.
1. Much has been written on the failure of the League of Nations to enforce its treaties, and
following the foundation of the UN in the 1940s efforts were made to differentiate it from the
league in order to secure its success. See Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of
Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton, N.J., 2009), and Jussi M.
Hanhimäaki, The United Nations: A Very Short Introduction (New York, 2008).
2. These documents usually differ in font and layout, but most of them preserve the form
of a bold title and a series of clauses.
3. Other organs of the UN initiated other projects in order to promote the declaration. A
series of articles published in UNESCO’s Courier reported on the work of “100 international
non-governmental organizations whose co-operation with Unesco helps the accomplishment
Critical Inquiry 40 (Summer 2014)

© 2014 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/14/4004-0002$10.00. All rights reserved.
332
Critical Inquiry / Summer 2014 333
tended to provide a moral and legal basis for national constitutions, stat-
utory laws, and regulations, as well as for the United Nations’ own
investigations, monitoring, reports, peacekeeping operations, economic
and political sanctions, and international tribunals.
The text of the declaration itself discloses very little of the prevailing
conception of human rights—or of the violation of such rights—at the
time or of the orchestrated campaign to change this conception and edu-
cate the public in the new discourse of rights. This campaign employed a
variety of means to illustrate and concretize the rather abstract language of
rights and to develop a new sensibility toward the violation of such rights.
In order to inculcate this new language and cultivate appropriate feelings of
indignation, the campaign exposed the public—directly, though tours and
expeditions, and indirectly, through verbal and visual representations—to
scenes of the violation of human rights that had taken place in different con-
texts. At the same time, those actions that fell outside the UN’s frame for
understanding the violation of rights faded from public view.
of its programme” (“A Hundred Groups with a Common Aim,” Courier 3 [Sept. 1950]: 2). In
1950, UNESCO produced an exhibition composed of 113 plates, juxtaposing clauses from the
UDHR with historical images that “illustrate[d] the conquest of [human] rights” (from the
introduction to the exhibition’s kit). Slavery was presented as an egregious violation of human
rights, and the abolition of slavery served as an illustration of the human capacity to champion
the rights enumerated in the UDHR, that is, to implement them globally. Photographs of the
different rituals surrounding the same activities around the globe—eating, raising a family,
voting, reading—were used to show both the diversity and commonality of humankind. The
exhibition, which was prepared as a ready-to-use kit that could easily be assembled in various
venues, avoided conflict around what could be considered violations of human rights, as well as
contemporary images of such violations. Some of the materials included in the kit, originally
supplied by various member states in the UN, had been exhibited by the Musée Galliera in Paris
in 1949. Another exhibition, organized by UNICEF (United Nations International Children’s
Emergency Fund), focused on orphaned children in Europe. The photographs, taken by David
Seymour (also known as Chim), depicted the children’s distress. This focus on the children
served to minimize the importance of the context of their deprivation.
ARIELLA AZOULAY teaches in the Department of Modern Culture and Media and
the Department of Comparative Literature, Brown University. She is the author
of From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State
Formation, 1947–1950 (2011), Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of
Photography (2012), and The Civil Contract of Photography (2008); and coauthor
with Adi Ophir of The One State Condition: Occupation and Democracy between
the Sea and the River (2012). Among her recent projects as a curator and
documentary filmmaker are Potential History (2012) and Civil Alliances,
Palestine, 47– 48 (2012). Her email is Ariella_Azoulay@brown.edu
334 Ariella Azoulay / Palestine and Human Rights Discourse
FIGURE 1 . United Nations International Nursery School, New York. Children of United
Nations staff members looking at a poster of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
December 1950. United Nations Photo Library #123898. UN Photo.
In the wake of World War II, photography took on an increasingly

crucial role in what might be called public lessons in human rights literacy.
Through the viewing of annotated photographs—printed in journals and
magazines and displayed in different contexts—citizens were invited to
learn to identify human rights and to recognize the violation of them. The
orchestration of efforts to disseminate the language of human rights was
largely conducted from above; the UN and some of its member states used
various platforms—including press conferences, photography exhibi-
tions, pamphlets, posters, and education programs—to distinguish vio-
lence defined as human rights violations from violence defined as the
legitimate use of the state’s coercive power to secure peace, order, and the
rule of law. The objective was to instil in the public an internalized, per-
sonal sense of human rights—a sense that would produce widespread re-
spect for and a commitment to the upholding of human rights generally
and that would support institutional responses to violations of these
rights.
A different approach to universal rights, however, is being imagined
today at many sites of protest all around the globe; though not necessarily
conceptualized as such, this is an approach that considers universal rights
to be an appropriate object of discussion among all concerned, that is,
everyone, everywhere. Such an approach would include every human be-
ing in any and all civil exchanges intended to formulate, claim, defend,
amend, recognize, or reject human rights and the means to enforce them.
The possibility of such an approach was precluded from the beginning.
Universal human rights were conceived as the prerogative of states; the
general public was neither consulted nor invited to participate in the for-
mulation of these rights. Rather, it was expected to accept them as ready-
made discursive objects and to naturalize the differential application of
them in different contexts. Thus, for example, when Ralph Bunche, the
UN-appointed mediator to Palestine in the late 1940s, reported “on the
plight of the half-million Arab refugees who had been forced by hostilities
to leave Jewish-held territory and seek refuge in neighbouring countries,”
the Iraqi delegate to the committee that was drafting the UDHR demanded
that the committee address “this concrete case of human rights violation
[rather] than . . . spend hours debating human rights in the abstract.” The
Iraqi delegate’s proposal was summarily dismissed, and the committee
continued its work.4 Clearly, not only laymen but also representatives of
states were not always able to distinguish human rights violations from the
legitimate use of state power.
Indeed, had the Palestinians been allowed to return to their homeland,
had this violation of their rights been addressed at the time, this episode
would be no more than an insignificant moment in the history of the
drafting of the UDHR. But it was, in fact, a paradigmatic moment in which
the very nature of this new regime of rights was made visible: the fate of the
Palestinian refugees—their dispossession and expulsion—was not consid-
ered a case of human rights violation. Soon afterwards, the “Palestinian
refugee problem” came to be seen and administered as a humanitarian
problem in the wake of a war between nation-states; the constitutive vio-
lence that established Israel as a Jewish nation-state—thereby creating the
“Palestinian problem”—was subsequently legitimized with the admission
of Israel to the UN as a member state. These events took place just as the
4. Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights (New York, 2002), p. 152.
UDHR came into being, thus inscribing the concrete limits of the new
discourse of human rights and the refusal to recognize certain forms of
violence as violating those rights. The actions of the UN committee that
shaped the declaration offer a disturbing lesson in human rights literacy.
Furthermore, because ratifying the declaration as well as adopting its
language and incorporating its principles into national constitutions be-
came an informal condition of acceptance into the UN and because the
State of Israel, having done these things and despite being responsible for
the displacement of more than half of its governed population, was admit-
ted as a member state, the limits and flaws of the new language of rights
were clearly delineated. The admission of Israel to the UN was not without
its difficulties, but, once opposition had been overcome, the UDHR be-
came institutionalized as a document that allows or tolerates regimes that
govern differentially. From its inception, this universal language of rights
was compromised by the political reality that some citizens, with well-
protected rights, were regarded as fully entitled to judge violations of hu-
man rights, while others, denied those same rights, were victimized and
pathologized.5
Using the Israel-Palestine case, I will show how, from its inception, the
UN’s implicit sanctioning of certain state practices and institutions served
to undermine its new discourse of universal human rights. The UN, by
legitimizing states6 that practised massive rights violations at the same
time that it undertook enormous efforts to promote human rights lit-
eracy, effectively taught citizens across the globe to selectively adhere to
the new regime of rights and to deny or altogether ignore particular
rights violations.
The establishment of the provisional Jewish government in Palestine in
May 1948 instituted the State of Israel in a territory from which hundreds
of thousands of Palestinians were expelled. The expulsions continued after
the founding of the state and were ongoing when the new state applied for
membership in the United Nations. This application was twice rejected
because, in the words of Charles Habib Malik, the Lebanese ambassador to
the UN, “the State of Israel, in its present form, directly contravened the
previous recommendations of the United Nations in at least three impor-
tant respects: in its attitude on the problem of Arab refugees, on the de-
5. In her essay in this issue, Lydia H. Liu discusses the way this was debated in the
international scene in terms of the “exceptionality of the ‘uncivilized status’ of colonial and
non-self-governing peoples in international law” (Lydia H. Liu, “Shadows of Universalism: The
Untold Story of Human Rights around 1948,” Critical Inquiry 40 [Summer 2014]: 613–45).
6. India, Pakistan, and South Africa, for example.
limitation of its territorial boundaries, and on the question of Jerusalem.”7
But on 11 May 1949, the State of Israel was admitted to the UN as a member;
the UN General Assembly “decide[s] that Israel is a peace-loving State
which accepts the obligations contained in the Charter and is able and
willing to carry out those obligations.”8 The most significant among those
obligations was described in the eleventh clause of the UN General Assem-
bly’s resolution 194 on 11 December 1948, which “resolve[s] that the refu-
gees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their
neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date,
and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing
not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles
of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Govern-
ments or authorities responsible.”9
To this day, Israel has not fulfilled this obligation. From the camps in
which they continue to live, Palestinians demand their right to return to
their homes and lands, sustaining as open and incomplete that moment
when the UN General Assembly recognized Israel as a member state of the
United Nations. For this, if for no other reason, the violation of Palestin-
ians’ rights is unfinished business and cannot simply be relegated to the
past. The Palestinian demand for their rights, continuously addressed to
the international community that admitted Israel as a member state in the
UN, points to Israel as responsible for their plight and frames Jewish Israeli
citizens as protagonists in the ongoing violation of their human rights—
that is, as perpetrators.10 This entanglement of victims and perpetrators,
7. UN General Assembly, “Application of Israel for Admission to Membership in the United Na-
tions (A/818),” 5 May 1949, unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/85255a0a0010ae82852555340060479d/
1db943e43c280a26052565fa004d8174?OpenDocument#Mr.%20EBAN%20(Israel)%20understood%20tha
8. UN General Assembly, “Admission of Israel to Membership in the United Nations,” 11
May 1949, unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/83E8C29DB812A4E9852560E50067A5AC. Those
who were expelled from Palestine were not allowed to return to the State of Israel. Israel
naturalized the minority of Palestinians remaining within its borders and granted them Israeli
citizenship in January 1949. Though citizens, they lived under military rule until 1966.
9. UN General Assembly, “Palestine—Progress Report of the United Nations Mediator,” 11
Dec. 1948.
10. Samer al-Issawi, a Palestinian detainee in an Israeli prison, has been on a hunger strike
since 1 August 2012. In a letter dictated to his lawyer and addressed to Israeli citizens, I hear his
plea for Israelis to claim their right to cease being perpetrators:
Israelis: I’m looking for an intellectual who is through shadowboxing, or talking to his face
in mirrors. I want him to stare into my face and observe my coma, to wipe the gunpowder
off his pen, and from his mind the sound of bullets, he will then see my features carved deep
in his eyes, I’ll see him and he’ll see me, I’ll see him nervous about the questions of the fu-
ture, and he’ll see me, a ghost that stays with him and doesn’t leave. . . . I have not heard
one of you interfere to stop the loud wail of death, it’s as if every one of you has turned into
gravediggers, and everyone wears his military suit: the judge, the writer, the intellectual, the
universal rights and differential practices, inspires me, as an Israeli citizen
of Jewish origin, to reconstruct the lessons to be found in the photographic
history of human rights literacy and to imagine other horizons for human
rights discourse.
As the Lebanese participant in the committee that drafted the UDHR as
well as the committee that agreed to the admission of Israel to the UN,
Malik claimed in 1948 that any decision about Palestine “is a matter of
exceptional significance. The decision taken on it would directly affect
millions of human beings. An aura of sacredness [has] always surrounded
Palestine. It [has] been hallowed for Jews, Christians and Moslems by the
preaching of the prophets, by countless pilgrimages and by the presence
there at one time of the Redeemer of Mankind.”11 Malik’s observation
addressed a fundamental, constitutive matter, which has affected the cred-
ibility of the UDHR as well as the history of the violation of human rights.
The violation of these rights in Palestine cannot be read merely as an
episode in the history of Palestinians because the rights that were violated
in 1948 cannot be isolated from those established by the UDHR. Further-
more, in addition to the violation of these rights, the way in which the
international community tolerated these violations at the time can only
be understood in terms of the consolidation of a new world order in
which universal human rights was simultaneously a contradiction in
terms and a political device in the postwar reconfiguration of the world
into nation-states.
Addressing this constitutive moment in its full complexity—a moment
at which an esteemed international organization proclaimed a universal
language of rights at the same time that it effectively sanctioned the insti-
tution of a state premised upon an utter disregard for those rights—helps
us to think about rights differently. It also allows us to question the notion
of enforcement that is closely associated with the concept of rights. Human
rights are not ready-made objects simply awaiting implementation and
enforcement. In the abyss between text and implementation and in light of
the lack of effective national or international organs of enforcement, nu-
merous nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have intervened in and
assisted injured populations, usually those I have elsewhere called the vis-
journalist, the merchant, the academic, and the poet. And I cannot believe that a whole so-
ciety was turned into guards over my death and my life, or guardians over settlers who
chase after my dreams and my trees. Israelis: Listen to my voice, the voice of our time and
yours! Liberate yourselves of the excess of greedy power! [“Samer Issawi’s ‘Hunger Speech’
to Israelis,” Mondoweiss, mondoweiss.net/2013/04/issawis-speech-israelis.html]
11. “Application of Israel for Admission to Membership in the United Nations (A/818).”
ible victims of the violation of human rights. Human rights violations
cannot, of course, become visible outside a certain discourse. Victims be-
come visible only when they are identified as such, when they are differ-
entiated from others involved in the violation, itself framed by the
discourse of rights. The victims are those recognizable figures that appear
in a certain type of image that eventually became known as human rights
photography from which the perpetrators are usually absent.12 From the
late 1940s onwards, when the language of universal human rights was
forged, human rights materialized in photographs in a way that framed the
violation of these rights as isolated, stand-alone events and the victims as
the sole bearers of the effects of the violation.
The focus on visible victims in human rights discourse—that is, the
language of national and international institutions and NGOs alike—
serves to stabilize the separation among victims (usually the photographed
persons), perpetrators (usually invisible in human rights discourse even
when photographed), and spectators (usually situated elsewhere). This
separation undermines the ability of human rights discourse to function as
a dynamic form and forum in which rights can serve as a medium of
relations among the governed, not only between individual citizens and
the power that rules them, but among citizens themselves—that is, as a
forum in which rights are something to be sought, invented, claimed,
exercised, discussed, rejected, and modified in the course of ongoing rela-
tions among all those affected by the powers capable of protecting and
violating these rights.
Since 1948, an enormous amount of work has been devoted to formu-
lating new documents and amending existing ones in order to declare the
rights of specific groups, such as indigenous peoples or children, expand-
ing and nuancing the repertoire of rights and finding ways to account for
new forms of violations and to address new claims by various populations.
However, this growing repertoire of rights has not changed the problem-
atic status of rights as independent claims requiring implementation and
enforcement or as constraints on the use of power.
In the sixty-four years that have passed since the UDHR was first
drafted, most of the world’s nation-states, as aspiring members of the UN,
have, at least in some minimal way, demonstrated their acquaintance with
the language of rights. But although the global map is entirely divided into
nation-states, the principle of the nation-state has failed to materialize in
12. For more on human rights photographs and the visible victim and the exposure of
certain populations to chronic disasters, see Ariella Azoulay, “Photography without Borders,”
in Handbook of Human Rights, ed. Thomas Cushman (New York, 2012), pp. 669–81.
one persistent spot on the map: Palestine-Israel. More than anywhere else
in the world today, the gap between state and nation, constantly repro-
duced by a differential and violent system of government operating in the
name of a Jewish nation-state in which five million Palestinians are gov-
erned as non- or second-class citizens, seems unbridgeable there. This gap
is exacerbated by the persistent demand of those who were expelled, in-
cluding the second- and third-generation Palestinian refugees, to return to
the land from which they were expelled.13 The Palestinian claim—made by
those who were expelled and their descendants, as well as by those living
within the State of Israel—and the assertion of the right to be governed
equally with others in their homeland destabilizes the legitimacy of the
Israeli state and makes it clear that equality cannot be partitioned or par-
tially distributed within one territorial unit.
The visible victims of this situation are, of course, the Palestinians. It is
necessary to understand the violation of their rights, not as individual and
isolated cases and not only as a series of finite events, but as the systematic
effect of and necessary condition for the well-being of a political regime
that was constituted by the creation of the State of Israel and its recognition
by the international community. Once this is understood, the regime itself
comes into question, as does the notion of citizenship under this regime
(from which only Jews fully benefit). On the one hand, Jewish Israeli citi-
zens are raised to accept the serial, systematic violations of Palestinians’
rights as necessary for their own survival. As a result, many of them will-
ingly join the state apparatuses that inflict these violations. On the other
hand, it is no less important to understand the systematic harm done to
Jewish citizens who become part of this machine of rights violations as
both perpetrators and bystanders, if only by their passive acceptance of the
naturalization of human rights violations.
But while the existing language of human rights is well equipped to
describe and denounce the harm done to the Palestinians, it lacks the
proper conceptual tools to describe, analyze, and denounce the harm suf-
fered by Israeli Jews or with which to understand both types of harm as
part of a single regime-made disaster. In regime-made disasters, perpetra-
tors are not only those who directly exercise violence; rather, the entire
population of fully entitled citizens, whose civil status within the body
13. The particularity of Palestine/Israel is anchored in the persistent claim of those who
were expelled to return to their country and their refusal to become naturalized elsewhere. This
situation makes them the nongoverned of the state of Israel and links them de facto to the state
of Israel. Denying this gap between nation(s) and state and in order to function as a Jewish
nation-state, the Israeli regime has constructed a system of rule and governance that violates
rights in a serial, systematic manner.
politic perpetuates the victimization of other groups, is implicated in the
violence. At the same time that this population must be held to account for
its complicity, it is necessary to recognize the harm done to its entitled
members, who, by being born into a regime that perpetuates the disaster,
are structurally positioned as perpetrators. Those who realize that their
citizenship actually forces them into the position of perpetrators and are
willing to evade this position can either renounce their citizenship or dis-
obey the law. They lack the right to undo the law—the constitutive law of
the place—that, achieved through violence, secures their citizenship.
What is needed is the recognition of three additional inviolable rights,
which Jewish citizens are currently denied: the right to be governed
equally, free from the privileges of a dominating class; the right not to be
and not to be forced to become a perpetrator; and the right to envision and
shape one’s future without having to perpetuate a machine of oppression
and rights violation. These rights need to be addressed by human rights
activists and organizations and by citizens at large, all of them participating
in an open, all-inclusive human rights lesson that becomes a substitute for
the mechanisms of enforcement.
The End of War: Politics

Much has been written on the primacy of the principle of state sover-
eignty in the discourse of human rights that was shaped in the mid-1940s,
and on the textual precedents to the UDHR—from the Atlantic Charter
(1941)14 through the UN Charter (1942). But little, if anything, has been
written about the conditions under which this universal language was
14. The Atlantic Charter was short and concise, as if what was at stake was beyond dispute
and therefore required no further explanation. Its eight clauses lay the foundations for the
global discussion of rights, understood as the rights of people defined as homogeneous nations
rather than as heterogeneous citizenry in given territories. On the way in which the state was
defeated by the nation, see Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Orlando, Fla., 1975).
On the distinction between nation (in Hebrew, Leom) and citizenry (in Hebrew, Uma), see
Azmi Bishara, “Between Nation and Nationality: Reflections on Nationalism” [Hebrew],
Theory and Criticism 6 (1995): 19–43, and Azoulay and Adi Ophir, The One-State Condition:
Occupation and Democracy in Israel/Palestine, trans. Tal Haran (Stanford, Calif., 2013).
According to Winston Churchill, as Penny Von Eschen writes, the principles of the Atlantic
Charter “did not apply to colonial subjects” (Penny M. Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black
Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 [Ithaca, N.Y., 1997], p. 25). According to the charter,
peoples are presumed—and ought—to be unified entities capable of claiming rights and
uttering their wishes. It declares that the right to self-determination—“the right of all peoples
to choose the form of government under which they will live” and the right of people to oppose
territorial conquest and adjustments—precedes all other rights (Franklin D. Roosevelt and
Winston S. Churchill, “Atlantic Charter,” 14 Aug. 1941, avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/atlantic.asp).
These rights, along with the free market (that is, the lowering of trade barriers), are presented as
the preconditions of world peace.
taught, about the way it shaped and was shaped by photographic images at
the time (énoncés), and, more particularly, about what constituted the
violation of human rights, about what sovereign states could, and could
not, define as a human rights violation.
As varied and rich as these debates were, one topic came to dominate
discussions—the fundamental right that lies at the very foundation of the
nation-state itself and to which all other rights are subordinated—that is,
the right to self-determination.15 Thus, in the late 1940s, the Jews in Pales-
tine, who were recognized as respecting human rights, claimed the right to
self-determination. The Palestinians, who refused to collaborate with the
UN committee responsible for the partitioning of Palestine, were expelled.
Their claim of the right to return to their homeland was represented as a
threat to Jewish sovereignty and was constantly overturned. The sovereign
power established in Palestine by the Jews became the sine qua non of all
other rights.
In order to more closely consider the differential application of univer-
sal rights, we must return to the end of World War II. After the conclusion
of the military campaign, a new political world order was instituted. The
violence required to implement this new world order, which was intended
to end the violence of war, was construed as a mere means to the end of a
better future. The exercise of violence and its framing as violence or non-
violence is precisely what was at stake in those early human rights literacy
lessons. This violence, conceived as necessary for the implementation of a
new political order, was subsequently transformed into law and therefore
became less visible as the violation of human rights, making it difficult, if
not impossible, to perceive and identify violations of human rights as such.
I shall show that the stabilization of the distinction between intolerable
violence and justifiable violence as a means to an end depended upon a
clear distinction between the violators of human rights and authoritative
representatives of human rights. Had it been possible to interrogate the
justifiableness of the violence deemed necessary for the implementation of
this new political order, the perpetrators of that violence might have been
seen to be violating the human rights of those against whom the violence
was directed. But they were rarely perceived as perpetrators against whom
affected citizens might claim the right of resistance.16 Instead, they were
regarded as the representatives of those designated in the famous phrase,
15. On the predominance of the right to self-determination, see Samuel Moyn, “The
Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 in the History of Cosmopolitanism,” Critical
Inquiry 40 (Summer 2014): 593–612, and Liu, “Shadows of Universalism.”
16. “In contrast, the twentieth-century concept of human rights did not grant such a right
[the right to resist], for it would not have been reconcilable with the principle of state
“We the peoples of the United Nations.” This phrase, with which the pre-
amble to the United Nations Charter begins, established them as the
guardians of the new world order.
Following the end of World War II, those responsible for the liberation
of Europe, as well as for large waves of forced migration, the implementa-
tion of national partitions, and vast destruction in the name of develop-
ment, presented themselves as “determined to save succeeding generations
from the scourge of war . . . and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human
rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person.”17 The 1945 UN
Charter was promoted through a series of photographs that depicted heads
of state signing it with the national flags of the world displayed in the
background, consolidating the idea that human rights can be secured by
and under nation-states.
The founding documents of human rights were designed to promote
the continuation of violence through politics. The Declaration by United
Nations, a 1942 agreement that formally bound the Allies together in the
war, explicitly linked complete victory over “savage and brutal forces seek-
ing to subjugate the world” to the protection of human rights.18 But unlike
this declaration and the Atlantic Charter, which articulated clear postwar
goals (also distributed in poster form), the poster was conveniently reduc-
ible to a slogan: “The United Nations Fight for Freedom.” The poster
featured a colourful split image: against dark smoke billowing over the
horizon, a flotilla of warships advances from the sea, and above them a
flotilla of united nations, represented by their national flags (all of them
arrayed under the US flag), advances in the air (fig. 2).19
In the visual human rights literacy lessons promulgated at the end of the
war, citizens were not taught to recognize human rights violations wher-
ever or to whomever they happened. On the contrary, they were taught to
acknowledge—or ignore—such violations according to the way in which
sovereignty dominant in the arrangements following World War II” (Wiktor Osiatynski,
Human Rights and Their Limits [Cambridge, 2007], p. 27).
17. UN General Assembly, “Charter of the United Nations,” www.un.org/en/documents/
charter/preamble.shtml. On the history of the creation of the UN, see Mazower, No Enchanted
Palace, and Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, Mass., 2010).
18. The Declaration of United Nations, Avalon Project, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale
University, avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/decade03.asp. This document was endorsed by
twenty-six governments (including eight in exile). On the emergence of the UN from this
declaration, see Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley, FDR and the Creation of the U.N.
(New Haven, Conn., 1997).
19. The poster was produced by the US Office of War Information, Division of Public
Languages and labeled poster no. 50.
FIGURE 2 . The United Nations Fight for Freedom. United States Office of War Information
poster. United States Government Printing Office, 1943.
sovereign states framed them—that is, as legitimate or illegitimate in-

stances of violence. The spectator was shaped in the image of the sovereign
citizen, a subject whose rights, unlike those of noncitizens, were protected
by the nation-state. Usually witnessing human rights violations from afar,
the citizen is unable to recognize atrocity when it is practised by his or her
own political regime, especially if that regime is regarded as an advocate of
human rights, that is, as a democratic regime. Without rethinking the
materiality of the human rights statement (énoncé),20 without reframing
the existing discourse, the conditions according to which such rights are or
are not respected will not change.
Hannah Arendt’s famous formulation—“the right to have rights”21—
was her answer to what she identified as the main weakness of human
rights conceived as belonging to the individual. She proposed replacing
the minimal notion of the rights of each individual with membership in
a community as the basis of human rights. Although often quoted,
Arendt’s astute criticism of the liberal conception of human rights was
not regarded as the key to a full reconceptualization of the basis of
human rights discourse.
Others’ Rights
I begin from the assumption that the main flaw of human rights think-
ing as it was shaped in the late 1940s is its focus on the rights of others,
including those designated as impaired or noncitizens for whom “solu-
tions” are shaped by imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism.22 The focus
on the rights of others, in contrast to the eighteenth-century discourse of
claiming rights for onself, separates the question of rights from the way in
which those who formulate them and those who “possess” them, each of
whom is regarded as respecting human rights, govern and are governed.
On the basis of this assumption, I propose to follow the Arendtian path,
but to take it a step further, replacing the idea of the rights of someone with
that of human rights as a form of discourse created by humans in order to
actively intervene in the way they share the world with one another. At
stake is not only the way in which they are ruled together but the way in
which they rule, the way in which they participate in ruling and give their
consent to being ruled. Human rights discourse must therefore address
20. Using Jean-François Lyotard’s theory of discourse, I relate to photographs not merely
as images but as a particular type of statement that implies the existence of four elements: an
addresser, an addressee, a referent, and a sense. In the context of the violation of rights, this
structure is helpful in reconstructing the harm done to one or more of those elements. For
more on the photographic statement, see Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, trans.
Rela Mazali and Ruvik Danieli (New York, 2008).
21. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 296.
22. According to Arendt and Jacques Rancière, these others can be described as “rightless”:
“the Rights of Man turned out to be the rights of the rightless, of the populations hunted out of
their homes and land and threatened by ethnic slaughter” (Jacques Rancière, “Who Is the
Subject of the Rights of Man?” South Atlantic Quarterly 103 [Spring–Summer 2004]: 297–98).
how people rule others. Such a discourse requires imagining human rights
as a kind of civil forum and contract among the whole of the governed
population, a population that is not partitioned into those susceptible and
those insusceptible to human rights violations. When people are free to
resist the positions accorded to them by a ruling power, the concepts and
social practices in which this discourse is embedded become the means by
which people can regulate, invent, and imagine a civic mode of living
together.
When the basis for rights discourse is shifted from the individual to the
community and can thus hold to account those who rule others for the way
they do so, the question of specific group rights—whether of humans,
animals, or the environment—becomes secondary. Thus, rather than de-
fining anew who and what is entitled to which rights, I propose to ascribe
rights discourse to humans as citizens, as active players who share the world
with others and invent this discourse in order to secure the necessary
conditions for the continued sharing of this world.23 By citizens I do not
mean people to whom citizenship is accorded as an asset or possession by
a sovereign state; I mean, rather, individuals who take part in the body
politic and who renew their participation in that body politic through a set
of practices by which they constantly enact their basic right to be governed
equally with others who are governed by the same power and with whom
they share a world. Such citizens do not respond to the violation of the
rights of others—usually anonymous strangers in distant places—as if
such violation concerns only the visible victims; rather, they insist that,
when the rights of a member of the body politic are violated, the rights of
every other member of the body politic, including those not directly in-
jured by the violation, are thereby violated. In other words, the violation of
any person’s rights infringes on the right of others not to be part of a
community of rights violators.24
Existing human rights discourse cannot conceive of the right to be gov-
erned equally with others or, to express it negatively, not to be governed
unequally, or the claim of such a right as an obligation of the rights-
protected citizen, as something implicit in any claim made by the victims
of a rights violation. The right to be governed equally with others is uni-
23. Arendt’s distinction between the world created by men and the earth might very well be
important to such a reconceptualization of human rights discourse. See Arendt, The Human
Condition (Chicago, 1998).
24. Such a claim underlies two Israeli organizations: Zochrot, which began as an
organization to promote the memory of the nakba in Israel (the expulsion of Palestinians from
Palestine in 1948), and which, in recent years, has been preoccupied with the return of
Palestinians, and Breaking the Silence, whose members are soldiers who blame the Israeli state
for mobilizing them to commit crimes against Palestinians.
versal by definition; the right not to be a perpetrator, which is derived from
this right, is universal by implication. The violation of these concurrent
rights immediately reveals the differential nature of the governed. When
uttered by both (potential) victims and (potential) perpetrators, the claims
reinforce each other. They also weaken the automatic identification of the
ruling power with that group of citizens whose rights are established by
that power.25 It thus becomes possible to imagine and work toward a civil
contract among all and applied equally to all members of the body politic,
as well as to the body politic collectively as a governed population and to
the ruling power that governs them.
The differential rights of some are part of a sovereign logic that seeks to
maintain a body politic divided between those designated as citizens and
all others. Proposing the right to be governed equally as the basic right of
all is the first step in the project of reconceptualizing rights discourse. It
marks a shift from sovereign logic, in which the rights of others are defined,
to a civil logic based upon a bond that might enable citizens to share the
world without becoming its abusers—the bond of not being perpetrators.26
Defending the civil nature of such a bond is the necessary condition for the
continuation of a life in common with others in a sustainable world. Such
rights cannot be understood as property nor can their violation be under-
stood as an infringement upon property. Indeed, such violation cannot be
understood apart from those who perpetrate it, apart from the world in
which it is perpetrated, or apart from those who observe it. For such rights
are basic rights; they are the only possible foundation for a civil commu-
nity based on equal partnership among members of the governed popula-
tion—the essence of political life—rather than the submission of the
governed to the ruling power.
25. Thus, for example, in the Israeli case, it becomes possible to deconstruct the unification
of all Israeli Jews and their presumed identity with the ruling power as though the two form
one side vis-à-vis the other, that is, the Palestinians. Without acknowledging this distinction,
the violation of Palestinians’ rights will continue to be perceived exclusively as a national
conflict.
26. Moyn argues that “the universalistic premise of nationalism that all peoples should
determine their own fate seems to have been the most appealing cosmopolitanism throughout
modern history, and that is perhaps because while collective emancipation could afford
individual protection the reverse was not obviously true” (Moyn, “The Universal Declaration of
Human Rights of 1948 in the History of Cosmopolitanism,” pp. 598–99). This assumption can
be made only when the rights of those excluded from national emancipation have been
forgotten or delayed. In the contemporary world, in which the number of those who have been
deprived of citizens’ rights to self-determination is almost equal to that of those who have benefited
from collective emancipation, a way to rethink human rights might be found in the protection of
individuals and collectives from the pernicious bond that ties them together—that is, being the
perpetrators of injustice against others.
The harm done by the violation of these rights, rights that I propose
here as a basis for all others, simultaneously affects not only the visible
victims but also those who are seemingly well protected from such viola-
tion and who, under the sovereign discourse, remain indifferent bystand-
ers or silent collaborators. The example of the Israeli organization
Breaking the Silence, founded by Jewish citizens who had been drafted at
the age of eighteen to defend their homeland and who, upon discharge
from the military at age twenty-one, realized that, as soldiers, they had
actually committed crimes against Palestinians but were unable to recog-
nize their acts as such at the time, is instructive here. Having had their civil
literacy and civil skills damaged since childhood and trained to believe that
oppressing Palestinians was necessary in order to defend their fellow citi-
zens, they were unable to perceive their own actions as unjust. To assign to
them the right not to be a perpetrator is not to equalize the damage
inflicted on young Jewish men and women and their Palestinian vic-
tims; rather, it is to imagine a common ground between them—the
understanding that the ruling power, which reproduces and preserves a
differential body politic, is the source of the distinction that separates
them into victims and perpetrators. By claiming these rights, citizens
can create the conditions for a body politic in which human rights
literacy becomes part of that which cultivates and protects a commu-
nity of equals. Together they can resist the ruling power’s efforts to
divide the body politic into potential victims and potential perpetra-
tors. I propose, then, to reconceptualize human rights discourse in a
way that binds its protagonists together—victims, perpetrators, and
spectators—without imposing any predetermined divisions on them.
The right not to be a perpetrator becomes, in this discourse, a funda-
mental right. Conceived as such, this right urgently needs to be ad-
dressed by human rights organizations.
Where Are the Perpetrators?

Human rights discourse, as it has been embodied in photography, has
cultivated two major figures: the victim, whose rights have been violated,
and the spectator, who witnesses and is presumably appalled by this viola-
tion. The victim is usually the visible figure framed at the centre of the
photograph; the spectator, whose gaze the photograph solicits and as-
sumes, is most often implied. The long-standing dominance of these two
figures has served to obscure the presence of the perpetrator, without
whom the photograph would not have been taken. This figure has gener-
ally been identified neither as an object of the gaze nor as a category to be
conceptualized and explored. However, though often unseen, the perpe-
trator is nevertheless present.27
The figure of the perpetrator cannot be magically inserted into the dis-
cussion as if it had simply been temporarily absent, as if its presence would
not affect the nature and status of the photographed victim or the specta-
tor. The recently expressed interest in the perpetrator is itself the conse-
quence of changes in the nature of the other two figures.28 Spectators and
those photographed have always participated in the event of photogra-
phy, but only recently have they come to be understood as active par-
ticipants in, rather than the silent objects of, the photograph.29 These
figures—the photographed subject and the spectator—can no longer
be considered without reconceptualizing them or without historically
situating the way in which they were, for so long, shaped without ref-
erence to the perpetrator.
The Circle of External Spectators

Let me use an example (fig. 3). Produced by Colenso BBDO of New
Zealand, a series of three photographs advertising Amnesty International
won the Silver Press Lion at the Cannes International Advertising Festival
27. For one of the few to deal with the figure of the perpetrator, see the archive project of
Eyal Sivan, Video Testimonies by Zionist Fighters in 1948 (exhibition catalog, Zochrot Gallery,
Tel Aviv, 2 Oct. 2012–15 Jan. 2013), zochrot.org/en/exhibition/towards-common-archive-video
-testimonies-zionist-fighters-1948
28. This interest in the perpetrator can be seen in ibid; in my plea to think anew human
rights discourse (“Photography without Borders”); and in the constitution of two photographic
archives, which situate the photographs as a site of encounter in which not only what was done
to others—Palestinians, in this case—but what Israel has done to both Palestinians and
Israelis—is at stake. See Azoulay, From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction
and State Formation, 1947–1950 (London, 2011) and Atto di Stato: Palestina-Israele, 1967–2007:
Storia fotografica dell’occupazione, trans. Maria Nadotti (Milan, 2008), and Paul Lowe,
“Picturing the Perpetrator,” in Picturing Atrocity: Reading Photographs in Crisis, ed. Geoffrey
Batchen et al. (London, 2012), pp. 189–200.
29. For years, the question of the spectator was dealt with as if she or he was the extension
of the photographer, capable only of either adopting or ignoring his or her ethical stance. In his
text on the photographic essay, W. J. T. Mitchell analysed the ethics of this genre. Among other
models, he focused on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the collaborative project between
Walker Evans and James Agee, claiming that the separation between the text and images was
part of an “ethical strategy”: “a way of preventing easy access to the world they represent. . . . It
may well have been counterproductive for any political aims” (W. J. T. Mitchell, “The
Photographic Essay: Four Case Studies,” Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual
Representation [Chicago, 1994], p. 295; hereafter abbreviated “PE”). Evans and Agee’s spectator
is presumed to be an isolated individual who is most likely not yet sufficiently mature to
appreciate the ethical project: “Agee’s generic requirements are not only . . . problematic, they
are also prescriptions for a highly alert reader/viewer that may not yet exist, that may in fact
have to be created” (“PE,” p. 290). The Evans and Agee model is indifferent to the figure of
perpetrator, seeking a spectator—yet to come—with the same ethical sensibility as the
photographer and essayist, who act as representatives of the ethical position.
FIGURE 3 . Schematic rendering by author of Amnesty International’s advertisement for

their 2010 Ignore Us, Ignore Human Rights campaign.
in 2010. Although Amnesty International did not adopt the campaign, the
photos, featuring the name of Amnesty International, nevertheless circu-
late on various websites, attracting much attention. The indifferent spec-
tator, often targeted by human rights discourse, is positioned at the center
of this campaign, which was entitled Ignore Us / Ignore Human Rights.
Imagining human rights anew as I try to do implies rejecting this partition
of time, space, and history. Each of the three photographs created for this
campaign centres on a violent scene, captioned, respectively, “street beat-
ing,” “rebel soldier” and “public execution.”
A tight circle of spectators surrounds each of these spectacles, which are
presented as if performed in an arena, but their backs are turned toward
the event. The campaign, which presents this turning-away as the typical
order of things, claims that its intention is to shame the audience into
looking at the violation of human rights. It invites spectators to attend to
what appears before their eyes as if the violation of human rights were pure
sense data rather than a political category. Moreover, it is a kind of bad
faith to suggest that simply looking at that which is ignored by others is
sufficient. Unlike Colenso BBDO, James Agee, in Let Us Now Praise Fa-
mous Men, asked spectators, “By what right do you qualify to [look at these
photographs] and what will you do about it?” (quoted in “PE,” p. 290).
Here, however, spectators are merely invited to acknowledge that what
they see is a violation of human rights; in other words, they are implicitly
asked to accept and confirm the authority of the human rights organiza-
tion in determining what constitutes the violation of human rights.
The success of this campaign expresses a certain consensus about hu-
man rights—that viewers who fail to respond to the call addressed to them
are responsible for human rights violations. This campaign, however, did
not invent spectator guilt; rather, it visually embodied a common image of
the spectator.30 The scheme, repeated time and again, is rather simple: the
violated rights are those of others, and viewer-citizens are encouraged to
recognize that the rights of others, who are often geographically distant
from the spectators, have been violated. Such images reflect the common
perception of human rights as a visibility project.
The differential rule of various governed populations that underlies so-
called democratic regimes around the globe enables the reduction of human
rights discourse to visibility and the maintenance of a stable distance between
citizens, who are encouraged to become spectators, and the violation of the
rights of others. The common way of relating to photographs—as proof of
events that have already taken place—firmly locates the event of a
rights violation in an abstract arena, disconnected from any real, his-
torical environment, just like that depicted in the Amnesty Interna-
tional photographs. The violation is framed as a typical object (“a
beating,” “an execution”); the agency of the perpetrator is secondary or
missing entirely; and the meaning of the photograph—the violation of
human rights—is presented as fixed by the stamp of an authoritative
organization.
In the Amnesty International images, the arena is neatly demarcated
and defined; the desertlike texture of the ground serves simultaneously as
a passe-partout and a background that serves to emphasize the violence at
its center. This visual isolation and emphasis preserves the distance be-
tween the spectators and the event they witness, assuring their continued
membership in (and allegiance to) a system of separate spheres.
Collapsing this distance would disrupt the circumstances that allow the
violence to appear as a typical statement of human rights violation in
which the focus on the visible victim rather than on the perpetrator reaf-
firms the division between them. As the campaign demonstrates, viewers
need exert no effort to remain outside the event, embodying the role typ-
ically assigned to them. Indeed, they have already been placed outside,
echoing the position of human rights organizations themselves.
30. Regarding the position of the spectator in the discourse of human rights, see Thomas
Keenan, “Mobilizing Shame,” South Atlantic Quarterly 103 (Spring–Summer 2004): 435–49.
The Spectators Are Not to Be Blamed
Rather than blaming spectators for their “indifference,” a reconstruc-
tion of the photographic statement of human rights and the position of the
spectator is needed.
As suggested above, such a reconstruction should start with the end of
World War II, when the current model of the visual statement of human
rights was shaped. The fact that its main features have remained un-
changed for such a long time might be explained by the complexity and
power of the discourse, which enabled people to overlook the discrepan-
cies between what they were seeing—both in photographs and in the
world—and what they believed about what they were seeing. The inner
conflict within the photographic statement of human rights results from
its stitching together of two different sets of protagonists: those of the
photographic moment—the photographed, the photographer, and the
viewer—and those of the human rights moment—the victim, the per-
petrator, and the spectator. In spite of the incongruence between these
sets—after all, photographed subjects are not always victims, nor are pho-
tographers always perpetrators—the human rights photograph creates the
conditions for the perception of their false identity. Thus, for example,
Palestinians, whose rights have been forever and constantly violated, have
for decades been identified as the photographed victims, while the Israelis,
responsible for the plight of the Palestinians, have remained hidden from
view, never depicted as perpetrators (fig. 4).31
Folding photographs in a particular way in order to hide the perpe-
trators, as I did for an exhibition I curated in 2008, has not been nec-
essary to obscure their presence; Israelis were simply invisible as
perpetrators, even when photographed. The act of folding and unfold-
ing such an image and inviting others to do the same during the public
presentation of this exhibition—that is, by enacting their disappearance
and reappearance—was one way to make the perpetrators present (fig. 5).
The Palestinians who were expelled in 1948 continue to be conceived of
and designated as refugees, as if they chose to leave their homes and their
land; rarely are they depicted as people who were forcibly expelled by the
Israelis, and no Israelis are ever depicted as the perpetrators of the expul-
sion. Even now, were I to describe myself as a second-generation perpe-
trator, I would seem provocative rather than factual. Similarly, it is no
coincidence that at least until the mid-1990s Israelis inhabited the role of
31. Since the Second Intifada, several documentary films, as part of the growing interest in
the figure of the perpetrator, have focused on perpetrators, even recording their voices as they
related their actions.
FIGURE 4 . “Potential History-Folded Exhibition.” Curated by Ariella Azoulay, 2008. Photo:

Al-Ramle, 12 July 1948. Photographer not identified. IDF and Defence Archive.
photographer.32 This is no accidental or random confusion but rather the

effect of the photographic statement of human rights that came into being
in the years immediately following World War II.
A Global Photographic Literacy Lesson

In 1945, as the death camps in Eastern Europe were opened, the disaster
created by the Nazi regime was gradually exposed. At the same time, two
other disasters, different in scale and scope but disasters nonetheless, oc-
curred: the merciless annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the
32. The division between Israelis/photographers and Palestinians/photographed subjects

was never absolute, but until the advent of digital media and the creation of the Palestinian
Authority it remained relatively stable. Most of the photographers were Israelis, and the
photographic discourse of human rights, by focusing mainly on the visible victim, tended to
overlook Israelis as photographed.
FIGURE 5 . “Potential History-Folded Exhibition.” Curated by Ariella Azoulay, 2008. Photo:

Al-Ramle, 12 July 1948. Photographer not identified. IDF and Defence Archive.
displacement of millions of people as part of “self-determination solu-

tions” and “development projects” that were meant to create a world order
of sovereign nation-states.33 In its various forms, this disaster of forced
migration has persisted to our day. It is therefore necessary to reconstruct
that discourse in relation to these three disasters as, respectively, an un-
qualified catastrophe, a “justifiable” military campaign (and thus a non-
catastrophe), and a catastrophe from the point of view of those it targeted.
33. On forced migration at the end of World War II, see Mazower, No Enchanted Palace;
Gerard Daniel Cohen, In War’s Wake: Europe’s Displaced Persons in the Postwar Order (New
York, 2012); and Gregor Dallas, 1945: The War That Never Ended (New Haven, Conn., 2005).
See also Anthony Oliver-Smith’s book on development and forced migration, Defying
Displacement: Grassroots Resistance and the Critique of Development (Austin, Tex., 2010).
FIGURE 6 . Eisenhower visits former concentration camp. “Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower,

Supreme Allied Commander (standing center, hands on hips), gazes at the bodies of dead
Russian and Polish internees at the former German concentration camp at Ohrdruf, while
touring the Third Army front with other Generals,” 12 Apr. 1945. AP wirephoto (WX5-APRIL)
from signal corps radiophoto, wd11413.
There was, of course, nothing new about directing the photographic act
toward the spectator or about the use of photographs to convince or per-
suade the public. However, as the camps were opened, the spectator was no
longer merely implied in the visual discourse of human rights; he or she
was positioned at the surface of the photograph, where the viewing of an
actual disaster became a model of viewing in itself (fig. 6). Making the
individual spectator the explicit addressee of the photographic statement
of human rights determined the very structure of that discourse. Against
the background of this formative moment, I want to examine the failure of
the spectators in the photographs of the Amnesty International campaign
to look at the violence in front of them.
The photographic discourse of human rights positions the spectator
outside the situation of rights violation. It also positions the victim at the
very heart of this discourse, giving him or her a place, a voice, and a pres-
ence and thereby equating the matter of human rights with the visibility of
the violation of such rights. The perpetrator, who seldom appears in these
images, remains invisible in this configuration and is thus easily ab-
stracted, generalized, and demonized. Perhaps most importantly, this dis-
course asserts a categorical distinction between these three figures, thereby
creating a kind of division of labor among them according to which it is
always the rights of others that are violated, others usually located else-
where even when geographically near; the violation is viewed from the
outside by a spectator who is in no way implicated, who is connected to
neither perpetrator nor victim—positions always, and in a structurally
predetermined way, reserved for others.
In Remembering to Forget, her book about the Holocaust, memory, and
photography, Barbie Zelizer pointed out that, alongside the horrific pho-
tographs of the camps which were published widely in the American and
British press, another type of photograph, which presented witnesses to
the horror as well, “forced [the viewer’s] attention on the act of bearing
witness.” Included in the book is a selection of photographs, taken from
various sources, that show delegations of reporters, editors, congress-
men, and even German citizens viewing the camps. In some images,
these witnesses appear alone in the frame, the horror around them
either excluded from the frame or only partially visible. Zelizer argues
that this testimony of witnessing, as it were, was perceived as the ap-
propriate response to Nazi terror. The world must see, Eisenhower
declared, and Zelizer maintains that what was revealed “coaxed the
world [in]to tak[ing] responsibility for what was being witnessed.”
Shifting between the way in which those orchestrating the photo-
graphic images described their strategies of presentation and a reading
of the photographs themselves, Zelizer argues that the figure of the
witness contributed to the creation of the meaning of the horror: By
“not looking at [the bodies], . . . the courtyard in the photo’s center
with its thousands of corpses seem[s] almost inconsequential, a visual
reflection of their lack of status within the Nazi belief system.”34
But Zelizer’s claim that 1945 marked the transformation of the spectator
into a witness does not sufficiently historically situate the spectator in the
photographic statement of human rights. The alleged identity between
spectator and witness is based on the language of those agents of the state
who were responsible not only for the organized display of Nazi crimes but
for the subsequent creation of a new world order. This identification of
spectator with witness disregards other modes of viewing in which, for
34. Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye
(Chicago, 1998), pp. 104, 100, 99.
FIGURE 7. Civilians viewing photographs, Apr.-May 1945, NARA.
example, spectators celebrated the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagaski

because it marked the end of the war or denied the atrocity of deporting
people for the sake of peace. The conditions of visibility of these three
postwar catastrophes were created through this new kind of visual literacy
lesson. As part of this lesson, the photographs from the camps were pre-
sented in the press, and displayed in the camps themselves, as well as in
guided public exhibitions (fig. 7). They functioned as objects of public
viewing in which the spectators themselves were explicitly implicated in the
event of photography, their position as spectators presented in the photo-
graphs rather than merely implied. But although this unprecedented project
of exposing horror made the spectator a crucial participant, the sovereign
forces nevertheless established the public viewing conditions, orchestrating
and defining the parameters of the entire project. The spectator targeted by
this project—the ordinary citizen of any sovereign state—was assumed to be
able to differentiate his or her own political regime from the Nazi or Soviet
regimes, as well as to recognize the new sovereign world order, which his or her
country was to help maintain.
Through June and July of 1945, during the exhibition of hugely enlarged
images of Nazi atrocities at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.,
the photographic discourse of horror could be described as open (fig. 8).
FIGURE 8. “Visitors view a photomural of survivors in their barracks in Buchenwald at the “Lest We
Forget” exhibition at the Library of Congress. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo
Archives #10621. Martin Luther King Memorial Library. Courtesy of Washington Star.
Until the beginning of that summer, citizen-spectators could still be de-

scribed as subjects learning how to read the photographic exposure of
atrocity, subjects who, in an open lesson, were learning how to draw a line
between themselves and such horror, how to distinguish their world from
a world in which such horror was possible. Then in August 1945, just a
short time after this intense photographic literacy lesson had begun, the
United States dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The re-
sult was biblical: “The whole land is brimstone and salt, and burning, that
it is not sown, nor beareth, nor any grass groweth therein” (Deut. 29:23).
Determined to frame the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as part of
a military campaign, the US attempted to prevent the production of and to
conceal images of ground zero. As part of a military campaign, what these
images revealed was considered irrelevant to the nascent discourse of hu-
man rights and the public lesson of human rights literacy.35 After the
35. On the policy of photographic censorship in Hiroshima and Nagasaki under the American
occupation, see John W. Dower, “The Bombed: Hiroshimas and Nagasakis in Japanese Memory,” in
Hiroshima in History and Memory, ed. Michael J. Hogan (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 116–42.
bombing, the lesson continued, but spectators were now invited to learn
how not to see the horror despite its appearance before their own eyes.36
On 13 August 1945, the cover story of Life magazine featured the United
States’ most advanced jet fighter, the P-80. Images of the annihilation of Hir-
oshima and Nagasaki were intentionally withheld from public view. Citizens
who were purposefully deprived of information about and images of this de-
struction were nonetheless urged to celebrate “Japan’s unconditional surren-
der.”37 Images of the brimstone, salt, and burning earth were simply not
shown; the ruination was merely presented as mission accomplished—the
end of the war (fig. 9). The people who annihilated the two cities, the perpe-
trators of this obscene act of state, were depicted as saviours, as guardians of
world order. Perpetrators such as Nazi collaborator Maréchal Pétain were
spotlighted while Japanese victims were silenced by US military rule.
The Damaging of Spectators’ Civil Skills

Human rights discourse cannot be reimagined without expanding the
types of photographs ascribed to it. Images not generally included in the
photographic discourse of human rights, which record blatant though
publicly unacknowledged catastrophe, should be cause for concern—
from the image of Admiral William H. P. Blandy and his wife cutting an
Operation Crossroads mushroom cloud cake to images of people being
expelled from their homes. The fact that such images were neither con-
strued nor disseminated as photographs of the violation of human rights
should not prevent us from recognizing the significance of their role in this
visual literacy lesson. Through them, people were actively invited to mis-
identify violations of human rights. The public celebration of the annihi-
lation of two cities cannot be separated from other skills taught in those
lessons. I propose these examples as images that need to be included in a
36. Until 1952, all published photographs of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
originated from the same source—the Manhattan Engineer District that supervised the disaster
and enforced the censorship implemented in Japan under American occupation. For detailed
information about the photographs that were published in Life magazine during the months
following the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, see Peter Bacon Hales, “Imagining the
Atomic Age: Life and the Atom,” in Looking at “Life Magazine,” ed. Erika Doss (Washington,
D.C., 2001), pp. 103–17. Hales describes Life’s depiction of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki disasters
as an “aesthetic of atomic pleasure and witness” (p. 111).
37. Photographs of crowds celebrating in Times Square—in particular, the famous
photograph of a sailor kissing a nurse—became iconic images of this moment. The catastrophe
of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of
Japanese citizens have been completely severed from these images of the celebration of the end
of the war. On the particular blindness reproduced through this photo, see “The Kissing Sailor,
or ‘The Selective Blindness of Rape Culture,’” Crates and Ribbons, cratesandribbons.com/2012/
09/30/the-kissing-sailor-or-the-selective-blindness-of-rape-culture-vj-day-times-square/
FIGURE 9 . Alexander Leydenfrost: “This drawing shows more graphically than ariel
photographs effect of atomic bomb hit on Hiroshima. Smoke billows at 40,000 feet” (“The War
Ends: Burst of Atomic Bomb Brings Swift Surrender to Japanese,” Life, 20, Aug. 1945, p. 25).
hypothetical archive of human rights violations not because the violations

they depict are more significant than others but because the first step in re-
imagining human rights is to establish the conditions in which damaged civil
skills can be restored. For the skill of recognizing an intolerable act lies not in
looking at images that speak for themselves, but in responding to claims, top-
ics, and voices that have been excluded from public discourse in advance.
I include these types of photographs in my reconstruction of the formative
photographic human rights statement because they play an important role in
this human rights literacy lesson. To ignore such images means to accept the
narrative imposed by those in power. Including them enables one to argue that
the creation of the spectator of the photographic statement of human rights in
the mid-1940s reaffirmed the sovereign citizen, indeed, the moral citizen, as
one who accepts as given his or her differentiation from others, from other
governed populations. Sovereign citizen-spectators were invited to acknowl-
edge disaster in one place—Nazi Germany, for example—and to fail to rec-
ognize it elsewhere when it involved other targets and justifications.
Because the disaster in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was territorially specific
and contained, the management of its containment and representation as a
nondisaster was relatively easy compared to that of the displacement of ap-
proximately twenty million people as part of the implementation of the post-
war policy of self-determination (itself conflated with liberation). This
displacement was part of the “solution” to the “problem” posed by “mi-
norities” on the way to stabilizing a new world order through sovereign
nation-states. Population transfer was not framed as yet another horror pro-
duced by the Nazi regime. On the contrary, it was perceived as a potential tool
for instituting the new order. As Mark Mazower observed, “the Nazis [had]
demonstrat[ed] the undreamed-of possibilities of demographic engineering
for nationalist ends.”38 Accordingly, a massive population transfer throughout
Europe, Asia, and Africa followed the end of war.
This repatriation and resettlement, which ignored the will of those dis-
placed and resettled, must be understood as part of the “faith in funda-
mental human rights” professed in the preamble to the UN Charter (1945).
Refugees were constructed as either a problem or a solution, but never as
the locus of an abuse of power by sovereign regimes, never as an instance of
an intolerable transgression against human beings. Millions of Germans,
Poles, Slovaks, Albanians, Indians, Palestinians, Chinese, South Africans,
Ukrainians, and others were expelled from their homes.
This population transfer was not considered a violation of human
rights, and it could not be criminalized as long as those who were conduct-
ing it were also those orchestrating the lesson in human rights literacy.
Images of forced migration—even when framed as a voluntary transfer
facilitated by state officials in formal attire who briskly and efficiently fill
out forms and stamp documents—are deeply disturbing. When citizens
are taught to misidentify the forced transfer of people from their home-
lands as part of a legitimate sovereign plan and policy rather than a viola-
tion of human rights by that sovereign policy, their capacity to recognize
and acknowledge such violations is diminished; they learn to acquiesce to
sovereign policy because it is the law, not because it is just. In this photo-
graphic literacy lesson, the sovereign state requires the participation of
citizen-spectators. Without them, photographs of human rights violations
would be nothing more than dormant archival documents. The sovereign
state needs its citizens-spectators to acknowledge its actions as justified
and legitimate. The deportation of millions of people at the end of World
War II was not perceived at the time and is not remembered now as a
catastrophe. Thus, during this particular lesson, spectators’ civil skills were
damaged; they learned to acknowledge as law that which they should have
identified as unjust and intolerable, as a violation of human rights. The
lesson they absorbed was that the largest forced migration in history,
38. Mazower, No Enchanted Palace, p. 137.

which happened before their very eyes, was an appropriate solution to a
geopolitical problem, that the agents of the state or their international
proxies who executed this transfer were alleviating the plight of refugees
rather than violating their fundamental rights.
Disguised as civil literacy, a sovereign literacy served as the basis for the
production and dissemination of the UN’s 1948 UDHR. Spectators were
taught to interpret sense data differently according to whether they were
looking at their fellow-citizens or at others. Citizens were invited to repeat
the accepted denotative gesture—“this is a disaster”—in those contexts
sanctioned by the state at the same time that they were denied the infor-
mation, tools, images, reports, and concepts that would have enabled them
to take up that gesture and unequivocally state “this is a disaster” in the
disastrous situation that surrounded them.
Co-Citizens-Spectators
In the first decade and a half of the twenty-first century, a civil understand-
ing of the victimization of citizens by their own political regimes has spread
around the globe. Citizens have come to understand that their passive accep-
tance of differential rule or of the abuse of the planet transforms them into
perpetrators, forcing them to participate in the continuation of regime-made
disasters.39 Increasing numbers of citizens, as demonstrated by various anti-
globalization protests and Occupy movements, refuse to play the role of the
moral spectator and reject the automatic and uncritical identification of the
perpetrators as others—in 1945, the Nazis and their collaborators, and follow-
ing 11 September 2001, al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.
To return to photography, it is necessary to conceptually foreground the
presence of the perpetrator in the visual field. His or her absence from this field
is, in fact, often fictitious; he is present even if, to date, he has not often been an
explicit object of reference in the photographic discourse of human rights. The
current discourse tends to ignore the perpetrator, minimizing or obscuring his
presence or dressing him in the attire of law so as to foreground the plight of
the identified victim. However, even when the perpetrator is not visible in the
photographs, the reconceptualization of photography as an encounter be-
tween several protagonists enables us to postulate his or her presence. Such a
postulation is not only possible but also necessary, especially in cases where,
39. On regime-made disasters, see Azoulay, “Regime-Made Disaster: On the Possibility of

Nongovernmental Viewing,” in Sensible Politics: The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Politics,
ed. Yates McKee and Meg McLagan (New York, 2012), pp. 29–42. On the practices of co-
citizens, see Azoulay, “When the Body Politic Ceases to Be an Idea,” Manifesta Journal 16
(2012): www.manifestajournal.org/issues/regret-and-other-back-pages/when-body-politic-
ceases-be-idea
without a Hitler to occupy the position of ultimate perpetrator, the situation
has been framed according to the postwar sovereign perspective in which the
state’s right to defend itself is paramount.
Once the perpetrator’s presence has been established—that is, once the
spectator has relinquished passivity and assumed responsibility for mak-
ing the perpetrator present—we are already at the threshold of a new
human rights discourse. But there have always been spectators—the vic-
tims themselves are also always and necessarily spectators of their own
situation—who have struggled to make perpetrators visible, insisting on
the meaning of what was done to them as a disaster. Not only have they
been ignored by the sovereign powers of the United Nations, they have
been ignored by the citizens of those sovereign powers who had been
trained to see them either as natural victims needing assistance or as those
who deserved what was done to them.
The recent emergence of fully entitled citizens claiming their right, along
with that of visible victims, not to be ruled unequally, that is, not to be perpe-
trators, changes the conditions under which regime-made disaster appears.
For years, the victims of these disasters have claimed “this is a disaster,” but to
no avail. The paradigmatic example of this is, of course, the Palestinians who
were expelled from Palestine in 1948 and have never been allowed to return.
Since the institution of a differential body politic in Palestine in May 1948 (that
is, the effect of the creation of the State of Israel), Palestinians have claimed that
their expulsion, as well as the Israeli state’s refusal to let them return, is a
regime-made disaster produced and perpetuated by the Israeli regime, itself
based on the differential rule of the population. Expelled from Palestine, they
were relegated to the position of victims, excluded from the circle of sovereign
citizens-spectators who, following the global lesson in photographic human
rights literacy, were used by the sovereign powers to sanction their actions.
But Palestinians refused to accept the role assigned to them, and, since
1948, they have acted as co-citizens-spectators who recognize regime-
made disaster for what it is. Refusing to accept victimhood, they have tried
to form an alternative circle of spectators (fig. 10). In photographs, these
co-citizens-spectators are usually encircled by soldiers and police
whose attempts to restore order are actually intended to preserve the
nationally defined meaning of disaster and prevent those exempt from
the disaster—in the first instance, themselves—from identifying it as
disaster. Israeli Jews who join the Palestinians in their struggle against the
Israeli regime refute the colonial and postcolonial conception that seeks to
represent the Palestinians’ struggle as a struggle between two opposing
groups within national borders. One example of such popular struggle,
which has been taking place every Friday for the past ten years, is the joint
FIGURE 10. Palestinian activists wrapped in chains in solidarity with prisoners in Israeli jails
confront heavily armed Israeli soldiers during a weekly nonviolent demonstration in Al
Ma’sara, West Bank, 14 Sept. 2012. Photo: Ryan Rodrick Beiler/Activestills.org.
effort by Palestinians and Israeli Jews to convene an alternative circle of

spectators, co-citizens-spectators, who, together, claim their respective
rights not to be victims and not to be perpetrators.
To conclude, let me make three suggestions: (1) the modern notion of
citizenship that was invented in the eighteenth century has yet to be realized,
not only for those who continue to be deprived of citizenship, but for those
who are considered to be citizens, whose citizenship is inherently flawed be-
cause they are governed unequally alongside those designated as noncitizens;
(2) a necessary condition for the exercise of the right to be governed equally
with others is the naturalization of all others, whether legal or illegal residents,
who are not citizens; (3) history must be retold, which requires that the pho-
tographic archive, so far divided into images of nation-building and develop-
ment projects on the one hand and photographs of human rights violations on
the other, be reorganized and restructured. This new order of archived images,
in an archive shared by the two communities, would make possible the nu-
anced articulation of a new right—the right not to be a perpetrator, the right
not to ruin or abuse the land, property, or life-world of others. The civil claims
now being made around the globe by numerous movements must be trans-
lated into clauses of a new civil declaration of rights. Such a declaration, inclu-
sive of all, remains to be written.
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Palestine as Symptom, Palestine as Hope: Revising Human Rights Discourse

Article in Critical Inquiry · June 2014

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The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was signed in

Critical Inquiry 40 (Summer 2014)

In the wake of World War II, photography took on an increasingly

The End of War: Politics

sovereign states framed them—that is, as legitimate or illegitimate in-

Where Are the Perpetrators?

The Circle of External Spectators

FIGURE 3 . Schematic rendering by author of Amnesty International’s advertisement for

FIGURE 4 . “Potential History-Folded Exhibition.” Curated by Ariella Azoulay, 2008. Photo:

photographer.32 This is no accidental or random confusion but rather the

A Global Photographic Literacy Lesson

32. The division between Israelis/photographers and Palestinians/photographed subjects

FIGURE 5 . “Potential History-Folded Exhibition.” Curated by Ariella Azoulay, 2008. Photo:

displacement of millions of people as part of “self-determination solu-

FIGURE 6 . Eisenhower visits former concentration camp. “Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower,

FIGURE 7. Civilians viewing photographs, Apr.-May 1945, NARA.

example, spectators celebrated the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagaski

Until the beginning of that summer, citizen-spectators could still be de-

The Damaging of Spectators’ Civil Skills

hypothetical archive of human rights violations not because the violations

38. Mazower, No Enchanted Palace, p. 137.

39. On regime-made disasters, see Azoulay, “Regime-Made Disaster: On the Possibility of

effort by Palestinians and Israeli Jews to convene an alternative circle of

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