Documentation Ideologies: Witnessing Palestinians Pain and Liberal Denials in Israeli NGOs - Dr. Omri Grinberg, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

This talk examines the failure of liberal politics in Israel to translate human rights (HR) from
the conceptual and abstract - moral and (primarily) legal understandings of violence - into
effective, impactful practices of working methods and public activity. The case studied is
Israeli non-governmental organizations (NGOs) documenting HR violations against
Palestinians by Israel and Israelis (and by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas – though less
of a focus for these NGOs). In this field, I conducted two comprehensive research projects:
(i) an ethnography of daily work routines in Israeli HR NGOs, examining their bureaucracy
and relation to state institutions, and; (ii) a historical anthropology of these organizations’
formation in the mid-late 1980s, studying their role in national and transnational politics of
archives and memory.

Israeli NGOs, as key sources of information for transnational institutions and as
symbolic heroes for liberal publics, allow us to think critically about liberalism's current
decline – in the national context of Israel, and as part of transnational politics and culture. By
considering these HR organizations’ overall significance while offering a unique portrait of
what human rights work actually consists of, I discern two taken-for-granted assumptions
influencing NGOs' work. One assumption concerns HR professional tools – namely, that
these tools are perfectly adequate for documenting violence and as advocacy paths. The
second assumption is that if Israeli state and Jewish publics (within and beyond Israel) would
truly know about the realities of violence, this will inevitably end the occupation. As I show,
both assumptions are refuted over and over again in a triad of scales: in the organizational
everyday, in discourses about NGOs (amongst activists, in academia, and within and between
organizations themselves), and in the realities of violence in Israel/Palestine.

My talk identifies three dominant forms of denial through which NGO workers avoid
contending with the refutations of these assumptions. To understand why and how Israeli
NGOs persist in doing what they do, and how HR still matter, I suggest that these denials are
indicative of "documentation ideologies": a professional and political commitment to
document and archive material that would otherwise be lost, which motivates organizations
(collectively) and employees (individually). However, neither organizations nor their workers
recognize that archival functions could reshape political-historical consciousness and bear
significant impact. This paradox intimates how the translation of liberal politics into action
confuses the means of human rights work (the bureaucracy of documentation and archiving
violence and injustice) as its ends (ending them).

Judaic Studies Department | Website | View More Events

Lior Libman

Contact the organizers