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" Writing Rights, Writing Violence The Bureaucracy of Palestinian Testimonies in Israeli Human Rights NGOs "
Grinberg, Amit Omri
Kalmar, Ivan
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Latin Dissertation
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| Language of Document
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English
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| Record Number
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1104195
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| Doc. No
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TLpq2202427690
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| Main Entry
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Grinberg, Amit Omri
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Kalmar, Ivan
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| Title & Author
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Writing Rights, Writing Violence The Bureaucracy of Palestinian Testimonies in Israeli Human Rights NGOs\ Grinberg, Amit OmriKalmar, Ivan
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| College
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University of Toronto (Canada)
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| Date
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2019
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| student score
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2019
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| Page No
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390
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| Abstract
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This dissertation is an ethnography of Israeli non-governmental organizations (NGOs), that document the violations of Palestinians’ human rights (HR) perpetrated by Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories. Israeli anti-occupation NGOs rely on a rigid bureaucratic logic in their processing of testimony – a written-down narration of a subjective experience of violence into a coherent narrative in document-form: violence is translated into a written text that can be used for legal-action purposes, research, media circulation, and is eventually archived. By anthropologically examining bureaucratic lugubriousness in NGOs, I theorize HR as a project of documentation and archiving that legitimates itself as a subversive bureaucracy. Simultaneously, this project’s own critical authority is undermined since it relies on colonial modes of knowledge production and representation. Based on 18 months of participant-observation in four NGOs, I trace the trajectory of Palestinians’ testimonies as NGOs’ main source of data and as HR’ dominant genre of representation. NGO practices are considered against the backdrop of growing disdain in Israel/Palestine towards HR, not only in the populist rhetoric and efforts of anti-liberal politicians, but also amongst activists, critical scholars, Palestinians living under the occupation, and within NGOs’ own staff. The main recurring critique is that HR fail to protect Palestinians or curb Israel’s settler-colonialism. Some detractors claim that NGOs are complicit with Israel’s violence. This study explores why Palestinians continue to testify for Israeli NGOs that, in turn, persist in documenting Palestinians’ testimonies. I suggest that HR are a genre of anti-colonial historiography that is itself based on colonial reason, mainly genealogies of surveying and bureaucratic writing: NGOs rely on what I term as “frames of in/validation” - phases of incessant verification and adaptation of Palestinian experiences of violence into simplified narrative structures, that conform to legal-moral discourses and definitions of HR. While the strictures of documentation and writing problematically limit the moral claims and political clout of NGOs, HR paradoxically remain relevant through the relational foundation affirmed by frames of in/validation, namely: between a violent past written as a bureaucratic document, and a distant future in which imagined publics make moral-political judgments based on NGOs’ archives.
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Middle Eastern Studies
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Organization Theory
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Social research
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