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A case of cosmopolitan memory? The media and the Israeli-

Palestinian conflict

Jérôme BourdonTel Aviv University, Israel

Center for the Sociology of Innovation, Ecole des Mines, Paris

EU SCREEN CONFERENCE, STOCKHOLM, SEPTEMBER 15, 2011

Cosmopolitan memory as oxymoron

Halbwachs denied the possibility of universal/transnational collective memory « History could be considered as the universal memory of

the human race. But there is no universal memory. Collective memory of any kind must be related to a given group located in space and time » (La mémoire collective, 1949). Even the nation was not central to his theoretical outlook

The growing field of media/memory studies: distant ‘memory making’ (Neiger et al., 2011)

Cosmopolitanism as political utopia/experience/methodology

Cosmopolitanism: a set of normative principles (« an ornament of the elite »)

Cosmopolitanism as often experienced, often unconsciously, as latent (conflictual) historical process

Cosmopolitanism as methodological choice: releasing major concepts, including memory, « from the fetters of the nation »

Food for memory: Israel-Palestine, the main foreign story

Israel-Palestine as the main « global media conflict » (but Israel-Palestine fatigue?)

Jerusalem as « default » foreign news Justifications (the 3 religions/petrol/holocaust/

diasporas) which feed themselves ….and feed culture beyond news: Israel

Palestine as cultural artifacts: documentaries, films, memoirs, comics, detective stories

Joe Sacco. Palestine. 1993

Suad Amiry. Sharon and my mother in law. 2006

Beyond journalists: Local Witnesses as Agents of Memories

The local actors of the conflict have long been used to narrating their experience to international audiences

…. And to taking to witness the media and the political pilgrims and tourists

… Instant/distant witnessing on the Internet Machsomwatch: http://www.machsomwatch.org/en/videos B’Tselem: http://www.btselem.org Shovrim Shtika: www.breakingthesilence.org.il

Archiving for the Future

« And the place of Breaking the Silence is now to create a bank, a museum of the Second Intifada, so that when Israeli society inscribes its national narrative about what happened here during these years, it will not be able to ignore the thousands of hours of sound and video of soldiers testimonies » (Yehuda Shaul, Initiator of Breaking the Silence….for who?)

Appropriations by audiences: media,identity and collective

memories Transnational diasporic audiences: Jews,

Arabs and Muslims, the radical left The Europe/US divide? Different relations to

the Israeli-Palestinian conflict However, beware of national/continental

reification: « multi-layered, transnational spaces and cultures of memory » (Ulrich Beck)

Framing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Some examples

From the left: the occupation as a universal good fight (less so after 9/11 and the rise of radical islam)

Distant suffering (Boltanski): a politics of compassion (« Christian » framing)

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict as global risk for world peace (the case of the nov. 2003, European Commission sponsored opinion poll)

Framing through metaphors

Israel as historical miracle, socialist experiment (kibbutz)

The watershed of 1967: occupation, colonization

The rise of the Palestinians in public space: new lexicon (Intifada, Nakba), new metaphors (Palestinians as David/Jews)

A rising metaphor: the apartheid

Cosmopolitanism as challenge for the media

Cosmopolitan memory is not an oxymoron, but a complex process: “issues of global concerns are becoming part of the everyday local experience and the moral life worlds of the people” (Ulrich Beck)

The mainstream media still functioning in the old national frame of neutrality/objectivity

Talking to journalists, backstage: cracks in « professionalism »