The Treachery of Images: Counter-Forensics in Palestine

Author/Contributor(s):	Molavi, Shourideh C.
Publisher:	Verso
Date:	6/15/2027
Binding:	Paperback
Condition:	NEW

A decade of on-the-ground counter-forensic research reveals how visual, spatial and textual documentation has shaped global understanding of violence against Palestinians. From a researcher at the Turner Prize-winning organisation Forensic Architecture.

This book is the culmination of original fieldwork, counter-forensic investigations, legal advocacy and archival research carried out by the author in Palestine over the past decade, including firsthand documentation in the occupied Gaza Strip during Israel’s ongoing genocidal military campaign. Born out of a desire to illuminate and explore the way that violence against the Palestinian people since the Nakba has been documented visually, cartographically, spatially, and in text, the author examines the present-day colonial legacies of these counter-forensic documentations, the modes of resistance they invite, and the ways they frame conversations around Palestine liberation. An urgent and critical examination of the ways in which the proliferation of widely-available videos and audio from Palestine, particularly since October 2023, have been mobilized by counter-forensic practitioners to document Israel’s genocide, this book interrogates the political, methodological, and legal foundations for the dehumanization of Palestinians, whose overstudied lives by much of mainstream media and open-source practitioners is being increasingly reduced to the lens of rubble, misery, and humanitarianism.