Another World is Possible: Arts-based Human Rights Interventions in Israel
In this blog, ART researchers Paul Gready and Ron Dudai reflect on the interviews they carried out with human rights organisations in Israel, and the value-added that art can provide to traditional human rights campaigning.
Illustration by Itai Raveh, reproduced with permission from the artist.
Introduction
In late June two Art Rights Truth researchers, Ron Dudai and Paul Gready, conducted a series of interviews with Israeli human rights organisations about the use of arts in their activism. Interviews were conducted with staff from four organisations: B’Tselem: The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, an NGO which has placed a premium on credibility, through empirical fact-finding and the format of the human rights report; Breaking the Silence, an organisation that based its legitimacy on the factual testimonies of Israeli soldiers; a former staff member at Zochrot, a group that anchors its work in oral histories, designed to educate and campaign among the Jewish public on the Palestinian Nakba (meaning catastrophe relating to dispossession and displacement); and Parents against Child Detention, a newer organisation challenging the detention of Palestinian youths and children that is less based in the testimonial and report-writing tradition.
From these different starting points, each organisation has incorporated arts-based interventions in their repertoires of working. B’Tselem uses media ranging from a camera distribution project to dance; Breaking the Silence launched with a photographic exhibition, and now uses films, plays, collaborations with creative writers, and more; Zochrot has perhaps been the most experimental, hosting its own gallery space and working with imagined futures; while Parents against Child Detention started its work by asking illustrators to represent the eight stages of detention.
In this context, the blog focuses on two themes emerging from the research: the importance of the foundation (reports, testimony, oral history), and the value-added of the arts.
The importance of the factual foundation
Among most of our interviewees there was a strong and enduring faith in the importance of fact-finding and human rights reports, and an attitude bordering in reverence for the raw material on which these are based - first hand testimonies carefully corroborated by the organisations. This despite acknowledgement that reports are ‘problematic’ and not widely read - ‘I don’t think many people read our reports’ one person tasked with writing such reports told us. Interviewees also acknowledged that reports are read in particular ways, for example, as reference material rather than ‘cover to cover’, and as a paper trail for history; and by specific audiences, such as diplomats, journalists, or academics, but not the general public.
But beyond these limitations reports are seen in both a methodological and almost existential sense as the foundation on which organisations are built. This foundation has a process element - ‘we must go through the process’ characterised by rigour and deep analysis - that informs organisational credibility, prestige and recognition as experts. Particularly in an environment as hostile to human rights work as Israel, the constant recreation of the foundation, while often off stage or in the background, is crucial to enable organisations to fend off critique and to say and do other things. Interviewees suggested that even when most people are exposed to their advocacy through short posts and films on social media, or indeed through the artistic interventions, they are aware of the fact-finding research effort that anchors other forms of outreach, and this gives these other forms a kind of inherited legitimacy and credibility.
Two factors help to build a bridge between the fact-finding foundation and the arts as one manifestation of the ‘other things’ that human rights organisations do. The first is a move beyond the belief that ‘if only people knew the truth’ they would think and behave differently. Several interviewees started their careers with this view; some remained incredulous that this theory of change seemingly achieves so little. But most had (also) moved on, to acknowledge that simply disseminating the truth about human rights abuses is not enough. One interviewee went so far as to describe this view as ‘super charming, romantic and naive’, stating that the challenge is that people know but either do not care or justify the status quo. It is in this space, between knowledge and understanding, that a ‘new language or imaginary’ is needed.
The second bridge to the arts is the realisation that a central challenge of human rights work in a place like Israel is how to keep ‘telling the same story in different ways’, ‘when everything is told already’. Another interviewee agreed, talking about not continually ‘stepping on the same stone’. When human rights abuses are extreme and relentless, nothing is new or news. When seeking to constantly find new ways of telling, the arts are an ‘amazing tool’.
The value-added of the arts
In moving beyond a strategy that seeks rational responses to truth to other forms of insight and reactions, and as a vehicle for innovative retelling, according to interviewees the arts add value in at least two main ways.
First, art facilitates the communication of things that ‘won’t pass for words’, elements usually edited out of human rights reports - the everyday, emotions, feelings, the hinterland of the human rights story, ‘where things happen, the way things look around what you document’, things that matter but ‘may not be a human rights abuse’. This is also about moving beyond the text – the legal foundation of the traditional report, into the visual, the performative, the interactive, the experiential. Arts-based outputs ‘capture you in all your senses’. Referring to artistic illustrations of the eight stages of detention, one interviewee spoke of the illustrations ‘pulling the eyes’ towards a colour, a shape, an image that you cannot resist, and working on the audience emotionally - in the hope that they will lead people to the next step, to read, engage, support a cause. Another interviewee also argued that capturing this wider canvas enabled people to ‘stay with’ difficult subject matter for longer. Art is then understood as a mechanism responding to the ease in which people can turn away from the written page of the report.
Second, and linked to the above point, for a movement more used to proclaiming truths as self-evident and self-justifying, and in a context characterised by polarised positions, arts-based interventions ‘open up’ people and spaces to allow for other possibilities. Rather than an overload of detail and truth - one person talked of the organisational DNA to ‘show everything’ factually, which ‘can be too much - and telling people what to think’, art allows the audience more interpretive freedom and opens up a world that accepts difference, complexity and multiplicity of experience. One interviewee detailed a series of ‘opening up’ roles that the arts can play: giving people the tools to think differently, unlearn the past, and reimagine alternative futures; assisting the move from knowledge to understanding, for example by enabling audiences to put themselves in the shoes of others; and asking questions rather than providing answers. She was clear that the role of the arts was not to provide a map or a plan - it was a means to open up the ‘political imagination’.
By way of conclusion
Even during what some label a post-truth era, with social media saturation and increasingly shortened attention spans, the traditional format of fact-finding and report writing remains the basis of human rights work. But, while it is not seen as obsolete, it is certainly recognized as insufficient. The use of art in public interventions based on human rights issues and materials seems to be one manifestation of this recognition.
Perhaps the most important role the arts can play in a place like Israel is that it has a manifesto-like quality - another world is possible - albeit without any accompanying detailed plan. In a setting where ‘the most difficult problem is imagining something else’, and going beyond the Israeli government’s mantra that there is only one way to survive and envisage the future, the arts have an invaluable function at the level of meta-narrative, in shifting the story, opening up space for discussion and different strategic possibilities, and embracing alternative futures.
