Irish Network for Middle Eastern and North African Studies

  by Paola Rivetti On September 8, 2022, the Irish Network for MENA Studies, the Early Childhood Research Centre (ECRC) at Dublin City University, and Academics for Palestine co-hosted the screening of the award-winning documentary Not Just Your Picture: the Story of the Kilani Family , by Anne Paq and Dror Dayan, with the participation of the director Anne Paq. I was surprised at my own feelings while watching Not Just Your Picture: the Story of the Kilani Family . I felt a piercing frustration at one specific point of the documentary. Layla Kilani, one of the protagonists, walks in the streets of al-Khalil/Hebron with her friends, classmates and a guide, when an Israeli settler passes by - insulting them and inciting the Israeli soldiers to remove them from ‘his streets’. This scene is familiar to anyone who has visited al-Khalil/Hebron: the visitors on a political tour, the violent settlers, the soldiers escorting the settlers to guarantee their safety and security – and, it goe...

Israeli tactics to deter Palestinian journalists from doing their work include imprisonment, fines, beatings, house arrests, and live fire. The targeting of Shireen Abu Akleh, a well-known media personality, signals an escalation in attacks by Israel on journalists attempting to expose the full detail of its decades-long occupation. by Claudia Saba  Veteran Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh (Photo: Creative Commons) On 11 May 2022, veteran reporter Shireen Abu Akleh, was shot in the head while covering an Israeli military raid by elite commando unit Duvdevan , near Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank. Her colleague, ​​Ali al-Samoudi, was also shot but survived. Witnesses at the scene maintain that the shots came from Israeli forces. Footage, photographs, and geolocation data have pointed to an Israeli convoy as the source of the bullets that killed Shireen and injured her colleague. Investigations by the New York Times , The Washington Post , CNN , Bellingcat , and the UN Hu...

  By Natasha Remoundou This blog article explores the ways technological media of vertical and oblique war photography and military surveillance are captured in contemporary Irish poetry to open up discussions about the Western 'gaze', ways of 'seeing'/'mapping', mobility, and conflict in the Middle East. In the photographic series ‘Heat Maps’, Irish conceptual documentary photographer Richard Mosse documents a digital atlas that archives forced mobility across the globe while capturing in film a haunting parallel journey between spectators and those that remain ‘unseen’ from above and afar. By means of repurposing military surveillance technology, Mosse uses vertical and oblique mid-wave infrared camera techniques, commonly used to detect and track criminals, to photograph humans in states of exception and landscapes in ruins. The specific use of this apparatus of visual surveillance assembles the transcontinental trails of migrants from Africa and the Persia...

  By Sahar Ahmed Lorie Shaull CC BY-SA 2.0 In October 2021, the Council of Europe released posters as part of a campaign against anti-Muslim discrimination. Slogans across the posters ranged from ‘Beauty is in diversity as freedom is in hijab’ to ‘My headscarf, My choice’, along with pictures of women - some wearing a headscarf, some not. But promptly following the publicity of these posters, there was loud opposition to them, most notably from  France .   Many French politicians condemned the campaign for promoting the wearing of the  hijab , arguing that the  hijab  did not represent freedom. Sarah El-Haïry, France’s Youth Minister, said during an interview on  French TV , that the campaign clashed with the secular values of France. The criticism was swift and powerful - enough for the Council of Europe to delete its tweets about the campaign and to take the posters down. Posters, which were part of an anti-hate speech campaign led by the inclusion a...