Visual Occupations: Violence and Visibility in a Conflict Zone

Perverse Modernities

by Gil Z. Hochberg

In Visual Occupations Gil Z. Hochberg shows how the Israeli Occupation of Palestine is driven by the unequal access to visual rights, or the right to control what can be seen, how, and from which position. Israel maintains this unequal balance by erasing the history and denying the existence of Palestinians, and by carefully concealing its own militarization. Israeli surveillance of Palestinians, combined with the militarized gaze of Israeli soldiers at places like roadside checkpoints, also serve as tools of dominance. Hochberg analyzes various works by Palestinian and Israeli artists, among them Elia Suleiman, Rula Halawani, Sharif Waked, Ari Folman, and Larry Abramson, whose films, art, and photography challenge the inequity of visual rights by altering, queering, and manipulating dominant modes of representing the conflict. These artists' creation of new ways of seeing—such as the refusal of Palestinian filmmakers and photographers to show Palestinian suffering or the Israeli artists' exposure of state manipulated Israeli blindness —offers a crucial gateway, Hochberg suggests, for overcoming and undoing Israel's militarized dominance and political oppression of Palestinians.

224 pages, Paperback

First published July 30, 2007

About the author

Gil Z. Hochberg is theRansford Professor of Hebrew and Visual Studies, Comparative Literature, and Middle East Studies, Chair of the Department of Middle Eastern studies south Asian studies and African studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University New York. Professor Hochberg’s research focuses on the relationship between politics and aesthetics. With a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (UC Berkeley 2002) her early work was primarily about literature. Her later work shifted to visual arts, primarily cinema, video art, photography and painting. Her main interest centers on questions of representation and power, particularly in the context of colonialism, orientalism, and nationalism, with a concentration on Palestine, Israel, Zionism as well as a broader interest in (post)colonial South Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

She has published numerous essays about Francophone North African literature, Palestinian literature, Hebrew literature, Palestinian and Israeli cinema, postcolonial cinema, queer studies, photography, colonial oppression and legacies of resistance across gender, race and sexual minorities, Race and Religion. Her most recent book My Father the Messiah: a Memoir (Duke University Press 2026) is a creative nonfiction text about messianism, mental illness, religion, queerness, Judaism, Zionism, anti-Zionism and the relationship between these all. She is also the author of a bilingual (French, English) book about the Benin Artist Roméo Mivekannin, Orientalisme (Editions Cécile Fakhoury, October 2025). In addition, Hochberg is the writer of several gallery catalogues, co-editor of special volumes on photography, and author of numerous option essays and creative nonfiction.