The Violence You Were/n’t Meant to See

This chapter starts with a consideration of the opportunities the internet affords us to become virtual witnesses to episodes of military operations and the deaths they result in. It is organised around an analysis of two such episodes caught on video and disseminated via the internet, (1) the Wikileaks ‘collateral murder’ video, and (2) the video of the targeted assassination of Hamas’s Military Commander, Ahmed al-Jabari, by the Israeli Defence Force in 2012. Drawing on ethnomethodological studies as well as Goffman’s examination of the ‘workshop complex’ (which we will outline), we examine what these videos could be said to show through an analysis of the ways we are directed to view them by those who have made them available to us. We will suggest the question of who takes such footage public ‘first’ rather than ‘second’ is an important one as the opening establishes the terms in which a video’s status as evidence will be discussed. Having reviewed each case, and what could be said to have been done via the release of footage to the public in them, we end by sounding a note of caution around the notion that videos of either kind represent a straightforward medium of ‘truth’. What it means to ‘watch war’, as Miezskowski has pointed out (2011), is not easily resolved and, we shall argue in conclusion, we need to treat video footage as posing as many problems as it seems to resolve.