Video warfare

During the Second Intifada,a French TV network aired a video of a 12-year- old boy,Muhhammad al-Durrah,cowering behind his father and then falling dead from Israeli gunfire. Years later,the Israeli government decided to dispute the veracity of the video,claiming that the killing was staged by Palestinian propagandists. In the years since,the footage has fed into a sense of injury and self-righteousness,and become an iconic exhortation to battle,for both sides. It also demonstrated the power and fallibility of moving image as documentary proof.

News of the Israeli commandos attack on the Mavi Marmara has been backed up by a deluge of amateur video. The organisers of the Gaza aid ship were webcasting events live,and videos of the violence have been replayed all over the world,to galvanic effect. Meanwhile,the Israeli military has matched that with its own mini film festival,with YouTube clips that make it seem that the soldiers were merely acting in self-defence. In one video,an activist appears to push a soldier off the vessel,others claim to reveal a cache of weapons on the ship. These disjointed bits of action have a disturbingly Rashomon-like feel its hard to imagine how it played out,the sequence of events,the exact provocation. But it doesnt matter,because both sets of video feed the partisan preconceptions and paranoia of both sides. Once,images claimed to bear witness from Abraham Zapruders 26-second video of Kennedys assassination or Tiananmen Square or Abu Ghraib itself. Conflicts branded themselves into our memory with single,iconic images. But now,though media is more personal and participatory than ever,the images claim to truth has never been so assailable.

There was,of course,only one truth that unfolded in the flotilla raid but sifting through to that truth may be impossible with this flood of video evidence. With their digital manipulability,pictures are only as good as words and we tend to choose those that reassure our own beliefs.