Description:
<jats:p>The article focuses on Hezbollah's filmed operations as key media texts in the group's discourse of resistance. In 1986 Hezbollah surprised the public with an innovation in their strategies of resistance: their fighters filmed one of their armed operations in the occupied southern Lebanon and broadcast it to the public. This video, followed by numerous others, had an impact on the growing popularity of the movement and, even more so, on the construction of their image in the minds of both their public and the Israeli one.</jats:p>
<jats:p>First broadcast by national media, these videos are now in online archives accessible to anyone at any time through Hezbollah's Internet sites. Stemming from Michel Foucault's and Edward Said's notions of power and knowledge, the article reads these videos as a strategy of resistance and as an attempt at self-representation that defies and inverts the prevalent relation of power and domination. The videos act as a metaphor of empowerment of a dominated self being presented as the “one who sees,” the “one who allows to see,” and the “one who is seen.” Thus they become what Daniel Dayan calls “monstration”: a reality that exists only through the way it is shown.</jats:p>