Negotiating Surveillance at Religious Sites: Jerusalem and Beyond
The following is a blog post from Lior Volinz, whose article “From Above and Below: Surveillance, Religion, and Claim-Making at Jerusalem’s Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif” was recently published in Surveillance & Society.
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Surveillance is an arena of contestation. The question of who gets to surveil whom, how, when and where is a topic of continuous debate among policymakers, security agents, and ordinary citizens. This is particularly the case at religious sites, where surveillance practices, materialities and technologies can evoke both strong emotions and legal claims for privacy and freedom of worship. In my article, a part of a special issue on Surveillance and Religion, I delve into the multitude of surveillance practices and technologies employed and negotiated at Jerusalem’s Temple Mount (or Haram-al-Sharif), a site holy in both Islam and Judaism, and the location of the al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock.
My research on the Israeli public-private security array in Jerusalem allowed me to observe different angles of the transformed Israeli security landscape in occupied Palestinian East Jerusalem: the emergence of a modular security governance, the increased privatization of security provision, and the growing reliance on digital surveillance aimed at policing urban spaces and sorting populations. The latter is of particular importance to the myriad religious groups which populate Jerusalem: ‘smart’ surveillance not only threatens their privacy, but can also lead to the placement of stringent limitations on religious assembly, the blacklisting of ‘unwanted’ worshippers, and further curtailing the role of religious spaces as sites for social, educational and political activity.
Yet surveillance is never just a top-to-bottom affair: the surveilled can find creative ways to negotiate, cope with or resist surveillance practices and technologies. In this article I explore three types of surveillance employed on the Temple Mount / Haram-al-Sharif: Israeli state surveillance, Palestinian Muslims’ grassroots sousveillance (which seeks to document violations by Israeli security agents and Jewish religious activists), and internationally-prescribed adjudicating surveillance (aimed at providing ‘neutral’ data towards conflict resolution). Together, these different dimensions of surveillance shed a light on the particularities of holy sites as an arena of contestation — where worshippers can benefit from an enlarged scope of negotiation with state surveillance technologies and practices while adopting new modes of claim-making of rights and resources articulated through surveillance.
