Witnessing and Testimony as Event Israeli NGOs, Palestinian Witnesses, and the Undoing of Human Rights Bureaucracy

This article shows that human rights NGOs sustain their relevance not by producing testimony texts and witness subject positions, but rather through the social and per-formative dimensions of events in which witnessing is transformed into testimony. The interactional dimensions between witness and documenter are usually omitted from textual representations due to NGOs’ rigid bureaucratic writing, and are also largely overlooked by scholars. Witnessing and testimony are analysed as spatio-temporal sites and occasions of contending with violence and colonialism. Through the peculiar case of Palestinian witnesses and Israeli NGOs’ sustained commitment to witnessing and testimony, despite shared acknowledgement of the failures of human rights, the event is theorized as malleable enough to be reshaped by its par-ticipants. These additional interactional layers may undermine the very logics of human rights witnessing and testimony.