Chapter 6 deals with the legal and political forces determining the visibility of Israeli state violence against young Palestinians. First, it examines three ways in which Israel subjects Palestinians to its gaze or pressures them to internalize it: putting up threatening posters with photographs of Palestinian youth or their parents; taking pictures of unsuspected Palestinian youth; and soldiers filming their abuse of young Palestinians. Second, this chapter lays bare a range of Israeli practices and discursive techniques operating to conceal, downplay, and legitimize violence against young Palestinians: the prevention of such violence from being witnessed in real time; the destruction of incriminating evidence; restrictions on publishing unflattering information; the failure to record interrogations; torture methods that leave no physical marks; legally sanctioned secrecy; the impunity of alleged perpetrators; and their depiction as merely a few rotten apples. Finally, the chapter offers a rethinking of evidence. Israel and its human rights critics tend to privilege video footage and state agents’ testimonies, thereby validating both Israel’s dismissal of uncorroborated Palestinian allegations and its “rotten apples” narrative. It is argued that alternative types of evidence foreground the representation at work and can thus highlight the invisibility shrouding both state violence and young witnesses.

This chapter examines a third pro-migration activist intervention, which involves the dressing of unmarked graves at cemeteries in which the bodies of those who died en route are buried. It situates the intervention in relation to existing instruments of containment charted in Part I and shows how grave dressing challenges biopolitical, thanatopolitical and zoopolitical dynamics of governing migration through death and vulnerability by accounting for the lives of those who have died at sea. The chapter draws on research carried out in Lampedusa and considers how cemetery activism invokes dignity in death through the naming of the deceased and the marking of graves as sites of loss and mourning. In so doing, it shows how such interventions go beyond an action for the dead alone, albeit in terms that bring to bear tensions between and within a politics of pity and a politics of empathy. By exploring different strands of cemetery activism, the chapter highlights the critical importance of those interventions that involve a refusal of racialised processes of dehumanisation and that extend practices of mourning beyond commemoration in terms that render visible the normalisation of death and vulnerability. It shows how such interventions enact dignity in death through a politics of responsibility that directly challenges authorities for a failure to account for the lives of those lost or disappeared. Grave dressing in this regard not only draws attention to the problems of a politics orientated towards the security of home, but also recreates home in more hopeful terms, through the enactment of a politics of collective responsibility for deaths at sea in solidarity with both the living and the dead.