Occupying Habits

Drawing on a unique and extensive archival and open-source research the book follows Palestinians exposing violations on their smartphone cameras and Israeli soldiers mimicking the practice with their own devices for both propaganda and operational reasons. Here media becomes itself a terrain of conflict and the means by which it unfolds. A compelling read on every page, the book brings together Mann's sensibility as a filmmaker to narrative and visual form and his scholarly attention to theoretical and historical context . * Eyal Weizman, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK * Occupying Habits reveals how Israel's military has usurped existing habits of shooting, tagging and sharing images, underscoring that the increased visibility of the military's routine procedures of repression has not led to the contraction of colonial power. Rather, Daniel Mann shows how the military absorbs everyday media practices and transforms them into effective elements of warfare. This profound intervention is as insightful as it is urgent, changing the way we understand the military's use of social media. * Neve Gordon, Queen Mary, University of London, UK * This is a theoretically rich and salient study of the important, contradictory, and ubiquitous presence of media technologies as embedded in soldiers' everyday lives and simultaneously integral to the functioning of the security, surveillance, and military regime in Israel/Palestine. Offering us the concept of habitual media, Mann moves beyond discussions of the power of the image and the normalization of occupation to consider how the flexibility of images, networks, computers, algorithms and information enable military and colonizing power. * Helga Tawil-Souri, NYU, USA *