Towards a new space of appearance: drone images of the 2023 Israeli pro-democracy protests

From January to September 2023 demonstrations erupted in Israel against the government’s anti-democratic juridical reforms. Spectacular drone images quickly became the preferred form of visualisation for the protests, enabling their propagation in the press and online media outlets. The reason for this preference on the part of the protests’ organisers was functional — to index the large number of protestors, against the police and mainstream media’s modest numeric counts. Yet, the images were criticised by scholars as intentionally unifying the weekly demonstration at Kaplan Street in Tel Aviv, which comprised also groups protesting against the Zionist nationalist agenda of the organisers. Our essay challenges these critical accounts by arguing that these images offer a new political imaginary beyond national sovereignty. While these criticisms address the images at the level of representation as if they were taken from a human perspective, we emphasise the technologically mediated way they are produced, operated, and disseminated. Rather than simply documenting the protests as given, drones as human-machinic assemblages produce forms of (in)visualisation that reconfigure the political, conceptual, and perceptual field of the protests. The images function as diagrams that emphasise fluid and contingent forms of relationality rather than the static presence of homogenised crowds.