Lawrence Abu Hamdan is an artist. He’s also an investigator. He calls himself a “private ear.” To put it succinctly, he listens to crimes—the audio captured in phone recordings and CCTV footage, for instance—in search of the truth:
One of the earliest cases Abu Hamdan worked on involved Nadeem Nawara and Mohammad Abu Daher, two Palestinian teen-agers who were shot dead by Israeli border police in the occupied West Bank during a Nakba Day protest. The Israel Defense Forces claimed that the officers had shot the boys with rubber bullets, to quell the demonstration, and that the cause of the deaths could not be determined. Abu Hamdan used sound analysis to differentiate the sonic signatures of various kinds of ammunition. In this case, the sounds were of neither rubber-coated bullets nor live ammunition “but something in between,” he said. “A kind of amalgamation of the two sounds.” Abu Hamdan ultimately found that the officers had fired live ammunition out of a rubber-bullet extension. This finding led to the indictment of Ben Deri, one of the Israeli border officers, on manslaughter charges. (In 2016, Deri accepted a plea deal for the lesser charge of negligent homicide and received a nine-month prison sentence.)
When Ben Deri was arrested, in 2014, it was the first time that a member of the Israeli forces had been charged with killing a Palestinian child. But how could Abu Hamdan feel anything like resolution? The pursuit of legal justice, however limited, had forced him into a cowed posture. “I was immediately asked to do something that, for me, was politically compromising, which was to argue that the Israeli soldiers were not firing rubber bullets but live ammunition,” he said—the implication being that rubber bullets were acceptable. “Rubber bullets, especially in the Israel-Palestine context, are constantly being shot in people’s faces at close range,” Abu Hamdan explained. They maim, as a form of deterrence.
Two years after the bullet analysis, he created an installation called “Earshot,” which reflects on the killings of Nawara and Abu Daher. The centerpiece is a video called “Rubber Coated Steel.” The film was shot in an indoor gun range, where the sounds of gunfire cannot be heard from the outside—a metaphor for violence done in a kind of aural darkness. There is no speech, but text runs along the bottom of the video: a transcript from an imaginary civil trial. And yet, even in this space of speculative justice, Nawara and Abu Daher are not given “a voice”; the boys are not made to ventriloquize a fantasy of justice from beyond the grave. Abu Hamdan challenges a maxim forced onto the marginalized: that their voices are a source of power.
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