The Presence of Palestinian Absence in Narrating the Zionist Nation into Being

Annie Pfingst

doi:10.5130/csr.v14i1.2102

Abstract

In 2005, the 38th year of the Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem and the year that saw the construction of an eight metre high concrete Wall of Separation through the Occupied West Bank, an exhibition, 'The New Hebrews: A Century of Israeli Art', was held at Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin. The exhibition can be read as the narration of the Zionist nation coming into being – a narration in which the Palestinian people do not figure, though the reconfiguration of the land does. Only in the room on Conflict are Palestinian refugees, the Occupation and the Wall represented by Israeli photographers and media artists, making a slight dent into a historiography and landscape devoid of Palestinian agency and presence. From a Jewish feminist engagement with the discourses on Palestinian Right of Return, the essay addresses a set of questions about the field of vision posed by Ariella Azoulay in Death’s Showcase: The Power of Image in Contemporary Democracy (2001) when she asks: Who sees? Who is capable of seeing, what, and from where? Who is authorised to look? How is this authorization given or acquired? In whose name does one look? What can be seen outside the narrative of redemption and the frame set by the Temple Scroll and the Jug of Tears? Are the photographs of the Intifada and the portraits from the refugee camps in effect inserting the presence of the spectral other, as described by Judith Butler? This essay will consider the ways in which we might read these Israeli photographic insertions in the circumstance where representation and representational space is such a contested feature of the conflict.

Highlights

In 2005, as part of my doctoral research, I went to Berlin to see the exhibition ‘The New Hebrews: A Century of Art in Israel’[3] at Martin-Gropius-Bau. 2005 was the thirty-eighth year of the Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip captured in the 1967 Six Day War, and a year that saw extensive Israeli construction of the Separation Wall between the West Bank of the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the state of Israel
The exhibition was the initiative of Berlin-based Israeli art historian and curator Doreet LeVitte Harten, developed in partnership with Yigal Zalmona, chief curator with the Israel Museum in Jerusalem
Reflecting on works in ‘The New Hebrews’, I consider what authorises our looking, determines who and what registers in our seeing, what frames become visible to our looking even as the Zionist national narrative so coherently registered in ‘The New Hebrews’ simultaneously disappears Palestinian presence

Summary

Introduction

In 2005, as part of my doctoral research, I went to Berlin to see the exhibition ‘The New Hebrews: A Century of Art in Israel’[3] at Martin-Gropius-Bau. 2005 was the thirty-eighth year of the Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip captured in the 1967 Six Day War, and a year that saw extensive Israeli construction of the Separation Wall between the West Bank of the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the state of Israel. While I was reflecting on ‘The New Hebrews’ and its representation of the cultural, political, and historical environments of Palestine-Israel, the Israeli ‘teenage’ soldier Gilad Shalit was kidnapped across the border from Gaza on 25 June 2006.

Results

Conclusion