Copyright

by

Noah Leon Simblist

2015

The Dissertation Committee for Noah Leon Simblist certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation:

DIGGING THROUGH TIME: PSYCHOGEOGRAPHIES OF OCCUPATION

Committee:

Ann Reynolds, Supervisor

Tarek El-Ariss, Co-Supervisor

Stephennie Mulder

George Flaherty

Yoav Di-Capua

DIGGING THROUGH TIME: PSYCHOGEOGRAPHIES OF OCCUPATION

by

Noah Leon Simblist, B.A.; M.F.A.

Dissertation

Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of

The University of Texas at Austin

in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements

for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

The University of Texas at Austin December 2015

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the support of my committee, especially my supervisor Ann Reynolds who generously read countless drafts of this dissertation and offered invaluable feedback that helped me to craft my writing to become more clear and precise. My co- supervisor Tarek El Aris was enormously helpful in helping me to conceptualize the relationship between Israel-Palestine and Lebanon, allowing this dissertation to move outside of the common binary of Israel-Palestine. He also was a great help in introducing me to many major figures of the art scene in Beirut. Yoav Di-Capua introduced me to

Tarek El-Aris and was the one who suggested that I think about Lebanon as well. But I also learned a great amount from his seminar, especially ways to think through methodologies of historiography. I remember learning some foundational principles about art and architecture of the Islamic and Arab world from a seminar that I took with

Stephennie Mulder and have continued to learn from her nuanced look at the legacy of a long and rich cultural history in the region in relation to contemporary art and politics.

I am also deeply grateful to George Flaherty for agreeing to join my committee at the last minute and provide poignant feedback. I also want to thank Andrea Giunta who started this project with me before leaving UT. Her seminar on politically engaged conceptualism in Latin America helped give me an analog for similar practices in the

Middle East.

I am also grateful to the support of Southern Methodist University, where I have taught since 2003. I pursued this PhD while teaching full time at SMU, Meadows School of the

iv Arts and my deans Jose Bowen and Sam Holland as well as my chairs Jay Sullivan and

Michael Corris helped me in this process in innumerable ways including research funding from Meadows Faculty Development Grants, University Research Grants and course relief. I was also fortunate to teach a seminar class based on my research. I am grateful to the students in this course who helped me tremendously to clarify my thinking through discussions that have aided my writing.

In many ways this dissertation began with my first trips with my family to Israel-

Palestine as a child. That early relationship with a place, that I have come to think of as a second home, extended through periods of living and working there from 1994-2000.

But the research that led to this dissertation began in earnest in 2006 when I began interviewing a number of NGOs and journalists in Israel-Palestine including Zochrot, Ir

Amim, Parents Circle, David Ehrlich and Daoud Kuttab. I thank staff at the Nesiya

Institute for making a number of introductions that helped me at these early stages. This was the first step in a number of research trips as well as lectures, panels, essays, interviews, reviews and exhibitions that I was involved with since then that dealt with the subject of art and politics in Israel-Palestine and Lebanon.

In 2008 I invited Walid Raad to SMU in conjunction with the Modern Art Museum of

Fort Worth. The time that I spent talking with Raad about his practice helped me enormously in thinking about a number of issues that made their way into this dissertation. I want to thank Terri Thornton for her enthusiasm with this project as well

v as Sarah Rogers and Nada Shabout for participating in a panel that SMU hosted along with Walid Raad to talk about histories and collections of art in the Arab world. That year I conducted another research trip during which I met and interviewed Yael Bartana at the Jerusalem Film Festival. I also participated in a building camp run by the Israeli

Committee Against Housing Demolitions (ICAHD) to research an article commissioned by

Sylvie Fortin at Art Papers about Bartana’s Summer Camp. During that time I also met representatives of NGOs including the International Solidarity Movement (ISM),

B’Tselem, Anarchists Against the Wall as well as filmmakers and activists. In 2009 I invited Yael Bartana to lecture at SMU, which resulted in much deeper conversation about her practice and that same year started the PhD program at UT.

In 2011 I curated an exhibition at Lora Reynolds Gallery entitled Out of Place that dealt with the common histories of exile for Israelis and Palestinians. I thank Lora Reynolds for supporting this project. Not long after the show opened I chaired a panel at CAA about the same material which included Dora Apel, Adair Roundthwaite, and Gannit Ankori, who replaced Rhonda Saad after her tragic and sudden death. I learned a lot from this show and panel, not the least of which was my first exposure to the complexities of BDS.

Later that year, I was invited by Yael Reinharz to participate in a curatorial trip to learn about the art scene in Israel-Palestine. During that trip I was fortunate to meet dozens of artists, curators and critics including Khaled Hourani and Dor Guez, two artists that I am fortunate to have been able to continue an ongoing dialog. I am grateful to Artis for this invaluable support.

vi

In 2012 I was invited to be a scholar in residence at the Israeli Center for Digital Art and during that time Ran Kasmy Ilan and Leah Abir were incredible hosts, helping me to meet a vast array of artists. One of the most incredible of these meetings was with Sandi

Hilal and Alessandro Petti who generously invited me to their home to answer questions about their project Decolonizing Architecture. During this time Jack Persekian and

Jumana Emil Aboud at the Al Ma’mal Foundation were very helpful, allowing me to see

Ayreen Anastas’s videos for the first time. I also was fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct interviews with Dor Guez, Khaled Hohurani, Rula Halawani, Miki Kratsman, and Avi Mograbi. Later that year Tarek El Aris introduced me to Aissa Deebi who has continued to be a valuable colleague and friend. Also that year I was fortunate to have the opportunity to interview Omer Fast when his work was exhibited at the Dallas

Museum of Art. I want to thank Jeffrey Grove for this introduction. Also that year I was awarded a Boone Fellowship through SMU’s Human Rights Program. In addition to supporting a research trip to Germany and Poland, and travel support to Lebanon and

Israel-Palestine, this fellowship helped me to develop the course based on my research.

I am grateful to Rick Halperin for the opportunity.

The 2013 research trip, funded by the Boone Fellowship, allowed me to see Akram

Zaatari’s installation in the Lebanese Pavilion of the Venice Biennale. I also visited Beirut where I interviewed Akram Zaatari, Walid Sadek, Tony Chakar, and others from the post-war art scene. During this trip the archives at the Beirut Art Center and Ashkal

vii Alwan were tremendously valuable. I am thankful to Laura Metzler and Suzy Haljian for introductions and conversations about the local cultural landscape. Not long after that, through an introduction provided by Leah Abir I met the pilot at the center of Zaatari’s piece and Hagai Tamir was generous to welcome me into his home and studio in Jaffa for an illuminating interview. On that same trip Khaled Jarrar took me on a tour through

Ramallah as well as inviting me to his studio. I am incredibly thankful for his boundless enthusiasm and openness. This research in Israel-Palestine was once again supported by a residency with the Israeli Center for Digital Art and I thank Ran Kasmy Ilan and Eyal

Danon for the opportunity. I also was invited by Chen Tamir to lecture at the Center for

Contemporary Art and I worked with Leah Abir on a follow up seminar with local artist. I am thankful to Tamir and Abir for the opportunity. That same year I was fortunate to conduct an interview with Charles Esche in Houston about his work on Khaled Hourani’s

Picasso in Palestine. I also met Emily Jacir for the first time at the Creative Time Summit, which honored Khaled Hourani with the Leonore Annenberg Prize. I later invited Jacir to

SMU, again for a joint program with the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and I am grateful to Jacir for her willingness to engage in conversations about her work and to

Terri Thornton for collaborating on this project.

In 2014 I was invited by Gilad Efrat at Shenkar and Avi Lubin at Hamidrasha to conduct seminars with their students about the relationship between art and politics. I am grateful to Efrat and Lubin for the opportunity as well as their students for engaging so willingly in speculative conversations about politics following a tense time during the

viii 2014 Gaza war. That same year I was supported by SMU to travel to the São Paulo biennial, curated by a team that included Charles Esche and Galit Eilat. There I was fortunate to see works by Yael Bartana, Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, Tony Chakar and others and to talk with them about the effects to a BDS controversy at the biennial.

I am also grateful to William Binnie and Mari Rodriguez for hosting me on this trip.

Over the course of the writing process I engaged in numerous writing groups with colleagues at UT. I am especially grateful to Kate Green, Andy Campbell, Chelsea

Weathers, Laura Lindenberger Wellen, Katie Anania Katie Geha, Alison Meyers, Robin

Williams, Lauren Hanson, C.C. Marsh, Elizabeth Welch for feedback on drafts throughout the writing process. My colleague at SMU Beatriz Balanta was also incredibly helpful with feedback on various drafts.

Through the process of being a full time PhD candidate in Austin and a full time professor in Dallas I also was helped by Sally Warren and Jeff Jackson as well as Janis

Bergman Carton and Evan Carton who opened up their homes to me as I lived between two cities. I will always be indebted to their generosity.

Finally I want to thank Margaret Meehan for her incredible love and support throughout the whole of this process. Without her none of this would have been possible.

ix DIGGING THROUGH TIME: PSYCHOGEOGRAPHIES OF OCCUPATION

Noah Leon Simblist, Ph.D.

The University of Texas at Austin, 2015

Supervisor: Ann Reynolds

Co-Supervisor: Tarek El-Ariss

This dissertation is about the relationship between contemporary art and politics in the case of Israel-Palestine and Lebanon. Specifically, I look at the ways that artists have dealt with the history of this region and its impact on the present, using four moments as the subject of the following chapters: ancient Palestine, the Holocaust, The nakba, and the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The historiographical impulse has a particular resonance for artists making work about the Middle East, a political space where competing historical narratives are the basis for disagreements about sovereignty. I focus on works by Avi Mograbi, Gilad Efrat, Ayreen Anastas, Amir Yatziv, Yael Bartana,

Omer Fast, Khaled Hourani, Dor Guez, Campus in Camps, and Akram Zaatari. A number of patterns emerge when we look at how these artists approach history. One is the tendency for artists to act like historians. As a subset of this tendency is the archival impulse, wherein artists use found photographs, film or documents to intervene in normative representations of history. Another is for artists to act like archaeologists, digging up repressed histories. Another is to commemorate a traumatic event in a way that rejects traditional forms of memorialization such as monuments. At the core of

x each chapter are examples of artistic practices that use conversation as a medium. I analyze these conversations about history as a dialogical practice and argue that this methodology offers a uniquely productive opportunity to work through the ideologies embedded within the psychogeographies of Israel-Palestine and Lebanon. Within these conversations and other aesthetic structures, I argue that these artists emphasize the all too common challenge in producing new forms of civic imagination – the tendency to address historical trauma though repetition compulsion and melancholia. They react to this challenge by engaging collective memory, producing counter-memories and, in some cases, produce counterpublics.

xi Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction 1 The Spatial and Temporal Logic 6 Collective Memory, Counter-memory and Counterpublics 11 Artist as Archaeologist 14 Artwork as Memorial 16 Dialogical Forms 19 History Repeats Itself 23 Chapter Division 31 Chapter 2: Past Projections: Ancient Palestine 37

Avi Mograbi: Masada and The Politics of Archaeology in Israel-Palestine 47 Imagined Histories of an Archaic Past: Gilad Efrat’s Archaeological Paintings 58 Pasolini in Palestine 69 Amir Yatziv: This is Jerusalem, Mr. Pasolini 72 Ayreen Anastas: Pasolini Pa* Palestine 77 Chapter 3: Spaces of Appearance: Parafiction and the Holocaust 89

Yael Bartana…And Europe Will be Stunned 90 Mary Kozmary (Nightmares) 91 Mur i Weiża (Wall and Tower) 98 Wall and Tower: From Palestine to Poland 100 From Monument to Memorial: Spaces of Appearance 102 Zamach (The Assassination) 108 The JRMIP Congress 114 Parafictional Publics 118 Spielberg’s List: Witnessing the Holocaust Industry 122 Holocaust Representations: Images in Spite of All 129 Memorializing the Holocaust: Instrumentalizion vs. Representation 138 Collective Memory, Counter-memory, Counterpublics 139

xii

Chapter 4 – The Nakba: Signifying Catastrophe 142

1948 and The Palestinian Culture of Memory 143 The Key of Return 149 The Berlin Biennale: Art and Politics 153 The Berlin Biennale: From the Holocaust to Israel-Palestine 155 The Berlin Biennale: Critical Reception 158 Re-Contextualizing The Key 160 Returning to the key: what does is mean? What does it do? 164 Campus In Camps: An Alternative To The Key Of Return 169 Dor Guez: Pictures Of A Ruined Home 175 The Occupation Of Al-Lydd 179 Ruins 181 The Civil Contract of Photography 186 The Photograph In Context 188 Chapter 5:

Shooting Back: Lebanon through the lens of a camera, the sight of a gun 191

Israel-Palestine-Lebanon 193 Beirut: The Postwar Generation 194 All Is Well On The Border 196 Here and Elsewhere 202 This Day 211 Two Point Perspective: Letter To A Refusing Pilot 221 The Pilot 226 The Meeting 229 Points Of View: Dialogical Exchange 234 Conclusion 254 Bibliography 258

xiii Chapter 1: Introduction

This dissertation is about the relationship between contemporary art and politics in the case of Israel-Palestine and Lebanon. Specifically, I look at the ways that artists have dealt with the history of this region, using four moments as the subject of the following chapters: ancient Palestine, the Holocaust, The nakba, and the 1982 Israeli invasion of

Lebanon.1 These chapters are briefly summarized at the end of this introduction but these historical moments are only one way that I am organizing this material. In this introduction I attempt to outline the strands of thought that weave their way through these separate historical moments. These ideas include the geopolitical and historical relationships between Israel-Palestine, Lebanon, Germany, and Poland; the role of collective memory, counter-memory and counterpublics in relation to the legacies of historical trauma in these regions; archaeology as both a literal and metaphorical methodology for historiography and artistic practice; the role of the memorial in relation to collective memory; the use of dialogical forms to negotiate the effects of history on a present political condition; and finally, themes of repetition that occur throughout many of the artworks that I discuss.

The historiographical impulse has become increasingly common in recent years for artists in general but it has a particular resonance for artists making work about the

1 The nakba (the catastrophe) is an Arabic term that Palestinians use to refer to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, which also signaled the start of Palestinian displacement.

1 Middle East. 2 I focus on works by Avi Mograbi, Gilad Efrat, Ayreen Anastas, Amir Yatziv,

Yael Bartana, Omer Fast, Khaled Hourani, Dor Guez, Campus in Camps, and Akram

Zaatari. A number of patterns emerge when we look at how these artists approach history. One is the tendency for artists to act like historians, meaning that artists engage in historical research and representation.3 As a subset of this tendency is the archival impulse, wherein artists use found photographs, film or documents to intervene in normative representations of history.4 Another is for artists to act like archaeologists, digging up repressed histories. 5 Another is to commemorate a traumatic event in a way that rejects traditional forms of memorialization such as monuments.6 There is also a tendency for artists to use representations of history as a lens onto contemporary politics and activism.7 These tendencies also move through the four historical moments that I focus on. But at the core of each chapter are examples of artistic practices that use conversation as a medium. I analyze these conversations about history as a dialogical practice and argue that this methodology offers a uniquely productive relationship between aesthetics and politics. Within these conversations and other

2 Dieter Roelstrate describes the historiographic turn as evident in an “obsession with archiving, forgetfulness, memoirs and memorials, nostalgia, oblivion, re-enactment, remembrance, reminiscence, retrospection – in short, with the past” in “After the Historiographic Turn: Current Findings” E-flux Journal #6 (May 2009) 3 Mark Godfrey, “The Artist as Historian,” October, Vol. 120 (Spring, 2007), pp.140-172. 4 Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October 110 (Fall 2004), pp 3-22. 5 See Dieter Roelstraete, “The Way of the Shovel: On the Archaeological Imaginary in Art” E-flux journal #4 (March 2009). Artist Akram Zaatari has said, “I was born in Saida in a society that fantasized about finding treasures in the ground…Maybe this is how I got the interest in digging…in the gesture of digging into an unknown core – the stories you hear from your grandmother, your uncles, your aunts.” As quoted in Jim Quilty, “Akram Zaatari and the Fine Art of Digging, The Daily Star, Jan 8, 2015. 6 Lisa Saltzman, Making Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art (Chicago and London: University of Chicago, 2006). 7 Some activist groups that I discuss in relation to art projects include B’Tselem, The Israeli Committee Against Housing Demolitions, and Zochrot (which means memories in Hebrew and focuses on revealing the repressed history of the nakba to Israeli society).

2 aesthetic structures, I argue that these artists emphasize the all too common challenge in producing new forms of civic imagination – the tendency to address historical trauma though repetition compulsion and melancholia.

In the last twenty years there has been a great deal of scholarship and exhibitions that have addressed contemporary art in Israel, Palestine and Lebanon. But few scholars have traced the meaningful connections among the three areas.8 There are a few reasons for this. First, there is the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, founded in 2005, and in particular its subgroup, The Palestinian Campaign for the

Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI). Because of BDS it is very rare for

Palestinian and Israeli artists to be included together in exhibitions, conferences or even publications.9 One reason for this is that BDS posits that this would normalize the occupation with the false veneer of academic and cultural cooperation, enabling the

Israeli oppression of Palestinians to continue. There have also been a number of exhibitions and cultural initiatives that attempted to embrace the Oslo era of Israeli-

Palestinian, and by extension Israeli-Arab, cooperation. But most of these, occurring in

8 Though it is a study of cinema and not art per se, one notable exception is Kamran Rastegar, Surviving Images: Cinema, War, and Cultural Memory in the Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 9 See http://www.bdsmovement.net/ and Omar Barghouti, Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011). See also Chen Tamir “A Report on the Cultural Boycott of Israel” Hyperallergic, Feb 3, 2015 http://hyperallergic.com/179655/a-report-on-the- cultural-boycott-of-israel/. It should be noted that PACBI explicitly states that the cultural boycott is not meant to exclude participation with individual Israeli artists or academics but in practice there is a tendency for some Arab artists to turn down invitations to participate in cultural events with individual Israelis. These artists will sometimes cite BDS as the reason for their decision not to participate but often the tendency is for artists and academics to avoid this situation in the first place.

3 the 1990s and early 2000s, exemplified the kind of normalization PACBI seeks to avoid.10

As a result, many Palestinian and Arab artists often refuse to participate in exhibitions with Israelis, especially those that are explicitly about themes connected to Israel-

Palestine. Secondly, with regard to Israel and Lebanon, since both countries are at war, artists and scholars from Lebanon are prohibited from being in contact with Israelis.

Finally, while the globalization of the art world accelerated in the late 1990s, allowing the inclusion of Palestinian, Israeli and Lebanese artists in major biennials, there was also a tendency toward what Tirdad Zolghar calls “ethnic marketing.”11 Zolghar defines ethnic marketing, as a Euro-American xenophilia that can be found in international exhibitions predicated on artists and curatorial platforms that engage in postcolonial platitudes. This phenomenon, which built on identity politics and multiculturalism, produced situations where books, organizations and exhibitions reinscribed essentialized identity positions that separated Israeli from Palestinian and other Arab artists.12 It should be noted that artists, curators and other cultural workers both inside

10 One exception to this was Liminal Spaces, organized in 2007 by Eyal Dannon, Galit Eilat, Reem Fadda and Philip Misselwitz, which included seminars in Palestine, Germany and Israel, culminating in a publication. The organizers of Liminal Spaces got permission from BDS for this project. 11 Tordad Zolghar co-curated the exhibition “Ethnic Marketing: Art, Globalization and the Intercultural Supply and Demand” with M. Anderfuhren for the Kunsthalle Geneva in 2004. 12 Some of these books include Gideon Ofrat, One Hundred Years of Art in Israel (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998), Yigal Zalmona, A Century of Israeli Art (London: Lund Humphries, 2013), Kamal Boullata, Palestinian Art: from 1850 to the Present (London: Saqi, 2009), and Gannit Ankori, Palestinian Art, (London: Reaktion, 2006), Hossein Amirsadeghi, New Vision: Arab Contemporary Art in the 21st Century (Thames and Hudson Ltd, 2009), Saatchi Gallery, Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East (Booth Clibborn Editions, 2009), Nada Shabout, Modern Arab Art: Formation of Arab Aesthetics (University Press of Florida, 2007). Organizations include Artis, a New York and Tel Aviv based organization whose mission is to promote Israeli Art; the New York based Arte East, whose mission is to promote art of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and its diaspora; London based Ibraaz, a critical forum engaged with visual culture of MENA; The Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World Iran and Turkey; Biddoun magazine which also covers the MENA. Exhibitions have included Catherine David’s Documenta X and her continuing project Tamáss: Contemporary Arab Representations; the New Museum Exhibition Here and Elsewhere (a show that a number of artists declined to participate in because of its ethnic marketing); as

4 and outside of the Middle East have participated in “ethnic marketing.” For instance, this tendency is evident when American or European curators look for examples of political art from artists in Beirut, Ramallah or Tel Aviv, but it is also evident in the work of some artists and exhibitions exported from the region. When ethnic marketing reinscribes Israeli identity as separate from any other it runs the risk of collaborating with the Jewish exceptionalism of the Zionist project. On the other hand, when ethnic marketing reinscribes Arab artistic practice as separate from and unrelated to Israeli or other global cultural activity it runs the risk of echoing a retrograde form of Orientalism and Pan-Arabism.13 By bringing these artists together I do not intend to reject the BDS concern about normalization, but instead I am focusing on artists that share a critical attitude toward the Israeli occupations of Palestine and Lebanon and on the ways that moments of this region’s interrelated past have contemporary resonance. By analyzing the overlapping political concerns shared by these artists, as manifest in their work, I want to highlight a particular attitude towards history. Finally, by bringing a Lebanese artist into a conversation about Israeli-Palestine, I intend to expand the typical binary of

Israel-Palestine to look at the Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon in relation to the nakba. 14

well as the focus on MENA in the Sharjah Biennial, the Istanbul Biennial, and the explosion of cultural programming in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Doha. On the Israeli Side, the benefit of a fully functioning cultural state apparatus has produced numerous exhibitions about Israeli art and politics at the Israel Museum, The Tel Aviv Museum, the Center for Contemporary Art and the Israeli Center for Digital Art, among others. 13 Pan Arabism is an ideology that advocates for the connection between Arab countries in the Middle East and North Africa. It was famously advocated for by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1950s and 60s. 14 The focus on artists in Lebanon, and Beirut in particular, by international curators and scholars also exploded in the 1990s and early 2000s. This was not only because of the acceleration of biennial exhibitions and ethnic marketing. This moment in history also coincided with the end of the Lebanon Civil

5

The spatial and temporal logic: Israel-Palestine in relation to Lebanon, Germany, and

Poland.

I use the term “Israel-Palestine” to denote a complex amalgam of nationality and territory. As Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir have argued, Israel-Palestine is a “one state condition” – two regimes that are separate but inextricably linked.15 This is a contemporary condition in which Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip all are linked politically, economically, juridically and socially. But, as I will argue, this is also a historical condition since the contemporary politics of Israel-Palestine are linked to the origin stories of both Israeli and Palestinian nationalism. These origin stories are defined by ancient Palestine, but they are also linked to the Holocaust and the nakba. In the case of Lebanon, I am focusing primarily on its relationship with Israel-Palestine, specifically, the legacy of Palestinian diaspora following the wars of 1948 and 1967 and, most importantly, the 1982 invasion and occupation of southern Lebanon until 2000. I argue that the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon and the Israeli occupation of

Palestine are related, but, furthermore, that there is a deep connection between the visual rhetoric of representations of these occupations in both activist and artistic discourse. For Lebanon, 1982 was akin to the nakba and just as memories of the nakba

war in 1990. Some examples include Out of Beirut at Modern Art Oxford (2006), special editions of magazines dedicated to the postwar art scene in Beirut such as Parachute (Oct 2002) Art Journal (Summer 2007) and dissertations such as Sarah Rogers, 2008, Postwar Arts and the Historical Roots of Beirut’s Cosmopolitanism, PhD dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA. 15 Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir, The One State Condition: Occupation and Democracy in Israel/Palestine (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013)

6 must contend with its contemporary legacy, so too must post-war Lebanon negotiate its relationship to the ramifications of 1982.

One artist that begins and ends this dissertation is the Israeli filmmaker Avi Mograbi. His work is one example of the interconnectedness of ancient Palestine, the nakba and

1982 Lebanon. His film Avenge But One of My Two Eyes (2005) looks at the nationalist ideology embedded within Masada, an archaeological site in Eastern Israel. This film includes scenes of tour guides that present a narrative of a small band of heroic Jews in the first century CE who endured a siege by Roman forces. Mograbi intercuts this footage with scenes of Palestinians subjugated by Israeli military control during the

Second Intifada.16 In this situation it is now Jewish Israeli forces that are besieging

Palestinian towns such as Jenin, Nablus, and Ramallah. I argue that Mograbi uses this film to show the persistence of a victim mentality and moral exceptionalism for Jews through a long arc of history, despite the fact that the power roles have been reversed.

One crucial part of this film involves scenes in which Mograbi has long phone conversations with a Palestinian friend who is stuck in his apartment while Israeli military operations rage on outside his door during the Second Intifada (2000-2005), the

Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza following the collapse of the Oslo peace process. In these conversations they discuss the humiliating conditions under which Palestinians live and how these conditions might lead some to commit suicide. Two historical relationships emerge from this conversation. One is the

16 The Second Intifada, also known as the Al Aqsa Intifada, was the second major Palestinian uprising against Israel. It started in September 2000 and lasted until 2005.

7 unresolved legacy of the nakba, which has stretched from 1948 through the Second

Intifada to today. The second is the comparison between Jews who were willing to commit suicide in a fight against Roman soldiers during the first century CE and

Palestinians who were willing to kill themselves in a fight against Israelis two thousand years later.

In 2010, Mograbi was engaged in another exchange, this time with the Lebanese artist

Akram Zaatari. This discussion, staged for a public audience in France and documented in the form of a book entitled A Conversation with an Imagined Israeli Filmmaker, also tracks a series of historical relationships. In this case, Mograbi and Zaatari each tell the story of their experiences in Saida, a town in southern Lebanon during the 1982 Israeli invasion. Zaatari talks about his being a teenager who was learning about photography at the time and as a result witnessed invading Israelis through the lens of a camera, while Mograbi talks about his experience of seeing Lebanon through the sights of a gun.

One condition that begins to blur the clear binary between these points of view, and the assumptions about the political identities of each subject, is that Mograbi reveals that his Jewish family lived in Palestine, Egypt and Lebanon prior to 1948. I compare Zaatari’s conversation with Mograbi with a conversation with another Israeli, a former air force pilot Haggai Tamir. In this conversation one subject emerges that connects the images used for Palestinian activism during the Second Intifada with Nazi imagery. The problematic moment is when Tamir sees an image that Zaatari appropriated from emails sent to him by Palestinian activists that depicted former Israeli Prime Minister

8 Ariel Sharon dressed as a Nazi. Tamir recoils at this image, and I argue that both the creation of this image and Tamir’s reaction are related to how deeply embedded the

Holocaust is in discourse surrounding Israel-Palestine. What is crucial to underline in relation to my project are the ways in which both of these conversations between an

Israeli and Lebanese citizen are haunted by particular, and often strangely shared, histories.

Two projects that I discuss in terms of the Holocaust effect on Israel-Palestine discourse are Yael Bartana’s Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland (JRMIP) and The Key of

Return, both featured in the 2012 Berlin Biennial. The Key of Return, a ten-meter long sculptural representation of a key, was constructed by Palestinian activists for Aida, the

West Bank refugee camp. Artur Zmijewski, the Polish artist and curator of the Berlin

Biennial, worked with the Palestinian artist Khaled Hourani and a group of collaborators to bring this key to the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art. I argue that this recontextualization of a sign for the nakba from Palestine to Germany made explicit the links between the history of the Holocaust and the history of the nakba. Yael Bartana’s

JRMIP also makes this link, but she does so by charting the legacy of the Holocaust in

Poland to the contemporary condition of Palestinian exile. Through a trilogy of films the

JRMIP calls for Jews to return from Israel to their “true” homeland in Poland. Reenacting the history of Jewish refugees in Palestine but in a displaced context, the second film shows a group of Jewish pioneers building a kibbutz on the site of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Implicitly this evacuation of Jews from Israel would create a space for Palestinian

9 refugees to fill, fulfilling the Palestinian right of return, the right that is signified by The

Key of Return.

The above projects are examples of the geopolitical connections between Israel-

Palestine and Lebanon and their historical relationships to Germany and Poland. They also illustrate the relationships between the four moments of history that I focus on. But how am I defining the temporal logic of the contemporary artworks that I discuss? I have chosen to focus on projects that participate in the realm of contemporary art since

2000. This is for a few reasons. First, this marks the start of the Second Intifada and along with it a tipping point in the disillusionment with the Oslo Accords.17 It also marks a moment when the globalization of the art world became evident through the explosion of biennials and the interest in artists from the Middle East by curators and collectors. Finally, this was a moment when artistic practice turned to more conceptually based, post-studio practices that addressed the political situation of the region. 18 While this is not a universal description of all art practices that have to do with

17 The Oslo Accords were a set of agreements between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization. They were meant to be the start of a peace process that would create a two state solution, including an independent Palestinian State. As an interim solution they created the Palestinian Authority, which has limited governing authority over portions of the West Bank and Gaza. 18 One might see the rise of conceptual art as a dominant paradigm in Israel-Palestine and Lebanon precisely when the peace process ends as a causal relationship. Artists could be seen as taking over the negotiation of political issues in the absence of diplomatic efficacy. But there are a number of other factors that affected the dissemination of conceptually based artworks at this time. One of which is the ease with which videos could be sent to international exhibitions and biennials relatively inexpensively. Another is that many of these artists have a critique of normative media outlets, which rely on spectacular imagery when representing political conflicts in Israel-Palestine and Lebanon. Finally, there have been arguments made about the relationship between dematerialized conceptual art and the post-Fordist global economy in early 2000s. The relationship between conceptual strategies and global economics and politics is too complicated for me to go into depth here but two texts that have informed by thinking on this subject are Alexaner Alberro and Blake Stimson eds. Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (Cambridge,

10 Israel-Palestine and Lebanon, I am interested in the particular ways that these contemporary practices interfaced with an approach towards not only politics but also history.

Collective Memory, Counter-memory and Counterpublics

When addressing the ways in which artists act like historians, it is useful to first consider historiographical approaches to traumatic pasts. Dominick LaCapra has proposed that historians that use a documentary research approach, using archival sources and primary documents to reveal objective facts about the past, mistakenly underestimate the affective power of writing as a mechanism for empathy. He says that this is especially true in the telling of traumatic histories. On the other hand, LaCapra is equally suspect of radically constructivist historical methods that conflate historical and fictional statements. LaCapra uses the example of relying on Holocaust survivor’s testimony and says that the historian must be responsive to the traumatic experience of others but, drawing on a psychoanalytical framework, must come to terms with a second-hand experience of trauma by “working through,” rather than “acting out” traumatic loss.

Furthermore, for LaCapra, It is only through the writing of historical traumas that they can become part of the public sphere.19 This notion of the historian as an active and complicit participant in the creation of collective memory through the representation of

MA: MIT Press, 199) and Alexander Alberro, Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). Overall, I want to emphasize the simultaneity of these forces rather than a simplified causal relationship. 19 Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000)

11 history is what I am using as the basis of my comparison between the artistic practice and historiography.

To address history, many of the artists that I discuss have had to contend with collective memory and propose potential counter-memories. I will argue that the introduction of counter-memories also has the potential to produce counterpublics. Maurice Halbwachs tells us that a social group’s identity is constructed with narratives of its past, which provide a sense of community. Furthermore, he says that individual memory is always dependent on collective memory. One person cannot remember events directly and relies on textual, visual or performative forms of culture that are social frameworks for memory to be accessed.20 When we combine this notion with Michel Foucault’s concept of counter-memory, which offers an alternative account of official versions of historical continuity, then alternative structures of collectivity can also be produced.21 I use

Michael Warner’s notion of counterpublics to elucidate the nature of this alternate form of collectivity. 22

A number of artists that I discuss create counter-memories in relation to standard forms of collective memory. For instance, when Avi Mograbi’s film presents tour guides on

Masada delivering history lessons, these stories are crafted to reinforce the social construct of Israeli collective memory. But when Mograbi intercuts these scenes with

20 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago press, 1992) 21 Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977) p160 22 Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005)

12 footage from the Second Intifada, a counter memory is produced through a reinterpretation of the history of Masada in relation to the political situation of contemporary Israel-Palestine. Alternatively, counter memories can also be produced by introducing repressed histories. Through a re-presentation of photographs from the Lod ghetto in 1948-49 and by photographing the ruins of houses that were abandoned or destroyed there in 1948 Dor Guez resuscitates the memory of the early stages of Israeli occupation – a memory that has been repressed within the regime of official Israeli accounts of history. Similarly, Akram Zaatari uses photographs that he took as a teenager during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, combined with archival photographs from the war, to recall the erased history of an act of civil disobedience on the part of an Israeli air force pilot. As I will explain, the writing of the history of the

Lebanon Civil War is highly contentious, and, as a result, there are huge gaps in the official narratives of Lebanese collective memory. As a result, many artists from Zaatari’s generation created archives to fill this aporia, proposing an historical remembrance that runs counter to the conspicuous void of information in official Lebanese history.

Furthermore, the story that Zaatari proposes, of an Israeli soldier that acted with compassion, runs counter to the totalizing view of all Israelis as unrelenting aggressive enemies.

13 Artist as archaeologist

To produce a counter-memory, many of the artists that I discuss need to act like archaeologists, digging through the layers of repressed memory.23 Dieter Roelstraete notes that the metaphor of artist as archaeologist is related to depth psychology, a strain of psychoanalysis. He says, “Depth delivers artistic truth: that which we dig up

(the past) in some way or other must be more ‘real’ and therefore also more ‘true’ than all that has come to accumulate afterwards to form the present.”24 Embedded within this metaphor is also the assumption that archaeologists are like scientists who unearth objects as evidence, formulate a hypothesis based on this evidence and test it against patterns that emerge through the further collection of objects. So in the instance of an artist who uses the archaeological metaphor in terms of depth psychology, that individual intends to probe their psyche or the psyches of their subjects, like layers of the earth, for images that are not only traces of the past but are also proof of the existence of a particular vision of the past. For example, in Omer Fast’s film Spielberg’s

List, the artist interviews extras for Spielberg’s Film Schindler’s List. In these interviews, the actors occasionally recount their own family’s memories of the Holocaust but these memories are intermingled with the memories constructed by Spielberg’s film. In these interviews a strange thing occurs; it seems like they are revealing repressed memories

23 The metaphor of artist as archaeologist, used by the artists, curators and critics that I discuss is influenced by Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 2002), Giles Delueze and Felix Guattari’s notion of ‘strata’ in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) and Walter Benjamin’s short essay “Excavation and Memory” in Walter Benjamin Selected Writings Volume 2, 1927-1934 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999) 24 Dieter Roelstraete, “The Way of the Shovel: On the Archaeological Imaginary in Art” p5

14 from the trauma of the Holocaust. But they are also telling stories about moments during the filming of Schindler’s List where they were forced to confront repressed memories. Furthermore, Fast’s film shows tourists in Krakow looking for the “original” sites of the film as if they are the original sites that the film was based on. In Spielberg’s

List, Fast acts like an archaeologist in a psychological sense, mapping the strata of truth and fiction in the layers of the Holocaust’s representation: the individual and collective memories of Krakow in WWII, Spielberg’s representation of this history, the leftover film set of a concentration camp, and the city of Krakow as an urban framework for traces of both Spielberg’s film and the events of the Holocaust.

Like Roelstrate, I use archaeology as a metaphor to describe artistic practice. But I also describe the use of archaeology as a literal subject. Archaeology as a practice has been greatly influenced by a post-structuralist skepticism towards teleological views of history and their relationship to power. Theorizations of history through the use of the archaeological metaphor proposed by Foucault, Deleuze and Guatarri have had a great impact on archaeological discourses over the last twenty years.25 In practical terms this has affected the ways that archaeologists have acknowledged the effects of nationalism on the drive to dig at particular historical sites.26 Furthermore, the view of archaeology as a discourse that is employed for particular ideological projects has also led to an interrogation of the uses of archaeology to further colonial projects. For instance,

25 Ian Bapty and Tim Yates eds. Archaeology after Structuralism: Post-structuralism and the Practice of Archaeology (London: Routledge, 1990) 26 Philip L. Kohl and Claire Fawcett, eds. Nationalism, Politics and the Practice of Archaeology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)

15 Orientalist and primitivist attitudes sought to create and define the colonial subject through the use of archaeology.27 But most directly related to my project is scholarship about archaeology in relation to national and colonial projects in Israel-Palestine.28 I find literature about the nationalist and postcolonial dimensions of archaeological sites in

Israel-Palestine to be useful in my discussion of Gilad Efrat’s paintings of archaeological sites such as Jericho and Tel Sheva. For example, I discuss a situation in which Jericho’s archaeological sites were at the center of a political dispute between Israel and the

Palestinian authority. I also discuss the Israeli use of the archaeological site Tel Sheva to not only “prove” Jewish continuity from ancient Palestine through modern Israel through “facts on the ground” but also as a signifier of Israeli Orientalist attitudes toward the Bedouin community that inhabits the modern day town next to this historic site. I argue that, in the context of these situations, Efrat’s paintings signify not only archaeological sites but also the ways in which these sites have been politicized.

Artwork as memorial

The memorial is another model that contemporary artists use to address the past. Many artists who use memorials as subject matter speak to an affective relationship to

27 Claire Lyons and John K. Papadopoulos, The Archaeology of Colonialism (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2002). See also Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush eds. Claiming the Stones / Naming the Bones: Cultural Property and the Negotiation of National and Ethnic Identity (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2002) and Matthew Liebmann and Uzma Z. Rizvi eds. Archaeology and the Postcolonial Critique (New York: Altamira Press, 2008) 28 Nadia Abu El Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self Fashioning in Israeli Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), Nahman Ben Yehudah, The Masada Myth: Collective Memory and Mythmaking in Israel (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995)

16 history, one in which collective memory is galvanized, often by the state, around a monumental structure to create a space for mourning.29 The artists that I discuss, especially Yael Bartana and Khaled Hourani, address the traditional ways that memorials are used to produce and even reproduce collective memory. But they also offer alternative models for memorializing past traumas that produce counter memories. For instance, a monumental bronze memorial for the Warsaw Ghetto figures prominently in

Yael Bartana film Wall and Tower. This memorial, built in 1948 to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, depicted Jews as heroes, using kibutznikim (members of a communal Zionist settlement) as its models. Thus this memorial linked the Polish Jewish martyrdom during the Holocaust with the rise of the

Jewish nation through the State of Israel. Bartana reverses this narrative in her film by depicting Jewish pioneers from Israel building a kibbutz at the site of the Warsaw

Ghetto, enacting a return to their ‘true’ homeland. Similarly, when The Key of Return is taken from the West Bank to Berlin, it acts as a memorial to the nakba, signifying both the memory of Palestinian displacement and the ongoing effects of Israeli occupation.

As I will argue, this connects a particular narrative of deferred Palestinian sovereignty with the lingering effects of the Holocaust, a connection that Bartana also implies. I

29 See Lisa Saltzman, Making Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art (Chicago and London: University of Chicago, 2006), James Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale, 1993), Katherine Hite, Politics and the Art of Commemoration: Memorials to Struggle in Latin America (New York: Routledge, 2012), Lisa Satzman and Eric Rosenberg eds. Trauma and Visuality in Modernity, (Lebanon, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2006), Ernst van Alphen, Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997)

17 discuss both of these artworks as a new genre of memorial that accounts for the ways that memorials are often used in relation to national mythologies.30

I find Rosalyn Deutsche’s discussion of memorials in terms of the construction of a public useful to discuss the phenomenon of artworks that address the legacies of traumas on particular sites. In an analysis of Kristof Wodiczko’s public projection in

Hiroshima, Deutsche uses theories of space and notions of the public to think through the memorial.31 She turns to Hannah Arendt’s interpretation of the public sphere, or democratic political community, as a space of appearance to describe what occurs when testimony by the surviving witnesses of the bombing of Hiroshima suddenly appear projected onto the architecture of public space. I argue that Bartana’s Wall and Tower documents a performance in which second and third generation survivors of the

Holocaust similarly appear within the public space of contemporary Warsaw. This appearance challenges a park that sits on the site of the Warsaw ghetto to become a space that deepens and extends democracy to include a diverse public of Jewish and other immigrants.

This notion of the memorial as a public sphere is at the heart of a tension between The

Key of Return and Campus in Camps. Both projects contend with the traumatic memory

30 This new genre of memorial is related to Suzanne Lacy’s notion of new genres of Public Art. Suzanne Lacy, ed., Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995). 31 Rosalyn Deutsche, Hiroshima After Iraq: Three Studies in Art and War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010)

18 of the nakba but in very different ways. The Key of Return relies on a normative sign for the mourning of the Palestinian homes lost in 1948. It is a monument with a fixed meaning in relation to Palestinian national consciousness. On the other hand, Campus in

Camps, an organization based in Dheisheh refugee camp in Bethlehem, uses the form of an alternative school to focus on the refugee camp as a sign for the nakba. I treat

Campus in Camps as an organization that is also an artwork.32 But Campus in Camps isn’t an object presented to a public. It is an object that, in and of itself, is a public.

Furthermore, it looks at camps not as a space for refugees to look back at lost homes in the past nor does it look for their reclamation in some future Palestinian state but rather treats them as cities that exist in the present. In this sense, Campus in Camps embraces the function of memorials to use memory to speak to contemporary social and political conditions.

Dialogical Forms

Campus in Camps uses conversation as a medium to negotiate the effects of history on a present political condition. As a school that is predicated on seminar based discussion,

Campus in Camps embodies what Grant Kester calls dialogical art practice. For Kester, this form of art involves conversations in which there is a suspension of the individual

32 The notion of an organization founded and run by artists was addressed at the conference Institutions by Artists, held October 12-14 at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. It was co-organized by Filip Magazine, the Pacific Association of Artist Run Centres, and the Artist-Run Centres and Collectives Conference. Some examples of these kinds of organizations include Tania Bruguera’s Immigrant Movement International and Rick Lowe’s Project Row Houses.

19 interests of each subject participating in dialogue.33 Kester states that this must occur in a physical and psychological space that is set apart from daily discourse. For Campus in

Camps, the refugee camp is this kind of exceptional space. As I will explain, Campus in

Camps uses seminars, lectures and charrettes on the redesign of public space to shift the subject of Palestinian political discourse to the present, with a focus on the architecture of the refugee camp. The subject of many conversations at Campus in

Camps is the commons, which they translate in Arabic to Al Mashà.34 For Campus in

Camps the commons differs from both public and private spaces, which “entail institutionalized relations between people and things, regulated by the state: public property is maintained by the state and private property is guaranteed by it.”35 They see the notion of a “public” space as problematic because in the case of Israel-Palestine the term is most often used to refer to a Jewish-Israeli public and does not include

Palestinians. They offer Al Mashà as a term to help reimagine the commons and shift it from a focus on a type of land to a kind of social relation. Furthermore, they propose that a commons can use the exceptional case of the refugee camp as an opportunity as opposed to a liability. I argue that the methodology for producing this commons is necessarily dialogical, using conversation as the primary medium with which to construct this social experiment.

33 Grant H. Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) p90 34 ‘The commons’ is a phrase that has its origins in medieval England, referring to natural resources that could be collectively used but not privately owned. The term became fashionable in the early 2000s through writings by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri and others. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011) 35 Alessandro Petti, Sandi Hilal and Eyal Weizman, Architecture After Revolution (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013) p179

20

The notion of dialogical form is also present in my discussion of Dor Guez’s photographs of ruined Palestinian homes. Guez’s series Lydd Ruins documents a series of crumbling overgrown domestic structures that have remained uninhabited since their evacuation in 1948. I use Ariella Azoulay’s notion of civil imagination to look at these photographs as objects that become common referents for the collective act of political imagination through discourse. Like Deutsche’s use of Arendt to argue for memorials as a public space, Azoulay deploys Arendt’s ideas to argue that photographs can become a civic space. In the case of Guez’s photographs of ruins, they can open a debate about the past like the events that led to the expulsion of a Palestinian population from these now deserted homes. But they also can lead to a discussion about the legacy of these destroyed homes, the present condition of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Azoulay urges us to see the difference between the ruin itself and a photograph of the ruin. For her, a photograph becomes a dialogical space that opens up the possibility for a civic encounter. Azoulay argues that there is a civil contract of photography that is predicted on the relationship between citizenship and photography:

Citizenship is not merely a status, a good, or a piece of private property possessed by the citizen, but rather a tool of a struggle or an obligation to others to struggle against injuries inflicted on those others, citizen and noncitizen alike – others who are governed along with the spectator. The civil spectator has a duty to employ that skill the day she encounters photographs of those injuries – to employ it in order to negotiate the manner in which she and the photographed are ruled.36

36 Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008) p14

21

Azoulay emphasizes citizenship as a tool for struggle against a regime and pairs it with photography as a useful mechanism to help negotiate the ways that both citizens and noncitizens are ruled. If we compare this notion of discourse around a photograph with

Kester’s notion of dialogical art the question of citizenship becomes key. Azoulay’s notion of civic discourse around photography is predicated on citizenship. But if we remember that Campus in Camps is predicated on discourse among noncitizens then it is dialogical but not necessarily a space for civic imagination in Azoulay’s terms. One reason for this is that Azoulay is speaking primarily to an audience of citizens of Israel and other countries that have the tools to negotiate on the behalf of noncitizen subjects of a ruling regime. But how does dialogical art function in the case of two citizens of countries at war?

I discuss Kester’s notion of dialogical art most explicitly in relation to Akram Zaatari’s project A Conversation with an Imaginary Israeli Filmmaker and his film Letters to a

Refusing Pilot. The first is based on a conversation with Avi Mograbi and the second is based on a series of conversations and correspondences with a former Israeli Air Force pilot Haggai Tamir. Both Mograbi and Tamir are Israeli citizens and Zaatari is a Lebanese citizen. In the conversation between Zaatari and Mograbi they claim that their subjectivity is fictive because they are out of synch with their national identities. They are actors in a political situation between Israel and Lebanon, but, because they are out of synch with the official positions of their respective countries, they claim to represent

22 their nations’ imaginations rather than their realities.37 In his conversations with

Mograbi and Tamir, Zaatari uses photographs from their youth to illuminate the ways in which their subjectivities were constructed by their respective nationalities. But these conversations also reveal overlaps between the citizens of separate nations and, in

Kester’s terms, the willingness of each participant to suspend their individual interests to participate in an open conversation. By comparing these two projects, I argue that

Zaatari’s project with Mograbi was more dialogical than the one with Tamir, because of the form of the conversation. In the case of Tamir, there was one particular incident in which the legacy of the Holocaust haunted their conversation to such a degree that he was unable to fully engage in an open conversation.

History repeats itself

When Hagai Tamir recoiled at the image of Ariel Sharon dressed as a SS officer in Akram

Zaatari’s film, the specter of the Nazi jumped from the historical circumstances of the

Holocaust and into the contemporary politics of the Middle East. But this is emblematic of many moments when history haunts the contemporary conditions in Israel-Palestine and Lebanon. In some cases, the artists that I discuss reveal the ways that historical memory is held onto through a kind of repetition compulsion.38 For instance, when

Omer Fast focuses on the film Schindler’s List and the Holocaust tourist industry in

37 Akram Zaatari, A Conversation with an Imagine Israeli Filmmaker Named Avi Mograbi (Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Kadist Art Foundation, Sternberg Press, 2012) p3 38 For Freud, “the repetition compulsion is when an action of displeasure is repeated with the hope that in this recurrence something better will be offered but when there is no satisfaction the action is repeated again.” Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (New York: Norton & Company, 1961) p16

23 Poland that it helped produce, he reveals the tendencies of Jews to compulsively remember the Holocaust by holding on to the traumas of their collective victimhood.

This way of remembering trauma is more akin to what Freud called melancholia, in which grieving involves holding onto the lost object to such a degree that the griever suffers delusions of persecution. Freud opposed melancholia to mourning, in which an individual who grieves for an object of loss replaces it and thus is able to move on.39

What Fast also shows us in his video Spielberg’s List is that when Jews are prompted to return to a site of trauma because of a semi-fictional Hollywood film, there is a slippage between real and imaginary objects of loss. I argue that these delusions are symptoms of melancholia.

Yael Bartana’s Wall and Tower reveals the difference between mourning and melancholia by referencing the ways that Jewish pioneers in mid-twentieth-century

Palestine seemed to replace the loss of a generation of European Jews with a new generation of Zionists in the State of Israel but in fact, were so beholden to the trauma of the Holocaust that in violent and political struggles with Palestinians they continued to play the role of the victim. Israelis played this role despite the fact that the power relationship between Jews and Palestinians is the opposite of that between Jews and

Nazis. This is not to say that Jews acted like Nazis, but in the case of the Israeli

39 Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia, trans. James Strachey, (London: Hogarth Press, 1957) pp243-58

24 occupation of Palestine, Jews have had the upper hand since 1948.40 Judith Butler has asked: if a subject is formed through violence is that subject condemned to repeat the violence of one’s formation? She cites Melanie Klein who pointed out that someone who experiences a loss and reacts in a way that is simultaneously defensive and aggressive is stuck in melancholia. In this state, the subject feels ambivalent towards the object of loss, simultaneously preserving this object through memory and seeking to destroy it out of anger at the object for going away. Butler suggests that state violence against a threatening other performs the aggression towards the object of loss, relocating the capacity to be violated elsewhere.41

Bartana’s intervention in this cycle of both repetition compulsion and transference, in which Palestinians seem like Nazis to Jews, simultaneously recalling the loss of Jews in the Holocaust and the Nazi perpetrators that took their lives, is to take Palestinians out of the equation and return Israeli Jews to the scene of the crime, to the origin of their victimhood at the Warsaw Ghetto. Bartana does this by building a kibbutz, an architectural structure that is emblematic of Zionist notions of Jewish renewal. By performing the act of building of a kibbutz, Bartana engages in a kind of historical reenactment. Rebecca Schneider says that reenactment “is not one thing in relation to the past, but exists in a contested field of investment across sometimes wildly divergent

40 Judith Butler has argued that the Holocaust played a crucial role in the Zionist enterprise. See Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012) p26 41 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso Books, 2010) p178

25 affiliations to the question of what constitutes fact.”42 By reenacting a scene of Zionist pioneers in Poland Bartana intervenes in the history of the Holocaust and the history of the State of Israel and the history of their interrelatedness. By doing so she questions the belief that the Holocaust means that Jews are perpetually persecuted. Instead I will argue that she shifts the meaning of the Holocaust from a question of Jewish victimhood to one of human rights, emphasizing the question of the refugee in general – the Jewish refugee fleeing the Holocaust, the Palestinian refugee fleeing the nakba, and the refugees fleeing conflicts in Africa and elsewhere that have sought refuge in Poland and the rest of Europe. Furthermore, she asks how one can embrace the labor of mourning in the presence of the site of trauma. As the Lebanese artist Walid Sadek has noted, the labor of mourning in the presence of the corpse shifts us away from Freud’s model of replacing the corpse with a live being. Instead, he argues, mourning should be about building a lived sociality in the presence of the corpse.43 When Bartana sites the Jewish

Renaissance Movement in Poland at the literal space of Jewish disaster and replaces it with a new society, she is enacting this new kind of mourning.

Another example of a project that focuses on a repetition of history is The Key of Return.

The return that is signaled by this project is the “right of return,” the belief that

Palestinians have the right to return to the homes that they were forced to leave in

1948. The most common representation of this notion is a key. When a sculptural

42 Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art And War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (London: Routledge, 2011) p56 43 Walid Sadek, “In the Presence of the Corpse”, Third Text, Vol. 26, Issue 4, July 2012, pp 479-489

26 representation of this key is moved from a refugee camp in the West Bank to Berlin, the diasporic condition of Palestinians is linked to the Holocaust. I argue that both the artists and activists involved with this project, along with the curator Artur Zmijewski, were aware of this connection. This gesture could be seen as a reminder of Palestinian dispossession, but it also implicates Berlin, the site where the Holocaust was conceived.

Furthermore, I propose that this piece asks the question: if the Holocaust had never happened, might the original keys that locked Palestinian homes in 1948 have remained mundane objects of daily functionality, rather than the trumped up symbols that they have become for Palestinian national identity?

Jalal Toufic offers another way to understand the Key of Return, along with a number of representations of disaster. He claims that the phenomenon of an appropriated copy might seem like a simple repetition but is actually a resurrection of a past tradition in the context of a surpassing disaster. Furthermore, he says that a resurrection occurs when the original is no longer available. In the case of Palestine, the key is a synecdoche for the house that is destroyed or inaccessible and signifies a return, an option that is also foreclosed. Toufic says,

All returns to tradition in the aftermath of a surpassing disaster have to be fought because tradition has been objectively withdrawn, and hence the “return” would be to a counterfeit tradition.44

44 Jalal Toufic, The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster (Forthcoming Books, 2009) p29

27 For Toufic, any representation, reenactment or repetition is a counterfeit copy of the original. But, he says, in surpassing disaster, art acts like the mirror in vampire films, it reveals the withdrawal of what we think is still there. To illustrate this concept, Toufic tells a story about a vampire in post-war Beirut who is looking for the perfect ruin and goes from one destroyed building to another, constantly dissatisfied until he finds a brand new building and buys it. The realtor was confused but at that moment saw the seemingly young vampire as old and the seemingly new building as a ruin. In this sense, the newly constructed building is haunted by the destruction that led to its construction, its becoming.45 So in this sense, the new building speaks to the presence of absence much more than the ruin would. As I argued above, Campus in Camps more productively deals with the nakba than The Key of Return. In Toufic’s terms, it is a project that addresses the nakba like the vampire’s new building, it is something that has been built in the context of a refugee camp, on top of the ruins of catastrophe and deals with the nakba as a present reality that always already signifies the surpassing disaster. This is opposed to The Key of Return, which acts like a ruin, attempting to display a copy of the destruction that occurred in the past.

To illustrate the notion of withdrawal of tradition Toufic offers another comparative example. In the film Hiroshima Mon Amour one character states, “You have seen nothing in Hiroshima.” This statement follows a montage of the horrific effects of a nuclear bombing on the flesh of its survivors, suggesting that this record of suffering is

45 Jalal Toufic, “Ruins” in Catherine David ed. Tamáss I: Contemporary Arab Representations: Beirut/Lebanon (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 2002)

28 not an experience of the suffering itself. Toufic asks, should this mean that one should not record? He answers that no, one should record this ‘nothing’ but because of the referent’s withdrawal, the photographs will only be available as documentary pieces once the referents are resurrected. He notes that during and after the Lebanese civil war, Lebanese citizens were indifferent to the documentation of carnage in film and photography because they have become habituated to destruction.46 This skepticism about documentary film and photography raises a crucial question about the representation of not only history in general but in particular, the histories of trauma.

The moments in history that I dwell on are histories of war and the ways that these histories affect the contemporary conditions of occupation in Israel-Palestine and

Lebanon. The artists that I discuss eschew traditional forms of documentary film and photography, most commonly experienced through the media and instead invoke the past through forms of representation that shift our understanding of it. Even though

Mograbi and Efrat rely on the documentation of archaeological sites they allow them to speak to the ways that these places become like vampires, undead creatures that have been resurrected to serve Israeli nationalist agendas. When Bartana and Fast focus on reenactments of the Holocaust they treat it like a parasitic vampire that refuses to die, unceasingly feeding on the lifeblood of contemporary sociality.

But is repetition always problematic when we think of history? In discussing her work that retraces the steps of Pasolini when he shot his 1965 film Location Hunting in

46 Jalal Toufic, The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster (Forthcoming Books, 2009) p58

29 Palestine for the Gospel According to St. Matthew, Ayreen Anastas references

Heidegger’s notion of repetition, which he claims is not merely recurrence but reclamation.47 For Heidegger, reclamation is a form of repetition that doesn’t simply retrieve the past as a given set of facts and bring it to the present. Rather, this form of repetition reclaims the potential that was present in the original occurrence.48 So when

Anastas retraces the path that Pasolini took to look for the true Palestine, she retrieves and reclaims the possibilities of this action with the new perspective of a Palestinian moving through a contemporary space of explicit Israeli occupation. When we look at this action as a repetition that included the replacement of one subject for another, then In Freudian terms this also allows this action to move from melancholia to mourning.

I will argue over the course of four chapters that the primary way of working through the tendencies of repetition compulsion and melancholia, or in Heidegger’s terms – retrieving the possibilities of the past, is through dialogical practice. This is the case in

Mograbi’s conversations with his Palestinian friend, in the conversations at the heart of

Yael Bartana’s JRMIP congress at the 2012 Berlin Biennial, in the conversations at

Campus in Camps and the civic imagination made possible by Dor Guez’s photographs, and finally in the conversations that Akram Zaatari has with Haggai Tamir and Avi

Mograbi.

47 Christine Tohmé ed. Homeworks III (Beirut: Ashkal Alwan, 2008) p267 48 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1996) p352

30 SYNOPSIS OF CHAPTERS

Chapter one deals with ancient Israel-Palestine. I look at works by Avi Mograbi and Gilad

Efrat and discuss the ways in which these works reveal how Israel politicizes archaeology to justify its argument for a Jewish historical right to historic Palestine. For instance, I address Mograbi’s film Avenge But One of My Two Eyes (2005), an experimental documentary that looks at the political role of Masada, an archaeological site in Eastern

Israel. I also discuss a series of paintings by Efrat that depict Tel Sheva, a site in the

Negev desert, arguing that Efrat deliberately points with his paintings to the ways that the State of Israel uses archaeology to further its own national interests. I compare

Mograbi’s film about the explicitly political use of archaeology to what Laura Marks called cinematic archaeology, a filmic methodology that reveals the intersections between place and subaltern peoples. 49 For Marks, cinema has the potential to visually represent repressed histories just as archaeology physically reveals them. As an extension of this notion, I then look at the ways that the artists Amir Yatziv and Ayreen

Anastas rework Piero Pasolini’s The Gospel According to Matthew (1964) to reveal its visual rhetoric of an Orientalist gaze on the “holy land.” Pasolini had intended to film his feature in historic Palestine, but on a 1963 site visit he discovered that as a modern

Israeli state, he felt it was too cosmopolitan to be the setting for what he imagined historic Palestine to look like and instead decided to film The Gospel According to

Matthew in rural Italy with local actors. The Israeli artist Yatziv combines the audio from

49 Laura Marks, “Cinema as Archaeology” in The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke, 2000)

31 Pasolini’s site visit documentary with footage from his feature film. As a result we hear

Pasolini describing the people and places that he encounters in the real Palestine while we watch the peasants and landscape of southern Italy that better matched Pasolini’s

European expectation of what historic Palestine should look like. Anastas, a Palestinian, also made a video piece from both Pasolini’s feature and the site visit documentary. But she inserts her attempt to retrace his path, alluding to Heidegger’s notion of repetition as a method of retrieving hidden possibilities from past events.

Chapter two is about the ways that two artists, Yael Bartana and Omer Fast, have addressed the memory of the Holocaust and its relationship to the contemporary politics of Israel-Palestine. These artists approach this subject without the customary reverence and reassess the way that the Holocaust has been inscribed into the collective memories of Germany, Poland, and Israel-Palestine. The works by these artists show how Jewish victimhood in the Holocaust has been instrumentalized by Israel, Poland and others to create, what some have called, a Holocaust industry.50 I focus on Bartana’s project …And Europe Will be Stunned, which includes a video installation and parafictional political movement, The Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland. In one part of this project she proposes a new form of public memorial in the former Warsaw

Ghetto through a kind of performative architecture. She does so by provocatively linking two forms of camps: Nazi concentration camps and kibbutzim, utopian collective communities built by Zionist pioneers in Palestine in the early twentieth century. I argue

50 Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (London: Verso, 2000).

32 that not only does Bartana critique methods of memorializing the Holocaust by linking it to Israel-Palestine but she also goes further to critique nationalism itself by redefining the notion of a public. Fast also deals with a Holocaust site but looks at the ways that its representation through storytelling blurs the line between fact and fiction. While Fast’s video doesn’t explicitly make the connection between the Holocaust and Israel-

Palestine, I argue that his practice destabilizes collective memory in relation to the

Holocaust and thereby critiques Israel’s use of the final solution in its own national narrative. At stake in these artists works is collective memory and its role in producing a public. I argue that these artists produce counter-memories and thus counterpublics.

Chapter three looks at the nakba (the catastrophe), a term that Palestinians use to refer to the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. I look at the ways that this traumatic past for Palestinians is both memorialized and symbolized as a driving force for contemporary activism. In particular, I discuss The Key of Return, a project commissioned by Artur Żmijewski for the 2012 Berlin Biennale and organized by the

Palestinian artist Khaled Hourani, which involved shipping a ten meter long steel key from the Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem to the Kunst-Werke in Berlin. I look at the use of the key as a symbol of the nakba in the context of a biennial that not only was devoted to art as activism but also sited in Berlin, the historical capital of the Third Reich and the center for the planning of the Final Solution. I compare the nostalgia inherent in

The Key of Return with Campus in Camps, a program in Dheisheh refugee camp in

Bethlehem, initiated by Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal that seeks to produce new

33 forms of representation of the nakba that move beyond victimization, passivity and poverty and instead replace it with tools for empowerment and growth. I then turn to the ruins of a destroyed Palestinian home as another symbol of the nakba, using photographs by Dor Guez as a case study. Using Ariella Azoulay’s notion of photography as a mechanism for ‘civic imagination, ’ I argue that Guez addresses not only a different symbol for the nakba, but he also uses a medium that has a unique ability to mobilize contemporary civic engagement with the legacies of past trauma.51

Chapter four looks at the Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon in 1982, through a series of works by Akram Zaatari. In these works Zaatari acts as a historian, but one who questions the veracity of any narrative of the past. Zataari’s All is Well on the Border

(1997) is an homage to Jean Luc Godard’s Ici Et Ailleurs (1972), an experimental documentary film, originally made as a result of the invitation by the Palestinian

Liberation Movement, that is a deconstruction of the propaganda of revolutionary movements. Using Ingrid Emmelhainz’s writing on Godard’s “materialist fictions,” I compare Godard’s and Zaatari’s approach to politically engaged filmmaking.52 Following from this discussion I look at Zaatari’s This Day (2003), which similarly unpacks the ideology of film and photography through three sets of images: Zaatari’s personal photos recording the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982; an Orientalist group of photos of Bedouins from the 1950s; and images found online during the Al Aqsa intifada from

51 Ariella Azoulay. Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography (London: Verso Books, 2012) 52 Ingrid Emmelhainz, “Between Objective and Engaged Cinema: Jean-Luc Godard’s Militant Filmmaking” (1967-1974) Part 1. E-flux Journal #34, April 2012.

34 2000-2002. These two works set up two later projects based on the triangulation of

Israel-Lebanon-Palestine: Zaatari’s book project A Conversation with an Imagined Israeli

Filmmaker (2012) and his film/video installation Letter to a Refusing Pilot (2013) both hinge on his memory of the Israeli bombing of his hometown of Saida and its intersection with the stories of Avi Mugrabi and the Israeli architect Hagai Tamir. These last two works are predicated on conversations between citizens of countries at war. I argue that these conversations are not only the research necessary for this work to be produced but, following Grant Kester’s notion of dialogical aesthetics the conversation is at the core of the meaning and methodology of the artwork.

Taken together, these four chapters argue that contemporary artists that engage with the histories of Israel-Palestine and Lebanon reveal the complex and contradictory ways that nations, citizens, and non-citizens deal with the past. This engagement takes on multiple forms including historiography, archaeology, archives and memorials.

Throughout each of these practices these artists chart the ways that trauma is embedded within these histories and the ways that these traumas have produced contemporary political conditions. In this sense, history’s trace can be felt on the psychogeography of Israel-Palestine and Lebanon.

I borrow the term “psychogeography” from the Situationist International which Guy

Debord defined as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, whether consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of

35 individuals.53 When I first started this dissertation, I planned on using a spatial logic as the dominant narrative. In the case of Israel-Palestine settlements, refugee camps, concentration camps, housing demolitions, and demonstrations within the city suggested to me that the contemporary political condition could be found within a study of the laws and effects of geography – the mutual relationship between the physical and social features of an urban environment. But, while this is an analysis that I would still like to pursue at a later date, the more I looked at the psychogeography of this region, the more I found that the laws of the geographical environment were rooted in and haunted by the effects of history. To me, this emphasizes the prefix

“psycho” in phsychogeography, looking more closely at the mental experience of space

– something that I identify within the context of memory and trauma.

One symptom of history’s trace that these works reveal is repetition compulsion and its close relation, melancholia. But some of these works also propose that when history is repeated through representation there are forms of mourning that are possible such as

Jalal Toufic’s notion of resurrection or Heidegger’s notion of reclamation. Some of these works also propose dialogical practice as a key to working through the past towards the present. A distinction between different attitudes towards the past also lays the groundwork for different types of civic imagination. In this sense, a new organization around history can allow the possibility of new forms for the commons.

53 Guy Debord, “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography” in Ken Knabb Situationist International Anthology (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981) p30

36 Chapter 2: Past Projections: Ancient Israel-Palestine

In this chapter I look at archaeology through works by four contemporary artists who address the ancient history of Israel-Palestine: Avi Mograbi, Gilad Efrat, Amir Yatziv and

Ayreen Anastas. I will argue that these artists intend for their work to act like postcolonial historiographies that intervene in the dominant narratives of collective memory in Israel-Palestine. I am using “archaeology” to describe a literal methodology and as a metaphor for addressing the traces of history in the contemporary moment.

For instance, Mograbi focuses on the archaeological site of Masada and events that occurred there in 73 CE in relation to political conflicts in Israel-Palestine in 2003-4. In his film Mograbi compares the Jewish struggle against imperial Rome with Palestinian resistance to the Israeli occupation. I will also discuss a series of paintings by Efrat that depict Jericho and Tel Sheva, an archaeological site in the Negev desert with strata that range from the 12th century BCE to the 8th century CE. As I will explain, these paintings contain narratives of both British and Israeli colonialism. Finally, Yatziv and Anastas don’t refer to literal archaeological sites in their works, but they address a 1965 film by

Pier Paolo Pasolini that is an adaptation of the Gospel of Matthew. As I will explain,

Yatziv and Anastas act like archaeologists, mapping the strata of discourses about the

‘holy land,’ and in particular, they deal with the primary postcolonial discourse of Israel-

Palestine: Orientalism. I will argue that these artworks address the haunted landscape of

Israel-Palestine by revealing the ghosts of its repressed histories.

37 Israel-Palestine is haunted by the ghosts of an ancient past because the Israeli and

Palestinian national projects are predicated on highlighting selected histories from its landscape to justify their respective rights to sovereignty. Jacques Derrida describes the condition of ‘hauntedness’ as one in which a historical truth is repressed but returns in the form of a ghost.54 The ghosts that Derrida speaks of rise up from below, moving through the strata of historical truths and the layers of repression that occlude them. In the ‘holy land’ these ghosts haunt a political condition that manifests itself in contemporary physical space. Archaeology is a way to address the stratified nature of history upon which the contemporary moment is predicated. Before moving into a more detailed analysis of artworks in relation to archaeology, I will first address the term and the ways that it describes both a literal material practice and a more metaphorical relationship to history.

Michel Foucault most famously made the argument that history should be treated like archaeology saying,

There was a time when archaeology, as a discipline devoted to silent monuments, inert traces, objects without context, and things left by the past, aspired to the condition of history, and attained meaning only through the restitution of a historical discourse; it might be said, to play on words a little, that in our time history aspires to the condition of archaeology.55

54 Jacques Derrida, trans. Eric Prenowitz, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press) p87 55 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 2002) p8

38 For Foucault it was important to move away from a picture of history as one continuous teleological stream and instead to treat history like archaeology, where certain sets of facts are looked at within specific contexts. He wanted to move away from a causal model of history that was based on outcomes that resulted from origins because he felt that this practice left out seemingly irrational events that could be better revealed through a nonlinear picture of discursive relationships through time.56 Giles Deleuze and

Felix Guattari took the metaphorical relationship between archaeology and history one step further when they argued that each stratum of an archaeological site contains objects of inquiry that might seem like facts but are actually resistant to fixed definition:

Strata are layers, belts. They consist of giving form to matters, of imprisoning intensities, or locking singularities into systems of resonance and redundancy, of producing upon the body of the earth molecules large and small and organizing them into molar aggregates. Strata are acts of capture, they are like “black holes” or occlusions striving to seize whatever comes within their reach. They operate by coding and territorialization upon the earth.57

For Deleuze and Guatarri if we want to grasp an event we must plunge into it and go through all of its geological layers. But to understand these strata we must see them as systems that have captured particular events for particular reasons. Furthermore, echoing Derrida’s notion of the ghost that moves through layers of the earth, Deleuze

56 In an interview published long after this text Foucault is asked about his thought about the relationship between his notion of the archaeology of knowledge and geography or other theories of space. He makes explicit that this comparison between archaeology and history was not meant to be taken literally but rather as a metaphor to think through the history of ideas. He writes very little about archaeology per se. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, Ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980) p 64. 57 Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnessota Press, 1987) p4

39 and Guattari suggest that there are forces that move between the territory of each stratum:

Physical particles and chemical substances cross thresholds of deterritorialization on their own stratum and between strata; these thresholds correspond to more or less stable intermediate states, to more or less transitory valences and existences, to engagements with this or that other body, to densities of proximity, to more or less localizable connections.58

Theorizations of history through the use of the archaeological metaphor by Foucault,

Deleuze and Guatarri have had a great impact on discourses within the practice of archaeology over the last twenty years.59 In practical terms this has affected the ways that archaeologists have acknowledged the effects of nationalist projects on their practice.60 Furthermore, the view of archaeology as a set of discourses that is employed for particular ideological projects has also led to an interrogation of the uses of archaeology to further colonial projects. For instance, Claire Lyons and John K.

Papadopoulos have argued that Orientalist and primitivist attitudes sought to create and define the colonial subject through the use of archaeology.61 But most directly related to this chapter is scholarship about archaeology in relation to national and colonial projects in Israel-Palestine by Nadia Abu El-Haj and Nachman Ben-Yehudah

58 ibid. p53 59 Ian Bapty and Tim Yates eds. Archaeology after Structuralism: Post-structuralism and the Practice of Archaeology (London: Routledge, 1990) 60 Philip L. Kohl and Claire Fawcett, eds. Nationalism, Politics and the Practice of Archaeology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 61 Claire Lyons and John K. Papadopoulos The Archaeology of Colonialism (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2002).

40 because they look at the ways that archaeology has been used to further a teleological view of Israel’s history.62

The four artists that I discuss engage with archaeology in two ways. First, they use archaeology as a subject, looking at the ways that it has been instrumentalized to further both nationalist and colonial ambitions. They do so by treating national approaches to history as discourses that need to be unpacked and looked at in the context of the contemporary political forces that shaped them. Secondly, they act like archaeologists, digging through layers of repressed memory. The curator Dieter

Roelstrate has called this kind of artistic practice, “the way of the shovel.”63 He says that this kind of artistic practice is analogous to archaeology not only because of the metaphor of digging through repressed memory but also because of the patient labor of working through physical material to unearth an image. And finally, he sees art and archaeology linked because they are dependent on display. I agree with Roelstrate that archaeology is a useful metaphor to think about historiographic art practices but art and archaeology should not be conflated. While I will describe a number of instances within the archaeology of Israel-Palestine where ideological forces have skewed the truth of historical fact, the practice of archaeology is still invested in constructing an accurate picture of history, even if that history includes competing discourses that surround a given site. On the other hand artists have no such obligation and are instead allowed

62 Abu El Haj, Facts on the Ground, Nahman Ben Yehudah, The Masada Myth: Collective Memory and Mythmaking in Israel (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995) 63 Dieter Roelstraete, “The Way of the Shovel: On the Archaeological Imaginary in Art” E-flux journal #4 (March 2009).

41 much more flexibility to inhabit historical imagination. But despite the fact that the stakes are different for each practice, the space between fact and fiction is something that both art and archaeology must negotiate. For example, in her book Facts on the

Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self Fashioning in Israeli Society, Nadia

Abu El-Haj proposed that in the case of archaeological practice in Israel-Palestine fact and fiction have been blurred since at least 1948.64 Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman have said that the making of facts,

depends on a delicate aesthetic balance, on new images made possible by new technologies, not only changing in front of our very eyes, but changing our very eyes – affecting the way that we can see and comprehend things. Aesthetics, as the judgment of the senses, is what rearranges the field of options and their perceived likelihood and cuts through probability’s economy of calculation.65

Keenan and Weizman propose that seeing and the apparatus that allows us to see produce a situation in which what is perceived is understood and judged to be true or false. I find this useful in thinking comparatively between art and archaeology and the ways that a technology of seeing can be thought of as a form of projection into the past.

These four artists are bound together by two forms of projection into the past: archaeology and the camera. Mograbi, Yatziv and Anastas use film and video and Efrat uses photography as source material. Ian Russell said,

At the end of the nineteenth century, the advent of modern photography aligned with archaeological pursuits. The possibility of using light itself to

64 Abu El Haj, Facts on the Ground 65 Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman, Mengele’s Skull: The Advent of Forensic Aesthetics (Berlin: Sternberg Press/Portikus, 2012) p24

42 draw (or capture) an image presented the illusion of being able to document the event as it had happened. As with previous technologies of capturing and creating images, archaeologists embraced photography to document and thereby preserve through registration and inscription within a photographic image, the current condition of sites and artifacts.66

The technologies of archaeology and photography have been aligned since the nineteenth century but this technological connection is related to a methodological one, that of projection. Archaeology’s methodology is predicated on a grid laid over the earth’s surface with which archaeologists dig. They sift through layers of dirt, but this spatial vector also implies a temporal one. An archaeologist’s sightline is projected downward through this grid into the past. She then projects her findings to an audience through an interpretation of this empirical process. A filmmaker or photographer looks through a camera, an apparatus like the archaeologist’s grid, to capture images from the world. She then projects it back towards us, and the screen or the photographic print becomes yet another form of display that guides our interpretation of the captured images. In this analogy both the grid and the camera provide us with an aperture through which we can see the past. We could define both mechanisms as tools to see the past more clearly but this supposes the assumption that an apparatus is independent of ideology. On the other hand, we could look at the grid and the camera as tools of ideology that are used to project a view that we have in the present about the past.

66 Ian Russell, “The Art of the Past: Before and After Archaeology” in Dieter Roelstraete, The Way of The Shovel: On the Archaeological Imaginary in Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014) p302

43

Laura Marks has called the link between the grid and the camera “cinematic archaeology,” a process most commonly used by filmmakers who confront the lack of minoritarian histories in communities exclusively controlled by a dominant culture.

“These artists must first dismantle the official record of their communities, and then search for ways to reconstitute their history, often through fiction, myth and ritual.”67

Marks derives this notion of cinema as a form of archaeology from Giles Deleuze’s description of post World War II spaces as

deserted but inhabited, disused warehouses, waste ground, cities in the course of demolition or reconstruction. And in these any-spaces- whatever a new race of characters was stirring, kind of mutant: they saw rather than acted, they were seers.68

Marks argues that this description of postwar space could also describe postcolonial spaces and necessitates new forms of seeing to unearth the buried phantoms that are hidden the between “the deserted layers of our time.”69 Israel-Palestine consists of many layers of history built on top of one another over the course of thousands of years. Each layer is a postwar reality built upon a demolished city. We often think of archaeological sites as representations of the distant past, but the “waste ground” of a post war reality in Israel-Palestine is most freshly built on top of the wars of 1948 and

1967, wars that in many ways were predicated on the ancient layers below. One

67 Laura U Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000) p24 68 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989) pxi 69 ibid p244

44 approach to this site would be to unearth the stories of the victims of each postwar reality. But Marks says,

Cinematic archaeology is not a question of exhuming the ‘authentic voice’ of a minority people – for that would be a ‘unitary voice’…the intercultural artist must undo a double colonization, since the community is colonized both by the master’s stories and by its own. It is tempting for exiles to fetishize images of homeland in the melancholic longing for an irrevocable past…the makers of intercultural cinema by contrast destroy myths from the inside. They do this not by extracting a truth from their traditional culture but by evoking the myth of culture as a necessary fiction.70

Mograbi, Efrat, Yatziv and Anastas guide us through layers of history, enacting a kind of cinematic archaeology, all the while acknowledging the fictions inherent in projecting onto the past. In my discussions of these artworks I will draw on the separate discourses of archaeology and their links to history, nationalism and postcolonialism, weaving them together to help illuminate the ways that contemporary art extends and intervenes in the particular case of Israel-Palestine. A key to understanding the significance of these art practices is the way that archaeology participates in “collective memory,” a term coined by Maurice Halbwachs to describe the ways that a social group’s identity is constructed with narratives of its past to provide a sense of community.71 I will argue that the collective memory of Israel-Palestine is intertwined with what Homi Babha called a nation’s narration.72 The artworks that I discuss reveal the ways that archaeology participates in a nation’s narration but more importantly is a practice that

70 Marks, The Skin of the Film, 65. 71 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago, university of Chicago press, 1992) 72 Homi K. Bahbha, Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990)

45 can propose alternative narratives. One problem that archaeologists have encountered is the assumption that archaeological strata represent autonomous cultures but recent archaeological scholarship has introduced the notion of hybrid material culture.73 This notion allows for the possibility that cultures intermingle and can’t be clearly defined as autonomous historical entities. Thus, one can’t assume that the strata of the earth are discrete and essentialized cultures stacked on top of one another. Archaeologists invested in approaching their practice with an awareness of hybrid material culture draw on Homi Babha’s notion of hybridity, which describes identity, especially colonial identity, as a liminal space.74 I propose that these artworks introduce this notion of hybridity to Halbwach’s collective memory, drawing on Bhabha’s hybridity to give nuance to his description of nations and their narration. As we shall see in the example of Avi Mograbi’s film, the intercutting between Israeli narratives about Masada and narratives of Palestinians under occupation reveals a hybrid material culture that most accurately describes the multiplicity of nations and their narration embedded within

Israel-Palestine. If we remember that I am addressing Israel-Palestine as a one state condition, then Mograbi’s film uses archaeology to narrate a hybrid collective memory.

73 Jeb J. Card ed. The Archaeology of Hybrid Material Culture (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 2013) 74 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994)

46 Avi Mograbi: Masada and The Politics of Archaeology in Israel-Palestine

In September of 2000, former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon led a delegation from his right-wing Likud party around the Temple Mount/Haram Al-Sharif in the old city of

Jerusalem. 75 He was surrounded by hundreds of riot police prompting protests by dozens of young Palestinians who saw this as a political provocation and an infringement onto their territory. They threw rocks and chanted Allah Hu Akbar [god is great]. Police responded with rubber bullets, teargas and clubs and the Second Intifada was sparked.76

This moment of Sharon circling the Temple Mount/Haram Al Sharif was pure political theater, a show of power that revealed the radical failure of a peace process begun in

Oslo in 1994. 77 This moment is significant because of the ways in which the Temple

Mount/Haram Al-Sharif, a site of numerous archaeological excavations and a space that

75 Jews refer to this site as The Temple Mount, because it is the site of the Jewish Temple, last destroyed in 70 CE, and the holiest site in Judaism. For Muslims, this site is Haram Al-Sharif, or the noble sanctuary, the third holiest place in Islam after Mecca and Medina. The two major holy sites on this compound are the Al Aqsa mosque and The Dome of the Rock, where Muslims believe that the prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven. 76 The Second Intifada (uprising), also known as the Al Aqsa Intifada lasted from September 2000-February 2005. The first Intifada lasted from 1987-1993. Both events were a Palestinian revolt against the Israeli occupation. “Palestinians and Israelis Clash at Holy Site” New York Times, September 28, 2000 77 Stephen Duncombe has argued that politicians consciously embrace the performance of fiction. He cites an unnamed advisor to president George W. Bush who said in 2004 “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create reality. And while you are studying that reality— judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” Stephen Duncombe, Dream: Re- Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy (New York: New Press, 2007) p1. See also Merijn Oudenmpsen, “Political Populism: Speaking to Imagination” Open (Rotterdam: Nai Publishers, 2010) pp 6- 20, who argues that like with the case of Geert Wilder’s PVV in the Netherlands or the Lega Nord in Italy, “there is a fight for the imaginary in American society, in which a populist right-wing campaign has set itself the goal of rendering harmless a historical past of left-wing protest and of appropriating its symbolic power.” p 7-8.

47 is densely charged with the remnants of a contested past, became the stage for the performance of politics.78 For some, archaeology might seem like an objective practice based on empiricism and facts – a science that transcends ideology.79 But archaeology is a practice that is often used in Israel-Palestine to actively find and frame historical evidence from the past to justify a political present. 80

The phenomenon of politicized archaeology is the basis for Avi Mograbi’s film Avenge

But One of My Two Eyes (2005), which intercuts moments of Palestinian humiliation and subjugation under the Israeli occupation during the Second Intifada with footage of

Jewish tour guides at the Masada archaeological site. Aside from Jerusalem, one of the most famous sites that illustrates the politics of archaeology is Masada, a Roman era fort on the top of a plateau in the Judean desert that overlooks the Dead Sea. The story of Masada is legendary in Israeli society, and it helps to illustrate the mentality of

Sharon on that day described above in 2000. 81 According to Josephus Flavius, following the destruction of the second Jewish temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE, a group of Jewish

78 “Archaeological digs are being carried out as part of a concerted campaign to expel Palestinians from their ancestral home.” Yigal Bronner and Neve Gordon “Beneath the Surface” The Chronicle Review, April 15, 2008, Volume 54, Issue 33, p B5. See also Kristin M. Romey, Archaeology, Volume 53, Number 2, March/April 2000 http://archive.archaeology.org/0003/newsbriefs/flap.html 79 “The practice of archaeology is rather like that of the scientist. The scientist collects data (evidence), conducts experiments, formulates a hypothesis (a proposition to account for the data), tests the hypothesis against more data and then in conclusion devises a model (a description that seems to best summarize the pattern observed in the data). The archaeologist has to develop a picture of the past, just as the scientist has to develop a coherent view of the natural world. It is not found ready made.” Colin Renfrew and Paul Bahn eds. Archaeology: Theories, Methods and Practice, 4th ed. (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004) p 13. “Archaeology is the scientific study of an ancient human behavior based on the surviving material remains of the past.” Brian M. Fagan, Ancient Lives: An Introduction to Archaeology (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000) p13. 80 Abu El Haj, Facts on the Ground 81 Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) p60-78

48 rebels called the Sicarii set up camp in this site, originally built by King Herod as a palace and fortress. They used it as a base for rebel attacks against the Romans, and in 72 CE the Roman governor surrounded Masada, laying siege to the encampment. The Romans built a ramp to reach the walls of Masada and used a battering ram to enter the fortress but when they arrived they found that all 936 inhabitants had committed a mass suicide.82

This site became central to the myth of Jewish heroism embedded within the State of

Israel. The story of Masada involved the overwhelming force of the Roman army and a scrappy group of Jewish rebel fighters. This image represented the historic persecution of Jews for which the State of Israel was to be an antidote. But this instance of Jewish heroism was also a counter-myth to the passive victimhood of Jews in the Holocaust.83

The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) regularly swears in its recruits at Masada because this site represents the notion of the new Jew. As opposed to the stereotype of the pasty, thin, weak, bookish Jews of Eastern Europe that were the passive victims of pogroms and the Holocaust, the new Jew was to be a brave, bronzed muscular soldier.84 The main archaeologist that excavated the site of Masada in the 1960s, Yigael Yadin, exemplifies the new Jew and the links between Israeli archaeologists and the military.

82 Nahman Ben Yehudah, The Masada Myth: Collective Memory and Mythmaking in Israel (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995) 83 Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) p70 84 Oz Almog, The Sabra: The Creation of the New Jew (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). See also Sander Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Race and Madness (Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985) and Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986)

49 He was in the Haganah and was head of operations during the 1948 war, becoming the second Chief of Staff of the IDF until 1952. 85 Masada’s importance to Israeli society has to do with the way that it informs Zionist collective memory by representing a moment of Judea’s wars of liberation against Rome and other imperial forces during this period.

But in a larger sense Israeli collective memory is invested in antiquity as a period in which the ancient Hebrew nation flourished. For Israel, Masada represents national continuity but also a counterpoint to the period of exile between antiquity and the

Zionist project.86

Mograbi filmed Avenge But One of My Two Eyes in 2003-2004, during the Second

Intifada, a moment when Palestinian suicide bombings became common in Tel Aviv and

Jerusalem. He montaged scenes from both Masada and the West Bank to link this tactic of self-sacrifice as a form of political resistance with the famous story of the Jewish mass suicide at Masada.87 Through the tour guides, the film sets up some of the ways that

Israel indoctrinates its citizenry to believe that its contemporary aggression is justified by centuries of Jewish oppression. As Mograbi shows viewers scenes of Palestinian suffering under occupation at the hands of the Israeli military, we hear Israeli tour guides tell the story of the small brave band of Jewish revolutionaries that was threatened by the awesome power of the Roman army.

85 The Haganah was the Jewish paramilitary organization active in British Mandate Palestine from 1920- 1948. 86 Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, 23. 87 Mitchell Miller, “Voices Within the Siege: Avi Mograbi and the Rules of Absolute Engagement,” Cineaste Vol. 32 No. 3 (Summer 2007) http://www.cineaste.com/articles/voices-within-the-siege.htm

50

Figure 2.1. Avi Mograbi, still from Avenge But One of My Two Eyes (2005)

Avenge But One of My Two Eyes opens with Mograbi speaking on the phone with a

Palestinian friend who is trapped by an Israeli military siege on Jenin [figure 2.1].88 Then we see a group of young British Jews at Masada. It is dawn and in the gray early morning light we see a soldier with a kippah speaking English to the group. He encourages them to be quiet, to close their eyes and to breathe deeply. He says, “I want you to think that you are part of the 960 people that killed themselves on Masada, because in some way you are.” He tells them to remember the burning Jewish temple and that it could have been their grandparents that were there. He tells them to picture the Roman soldiers besieging the place, screaming war cries and producing panic in everyone on top. In this

88 The Palestinian is played by the actor Shredi Jabarin because Mograbi wanted to protect his friend’s identity.

51 scene the soldier is asking this Jewish youth group to identify with the Sicarii. He wants them to identify with them as Jewish individuals who were surrounded by a threatening army and killed themselves rather than falling into the hands of the enemy. He suggests that in some way they are part of this group, presumably because they are Jewish and share the same cultural memory. But implicit in this pseudo-psychological exercise in identification is his request that they make another identification between themselves as diasporic Jews with Israelis, suggesting that they are both linked by the cultural memory of Masada.

From this scene Mograbi cuts to another scene in which we see a group of Palestinian farmers on tractors trying to cross a fence, the separation barrier, in order to till their fields. This barrier, which stretches very roughly along the 1949 Jordanian-Israeli armistice line (also known as the Green Line) is also called the separation wall, the security fence, or the wall of apartheid. Each of these terms has different political implications, but each also describes different material realities. Some portions of the barrier consist of a barbed wire fence and other sections consist of a concrete wall. In this instance, it is a portion of the fence that separates Palestinian villages from their fields, a common side effect of the original stated purpose of its being built. Israel began construction on this barrier in 2000 during the Second Intifada for security reasons, but it has had significant detrimental effects on Palestinian civil society and its economy.

52 In the next scene we see a group of Palestinian farmers working in a field and an Israeli military jeep coming to intercept them, claiming that their field is a closed military zone.

Then Mograbi cuts back to Masada and a tour guide says in Hebrew “look at the camps of the Roman soldiers” and warns them that they are surrounded just like Israel is surrounded by Arab states. By juxtaposing these scenes from Masada and the West

Bank, Mograbi shows the viewer the cultural memory that feeds the perception of perpetual threat, prompting Israel to build the barrier and police its border zones. This cultural memory is predicated on the kind of identification that the Masada guide proposes. But, as we shall see, what Mograbi is after is a very different kind of identification.

In another scene we see a group of Palestinians who are detained by the side of a road.

They were trying to go to Bethlehem, some on their way to school, and others on their way to work. Israeli soldiers have made them stand in a line, and one is made to stand on a rock because he looked backwards when he was initially detained. He says to the camera that this is why people commit suicide, because of the humiliation experienced in moments like this. When we combine this comment with the phone conversation that

Mograbi has with his Palestinian friend throughout the film, we start to see a picture of

Israel as a dominating force that has besieged and humiliated the Palestinian people to the point that they rebel and even commit suicide like the Sicarri at Masada. After this scene Mograbi cuts back to an image of him in his editing studio, and he is once again on the phone with the same Palestinian friend who invites Mograbi to come to Jenin to

53 experience what it is like for him to feel the pressure of military occupation. The

Palestinian says that nothing can be changed through force and asks how Algeria or

South Africa got freedom. He says, “I don't want to see blood on the street.” This statement offers another point of view from the detained Palestinian, undoing the clear- cut identification between the Palestinian suicide bombers and the Sicarii. Mograbi’s friend references two other instances of revolts against colonialism and proposes that militarism is not a productive decolonizing strategy.

In another scene at Masada a group of Israelis scream from the mesa that they will never surrender. In this instance a young boy is at first shy and reluctant to raise his voice, but he is urged by the surrounding adults to repeat the exercise over and over again until he reaches the volume of the others. Mograbi implies with this scene that the tours on Masada are examples of overt indoctrination, asking participants to not only identify with the past but to actively inhabit the position of the Sicarii. In another scene a woman speaking English conducts a roleplaying exercise in which a group of

American teenagers is asked to organize themselves into four groups: those that would choose to fight, pray, surrender or kill themselves. Almost all of them go into the group that fights, one surrenders, a few pray, and none choose to kill themselves. This is where the identification transforms itself from contemporary Jews with the Sicarri to an identification with the contemporary Israeli, who has risen from the ashes of Masada and built a culture around the new Jew, the fighter. After this scene the film cuts back to

Mograbi’s studio, and the Palestinian on the other line says “when Palestinians start to

54 believe that living is not important, that’s what Israeli society has to think about – when they make a people reach this point when life is not worth living.” This comparison is striking because the Jews at Masada are asked to identify with the Jewish martyrs of

Masada, but they are only able to identify with the perceived threat of an aggressive other. Their reaction to that threat is completely different. The contemporary Jews that

Mograbi depicts at Masada choose the option to fight rather than take their own lives.

But it is the Palestinian in the film who claims a greater identification with the choice of

Jewish martyrs of Masada and warns that this suicidal tendency is not because of honor but rather because the life that the bombers have lived prior to taking their lives is unbearable.

At a number of points in the film, Mograbi is with activists from the Israeli NGO

B’Tselem, who are easily identified because the group’s logo is emblazoned on their car and their T-shirts. 89 In one of these scenes a group of soldiers is checking some

Palestinians’ papers, and one of the soldiers doesn’t want to be filmed. An argument ensues about whether or not Mograbi needs a permit. The soldiers circle around and taunt him, holding their hands up to the camera’s lens and pushing him around in an intimidating way. Meanwhile the commanding officer is on the phone to find out if

Mograbi is allowed to film in this area. Finally, the officer says that Mograbi is allowed to film. The soldiers walk away, and the scene ends.

89 B’Tselem, The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, aims to document human rights abuses in the Occupied Territories and educate the Israeli public about these conditions. http://www.btselem.org/

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Part of the tension in this scene derives from the fact that Mograbi and the Israeli activists are subject to an instance of humiliation similar to that of their Palestinian counterparts. It echoes the prior instances of identification at Masada, in which contemporary Jews are asked to identify with the Roman era Jewish rebels. But in both cases, it is clear that there is a limit to complete identification. Mograbi’s film makes it repeatedly clear that Palestinian suffering under the Israeli occupation far outweighs any contemporary Jewish or Israeli victimhood. The

Palestinian friend that Mograbi speaks to on the phone is under siege, subject to curfew and snipers. The Palestinians that we see intercut with the scenes at Masada are dealing with the wall, checkpoints and daily harassment by Israeli soldiers. Mograbi might face some degree of aggressiveness by working with NGOs that are sympathetic to the Palestinian plight, but because of his Israeli identity he is protected. Similarly, when contemporary Jews, both diasporic and Israeli, are asked by the Masada tour guides to identify with the 936 zealots besieged by the Romans, Mograbi implies that their relative comfort and safety makes this a false comparison. Of all the potential identifications, it is the contemporary Palestinian who most likely can identify with the Masada Jew. Both are under siege by a military power that far outweighs their own. Both are under military occupation. Both are driven to suicide, an act that is in turn mythologized into a heroic act. This link between the contemporary Palestinian and the Jews on Masada in 72 AD directly contradicts the comparison that the Masada tour guide regularly makes in Mograbi’s film between the zealots and contemporary Israelis.

56 Mograbi’s film reveals some of the deep connections between archaeology and nationalism. The discipline of archaeology emerged at the same time as the emergence of nationalism in 19th century Europe. If we follow Benedict Anderson and think of nations as imagined political communities, then archaeology provides us with one theater in which these communities enact their collective imaginations.90 Anderson suggests that, “communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.”91 One style in which the Israeli community is imagined often involves an archaeological site as a theater for the performance of nationalism. This is what Mograbi captured as he shot tour guides not only telling stories on the site of Masada but also creating interactive exercises for Israelis and diasporic

Jews to participate in, realizing a mythical history in a contemporary moment. But the performance of this myth reveals a tension between the origin story and the real lives of contemporary Jews, Israelis, and Palestinians. On the one hand Masada might seem to valorize the Jews who committed suicide but on the other hand Masada is also used to counter that martyrdom with the imperative to fight. Homi Bhabha describes this tension as an ambivalence that is built into the nation – an ambivalence between the fixed clarity of the origin story and the instability of cultural temporality.92 This instability allows for the possibility of Palestinians identifying more with the suicidal impulses of the Sicarri than contemporary Jews. Furthermore, for Bhabha, the study of the instability of a nation’s narrative also has implications for the stability of the nation

90 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: reflections of the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983) 91 Ibid p6 92 Homi K. Bahbha, Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990) p2

57 itself. If we remember that I am using Israel-Palestine as a one state condition, then we could think of the migration of an origin story of martyrdom from Jews to Palestinians within one provisional nation. In this sense, Mograbi’s film could be showing us the currents in which the performance of a nation’s origin story could actually reveal the transmutation of the nation itself.

Imagined Histories of an Archaic Past: Gilad Efrat’s archaeological paintings

The Israeli artist Gilad Efrat has also addressed antiquity through a series of fifteen paintings based on British Mandate era aerial photographs of archaeological sites in

Palestine. His painting practice between 1996 and 2000 used archaeology, both literally and metaphorically, as a subject. Efrat has said, “I’m always involved with fragments.”93

Echoing Roelstrate’s comparison between art and archaeology in terms of its materiality, Efrat sees the process of painting from a photograph and digging for historical fragments as similar. Extending the comparison that I made earlier between the technologies of the camera and the archaeologist’s grid, Efrat projects into the past by using painting as yet another apparatus laid on top of both photographic and archaeological grids. Efrat’s process involves gridding out a source photograph and working slowly, cell by cell, to produce a painted analog. In this sense, his paintings are made like an archaeological site, gridded to keep track of fragmented and dispersed objects and structures. Furthermore, Efrat uses a subtractive process in these paintings,

93 Michal Lando, “Perpetual Perspective: In the Studio with Gilad Efrat” The Jerusalem Post Jan 1, 2009.

58 where he lays down a field of wet paint and then rubs into it with a rag to make marks that reveal the lighter values of the under painting. Efrat sees this as similar to the subtraction of earth in an archaeological site.94 But in this painting process, the areas that are dug up and brought to the surface are the lightest areas that come forward spatially within the picture plane. For instance in his 1996 monochromatic painting Dir El

Balach [Figure 2.2] we can see two tones primarily. 95 The darker areas, which describe the hollows of a gridded ruin, are a greenish raw umber and the lighter areas, which articulate the walls and raised planes of the space, are pale with warm ochre undertones. In The Heavenly and the Earthly Dir El Balach from 1997, we also see a gridded archaeological site from above that tips slightly back from the picture plane but the darks in this case are a dusky ultramarine and the lighter tones that push forward a cool bluish white.

Figure 2.2. Gilad Efrat, Dir El Balach (1996)

94 As noted by Galia Bar Or in Gilad Efrat: Ape Scape (Ein Harod: Museum of Art Ein Harod, 2010) p96 95 The site that this painting represents, Dir El Balach, is in the Gaza Strip, which in 1995, the year before this painting was made, was newly administered by the Palestinian Authority as a part of the Oslo Accords.

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When we think of the paintings, photographs and archaeological sites involved in Efrat’s practice, there is a dialectical relationship between the empirical order of the grid and the disorderly traces of the past.96 But his use of aerial photographs provides an additional perspective on this dialectic by adding a third dimension that reinforces the grid’s Cartesian promise of objectivity. The distance of the aerial photograph promises an omniscient point of view by resisting the details of discrete fragments or even discrete cells of the grid and focuses instead on a whole site. We could see this totalizing view in two ways. It could either be objective disinterest or a tool for desired control.

For Efrat, the aerial viewpoint is a disinterested one, a position that is in stark contrast to not only the Zionist ideological relationship to archaeological sites but also the Israeli art historical precedents for expressions of connections to the landscape of Israel-

Palestine. Efrat’s archaeological paintings were first shown at the Israel Museum in 1998 as a part of an exhibition entitled To the East: Orientalism in the Arts in Israel, a survey show that sought to address Israeli artists’ ambivalent relationship with “the East.”

Efrat’s work was placed in the context of artworks by Jews in Palestine in the 1920s and

30s. Artists from this period included Nahum Gutman, who painted Palestinian shepherds and farmers with an Orientalist fascination and Yitzhak Danziger, who was a part of the Canaanite sculpture movement. For both Gutman and Danziger, their work was an expression of Zionism’s desire to create or express a relationship to the land.

96 Rosalind Krauss writes that the grid is a declaration of modernity in that it is ordered and antinatural – a mechanism, like a windowpane, that separates the seer from that which is seen. Rosalind Krauss, “Grids,” October, Vol. 9 (Summer, 1979), pp 50-64

60 Daniziger fashioned figurative sculptures such a Nimrod (1939) out of Nubian sandstone, with the intention to literally work with rocks from the local landscape to connect with ancient, pre-Jewish civilizations. Gutman painted Palestinian farmers to identify with their labor, work that was interpreted by Gutman to be noble and timeless. By placing

Efrat’s work in this context the curators misunderstood his intention of representing archaeological sites within Israel-Palestine. They thought that he was an extension of the Zionist romantic infatuation with the history embedded within the land of Israel. But

Efrat intentionally chose the aerial view to reject this desire for a greater connection with, and thereby domination of, the land in Israel’s social and art history by using a viewpoint that was literally and figuratively distanced from it.

The second way that we could interpret the aerial view is by looking at the relationship between omniscience and control. Michel de Certeau asks, “I wonder what is the source of this pleasure in ‘seeing the whole.’” 97 He answers that in the voyeuristic embrace of a totalizing view, we mistakenly believe that we possess the true knowledge about what we are looking at. But whether or not true knowledge is acquired through the view from above, the supposition that there is a link between seeing, knowing and controlling a space has been major part of state surveillance since WW I. By referencing photographs taken by British cartographers Efrat indexes the colonialism of the British mandate and by extension, the Israeli colonial control that succeeded it. In recent years, with the widespread military use of drones, there has been a considerable amount of

97 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: The University of California, 1984) p92

61 scholarship as well as curatorial and artistic practice that has addressed the relationship between new technologies of surveillance such as drones or satellites and power.98 In all of this work, there is a constant tension between the meaning and utility of a technology that enables a view from above for an individual or states. But in most of these cases there is a suspicion of a technology that has enabled surveillance to take away the agency of the individual. For Efrat, the aerial image was meant to reference successive instances of state power compacted into the grid of the archaeological site.

In his mind, the long view of history as represented by these sites shows that state power is ephemeral and is often replaced. So even if British or Israeli governments seek to use an aerial view as a method of control, archaeology itself is a record of the ephemerality of any state’s control over land, people, or objects. Another reason that

Efrat’s work differs from many projects in recent years adressing aerial views, through drones or other modes of surveillance, is that much of this more recent work was made in reference to the US war on terror, including assassinations of Al Qaeda operatives in

Afghanistan, Pakistan or Yemen, and Israeli assassinations of Hamas operatives in Gaza.

In contrast to this Efrat’s images are made from some of the earliest examples of aerial photography and are of archaeological sites. They aren’t explicit critiques of US or Israeli

98 For instance, the 2014 exhibition Decolonized Skies at Apexart in New York explored the history of the view from above with a range of images. One of the earliest images included in the show was a 1906 photograph taken by George R Lawrence who used a camera fastened to a kite that flew above San Francisco in the wake of a devastating earthquake. One of the most recent pieces in the show was a video by Forensic Architecture that looked at drone strikes in Gaza, Pakistan and Yemen between 2011-2014. Other notable examples of artworks that have been made about aerial photography and its links to state violence include Harun Faocki’s War at a Distance (2003), Omer Fast’s 5,000 Feet is the Best (2011) and numerous projects by Trevor Paglen. See also Laura Kurgan, Close Up at a Distance: Mapping Technology and Politics (New York: Zone Books, 2013), Lisa Parks, Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone (New York: The New Press, 2013), and Bard College’s Center for the study of the Drone.

62 drone warfare but instead are more oblique references to the view from above for state power. Furthermore, by choosing images of archaeological sites, he highlights the use of archaeology as another mechanism for state power. I now turn to two particular paintings by Efrat and the strata of historical discourse embedded within the sites that they depict: Jericho and Tel Sheva.

If we consider Efrat’s Jericho Winter Palaces (1999), a narrative about the control of space becomes interrelated with the political control of objects. 99 This 160 x 220 cm painting is based on an archaeological site in Jericho and the composition is based on a wider shot than many of the other paintings in this series. We can see a light gray field with rectangular dark gray shadowed indentations. It seems as if the excavations are not completely done, and as a result we see only a glimpse of a city plan. It’s as if a city were slowly rising from the earth, pushing against the upper membrane of the earth’s crust.

This particular area of Jericho depicted in the painting references the Winter Palaces of the Hasmonean Kingdom (140-37 BCE), the last Jewish sovereign power to precede the modern State of Israel. Thus, the painting frames and highlights the Jewish historical presence in the Jericho area. But on the other hand, the painting could also highlight

Israel’s ideological investment in linking archaeological proof of a Jewish sovereign presence in the ‘holy land’ with present day Jewish claims to the West Bank. Efrat painted this image four years after the Oslo Accords placed Jericho under the

99 Efrat took the image for this painting from Ephraim Stern, The Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land (Jerusalem: Carta, 1993)

63 administrative control of the Palestinian Authority. But just before this transfer of authority Israel revealed its investment in Jericho as an archaeological site.

In 1993, Israel was scheduled to withdraw from the West Bank in accordance with the

Oslo accords. The area around Jericho was to be turned over to the Palestinian

Authority and the Israeli Antiquities Authority launched Operation Scroll. This emergency set of excavations involved sixteen teams of archaeologists who combed a sixty-mile stretch of the Jordanian valley, looking for Jewish scrolls or other remnants of the Second Temple period. 100 This operation sparked a fierce debate between Israeli and Palestinian archaeologists about who had rightful ownership of archaeological finds in a territory with ambiguous sovereignty. This issue was put on the agenda for peace negotiations regarding the final status of Israel-Palestine after the temporary solution outlined by the Oslo agreements. There was a legal dimension to these negotiations that was raised by the Palestinians. The Hague Convention prohibits an occupying power from transferring cultural artifacts out of an occupied territory. This was to prevent one nation from plundering the cultural property of another. But the Israeli argument was that it is not clear who owns the cultural property from sites like Jericho.

If a city or area like Jericho has been governed and inhabited by many cultures then who is its rightful owner? Regardless of the juridical question regarding ownership it is clear that Operation Scroll revealed a direct correlation between the archaeological site of

Jericho and Israel’s collective memory. As Yael Zerubavel has shown, the narration of

100Abu El Haj, Facts on the Ground, 240.

64 the Israeli national identity includes a direct teleological through line from ancient

Jewish civilizations such as the Hasmonean kingdom to the modern state of Israel. If

Israel had to cede control of the space it was still invested in at the very least preserving ownership and control of its objects so it could use them as props for the discursive frameworks of Israeli national identity. When we dig beneath Efrat’s painting of

Jerricho’s Winter Palaces, we can see it as not only a painting of a photograph of an archaeological site but also as a representation of the layers of discourse that surround it.

Another painting of Efrat’s archaeological series is Tel Sheva (1998). It is again a black and white image with a city plan that is based on concentric circles that radiate from the canvas’s center. The painting is minimal, flat and almost abstract. The dark areas distributed throughout the painting describe the harsh shadows of late afternoon sun in the desert. These shadows are the main tools that Efrat employs to describe the remains of walls and other architectural structures visible in the source photograph. The

Tel in the painting’s name refers to a plateau created through centuries of cycles of cities being destroyed and rebuilt on top of their own ruins. This Tel is in the south of

Israel, just east of the Israeli city Be’er Sheva. The earliest evidence of inhabitants in Tel

Sheva dates back to the forth millennium BCE with a continuous presence through the eighth century CE. It contains layers of civilizations that include Persian, Helenistic,

Herodian, Roman and Early Arab remains.

65 Like Masada, Tel Sheva is maintained by the Israeli Nature and Parks Authority. A brochure for the site makes frequent mention of its connection to the Bible. For instance, a highlighted paragraph of text quotes from the book of Amos to speculate that an earthquake mentioned in the text might be the same one that destroyed one of the strata. Other highlighted texts include references to the Book of Kings and a passage in Genesis, which suggests that the site was named by Abraham to mark a pact that he made with Avimelech, king of the Philistines at the foot of a well. The brochure notes that Be’er means well in Hebrew and Sheva means oath. This intermingling of biblical citation and empirical evidence is quite common within Israeli archaeological practice.

As Nadia Abu El-Haj notes, a famous debate between Israeli archaeologists Yohanan

Aharoni and Yigael Yadin in the 1950s about the Israelite conquest of Canaan was predicated on proving the truth of events narrated in the Book of Joshua.101

Tel Sheva (officially Tel Be’er Sheva) is also located at the entrance to a Bedouin town of the same name. This Tel Sheva was established in 1967 as a part of a project by the

Israeli government to sedentarize the traditionally semi-nomadic Bedouins of the Negev desert.102 These Bedouin are Israeli citizens, but they are socially quite separate. Their first language is Arabic, and they are relatively poor. This is in stark contrast to the wealthy Jewish suburb of Omer that is adjacent to Tel Sheva, whose red terracotta roofs and verdant green lawns reveal its privilege relative to the dilapidated infrastucture of

101 Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground, 105. 102 Smadar Lavie, The Poetics of Military Occupation (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990)

66 its neighbor. Tel Sheva has a high crime rate, and in recent years, some members of the community have increasingly identified themselves as Palestinian.103

There are two competing narratives that Tel Sheva represents. On the one hand it can be seen as an enclave of an ancient tribal Bedouin culture that is timeless. This

Orientalist view of Bedouins was crucial to the early Zionist foundations of Israeli identity. From 1900-1930 early Zionists modeled the notion of the new Jew on their conception of the Bedouin who had a deep relationship to the land of Israel-Palestine.

Jews were historically seen as “Eastern” or “Oriental” in Europe and Zionism was based on returning Jews to Palestine, the place of their origin, in part because of this perception. Traditional Bedouins, with tents and camels, also embodied the Orientalist imagery of the European imagination. If European Jews saw themselves as Oriental, they saw Bedouins as even more so. For this reason Zionism was founded on a linkage between Bedouins and Jews. But on the other hand, European Jews also brought with them the Orientalism that Edward Said famously describes as a form of coercion and exploitation. 104 But on the other hand, Tel Sheva’s present conditions reflect the complex political, social, and economic situation of a community that has been deeply affected by the State of Israel.

103 Bedouins are referred to as Palestinians by a number of scholars including As’ad Ghanem in The Palestinian-Arab Minority in Israel: 1948-2000 (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2001) p177. This phenomenon has also been reported on in relation to Bedouin resistance to the Prawer-Begin plan in 2013, which proposed that 30,000-40,000 Bedouins in the south of Israel would be forcibly relocated. Because of both internal and international pressure the plan failed. See for instance the prevalence of Palestinian flags at a demonstration in this report: Matt Surrusco, “Hundreds protest Bedouin displacement in the Negev” August 2, 2013, 972 Magazine, http://972mag.com/hundreds-protest-bedouin-displacement-in-the- negev/76864/ 104 See Yaron Peleg, Orientalism and the Hebrew Imagination (Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005)

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So what do these competing narratives in Tel Sheva tell us about Tel Be’er Sheva? Both are examples of physical spaces that simultaneously represent a tension between the past and the present. Tel Be’er Sheva is used by Israel as proof of biblical “facts on the ground” that justify Jewish claims to the land. 105 While at the same time, it represents thousands of years of history that contain multiple claims to sovereignty. Tel Sheva embodies a present condition that is also framed by the needs of the Israeli state.

Bedouins from the Negev desert were sedentarized in order to control desert space for many purposes, most importantly military purposes. But the result of this rupture of tradition and forced form of modern living has been a social rupture, creating a wound that still festers.

In an essay for Gilad Efrat’s mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Art, Ein Harod, the curator Michelle White speaks about Efrat’s relationship to history. She reminds us of Walter Benjamin’s discussion of Paul Klee’s 1920 drawing Angelus Novis. She quotes

Benyamin saying, “The Storm drives [the angel] irresistibly toward the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble heap before him grows sky high. That which we call progress is this storm.”106 White says that Efrat often cites this text in relation to his work. He knows the Klee drawing well since it is in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. He is determined to make work that exists in a similar interstitial space, caught between past

105 “archaeologists assemble material culture henceforth embedded in the terrain itself, facts on the ground that instantiate particular histories and historicities.” Abu El-Haj p13 106 Michelle White, “Neither Here Nor There” Gilad Efrat: Ape Scape (Ein Harod: Museum of Art Ein Harod, 2010), p87

68 and future. But the image also speaks powerfully to the ways in which time manifests itself materially in both Tel (Be’er) Sheva and Efrat’s paintings. The archaeological site of

Tel (Be’er) Sheva is essentially a rubble heap that must be sifted through to find the strata of architecture and artifacts. Efrat’s paintings are made up of layers of painted marks that also resemble a heap of rubble up close. It is only when we step back that we can begin to decipher their meaning.

Pasolini in Palestine

At the end of an article about Efrat, Michal Lando says, “from the corner of my eye I noticed the book by his bed (which he reads on breaks from painting), A Violent Life, a novel by Italian director and writer Piero Pasolini…’I love his movies’ says Efrat.”

He is not the only artist that has noted the connection between Pasolini and Israel-

Palestine. Two artists in particular, Ayreen Anastas and Amir Yatziv, have made work about and from Pasolini’s films The Gospel According to Saint Matthew (1964) and

Location Hunting in Palestine for the Gospel According to St. Matthew (1965). Both artists highlight the Orientalism embedded within Pasolini’s films, characterized by the need for a Romanticized notion of ancient Palestine to be manifest in the present. This shared interest in Pasolini might seem like an inconsequential coincidence that links

Efrat to Yatziv and Anastas, but as we shall see there is a great deal of overlap between the Orientalism that Efrat alludes to in his Tel Sheva paintings and the Orientalism at play in Pasolini’s films. I will argue that Yatziv and Anastas enact a kind of archaeology,

69 digging through the layers of Pasolini’s film to reveal not only an Orientalist gaze but also the Palestinian as both a colonial subject and proletariat.

Pasolini’s film was remarkable for a number of reasons. First of all, many were stunned that a gay, atheist Marxist who was notorious for making films that produced moral outrage would have a relatively reverential take on the life of Jesus. After all, he was sentenced to jail for La Ricotta, his 1963 contribution to the anthology RoGoPaG, which was a cynical and irreverent take on the crucifixion. Secondly, The Gospel According to

Saint Matthew was not filmed in Israel-Palestine but rather, in the South of Italy.

Pasolini conducted a scouting trip in Israel-Palestine in 1963, but found that the location didn’t match his expectations. He recorded this trip and a documentary about the experience was eventually released in 1965: Location Hunting in Palestine for the Gospel

According to St. Matthew.

The Gospel According to Saint Matthew is about a past projection through the prism of western history and its links to Christianity. It draws from Europe’s Orientalist romanticism with the Levant, imagined to be an idyllic space of milk and honey. Pasolini was looking for the auratic original that Renaissance paintings or literature from the

Crusades had promised. Ironically, he was unable to see the actual people, places and

70 things in Palestine, because he was looking for an imagined reality. Instead, he could only see the failure of his mythic expectations.107

The film, as its title suggests, is based on the Gospel according to Matthew. Pasolini used a number of amateur actors to play the various parts, a typical practice for Italian

Neorealist filmmakers who used real people to describe the conditions of the working class in Italy.108 Pasolini is unique in the way that he used historical stories such as the life of Jesus from other places and other times, while at the same time telling stories with people and places that were set in and about the difficult economic conditions of his home.

107 In the 1960s and 70s a number of French and Italian filmmakers focused on Israel-Palestine. Pasolini was part of this wave of European leftist interest in a site that combined Palestinian revolutionary struggle and the Zionist socialist experiment with a biblical patina. For instance, Jean Luc Godard’s Here and Elsewhere (1976), Franco Zeffereli’s Jesus of Nazareth (1977) and Chris Marker’s Description of a Struggle (1961). An American counterpart to this activity is Susan Sontag’s Promised Lands (1974). See Irmgard Emmelhainz, 2009, Before Our Eyes: Les Mots, Non Les Choses, Jean Luc Godard’s Ici Et Alours (1970-74) and Notre Music (2004), PhD dissertation, University of Toronto and “Between Objective Engagement and “Engaged Cinema: Jean Luc Godard’s ‘Militant Filmmaking’ (1967-1974) Part I,” E-Flux Journal #34, April 2012 and Part II in E-Flux Journal #35, May 2012. Also see the conference at the Vera List Center, organized by Joshua Simon, entitled United States of Palestine-Israel: Here and Elsewhere, September 10, 2011, http://www.veralistcenter.org/engage/event/234/united-states-of-palestineisrael-here-and- elsewhere/ 108 Millicent Marcus, Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987)

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Figure 2.3. Still from Amir Yatziv, This is Jerusalem, Mr. Pasolini (2012)

Amir Yatziv: This is Jerusalem, Mr. Pasolini

Amir Yatziv’s, This is Jerusalem, Mr. Pasolini (2012) is an 18 minute edited compilation of film from The Gospel According to Saint Matthew [figure 2.3] and audio from Location

Hunting in Palestine for the Gospel According to St. Matthew. Yatziv’s video superimposes the filmmaker’s commentary about modern Israel-Palestine as he saw it in 1963 on the visuals of Italy posing as biblical Palestine, reversing Pasolini’s Orientalist gaze, which looked at Israel-Palestine through the lens of the West. This is Jerusalem,

Mr. Pasolini opens with a slow panning shot across the desert. Then we see the small figure of Jesus walking through a desolate landscape. Then we hear Pasolini say, “We’re about 50 km from Tel Aviv. Look at that Panorama, what luck!” Then Yatziv cuts back to the desert and we hear Pasolini say, “nearby, is a long, narrow stretch of the border

72 between Israel and Jordan.” With this introduction, Yatziv highlights the moment when

Pasolini looks out over the pastoral landscape of the ‘holy land’ and tries to imagine the ancient figure of Jesus in close proximity to a modern city of Tel Aviv and the nation states of Israel and Jordan. Then the camera pans across a wide swath of wheat fields, and we see a group of peasants tending to stacks of straw. Another group of peasants walks down a path, passing Jesus with scythes and pitchforks in hand. Pasolini exclaims

“This is what I was hoping to find! The sun and this straw. That tent, that heap of wheat.

The gestures of this old farmer” These statements are in line with the kinds of

Orientalism that Nahum Gutman displayed with his Romantic paintings of Palestinian shepherds and farmers. But then, Pasolini focuses on Jesus who looks towards the sky then looks into the distance and then directly at the camera. Throughout these shots

Pasolini says that while he had great hopes for what he would find in Israel-Palestine, he was ultimately disappointed.

I thought that Israel could be the perfect setting but even at this point I started to suspect…my first impression was of great modesty, of great smallness, of great humility… I imagined that the Mount of the Beautitudes would be part of the spectacular panorama that Palestine would have given me…instead I was stuck by its incredible smallness – a great lesson in humility

In this juxtaposition, Yatziv seems to portray Jesus as Pasolini, a European who arrives at a place that has been prophesized, painted and poetically described for centuries to such a degree that the actual place feels comparatively small. For instance, the Sea of

Galilee turns out to be a much smaller body of water, and Pasolini says that the Jordan

River is “a poor, humble, desperate green river.”

73

Yatziv’s film becomes a narration of Pasolini’s hopes and disappointment. He reveals both the Orientalism fueling his Romantic expectations and the inevitable disconnect between these expectations and the reality on the ground. But then Yatziv shows us that Pasolini transposed his experience of the relative humility of the landscape of

Israel-Palestine into a theological point with Marxist overtones. Once Pasolini saw that the space of the ‘holy land’ was not grand or gilded but humble and austere he saw it as a proletarian space where a poor carpenter could be the father of Jesus. Furthermore, that the poverty of this space might be connected to a colonial condition. As we see a scene of farmland, Yatziv pairs this shot with Pasolini’s statement that, “this is the territory of the Arabs that remained in Israeli territory.” Then we see the camera cut from close ups of one adult face to another and Pasolini says “and see the faces of the

Arabs? They are pre-Christian. Indifferent, happy, savage.” In the next scene we see

Jesus leading a group of peasants across some rocky terrain. Pasolini’s voiceover says that they are passing by Nazareth, in the north of Israel, he notes that they “pass through areas colonized by Israelis.” He sees areas where

everything seems burnt in material and spirit…an enormous piece of wreckage. This is what the Arab world is, the proletarians of Israel.

These statements imply that Pasolini empathizes with the Palestinian struggle and sees them as poor workers that are subjugated by the dominant Israeli class. But while he shows this kind of political awareness of civic inequality, he also makes statements that reveal his own Eurocentric view of the very Arabs that he sympathizes with. In a village

74 at the foot of mount Tabor, he sees “wretched, ragged people, waiting for nothing if not a miracle.” When they are traveling in the south he sees a group of Bedouin and says

They speak for themselves…they are the same faces that we also saw in the Druse villages…gentle, beautiful, happy, yet a bit somber, a bit mournful…They are full of a pre-Christian savageness. The images are stupendous…when we think of the Jews that crossed the desert.

But we have to remember that in Yatziv’s film, Pasolini speaks these pronouncements about Arabs, Druse or Bedouin while we see the landscape and people of Southern Italy.

As an Israeli artist, Yatziv, could be making a comparison between Pasolini and the

European Jews that colonized Palestine as Zionist pioneers.109 Many Jewish pioneers in the 1920s and 30s were Europeans from Germany, Russia and Poland and some had feelings similar to Pasolini’s dashed expectations once they arrived in Palestine. They had also grown up within a Western European context in which they knew the Land of

Israel as a biblical space not an actual place. They imagined it as a kind of preserved history, whose grandeur matched its theological aura. Given that context, disappointment was inevitable.

109 Edward Said applied his argument of Western anti-Islamic and anti-Arab attitudes in Orientalism (1979) to a critique of Zionism, a movement that grew out of modern Europe, in The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). These ideas were also picked up by a group of Israeli “New Historians” who revised Israeli historiography to reveal its ideological biases. For instance, Benny Morris notes that the Zionist slogan “A land without a people for a people without a land” was based on attitudes such as that of Moshe Smilansky who stated that European Jews “were headed to a “desolate and largely neglected land, waiting eagerly for its redeemers.” Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999) p42. But Morris notes that this was a lie that even early Zionists such as Ahad Ha’Am realized when they found that most of Palestine was populated with Arabs that had cultivated most of the land.

75 Pasolini, like early Zionists, brought an Orientalist lens to the Arab other, conflating pre-

Christian Jews, Druse, Bedouins, and Palestinians as noble “savages.” Edward Said famously has said that the Orient was a European invention that had more to do with

“the West” than it did with “the East,” so in a strange way it makes sense that Pasolini would cast Italian actors and set the location of a film about biblical Palestine in Italy.

Yatziv takes this further by linking the subject of Orientalist projection (Europe) with its object (Palestine). In Yatziv’s film we see Europe as we hear Pasolini’s descriptions of

Palestine. This is Jerusalem, Mr. Pasolini becomes a picture of how Orientalism operates.

Furthermore, Yatziv suggests that Pasolini might have begun his location scouting in

Palestine with a kind of colonialist lens, but by choosing to move the film back to Italy, he corrects that impulse. Instead of forcing the people or place of Palestine to conform to his Orientalist imagination he brings the mythic origin story of Christianity to Italy, a site where so many myths about biblical Palestine were created.110 Finally, in This is

Jerusalem, Mr. Pasolini Yatziv highlights the strains of Pasolini’s Marxism in his two films about Israel-Palestine. Like many others in the 1960s and 70s, Pasolini believed that the proletariat was a transnational class that cut across national boundaries. As a result, the subaltern in Italy and Israel-Palestine were linked through class struggle.111 We can see this in one scene of Yatziv’s film that depicts three children with solemn faces on a dirt path. Pasolini says in a voiceover, “an Arab population…often very similar to European proletarian populations.” This transnational class consciousness also led Jean-Luc

110 In this sense, Yatziv follows a similar logic as Yael Bartana’s Wall and Tower, in which European, Jewish, Israelis return to their “true” home in Poland. 111 See Adelmo P. Dunghe, “Passolini’s Semiotics of the Sacred” Italica, Vol.89, No. 4 (Winter 2012), pp.582-588.

76 Godard to film Here and Elsewhere (1974) about the links between French proletariats and Palestinians. This attitude was also present in the Israeli Communist Party and the

Israeli party Matzpen, which brought together Palestinians and Israelis who were anti-

Zionist and anti-capitalist.112

Ayreen Anastas: Pasolini Pa* Palestine

Another artist that has addressed Pasolini’s filmic relationship to Israel-Palestine is

Ayreen Anastas through her work, Pasolini Pa* Palestine (2005).113 Her film intercuts

Pasolini’s footage and voiceovers from his scouting trip with her own footage, shot while she attempted to track his travels through the ‘holy land’ in 2004. Anastas, a diasporic Palestinian, who was born in Bethlehem and has lived in Berlin and New York, walks in Pasolini’s steps in two ways. First, she literally traces the route of his scouting trip. Secondly, this trip is her return to Palestine after many years away and as a result she travels through its landscape as a semi-outsider, part Palestinian and part

European/American. Because Anastas has been gone for so long she notices the increase of settlements and development, the wall and checkpoints and the increasing militarization of its landscape.

112 See Sarah Rogers “The Return” in Otherwise Occupied, eds. Ryan Bishop and Gordon Hon (Jerusalem and Venice: Palestinian Art Court, 2013) p80-102. I will discuss Godard’s Here and Elsewhere at length in chapter 5. 113 This film was the product of a residency with the Al Ma’mal Foundation in Jerusalem

77 When Pasolini traveled through Palestine in Location Hunting, he was having an individual experience, but it was dependent on a collective memory. It was, as Said says,

“a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient’s special place in

European Western experience.”114 Maurice Halbwachs notes that medieval Christian

Europeans pored over the New Testament to follow the places where Jesus walked and

Pasolini follows in this model of theological tourism. 115 Like European Crusaders,

Pasolini was looking for the text of the New Testament to reveal itself incarnate in the landscape of Israel-Palestine. Anastas is aware of this Western projection on the landscape of Israel-Palestine, but she complicates a simple critique of Pasolini’s

Orientalism by implicating herself in the process of traveling through and thinking about the same territory.

Pasolini Pa* Palestine opens with Arabic-speaking female voices combined with maps and black and white archival imagery of Palestine. “Here you see the map,” one says.

This is footage from the starting point of Location Hunting with Pasolini, in 1963, looking at a map to find his way through Israel-Palestine. Anastas begins with the start of

Pasolini’s spatial and filmic journey, using the map as a common starting point. She tells us that she will try to retrace his path. Throughout this process Pasolini Pa* Palestine constantly cuts back and forth between video shot by Anastas on her travels through

Israel-Palestine and film from Location Hunting. All the while Anastas recounts, through

114 Said, Orientalism, 1. 115 Susan Slyomovics, The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate The Palestinian Village (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998) p xi.

78 a voiceover, the decisions that she makes during her process of retracing his steps. She tries desperately to keep to his path, like he was retracing the European colonial imagination, but she keeps getting sidetracked. To some degree these deviations are because of the fact that she is of Palestinian origin and as such there is a limit to her ability to completely inhabit the point of view of an orientalist European gaze. But this tug away from Pasolini’s path is compounded by the contemporary traces of Israeli occupation which are much more evident within the landscape than they were in 1963.

In one scene shot by Ananstas she looks at a hilltop in the West Bank, and she notes that it is infected by Israeli settlements. The land is shrinking because of borders, she says, but “we are still part of the archaic.” Perhaps what she is saying is that the borders or the State of Israel and the areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority are changing in 2004 but these changes are fueled by the historic roots of these nationalities in the archaic. Right after this she says, “wait, this is the wrong scene,” and she cuts back to

Pasolini’s imagery from 1963. Anastas cuts back and forth not only between the footage of her travels and Pasolini’s, but, as a result, she also cuts back and forth across time.

Furthermore, even when she is cutting between 1963 and 2004, she knows that both time periods are deeply rooted in the archaic.

At another point she is in the Galilee and notes that they are not far from the 1967 ceasefire line between Syria and Israel. She wanders off course toward the Golan

Heights, the territory occupied by Israel in 1967. But then says again, “The Golan is all

79 wrong...the Golan is not the Galil!” and the film again returns to Pasolini’s imagery in the Galilee. Then we are back on track and see images of Mount Tabor in the lower

Galilee, a site holy to both Jews and Christians. Then she asks, “Shall we start the music now?” and classical orchestral music plays as we see mosaic murals of Jesus in a church, olive trees and Lake Tiberius. But soon these biblical images turn to images that Anastas shot including barbed wire, surveillance cameras, a border fence and Anastas notes again “Stop please, we are on the wrong path.” Images of natural pastoral beauty and biblical sites are interrupted and intercut by images of a military occupation. Like

Pasolini constantly being disappointed by the disconnect between what he imagines the landscape of biblical Palestine to be and its modern reality, Anastas highlights the disconnect between her memories of an idyllic Palestine with the realities of a military occupation.

In another scene Anastas meets an Italian archaeologist who shows her photos from the site where Franco Zeffereli directed Jesus of Nazareth (1977). Following this scene is a montage of disparate imagery that Anastas shot around Israel-Palestine. “This is Hebron

Today,” she says. “Is this Nablus? No that’s Yatta.” She notes that we are also passing more recent ruins than the ancient ones that the archaeologist was showing her. These are ruins of Palestinian homes that were abandoned in 1948. Then we hear Pasolini meditate on the Jordan River and how small and pathetic it looks in comparison to the legendary spot where Jesus was baptized. In her film there is a constant misrecognition of both time and space. Anastas says at one point that the street signs are not helpful

80 for Arabs, presumably because the names of many streets and towns have been changed by Israel.

Pasolini Pa* Palestine is an impressionistic montage of disparate imagery and voiceovers. It includes the iconography of Orientalist tourism such as sabra fruit, pomegranates, olive trees, and shepherds with goats. This imagery emphasizes the pastoral pre-modern notion of the holy land. There are also biblical sites such as the

Mount of the Beautitudes, Bethlehem, the site of Christ’s birth and manger, Jericho and

Jerusalem. Then there are checkpoints, the wall, settlements, destroyed villages, Israeli soldiers, barbed wire and cameras, which point to the occupation. It is this last group of images that provides the most direct contradistinction to Pasolini’s imagery, and there are two scenes in Pasolini Pa* Palestine that evoke the complexities of contemporary

Israel-Palestine that Pasolini’s films do not touch.

First, when in the Golan, Anastas stops in a village workshop to ask a question. The workshop owner invites Anastas to come inside and sit and have some coffee. He tells her about his experience of becoming an Israeli citizen after Israel occupied the Golan

Heights in the 1967 war. He shows her his identity card and tells her that this does not make him an Israeli citizen. He has lived and worked in the same place, but a military occupation and a new identity card has somehow sought to transform his existence. He is resisting this bureaucratic identity shift and simply lives his life with the awareness that he is surrounded by destroyed cities and farms from the time when this village was

81 in Syria. Anastas claims in a voiceover that they should be the protagonists for her film.

She says that if Pasolini was looking for authentic proletarians, this group of Arab laborers in the Golan Heights exemplify his Marxist ideal.

Another moment in which Anastas interrogates the proletarian condition in Palestine is at a kibbutz. She interviews a Russian volunteer named Andre about his experiences on the kibbutz. 116 Speaking in German, she asks him what a kibbutz is. He says that they are not the way that they used to be, a communist micro-society in which they avoided using money. Now they are privatized, and he has been disappointed by his experience because it didn’t live up to the socialist utopia that he was hoping for. Anastas asks him if he feels a part of the community, and he says no, that he feels like he is an outsider.

“I’m not a member of the kibbutz,” he says, and also that “its typical these days that the movement is gradually disappearing.”

The kibbutz movement was a social system predicated on a Marxist political economy.117 It grew concurrent with Zionism and the Israeli State as a model for idealistic Jewish settlers to develop models of communal living. From 1909 until the mid

1970s it thrived, but a series of economic and political shifts in Israel led to the eventual

116 His name and national origin are not cited in Anastas’s film but she explained more about him during the course of her participation in “Artist Conversation with Ayreen Anastas and Jaleh Mansoor” Feb 12, 2011 in New York’s Museum of Arts and Design as a part of the Feminist Art Proect at the College Art Association’s A Day of Panels organized by Johanna Burton and Julia Bryan Wilson. Video documention: https://vimeo.com/65073418 117 Daniel Gavron, The Kibbutz: Awakening from Utopia (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000) and Henry Near, The Kibbutz Movement: A History, Volumes 1 and 2 (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008)

82 demise of the utopian promise of the kibbutz. Following the 1973 war between Israel,

Syria and Egypt, Israel began to privatize its economy and move away from state centered socialism.118 Pasolini also interviewed kibbutz members in Location Hunting, and at that moment in 1963 he found a leftist social movement that to him seemed full of promise but by the time Anastas interviews Andre in 2004, the movement has long lost its power, both in terms of its internal social and economic structure and in relation to Israeli society. By pointing to Andre’s disappointment, there is a double frustration that Anastas alludes to. First, there is the failure of a socialist experiment, which sought to create a classless society that could protect the disenfranchised. But second, in the scenes that follow this interview, she alludes to one way in which this experiment was doomed to fail from the start. The kibbutz movement might have been predicated on communal utopianism, but it was a superstructure built on the base of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land.119 So, when Anastas ends her interview with Andre at the kibbutz, and immediately cuts to the Palestinian village of Tawneh, a village in the southern West Bank, she is looking at the true victims of the failures of Zionist egalitarian ambitions. After an initial clip in which we see her driving past a set of

118 The relationship between these political and economic trends and its social and aesthetic effects on architecture and urbanism was the basis of Israel’s contribution to the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale. Milana Gitzin-Aviram, Erez Ella, Dan Handel eds. Aircraft Carrier: American Ideas and Israeli Architectures after 1973 (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012) 119 Indeed, there are two shifts that happen in the 1970s in terms of the interrelated political, social, economic and military structures of Israel. First, when the Soviet Union backed the Syrian and Egyptian Invasion in 1973, the US backed Israel both militarily and economically for the first time in any significant way. As a condition of this involvement, the US insisted that Israel adopt free market policies. Secondly, as the socialist utopianism of the kibbutz began to wane, it was replaced by the immense growth of the settler movement, which started in the late 1960s as a consequence of the 1967 war. The settler movement built on the practices of the early Zionist kibbutzim in that they allowed architecture as a means to further displace and disenfranchise Palestinians. See Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar, Lords of the Land: The War Over Israel’s Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967-2007 (New York: Nation Books, 2007)

83 Palestinian houses, the camera pauses over two children on a donkey. A male voice says in Arabic “an immense pale of ruins but this is how the sub-proletariat Arab world in

Israel appeared to me.” But Anastas interrupts him and says,

But this is inappropriate here. First of all, we are not in Israel and the sub- proletarian-world’ is a term that may not exist in Arabic. There is no need for translation so let’s repeat.

We return to the same footage of the children on the donkey but a different voiceover says in English,

a happy donkey in some village. Pasolini and Don Andrea talking from left to right. A woman bearing a vessel on her head with food and water from the other side.

And then a male voice says in Arabic,

I would like my film in Palestine to have a folk quality, telling the story of the people. Therefore I would like to give great importance to the great multitudes that followed Christ. Here I want to follow the multitudes in the reality of the day-to-day situation. The first thing I did was look for the characters of the film. I photographed lots of people as I roamed. These are the kids that followed Christ. This is a courtyard in a house and the Holy Ghost appearing like a dove.

In this last section images of children in the streets looking into the camera correspond with the “kids that followed Christ” and the dove that is referred to corresponds to a dove in a courtyard. Anastas is quoting both the images and the text of Pasolini who is quoting from biblical sources. As a result sets up a series of translations and transpositions of Christian, Orientalist and Marxist readings of the people and places of

Palestine.

84

To what extent does Anastas provide a corrective to Pasolini’s film Location Hunting? Is she saying that he was naively Orientalist by projecting a European imagination on the people and places of Palestine? Is she saying that he could not have imagined the brutality of the contemporary Israeli occupation, and she is filling this in? Or is she saying that he failed to see, and maybe even willfully ignored, the traces of occupation in 1963? Anastas does not explicitly answer any of these questions in the film, but in a written introduction to a screening of the film in Beirut she reveals that the act of repeating Pasolini’s scouting trip enacted a dialog with him and through that dialog also put multiple historical moments in dialog with one another: biblical Palestine as well as

Israel-Palestine in 1963 and 2004. She says:

The video explores repetition, a term which – along with “retrieval” – Heidegger claims, signifies an appropriate attitude toward the past and establishes a dialogue with Pasolini.** The term discutere (to smash to pieces) is the Latin source for the modern words “dialogue” and “discussion.” The video does not criticize Pasolini, but rather reveals the possibilities in his thought and works, tracing them back to the “experiences “ which inspired them.120

In the note within the above text signified with two stars ** Anastas demonstrates what this dialogue or discussion might look like, a conflation of their voices into one text.

Pier Paolo Pasolini: “My hopes were still intact then. I really thought that by repeating this trip 40 years later I would be able to shed a new light on, and gain a new perspective of this reality. Instead, I found myself

120 Christine Tohme ed. Homeworks III (Beirut: Ashkal Alwan, 2008) p267

85 repeating the same mistakes: The heat of the summer of ’63 was intolerable. I could have arranged this trip in spring, for example. They tell me that it is much milder here in spring, and I could have gotten a lot more out of this landscape then.

Another question concerns the path we took. The images of the ancient world, its architecture and a primitive way of life that might have been very useful for my film, were still intact in the villages of Hebron. Here we are halfway up the Mount of the Beatitudes where crowds gathered to listen to Christ. Here I am, with a camera reflected in the glass of a clear shop window. I obviously came here to film.

To film what? Not a documentary, not a feature picture. I’ve come to shoot some notes for a film about the Christ of a modern Palestine. The choice is not yet final. And the meaning of what I mean to be a modern Palestine in this film is probably wider than the geographies of political borders that were created in the past hundred years or so. I intend Palestine to mean an expression of a time past, present today in the current landscape and on the faces of these Palestinians, in their constant suffering and endless wait for a new savior. This idea of the Savior has been present in contemporary Arab and Palestinian politics – perhaps it would be even more precise to speak here about the periods of resistance – since before the end of the Ottoman Empire.”121

In this text Anastas lists a number of things that she repeated from Pasolini’s trip: the weather, the images of the ancient world, and the act of filming itself. Pasolini’s

Location Hunting was a work intended originally as a part of the process for a feature film. As a result it was a diaristic narrative in which he places his expectations in dialog with his impressions of what he actually found. The questions that arose from the disjunction between expectation and experience in the scouting documentary weren’t resolved in the feature film itself, aside from the choice to relocate the setting. But the disjunction between expectation and experience also weren’t resolved in Anastas’s revisiting of Pasolini’s path. She claims, through Pasolini’s voice, that she thought she

121 ibid

86 could gain new perspective on Palestine. But instead, she repeated the same mistakes.

At the end of this passage, Anastas suggests that the promise of resolution, or the act of repetition as a teleological methodology towards transcendence, is fraught with the same false promise of “the savior.” Anastas is making the connection between Jesus as savior and the promise of a political savior for the Palestinian political struggle towards self-determination.

In her introduction to this passage, Anastas references Heidegger’s notion of repetition, which he meant not as a matter of simple recurrence but rather one of reclamation.122

That is, if a moment or circumstance is repeated “the past is reclaimed as a possibility.”123 In terms of history Heidegger is saying that “without repetition the past would simply be a collection of isolated facts and would remain without meaning or sense…Repetition enables one to achieve an understanding of one’s personal past as well as of the tradition out of which the personal past emerges.”124 When Anastas repeats Passolini’s trip through Palestine she is also tracking the repetition of the savior, the proletariat, the kibbutz, the street names, the map, the demolished houses and villages through the history of 1963 until 2005. Similarly, when she and Yatziv repeat

Pasolini’s film, they are repeating and reclaiming the filmic representations of these and other tropes.

122 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1996) p352 123 Calvin O. Schrag, “Heidegger on Repetition and Historical Understanding” Philosophy East and West, Vol. 20, No. 3 (Jul., 1970) p289 124 ibid

87 Other artists discussed in this chapter have also used repetition as a means to understand history. Gilad Efrat repeated representations of archaeological sites by transferring archival photographs from the British mandate to paintings in late twentieth century Israel. In this sense, there was a repetition of image, transferring it from one medium and one time into another. Avi Mograbi used film as a way to track the ideology of Jewish martyrdom as a trope that is repeated from the archaic past of

Masada to the contemporary conditions of the occupation. Mograbi’s film reveals an approach to history that Heidegger warns against. Repetition for him is not a way to bring the past back to life or to force the present to coincide with it. For Heidegger, this is both impossible and undesirable: “Historical understanding takes the path of projecting possibilities through which new meanings within one’s past are released.”125

In this sense, these artists are using repetition to project toward the past, reveal its traces in the present, and project its possibilities towards the future.

125 ibid, p290

88 Chapter 3: Spaces of Appearance: Parafiction and the Holocaust

This chapter is about the ways that two artists, Yael Bartana and Omer Fast, have addressed the memory of the Holocaust and its relationship to the contemporary politics of Israel-Palestine.126 These artists approach this subject without the customary reverence and reassess the way that the Holocaust has been inscribed into the collective memories of Germany, Poland, and Israel-Palestine. 127 The works by these artists show how Jewish victimhood in the Holocaust has been instrumentalized by Israel, Poland and others to create, what some have called, a Holocaust industry.128 I focus on Bartana’s project …And Europe Will be Stunned, which includes a video installation and parafictional political movement, The Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland. In one part of this project she proposes a new form of public memorial in the former Warsaw

Ghetto through a kind of performative architecture. She does so by provocatively linking two forms of camps: Nazi concentration camps and kibbutzim, utopian collective communities built by Zionist pioneers in Palestine in the early twentieth century. I argue that not only does Bartana critique methods of memorializing the Holocaust by linking it

126 There are number of other artists that have used artworks to address the legacy of the Holocaust, most famously Christian Boltanski, Art Spiegelman, Anselm Kiefer, Artur Zmijewski and Roee Rosen. See Barbie Zelizer, ed. Visual Culture and the Holocaust (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001); Ernst van Alphen, Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997); Norman Kleeblat, Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art (New York: The Jewish Museum, 2002); Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz eds. Image and Remembrance: Representation and the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003); Andrea Liss, Trespassing Through Shadows: Memory, Photography and the Holocaust (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). 127 For more on the normative tendencies with representations of the Holocaust and its problematics see Bulent Diken, Carsten Bagge Lausten, “The Ghost of Auschwitz” Journal for Cultural Research, Vol 9. No 1. (January 2005) 128 Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (London: Verso, 2000).

89 to Israel-Palestine but she also goes further to critique nationalism itself by redefining the notion of a public. Fast also deals with a Holocaust site but looks at the ways that its representation through storytelling blurs the line between fact and fiction. While Fast’s video doesn’t explicitly make the connection between the Holocaust and Israel-

Palestine, I argue that his practice destabilizes collective memory in relation to the

Holocaust and thereby critiques Israel’s use of the final solution in its own national narrative. At stake in these artists works is collective memory and its role in producing a public. I argue that these artists produce counter-memories and thus counterpublics.

Yael Bartana… And Europe Will be Stunned

Yael Bartana’s … And Europe Will be Stunned was first shown in its entirety at the Polish

Pavilion of the Venice Biennale in June 2011.129 It includes three components: three videos, the exhibition installation, and the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland

(JRMIP). The three videos tell the story of the JRMIP: the initial call by its leader for Jews to return to Poland, a group of pioneers who heed this call, and the tragic death of the leader, whose memorial galvanizes JRMIP members to carry out a political rally.

Designed by the architect Oren Sagiv, the exhibition … And Europe Will be Stunned

129 The Polish pavilion was also co-curated by an Israeli, Galit Eilat, the founding Director of the Israeli Center for Digital Art and Sebastian Cichocki, the chief curator of the Modern Art Museum in Warsaw. The decision for Poland to invite an Israeli artist was a conscious subversion of the essentialized nationalism of the pavilion system at the Venice Biennial. … And Europe Will be Stunned has been exhibited in a number of contexts since the 2011 Venice Biennale including The Tel Aviv Museum of Art in Israel, Secession in Vienna, Austria, The Van Abbemuseum in Eindoven, the Netherlands, and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark, The Moderna Museet Malmö, and additional venues in the United States, Poland and Australia.

90 includes three separate viewing rooms for each video but these spaces are all visible from one vantage point at the entrance. The installation also includes a large glowing neon sign with red cursive text that spells out the title of the piece and stacks of posters for visitors to take. The posters include black and white text on a red ground with the manifesto for the JRMIP along with its insignia, a six-pointed star combined with an eagle. At the center of this trilogy is the JRMiP, a parafictional political movement started by Bartana.130 As I will explain in more detail below, the JRMIP has only existed within the cultural sphere, like the Venice Biennale and other museums and biennials in which … And Europe Will be Stunned has been exhibited, but was established to imagine the possibility of a real political movement.

Mary Kozmary (Nightmares)

Figure 3.1. Yael Bartana, Still from Mary Kozmary (Nightmares) (2007)

130 I use the term “parafictional” in the sense that Carrie Lambert Beatty describes as something fictional which “has one foot in the field of the real,” Carrie Lambert-Beatty, “Make Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility” October 129, Summer 2009 pp 51-84

91 The first video of the trilogy, entitled Mary Kozmary (Nightmares) (2007), opens with

Slawomir Sierakowski striding into a stadium to the sound of the Polish national anthem. 131 He walks up to a podium and begins to speak [figure 3.1]. There are a few young members of the JRMIP that attend the ceremony, wearing crisp brown shirts and red cravats. The camera pans across the stadium as Sierakowski speaks with a loud pleading call that echoes against empty seats, overgrown with weeds. Then Bartana cuts to the serious faces of Sierakowski’s followers who stand in rapt attention in the middle of the playing field. As he talks, we can see the members of the JRMiP writing parts of his speech in large block letters on the grass of the stadium using white chalk and paper stencils. Finally, Sierakowski descends from the podium, is handed a bouquet of red flowers and the JRMiP gathers around him ceremoniously.

Sierakowski’s speech calls for the return of 3,300,000 Jews to the land of their forefathers. He says, “This is a call, not to the dead but to the living…we want you to live with us again. We need you! We are asking you to return!” This gesture not only evokes the legacy of the Holocaust in Poland but also the Palestinian right of return.132 First, it implies that the true Jewish homeland is in Poland and not in Palestine, because of the

131 Sierakowski is a journalist, activist and leader of “Political Critique,” an influential left wing movement in Poland. He wrote the speech in Mary Kozmary with Kinga Dunin, a feminist sociologist and activist. Bartana’s choice to collaborate with two Polish intellectuals who are actively engaged in Polish politics was one example of her desire for the JRMIP to have one foot in real politics even though the video is clearly fiction. 132 The “right of return” refers to the idea that all Palestinian refugees from 1948 and 1967 and their descendants have the right to return to their homes in Israel. I will discuss this notion in more detail in chapter 3.

92 long recent history of Jewish life there.133 This directly contradicts the history of

Zionism, the nationalist movement begun in the nineteenth century that believed that the Land of Israel is the homeland of the Jewish people, culminating in the establishment of the State of Israel. Second, if European Jews return to Poland, they will create a void that Palestinians displaced by Israel in 1948 and 1967 would most probably fill. The number of Palestinians in Jordan, The West Bank, Gaza, Syria, and Lebanon

(excluding those in refugee camps) was estimated in 2010 to be 3,300,000, the exact number of Jews that Sierakowski calls to return.134 This call for return links Poland with

Israel-Palestine and proposes an activist stance toward the legacy of the Holocaust.

Rather than fixating on the traumatic memory of the Holocaust, Bartana has done two things that address this memory with action in the present day. First, she acknowledges the ways that the Holocaust is linked to the contemporary politics of Israel-Palestine.

Second, she proposes an audacious solution, one that flies in both the face of the legacy of Zionism and the status quo of a homogeneous Polish society.

The title Mary Kozmary can be broken down into mary, Polish for a platform on which the bodies of the dead are laid out, and koszmar, which is rooted in the French word couchemar, meaning ‘nightmare.’ So Mary Kozmary are not merely bad dreams

133 The notion that Europe is the homeland of the Jews was also debated during the evolution of Zionism. For instance, by Herman Cohen in 1915, who believed that Germanness and Jewishness were inextricably linked, wrote in opposition to Theodor Herzl’s Zionist push towards Palestine saying that Jews belonged to the definition of Europe. Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012) p140. Butler recalls this history of Jewish objections to the notion of Israel and the Jewish homeland as a part of her critique of the equation of Judaism and Zionism. But she also notes that Cohen’s objection happens to also be rooted in a Eurocentrism that discounts the long history of Jews in the Middle East, North Africa and other parts of the world outside of Europe. 134 UNWRA estimates: http://prrn.mcgill.ca/background/index.htm

93 encountered while sleeping, they are nightmares that link the bed as a site for these dreams with a funeral pyre, a performance of death. Couchemar, can be parsed out further into couche, meaning ‘press’ in Picard (Northern French) and mare, the name of a female demon in Germanic folklore.135 Thus, we can see that in her choice of a title

Bartana, alludes to the German demons that haunt even the etymology of nightmares in

Poland, let alone the actual memories of the Poles and Jews who lived through the

Holocaust. This title succinctly encapsulates the themes of traumatic memory and the haunted space of the site of atrocity that the trilogy addresses.

The setting for Mary Koszmary is the Decennial Stadium in Warsaw, built in 1955 to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the communist state of Poland. But Poles also remember it as the site of a famous protest against the Soviet invasion of

Czechoslovakia, which involved the self-immolation of Richard Siwiec, a Polish soldier, in

1968.136 In Bartana’s video, the stadium is empty and filled with weeds. So we can see that some time has passed since the stadium was used as a site to glorify Soviet communist rule over Poland or as a space to protest against it. The site of the stadium functions as a memorial to the trauma of Poland’s communist past. But Poles experienced a double trauma in the twentieth century. First there was the Nazi invasion and occupation, setting it up as a killing field for not only Jews but also communists, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Gypsies. Then there was the Soviet occupation

135 Joanna Mytkowska, “The Return of the Stranger” in And Europe Will be Stunned, Eds. James Lingwood and Elinor Nairne (London: Artangel, 2012) p131. 136 ibid

94 that immediately followed. It was only after 1989 that Poland could realize that the result of the Nazi deportations and systematic killings of the Holocaust was that it had become ethnically and religiously homogeneous. Thus the stadium becomes a memorial for the lack of freedoms for Poles under both Nazi and Soviet occupation and its emptiness helps us to visualize Poland as a space that was emptied out during WWII.

This image sets the stage for the call for the Jews’ return. It also references the many speeches that Hitler famously gave in stadiums calling for Jews to leave Europe, but in this case Sierakowski’s speech is inverted from Nazism. Instead of advocating for Jews to leave, he is asking them to come back. Sierakowski asks Jews to return to Poland to aid in the post-occupation task of rebuilding and to restore its former cultural richness and diversity.

Boris Groys notes that the red cravats that Slawomir Sierakowski and his young attendants wear evoke the links between Soviet and Zionist communalism.137 A radical utopian form of socialism, communalism is the belief that a community can govern and own property collectively. Zionist communalism is epitomized by the kibbutz, a social structure where all labor and resources are pooled together, even to the extent that children are communally raised. This communal idealism is something that all three videos in Bartana’s video evoke. Aside from the red cravats, characters in the trilogy wear clothing such as brown or white shirts that evoke Zionist pioneer dress; they hold tools for proletarian labor like shovels and hammers as both utilitarian and ideological

137 Boris Groys, “Answering a Call” in And Europe Will be Stunned, Eds. James Lingwood and Elinor Nairne (London: Artangel, 2012) p134

95 props; and they are seen huddling together in work, rest and protest, modeling the values of togetherness and egalitarianism. By emphasizing communalism in the context of an artwork that is sited in a former communist state and references Israel-Palestine,

Bartana resuscitates the concept of progressive politics, once central to both Soviet communism and political Zionism but now largely forgotten. Soviet communism famously became totalitarian, known more for the horrors of Stalin’s gulag work camps than the promise of communal farms, which were emblematic of communism’s aim to eliminate class distinctions and evenly distribute both resources and power. Israel was founded by idealistic socialists in the kibbutz movement who wanted to create a new model for society that was predicated on equality and the eradication of private property. But in the 1970s Israel began to move toward a capitalist model and today most of the kibbutzim have become privatized.138 Groys suggests that Bartana is trying to revive the egalitarian roots that both Zionism and Soviet communism shared. He reminds us that while many in the West might today see Israel as a major world power, both militarily and economically, and the Soviet Union, in light of the cold war, as a totalitarian state, we might forget their shared emphasis on collectivism in the 1920s and 30s. 139 These shared collectivist ideologies also led to similar aesthetics in photography, film and architecture – something that Bartana references as well.140

138 This economic history is described in depth in MIlana Gitzin-Adiram, Erez Ella, Dan Handel eds. Aircraft Carrier: American Ideas and Israeli Architectures after 1973 (Hatje Cantz, 2012). See also, Daniel Gavron, The Kibbutz: Awakening from Utopia (Lenham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2000) 139 Groys p136 140 Groys notes that the scenes of common work, meals and recreation in Bartana’s And Europe Will Be Stunned could have been lifted directly from Soviet films from the 1920s and 30s. Groys p134 The comparison between her current aesthetic and historical examples of socialist films was made most

96

By referencing the universalist egalitarianism embedded in Socialism, shared by both communist and Zionist history, Bartana is proposing that Israel and Poland look to their roots to find a model for a future governed by human rights. This application of human rights is not just directed towards Jews in Poland and Palestinians in Israel, but toward any refugee or disenfranchised person who is seeking a better life. In Mary Koszmary

Sierakowski says: “Today we are fed up looking at our similar faces. On the streets of our great cities, we are on the lookout for strangers and listening intently when they speak. Yes! Today we know we cannot live alone. We need the other.” Sierakowski is saying that the pre-war moment of Polish history was better because of its diversity, especially through the participation of Jews in the culture and economy of Poland.

Today, as Poland struggles with the social issues surrounding immigration and homogeneous societies that many of its fellow EU members also contend with, the gesture towards Poland’s own past suggests a model for the value of a heterogeneous culture.141

explicit with Bartana’s Summer Camp (2007), which paired her 2007 film of a work camp run by the Israeli Committee Against Housing Demolition and a 1936 film Avoda by Helmar Lirsky. 141 In 2011, during a Polish Independence Day, Jarosław Kaczyński, a conservative Polish politician and head of the Law and Justice Party, organized a march of 10,000 in Warsaw that included groups such as All-Polish Youth and National-Radical Camp, carrying white pride and Neo-Nazi banners. That day other related rallies around Poland resulted in attacks against immigrants including an Indian Polish couple’s apartment set on fire in Bialystok and a Muslim owned store in Gdansk was also attacked. Jakub Dymek, “False Symmetries: Analyzing Poland’s New Violence” Political Critique, Dec 12, 2013. http://politicalcritique.org/opinion/2013/false-symmetries-analyzing-polands-new-violence/

97 Mur i Weiża (Wall and Tower)

In Mur i Weiża (Wall and Tower), the second video in the trilogy, the JRMiP has heeded

Sierakowski’s call to action and gathered a group of Jewish pioneers to build a kibbutz in a park at the site of the Warsaw Ghetto. Wall and Tower opens with scenes from

Sierakowski’s speech in Nightmares but then it cuts to a scene of a pioneer walking away from a large bronze memorial for the Warsaw Ghetto and toward a new JRMiP icon that combines the Polish eagle with the Jewish star. One pioneer says to the group,

“we have twenty four hours to build a settlement and to rebuild the Jewish community in Warsaw.” The camera pans across the faces of the pioneers who listen with rapt attention. In the next scene groups of bustling workers carry walls built with wooden slats towards the site of the new compound. Pioneers bring in supplies in a ceremonial fashion, digging foundations, building walls, and raising a watchtower with a communal spirit. The soundtrack oscillates between the bombast of the Polish national anthem and the quiet melancholic melody of a lone harmonica. After the pioneers finish building the kibbutz we see them bring in gravel to fill the areas between the walls, just as 1930s kibbutz-builders did. There are also glimpses of contemporary Warsaw to remind viewers that this is not an image from the past. Finally Sierakowski arrives through the newly finished enclave with a red flag emblazoned with the JRMiP crest. The flag is ceremoniously relayed to the top of the tower, one worker raises the flag as the pioneers smile again and applaud. Following the kibbutz’s inauguration, the film intercuts between scenes of people laying barbed wire and the images of the newly

98 built communal Polish language school that teaches words like ‘land’, ‘freedom’, and

‘peace’. Finally, we see multiple angles of the completed camp, the ritual hanging of

Zoltan Kluger’s photograph of Jewish pioneers building the Tel Ammal kibbutz in 1936, and as darkness falls a searchlight scans the surroundings from the kibbutz watchtower.

Its light falls on the Warsaw Ghetto memorial, highlighting the faces of the Jewish rebels who died in their struggle against Nazi oppression. Then we see a group of elderly men and women in modern dress walking around the camp’s outer walls. One woman walks to the entrance, quizzically looking inside, next to a sign that says, bruchim habaim

(‘welcome’ in Hebrew). Then the film cuts to a crane shot that reveals the completed camp, now empty, filled only with the sounds of chirping birds [figure 3.2]. And there the film ends.

Figure 3.2. Yael Bartana, Still from Mur i Weiża (Wall and Tower) (2009)

99 Wall and Tower: From Palestine to Poland

As much as Wall and Tower points to the traumatic history embedded within the

Warsaw Ghetto, the JRMiP also indexes the history of Israel-Palestine. The activists in

Wall and Tower are dressed like the idealist Zionist pioneers who built identical structures in Palestine during the 1930s. The original Zionist pioneers came primarily from Europe and Russia to Palestine in the early twentieth century. Many fled their homes because of anti-Semitism. But they were also emigrating to Palestine because of

Zionist idealism. One of the key tools of Zionist settlement was the kibbutz. Until World

War I, the earliest incarnations of kibbutzim appeared in Palestine under Ottoman rule, though increased Jewish immigration occurred during the British Mandate in the 1920s and 30s.142 The Homa Umigdal (wall and tower) project began in 1936 at Kibbutz Tel

Amal. Its objective was to seize land purchased by the Israel Lands Administration that could not be settled due to Palestinian hostility towards the increasing Jewish presence.

Built by groups of forty people in a day or overnight, these kibbutzim sat on an area of

35 meters by 35 meters, surrounded by barbed wire. Between 1936 and 1939, fifty- seven of these outposts were constructed.143

But Wall and Tower was more than improvisational building; it became a foundational way to practice architecture and urbanism in Israel. The wall may function as a

142 Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–1999, New York: Knopf, 1999. p37-160 143 Sharon Rotbard, ‘Wall and Tower (Homa Umigdal): The Mold of Israeli Architecture’ in A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture, ed. by Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman (London: Verso, 2003), p39-56.

100 defensive measure but it also works offensively by allowing for the tower’s panoptic surveillance. Wall and Tower became a model for Israeli military bases and the separation barrier that today roughly weaves its way along the Green Line, but it also became enormously influential for the design of contemporary civilian structures in the

West Bank. This phenomenon is what Eyal Weizman has called the ‘optical urbanism’ of a civilian occupation. In 1978 Israel’s Likud government began a policy of transforming the improvised settlement projects like Kibbutz Tel Amal into elaborate state sponsored building projects. The first of these projects was Ma’ale Adumim, sited on Road Number

1, which connected Jerusalem with Jericho and Amman. While not as fast as the overnight construction of Wall and Tower settlements, Ma’ale Adumim was constructed in four years. This may seem like a long time but its first phase resulted in a city consisting of 2,600 housing units.144 This city became a model for a number of settlements in the West Bank and followed a strict geometric order. These settlements were most commonly built on a hilltop and ideally included concentric circles of houses that faced outward to the valley below. The windows for these houses were positioned to look down the steep slopes on which they were built so that the inhabitants of this community could monitor the areas surrounding the settlement and inform the authorities if they saw any suspicious activity. 145

In Wall and Tower Bartana not only references one historical instance of Israeli architecture in the 1930s; she also invokes the settlement ethos behind Israeli

144 In 2012 Ma’ale Adumim had a population of 39,200 145 Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso, 2007), p111

101 architecture and urbanism in general. Bartana suggests that the JRMiP acts as settlers, occupying Warsaw through the smiles and civilian clothes of idealistic youth. There is an ominous quality to the barbed wire along the walls toward the end of the film. On the one hand we could see this as Jewish trepidation about returning to a Holocaust site. In this sense the barbed wire could be meant for defense against the potential for Polish violence, fueled by anti-Semitism, against this Jewish community’s return.146 But she also suggests that the Jewish occupation of Polish territory could be producing the potential violence that the barbed wire is meant to protect against. This ambiguity makes a parallel between the Jewish settler community in Israel-Palestine and the

JRMiP settlement in Poland. It sets up the question: is Palestinian or Polish violence against Jewish settlements based on antagonism because of the settlers’ Jewish identity or is this antagonism based on a reaction against a civilian occupation that is potentially a mechanism for political control?

From Monument to Memorial: Spaces of Appearance

In addition to the architecture of the settlement built in Wall and Tower, the memorial for the Warsaw Ghetto that figures prominently in Bartana’s film also signals a

146 Bartana intentionally set up this feeling to echo the events chronicled by Jan T Gross in his book Neighbors about the killing of a Polish village’s Jewish population in the immediate aftermath of the war. Gross tells us that the Jews of Jedwabne were rounded up in the middle of the night, forced into a barn, locked inside and collectively burned alive. The publication of this book in 2001 provoked outrage in Poland because it depicted Poles as being complicit with the anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany. Jan T Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001)

102 relationship between Poland and Israel-Palestine. Nathan Rapoport’s Warsaw Ghetto

Monument was built in 1948 to mark the fifth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.147 According to James E Young, “it is the most widely known, celebrated and controversial.”148 The monument, standing thirty-six feet tall, includes a large bronze relief set inside a gray stone freestanding wall. The relief depicts a cluster of seven figures. One man that stands at the center is gaunt and hollow eyed but stridently stares into the distance. Three figures surrounding him seem poised for battle, while one is collapsed at the central figure’s feet. Behind them all at the top of the relief is a female figure holding a child.

Rapoport was born in 1911 to working class Jewish parents in Warsaw; his grandparents were Hasidim, and he was a member of Hashomer Hatsa’ir (Young Guard of the Zionist

Left Wing).149 When Germany invaded Poland in 1939 Rapoport fled to Russia where he became a state sculptor. As a result of this background, this monument is social realist, depicting a group of Jews as heroes. He used kibutznikim that had returned to Paris from Palestine after the war as his models. Rapoport set out to make, “a clearly national monument for the Jews, not a Polish monument.”150 Rapoport said that he “needed to show the heroism, to illustrate it literally in figures.”151

147 James E Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press) p155 148 ibid 149 ibid p157 150 ibid p168 151 ibid.

103 Rapoport’s statements about nationalism and heroism reveal a few things. First, by linking the Jews that staged the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising with Zionist pioneers in

Palestine, Rapoport draws a teleological line between the Jewish victims during the

Holocaust and the Zionists that participated in the creation of the State of Israel. By doing so he implies that the martyrdom of the failed Jewish uprising in Warsaw was redeemed by the strength of the newer, stronger, Zionist Jews who found a relative safe haven in Israel, their reclaimed homeland. This linkage between WWII Poland and

Modern day Israel is reinforced by the fact that a second casting of Rapoport’s monument sits in the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. Secondly, Rapoport emphasizes Jewishness as a national identity that was alienated in Poland and naturalized in the State of Israel. Thus Rapoport uses this monument to memorialize the Warsaw Ghetto uprising as not only one instance of the Holocaust but also as a point in the trajectory towards the State of Israel. In this sense, Rapoport’s monument is explicitly used as a framework to help structure Jewish collective memory. If we follow

Maurice Halbwach’s definition of collective memory then we understand this memorial as a story of a collective’s past to create a sense of present day community. 152 In this case it is a particular view of a traumatic moment in history that defines present day

Jewishness in terms of Zionism.153 In Wall and Tower Bartana reverses the Zionist message of Rapoport’s monument and reinscribes Jewish identity into the fabric of

152 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago press, 1992) 153 The link between the Holocaust and Israel is addressed in depth in Tom Segev, The Seven Million: the Israelis and the Holocaust trans. Haim Watzman (New York: Fararr, Strauss and Giroux, 1993)

104 Polish nationalism. In this sense, she creates a counter-memory.154 For instance, a common practice for Polish born Zionists in Palestine was to learn Hebrew to replace their native Polish or Yiddish. But in Wall and Tower we see the pioneers teaching themselves Polish to replace their native Hebrew.

Another crucial difference between Bartana’s Wall and Tower and Rapoport’s monument is her use of performance and video in relationship to architecture. One dimension of the work is the performance of the JRMiP building the kibbutz at the site of the Warsaw Ghetto. The second dimension of Wall and Tower is its use of video as a medium. An analogous model for Bartana’s use of a historically loaded urban space as a site for a performative video is provided by Rosalyn Deutsche in her discussion of Polish artist Kritof Wodiczko’s Public Projection, Hiroshima (1999).155 Wodiczko’s projections occurred on August 7 and 8, 1999, the two days following the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb. In preparation for this project, Wodiczko conducted interviews with witnesses of the bombing and in particular, he focused his camera on their hands. The resulting piece combined the audio of these interviews with projections of their hands onto the embankment of the Motoyasu River, underneath the city’s

Atomic Dome. Deutsche suggests that the projections anthropomorphized the dome and allowed it to speak as an architectural witness. She explains that his kind of site- specific action creates a new form that combines the memorial and the witness as

154 Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977) p160 155 Rosalyn Deutsche, Hiroshima After Iraq: Three Studies in Art and War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010)

105 modalities for a community to reconcile itself to a traumatic past.156 I believe that

Bartana created a similar kind of performative architecture in Wall and Tower. 157 First, the performative gesture of bringing Jews back to the site of the Warsaw Ghetto to build a camp that resembles a concentration camp, asks Polish society to reckon with the absence of its once thriving Jewish community. But secondly, it asks Polish civic society to also consider what this absence has produced. By performing the act of building a structure that also resembles Zionist settlement architecture, she asks Polish viewers to also reckon with the nakba, and to think of it as another consequence of the

Jewish absence produced by the Holocaust. But these considerations only account for the live performativity of Wall and Tower’s film set. The video of this performance allowed it to extend to other contexts. Once the film toured to Italy, The Netherlands,

Sweden, Austria, and other parts of Europe, it also asked European audiences to grapple with similar stories of both post-war memorialization and the legacies of the Holocaust.

In her analysis of Wodiczsko’s work Deutsche uses theories of space and notions of the public to think through the memorial.158 She turns to Hannah Arendt’s definition of the public sphere, or democratic political community, as a space of appearance. Arendt says

156 ibid. p 59 157 Bartana’s use of architecture is performative in two ways. First, her actors literally perform the act of building for the camera and this act of building is laden with a set of meanings tied to Israeli history. Secondly, the nature of what is being built performs a set of meanings, also tied to Israeli history. This latter sense of performativity in relation to architecture is rooted in literature such as John Andrews, Architecture, A Performing Art (Oxford University Press, 1982), which looks at how the built environment disseminates ideas. My use of the term “performative architecture is more in keeping with Andrews than Branko Kolarevic’s and Ali M. Malkawi’s Performative Architecture: Beyond Instrumentality (New York: Spon Press, 2005), which looks at digital models to project building performance in terms of engineering.

106 that the public sphere emerges, “when social groups declare the right to appear.”159 For

Deutsche, Arendt’s statement opens up the possibility “that visual art might play a role in deepening and extending democracy” because the polis is not a physical location but is the organization of people that act and speak together.160 In Wodiczsko’s case, he set up an instance for a space of appearance in which Japanese people could come together to collectively reconcile themselves as a society to the traumas of Hiroshima. Similarly,

Bartana’s Wall and Tower turns the former Warsaw Ghetto, now a park, into a public space, in Arendt’s sense, where the Jews that have been absent for decades suddenly declare their right to appear. But Deutsche notes that

Artists who want to deepen and extend the public sphere have a twofold task: creating works that, one, help those who have been rendered invisible to “make their appearance” and two, developing the viewer’s capacity for public life by asking her to respond to, rather than react against, that appearance.161

It is less clear if Bartana was able to attend to this second task through the performance in Warsaw even though the stated goal of the JRMiP in the first two films was to reintegrate Jews into Polish civic life. But as I will argue below, the larger activities of the JRMiP, especially its congress at the 2012 Berlin Biennial started to ask for the viewer to respond to the reappearance of Jews that occurred in the former Warsaw Ghetto.

159 Rosalyn Deusche, “The Art of Witness in the Wartime Public Sphere” in Forum Permanente, transcript of the Tate Modern lecture, March 4, 2005. http://www.forumpermanente.org/Members/jmbarreto/the- art-of-witness-in-the-wartime-public-sphere/ 160 ibid 161 ibid

107 Zamach (The Assassination)

In the third film in the trilogy, Zamach (The Assassination), Sierakowski has been assassinated. While we don’t know the circumstances of his murder, the film focuses on his funeral, which becomes a political rally for the JRMIP. The Assassination opens with a hearse parked in front of the Palace of Culture in Warsaw. Members of the JRMIP slide out Sierakowski’s casket and bring it up the gray stone steps of the theater. We then see his body on stage in an opened casket lying in state in front of a large JRMIP banner, large wreathes with red and white flowers and four pall bearers in dark black suits and white gloves. No one sits in the audience of empty red and white seats but a long line of mourners pours one by one down the central isle to pay their respects. Most take a moment to look silently down at Sierakowski but some place white roses on his chest.

The film then follows the crowd of mourners outside as they march towards the

Pildudski Square, the site of the unknown soldier. The crowd includes immigrants from

Asia, Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere and they hold a banner that reads

“NATIONALISM = TERRORISM.” [figure 3.4] Other signs read “Jews and Poles refuse to be enemies” and “with one religion we cannot listen” and “with one color we cannot see.” They also carry flags of the JRMIP and the EU.

108

Figure 3.4. Yael Bartana, Still from Zamach (The Assassination) (2011)

The crowd gathers in the square in front of a stage where a series of eulogies are read next to a huge gray bust of the slain leader. The first is by Rifke, a fictional character referenced in Sierekowski’s speech in Mary Kozmary whom Bartana uses as a symbol for all victims of the Holocaust.162 Then Serakowski’s widow, played by the Israeli artist

Dana Yahalomi, says, “for you I have exchanged one homeland for another…we love you dearly and promise you Slawek, promise you all, that fear will not make us lower the flag of hope.” She is followed by Anda Rottenberg, the director of the National Gallery of

Art in Warsaw, and Allona Frankel, a Polish born, Israeli children’s book writer who is also a Holocaust survivor. Frankel tells the story of her survival in Krakow throughout

162 Rifke is also teenaged character in Wladyslaw Broiewski’s poem “Ballads and Romances” (1945) who runs naked through the urban ruins of the Warsaw ghetto. Joanna Mytkowska, “The Return of the Stranger” And Europe Will be Stunned, Eds. James Lingwood and Elinor Nairne (London: Artangel, 2012) p131.

109 the war and the fact that her family fled after the war when anti-Semitism persisted.

She says that her citizenship was stripped from her when she left and she asks for it back. She is followed by Yaron London, an Israeli journalist who criticizes the JRMIP saying to its members in the audience: “for all your good will, you fail to understand the simple incontestable fact that the State of Israel is the only guarantee against another

Holocaust.” He is followed by two members of the JRMIP, Marek Maj and Salome

Gersch, a young man and woman who wear white shirts and red cravats, who say:

Optimism is dying out. The promised paradise has been privatized. The kibbutz apples are no longer as ripe. We direct our appeal not only to Jews. We accept into our ranks all those for whom there is no place in their homeland, the expelled and persecuted…we shall not check your residence cards, nor question your refugee status. We shall be strong in our weakness…Join us and Europe will be stunned.163

This set of speakers lay out conflicting opinions about the JRMIP and Sierakowski’s legacy. Alona Frankel speaks from the perspective of a Polish-Israeli Holocaust survivor who feels that despite the fact that Polish anti-Semitism pushed her out of the country that Poland is still her home. On the other hand, Yaron London speaks from the Zionist point of view that sees Poland and the Jewish diaspora as an outmoded thing of the past and suggests that it is naïve and dangerous for Jews to return to Poland. Finally, Marek

Maj and Salome Gersch emphasize the intent of the JRMIP as a movement for all persecuted immigrants and refugees. Their final words, “and Europe will be stunned” emphasize Poland’s membership in the EU and the EU’s difficulty with immigration

163 Ibid p125

110 issues and racism in a period of increasing globalization and European heterogeneity.164

These final words are also the title of Bartana’s trilogy and emphasize the larger questions of immigration that de-emphasize Zionist or Polish nationalism and highlight the larger concerns of human rights.

While Zamach is the only film in the trilogy that is explicitly about mourning, being that it revolves around a funeral, it reveals the rituals of a collective memorialization as sites of political ideology. At the end of the film Bartana notes two other assassinations that

Zamach references: that of Yitzhak Rabin in 1994 and Juliano Mer-Khamis in 2011. Rabin was the Israeli Prime Minister who opened the way to a potential peace plan between

Israelis and Palestinians and was killed by the Jewish-Israeli Gilad Shalit. Mer-Khamis was a Palestinian-Israeli actor and activist who was killed by a masked Palestinian gunman in Jenin. By referencing these two politically motivated assassinations Bartana sets up Zamach as a memorial to them, in addition to the fictional memorial to

Sierakowski. But because both Rabin and Mer-Khamis were killed for their progressive politics Bartana sets up the JRMIP as a part of their legacies. Not only does the JRMIP address the problems related to the histories of Jewish and Palestinian exile and displacement but it also opens up the larger questions of immigration, nationalism and difference.

164 See Yasemin Nuhoglu Soysal, Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994)

111 Freud says that mourning succeeds when the mourner can exchange one object for another. For example, if someone’s spouse dies, the mourning is successful when they remarry. But if they refuse to replace the lost object of mourning then they are caught in melancholia. Freud suggests that one symptom of melancholia is delusions of persecution.165 So when Yaron London warns against the potential for Anti-Semitic persecution in Poland, implying that Sierakowski was killed by Poles who didn’t want

Jews to return, we could interpret this as a form of melancholia, holding on to Jewish victimhood. But London, like many Zionists, has replaced Poland for Israel as a Jewish homeland and this would indicate that he is following Freud’s model for mourning.

Perhaps the problem is that he is still holding onto the victimhood as a defining characteristic of Jewish identity because he has erased the memory of Polish Jewry that he sees as weak and vulnerable in order to replace it with Israeli Jewish identity that he sees as strong. Judith Butler offers a way to think through London’s form of mourning and offers an alternative. She argues that one need not forget the lost object in order to follow Freud’s model for mourning, but instead must work to find the loss within this process of exchange: that is, if we simply replace one person that is lost with another, we also let go of the loss itself. One might assume that it is beneficial to let go of the feelings associated with a trauma but perhaps there is something valuable to be maintained by holding on to some aspect of loss. Butler writes:

165 Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia, trans. James Strachey, (London: Hogarth Press, 1957) pp243-58

112 I propose to consider a dimension of political life that has to do with our exposure to violence and our complicity in it, with our vulnerability to loss and the task of mourning that follows, and with finding a basis for community in these conditions. 166

Perhaps the problem for London is that he does not see any complicity with the violence perpetrated against Sierakowski, and symbolically against Rabin and Mer-Khamis. We can see Butler’s attitude in relation to the mourning of Sierakowski, Rabin or Mer-

Khamis that The Assassination displays. Contrary to London, the JRMIP mourners at the funeral-cum-political rally acknowledge a collective complicity with the violence of

Sierakowski’s murder. If we think of this complicity in relation to Rabin and Mer-Khamis, the question of the complicity of Israeli and Palestinian civil society with these murders has been raised and debated at length.167 While the funeral focused on the loss of

Sierakowski, the political rally exchanged this loss for a mandate to create a community based on the principles that he stood for. But how is this community defined? Bartana could have focused on the Jewish community that mourns the loss of Sierakowski, their leader, but instead emphasizes all communities that have experienced exile, diaspora or displacement. Thus the community that mourns here is focused not only on the loss of a leader but also mourns the loss of agency and human rights that all immigrant communities experience, including, but not limited to, Israelis and Palestinians. Butler says: “Grief contains the possibility of apprehending a mode of dispossession that is

166 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), p. 19. 167 See for instance: Victor Ostrovsky, “Commission Report Leaks Make Strong Case for Complicity of Shabak Officers in Rabin Assassination” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 1998, Pages 30, 111-112. Adam Shatz, “The Life and Death of Juliano Mer-Khamis,” London Review Of Books, Vol. 35 No 22, Nov 21, 2013.

113 fundamental to who I am.”168 If we use this as a framework to think through the mourning occurring in The Assassination, we can see that the grief that is performed at the funeral and rally is also at the center of the identity of the JRMIP community. This attitude is in stark contrast to the supposed Jewish ownership of grief and victimhood in relation to the Holocaust and expands it to a wider community that gathers around dispossession. Bartana uses a funeral and a rally to show the ways that the performance of mourning is also the performance of politics, but it is a politics that is predicated on embracing weakness as a sign of strength.169 As the JRMIP members declare: “We shall be strong in our weakness.”

The JRMIP Congress

The JRMiP has existed primarily within the imagined space of Bartana’s films but in

2012, in the context of the seventh Berlin Biennal, curated by Artur Zmijewski, Bartana organized a congress for the movement. This congress, held at the Hebbel am Ufer

Theater, addressed three questions:

1. How should the EU change in order to welcome the Other?

2. How should Poland change within a reimagined EU?

3. How should Israel change to become part of the Middle East?

168 Ibid p20 169 In 1942 Abba Kovner published a manifesto in the Vilna Ghetto that urged “Let us not go like lambs to the slaughter.” This phrase has often been used to describe the notion that European Jews that died in the Holocaust were weak and passive.

114

Figure 3.5. Yael Bartana, JRMIP Congress (2012)

The space was set up as a series of concentric circles [Figure 3.5]. At the center of the theater was a round white table, around which sat the delegates for each day’s debate.

The delegates each put forth proposals to vote on. Surrounding them were the participants who could ask questions or make comments. And above them in the balcony was an audience for the proceedings. The delegates and participants in the congress voted on each proposal with double sided cards. On one side of the card was a red ground with white text for ‘yes’ and on the other side was white ground with red text for ‘no.’ Each day’s proceedings were chaired by different people who moderated the conversation and tallied the votes for each proposal. Bartana also set up a video crew that recorded the proceedings and she later edited this footage to make a video that documented the event. Raw footage was also streamed live on a screen in the

115 theater so that the delegates, participants and audience members could see the delegates as they spoke.

The First Congress of the JRMIP opened on the first day with its chair Boris Buden, the

Berlin based cultural critic, reading a letter written by Sierakowski, supposedly found after his assassination. The letter says:

To my friends and comrades,

I can feel that I might be gone soon, but I know that you won’t run out of strength and imagination to change the world… I had a dream about what should be changed in Poland. But we need more dreams and imagination to change Europe and the Middle East. And I can promise you that these changes will be big and difficult to carry out. That’s why I’m asking all of you to think about them together. Argue, debate, and choose those that will best serve our cause. The cause of the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland (JRMiP)!

There are two main elements of this letter that drive the proceedings of the congress.

First, there is the explicit mandate to change not only Poland but also Europe and the

Middle East. Secondly, Sierakowski asks that these changes be brought about by thinking together through imagination, argument and debate. This second element addresses Deutsche’s statement that I described above: that in order to develop the viewer’s capacity for public life, she must be asked to respond to the appearance of those who have been made invisible. The structure for this kind of response was integral to the way that the congress was assembled and performed.

116 The JRMIP recruited delegates that included real world professionals including politicians, artists, scholars and curators.170 The first proposal by Galit Eilat, an Israeli curator, was for all profits from Holocaust tourism in Poland to go to rehabilitate Gaza,

Rwanda, Congo, South Sudan and other countries that have suffered in the wake of western colonialism. One of the participants commented that the profits should not only come from the fees collected at Auschwitz-Birkenau but also from the profits of

Hollywood movies about the Holocaust. But one delegate, Michal Zarada, objected to

Eilat’s proposal because he argued that the notion of a Holocaust industry is anti-

Semitic, because is echoes the assumption that the Holocaust is merely a way for Jews to make money.171 The Palestinian curator Reem Fadda replied that Holocaust tourism, like Israeli youth group trips to Auschwitz, reinscribes the notion of Jewish victimhood that is the basis for Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Finally, the proposal was put to a vote and 49 voted yes and 11 voted no. This proposal and the exchange that it elicited reveals a few crucial elements of the congress. First, it provided a space for disagreements over the use of the Holocaust representations in relation to Israel-

Palestine. Second, the debate between the delegates over this one proposal shows how the JRMIP congress constructed a framework for civic engagement. But who is the public that participated in this civic body? Are the participants in the JRMIP congress like

170 Some of these included: Galit Eilat, Reem Faada, Ali Abunima, Zoran Terzic, Gil Hochberg, Joanna Warsaw, Kinga Dunin, Joshua Simon, Khaled Jarrar, Eyal Danon, Yosi Yonnah, Cilly Kugelmann, and Charles Esche. 171 This is the basis of the criticism that has been directed towards Norman Finkelstein, the author of a book entitled The Holocaust Industry. This criticism ultimately lead to him being denied tenure at DePaul University in 2007, a situation that was publicly debated. See Matthew Abraham, “Suppressing Critics of Israel: The Campaign Against Norman Finkelstein” The Electronic Intifada June 25, 2007. https://electronicintifada.net/content/finkelstein-case-academic-freedom-loses-israeli-lobby/7027

117 the actors that play the JRMIP members in Bartana’s trilogy? In that sense, are they imaginary characters in an artwork? If so, then how can they be members of a public? If each individual that participated in the congress is imaginary then are they part of a representation of a public? If they are not imaginary and are in fact real, then are they viewers that were given the opportunity to respond to ideas inherent in the video work?

Has Bartana expanded the fourth wall to include both actors and audience in the artwork? That is, when a viewer becomes a participant do they move from audience member to actor or do they occupy a third position? To address these questions, we must first discuss the ways in which the real and the imaginary function in …And Europe

Will Be Stunned.

Parafictional Publics

During the third day of the JRMIP Congress, Reem Fadda, sitting as a delegate in the central table, demanded that the JRMIP acknowledge the Palestinian right of return.

Yossi Yonah, sitting at the table to her left, said that he was a part of the Israeli delegation that worked on the 2003 Geneva Initiative and that the Palestinian delegation understood that the Right of Return was a non-starter for negotiations.

Fadda then replies that the Oslo Accords were a complete failure as were any other examples of negotiated settlements thus far and she reasserts her desire for the Right of

Return to be acknowledged. Yonah says that she is not being realistic because this

118 demand is impossible and at this point Charles Esche, the moderator of this day’s panel intervenes and says:

Politics is the art of the possible until the impossible becomes possible. So if you can never think that the impossible can become possible, you can never think. And we’re here to think and not to be pragmatic because pragmatism has gotten us nowhere in the last twenty years.

There are a few things about this exchange that are notable. First, it includes a Jewish

Israeli philosopher and activist, a Palestinian curator, and a British born director of a

Dutch museum. These three examples of participants that day show the range of identity positions that were included in the congress. Furthermore, while the conversation is about politics, only one of the three, Yossi Yonah, has actually participated in normative electoral politics and diplomacy. The other two are cultural workers who have long histories of working with artists that engage politics but don’t necessarily engage normative political structures.172 But Esche’s point is that politicians have been so focused on the reality of pragmatism that they have been unable to imagine the seemingly impossible becoming possible. He says that the congress is a space to think, maybe not to act, because the JRMIP doesn’t have the agency to act on behalf of any population. But as a parafictional entity the JRMIP has the ability to speculate on possible futures and to imagine their becoming. It takes the aspect of art that is related to imagination and put it at the service of politics.

172 Most notable in terms of Israel-Palestine is Charles Esche’s 2011 project Picasso in Palestine, which was a colaboration with Khaled Hourani and the International Art Academy in Ramallah. Fadda, Associate Curator of Middle Eastern Art at Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, helped found the International Art Academy and has been involved in a number of exhibitions and conferences that deal with Israel-Palestine. They were both participants in Liminal Spaces, along with Yael Bartana, a series of workshops and seminars held in Israel-Palestine and Germany in 2006.

119

In Julie Carson’s analysis of the congress she describes the notion of the impossible, that

Yonah, Fadda and Esche debated, in terms of Lacan’s notion of the objet petit a – the object that is desired but is unattainable. In this example, the unattainable object of desire is The Right of Return, something that Yonah says is unrealistic and impossible.

Carson addresses the question of reality in the congress in terms of Lacan’s definition of the real. She says that if we are looking to see if the delegates, participants or even the political debates were real or imaginary, we are stuck in a false binary. If we understand the congress in terms of the symbolic order, a chain of signifiers instead of signifiers that point to some ‘real’ signified, then we cannot make such a clear distinction between imagination and reality.173 In this sense, the difference between Fadda and Esche’s staunch advocacy for thinking about the impossible versus Yonah’s adherence to acting within the pragmatic realm of realistic possibility is actually a mirror of Freud’s view of reality versus Lacan’s. Freud’s reality principle was defined in terms of the limitation of the pleasure principle. This is the basis for what Yonah says to Fadda. He tells her that she might desire the gratification of The Right of Return but that he understands the political reality that won’t allow it. But when Esche intervenes and says that politics is defined by the transition from the impossible to the possible, he is taking a Lacanian view, which blurs the distinction between imagination and reality. Furthermore, he stresses the fact that the congress, as a political space defined by art is more open than

173 Juli Carson, “Art of the Impossible: The Jewish Renaissance Movement of Poland (JRMIP),” Yael Bartana: If You Will it, It is Not a Dream (Vienna: Secession, 2013)

120 the pragmatic approaches of normative politicians to see the reality of the question of the Right of Return in terms of a symbolic order.

Carrie Lambert Beatie’s notion of parafiction might be useful to think through what is happening in terms of the real and the imaginary at the congress. She says that, “in parafiction real and/or imaginary personages and stories intersect in the world as it is being lived.”174 So in the case of a debate about the Right of Return in the JRMIP congress it intersects with these same debates within the political sphere of Israel-

Palestine. Lambert Beattie notes that parafiction differs from a view of the world in terms of simulacra, because it doesn’t rely on the disappearance of the real and instead relies on the possibility that fictions can be treated as facts. After all, the congress starts with an imaginary letter, written by an imaginary leader, played by a real political activist to produce a real political debate.

Lambert Beattie says that the introduction of parafictional experiences into the public sphere is also an intervention in what Jacques Ranciere called the distribution of the sensible – the regime that determines what can be sensed, including what can be seen, felt, said, thought and heard. It is here that Bartana’s use of parafiction with the congress connects with Arendt’s notion of spaces of appearance. Not only did Bartana transform the former Warsaw Ghetto as a space of appearance for Jews in a postwar

Poland, she also produced the congress as a space of appearance where a set of

174 Carrie Lambert-Beatty, “Make Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility” October 129, Summer 2009 p 54

121 audacious and provocative ideas could be voiced and heard. As Esche noted, The Right of Return is most often seen as impossible within normative diplomatic circles but in this cultural space, the proposal could be debated with seriousness and possibility. Similarly, the notion of the Holocaust tourist industry being taxed to help Gaza would also be seen as preposterous anywhere else. But in the context of a theater in Berlin it could be treated as a real possibility. Arendt says, “For us, appearance – something that is being seen and heard by others as well as by ourselves – constitutes reality.”175 Thus, Arendt suggests that the reality of a public realm is constituted by the parafictions of representation.

Spielberg’s List: Witnessing the Holocaust Industry

Figure 3.6. Omer Fast, Still from Spielberg’s List (2003)

Omer Fast’s Spielberg’s List (2003) also addresses the Holocaust through mourning, memorialization and parafiction, but he does so by taking the film Schindler’s List (1993) as its subject. Schindler’s List, directed by Steven Spielberg, has become iconic as a cinematic form of Holocaust memorial. It is a feature film based on the true story of

175 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958) p50

122 Oscar Schindler, a German industrialist that saved 1200 Jewish workers in his Polish factory during WW II. Fast went to Krakow, where the film was set and interviewed extras and actors from the movie about their experience [Figure 3.6]. As they tell their stories of being in this film, it sometimes seems as if they were actually the Jews depicted in the movie. This ambiguity between a real person describing the experience of playing a role that depicts a real historical event and a real person describing a memory of an actual experience is at the heart of Fast’s film.

There are multiple levels of play between reality and fiction in Spielberg’s List. There is the level of reality that is the original event of the Holocaust, then there is the semi- fictional film that was based on that reality, then there are the real actors who live in the real site of the film and finally there is Fast’s two-channel quasi-documentary video installation that plays with all of these layers of the real and the imaginary. This blurring between the real and the imaginary is a quality shared by Fast’s work and Bartana’s.

Jacqueline Rose, in speaking about Yael Bartana’s work notes that the blurred line between reality and fiction is related to a psychoanalytic perspective on history. She notes that

Jacques Lacan’s notion of future perfect, as the tense of analysis: not what I was and am no more (repression), nor what I still am in what I was (repetition), but what I will have been in the process of what I am becoming; he is describing a futurity, neither simply backward-looking nor forward-looking, that gathers the shards of the past as it moves forward in time. 176

176 Jacqueline Rose, “History is a Nightmare” in And Europe Will be Stunned, Eds. James Lingwood and Elinor Nairne (London: Artangel, 2012) p145

123 Rose is interpreting Lacan here to say that the real and the imaginary must necessarily be linked in relation to becoming. Specifically, that there is evidence of the past mixed with its misrecognition that serves as the material that we use to imagine our futures.

So when Bartana seeks to build a new society advocated for by the JRMIP, she looks back to the visual and material culture of the Holocaust and early Zionism. Similarly, in

Fast’s Speilberg’s List, he shows how the creation of the film Schindler’s List was built on the very real memories embedded within the site and people of contemporary Krakow.

While Bartana’s project is more utopian and thus explicitly geared toward futurity,

Fast’s film looks at the ways that our past produces our contemporary condition.

Specifically, he focuses on how the frameworks that we use to remember the Holocaust produce the particularities of the present, especially for Jews and Poles.

Spielberg’s List, as a two channel video installation, is constantly comparing images. The piece is composed of two videos projected side-by-side, juxtaposing slight shifts in register. This can occur between clips of Schindler’s List compared to Fast’s footage; it can occur between alternate translations (or mistranslations) in the English subtitles from the interviews in Polish; and it can occur between the sets built for the film and the actual remnants of WWII Krakow where both Spielberg’s List and Schindler’s List were shot. Fast has pointed out that Kraków-Płaszów, the real original camp, has barely any remnants, “while the staged camp is beginning to accelerate into disrepair, thus

124 increasingly resembling its original.” 177 Spielberg’s List opens with an image of a contemporary Polish train station that Fast shot, juxtaposed with the image of a WWII era train station in Schindler’s List. But both of these images of trains point to a third image, which is the sign of the train car that transported Jews to the death camps in the

Holocaust. Railway cars are displayed at a number of holocaust museums, including Yad

Vashem in Israel and the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, to represent their essential function in carrying out the final solution.178 And so with both the camp and the train car, we can see that Fast knows that the memory of the

Holocaust must negotiate with various tropes, regardless of primary experience. It’s not that he is comparing his documentary footage with the fictional footage of Spielberg’s film to prove the truth value of the documentary. Instead, what he shows is that both documentary and feature films produce images that rely on preexisting systems of meaning. We necessarily understand an image of a camp or a train car both indexically and experientially.

But beyond these comparative images of reality and fiction as well as the present and the past, the interviews with the Schindler’s List actors are the most provocative. The first interview is with a woman who appears to be in her late 50s or early 60s. She talks about hearing about a conscription notice for work. She goes to the meeting and finds that there are all sorts of people there, including whole families of men, women and

177 Gideon Lewis-Krauss “Infinite Jetzt” in In Memory: Omer Fast, ed. Sabine Schaschl (Berlin: The Green Box, 2009) p61 178. Oren Baruch Steir, “Different Trains: Holocaust Artifacts and the Ideologies of Remembrance” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Volume 19, Number 1, Spring 2005, pp. 81-106

125 children. She remembers that someone walked through the room looking for those that were Semitic looking saying: “I had black hair and they asked me to show them my profile.” In a ridiculously bizarre twist of phrase, the racial profiling behind this action could refer to both the Nazis and casting directors. Indeed, Fast reminds us of this double speak with two slightly different subtitles under her story. The subtitles in the left channel read “sometimes there is this emptiness because you want to say everything at the same time,” while the subtitles on the right read “sometimes there is this echo because you want to say everything at the same time.” Fast uses the word

‘echo’ to emphasize the ways in which racial profiling continued, though, of course, to a much lesser degree, from the time of the Holocaust to contemporary Krakow. Many of the interviews with actors are intercut with contemporary street scenes from Krakow. A blonde woman, countering the racial essentialism in the scene described above says,

“What do I know, Jews also look like Europeans, they don’t have their own unique features because these days there are all sorts actually.” Later, a young man says that he was also in a group from which individuals were chosen to be either Jewish or

German and he realizes that, in retrospect, he wanted to be German. He says, “I preferred not to be a victim.” In these statements, we can see Fast revealing the self awareness of the actors in relation to how much they identified with Jews and Germans that they were supposed to represent. Through this process of identification they talk about the relative similarities and differences between attitudes towards otherness or weakness.

126 Later in the film another dimension we see a group of American tourists traveling with a guide through Krakow to see the sites of various scenes from Schindler’s List. The guide points out a number of inconsistencies between the film and the real history. For instance, the house where SS officer Amon Goeth, played by Ralph Fiennes, lived was not actually in the camp but outside its walls. Fast splits the screen to tell this story with the same scene playing out on two channels, except the subtitles are again slightly different. One channel indicates that his house was inside the camp, while the other says outside, allowing the two channels to represent the two narratives of the camp’s history. At another point in the film, the guide points to a bridge and says that it was used to transport Jews from Krakow to the ghetto but Spielberg filmed it the other way round. At this point, one subtitle says, “because the area had been so publicized” and the other says “because the area had been so modernized.”

In a departure from the interviews with extras, a bearded man is interviewed who tells the story of the influence of Schindler’s List on Krakow. He says that just after the premier of the film, tourists started pouring into the town with a copy of a New York

Times article about the film in their hands. The article had pictures from the film and from real life but the tourists couldn’t tell the difference between the two. They would point to a gate and ask if it was the gate to the ghetto. They wanted to see all of the places from the film. In response the man says that he started publishing some general information for the tourists as a guidebook. Then he hired a bus and started offering tours where they would show both sites from the film and from the real places that the

127 film was based on. He says that they wanted the tours to be based in historical fact, but the tourists could only see the history of Krakow’s Jews through the eyes of Steven

Spielberg.

Towards the end of the film, an older man speaks of being an extra in the film but also recalls stories that his mother used to tell him about the Holocaust. He says that each time that his mother would tell these stories, other women in the room would start to cry. After this interview, we see the famous scene from Schindler’s List in which Oscar

Schindler watches from a hilltop as the Krakow ghetto is liquidated. As Schindler looks on in horror, he notices a girl with a red coat that seems to walk through the violence unharmed. Fast found the exact spot where the shot was taken and fades from the film’s scene to footage of his own, shifting within one frame from Spielberg’s fiction to his own present reality. But Fast extracts the scenes that cut to Schindler so that we only see the image of the girl. As a result, we become the witness, taking Schindler’s place.

When the old man talks about his mother telling stories about the Holocaust, he describes her as a first person witness who uses her testimony to mourn and to gather others to join her. In this sequence, Fast weaves together multiple strands of reality and representation. He first interviews the old man, an extra in a film who digresses to recount a story about his mother’s stories about the Holocaust. Fast then shows us the hilltop that the tourists look over to see where the character of Schindler stood in the film to watch the girl in the red coat. One of these woven strands is the extra as witness,

128 another is his mother as witness, yet another is the actor playing Schindler as witness and then Fast, the artist, as witness to the site of the film and the Holocaust and its memorialization. Finally, Fast brings another strand - the tourist as witness. Fast is witnessing not only the aftermath of the Holocaust through site and storytelling but also what Norman Finkelstein has called “The Holocaust Industry.”179 Like Schindler watching violence perpetrated on Krakow’s Jews, Fast is witness to the perverse phenomenon in which the tourist industry capitalizes on the social capital of a Hollywood movie and as a result commodifies the memorialization of a site of atrocity.

Holocaust Representations: Images in Spite of All

To some degree, Fast is raising the problematics related to any representation of the

Holocaust, whether it is a Hollywood film or the tourism that grows from it. Theodor

Adorno has famously written that “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” a phrase that has been interpreted in many ways. 180 George Steiner proposed that Adorno meant that there should be no poetry after the Holocaust, that it is not only impossible but immoral, and James Young has suggested that Adorno simply hated the art of atrocity.181 Following these interpretations, Adorno could be pointing to the danger of aestheticizing politics, of allowing the horrific ugliness of genocide to become beautiful.

He also could be pointing to the barbarism of modernity, which commodifies even a

179 Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (London: Verso, 2000) 180 Theodor Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” Prisms (London: Neville Spearman, 1967) p34 181 Antony Rowland, “Re-reading ‘impossibility’ and ‘Barbarism’: Adorno and Post-Holocaust Poetics” Critical Survey, Vol. 9, No. 1 (1997), p 57

129 solemn act of memorialization.182 In this sense, it is not only ethically problematic for a film to make a profit off of the story but it is also problematic for the site of an atrocity to be turned into a tourist destination. On the other hand, the film and the tourism that surrounds it, pushes against the tendency to repress the history of the Holocaust in

Krakow. Indeed, Spielberg used some of the profits of Schindler’s List to start the Shoah

Foundation, which gathers and archives video documents of survivor testimonies. The question of Holocaust representation, as addressed by Fast includes the representation of its history though Hollywood Film, the tourism in Krakow that he depicts through his documentary images, and finally through the interviews with the movie’s actors. The interviews that he conducts with them allow them to tell stories that become ambiguously about both the film set and the history of the war itself. This final form of representation could be called storytelling but it also has the characteristics of a witness’s testimony – a particular form of imagining or representing the Holocaust that has a great deal of significance.183

Giorgio Agamben describes witnessing as a method of survival.184 He says that witnessing was the drive for prisoners to stay alive so that they could tell their story. But the function of this story has two irreconcilable parts. In Latin there are two words for

182 ibid, p62 183 Probably the most famous example of the use of testimony as a form of history is Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 1963) but this text has also been the starting point for an important texts on trauma and memory in relationship to the Holocaust: Shoshana Felman, The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002). 184 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 1999) p15

130 witness, testis, from which “testimony” is derived, and superstes. Testes refers to a third party who speaks at a trial to mediate the differences between two parties in a lawsuit.

Superstes refers to someone who has lived through an event and therefore can bear witness to it. The former implies juridical authority while the latter refers to a neutral position that is more interested in an ethical gray zone. Agamben quotes Primo Levi saying that survivors are not interested in ethical judgment because they lived through an experience where “no group was any more human than any other…the lesson of the camps is brotherhood in abjection.”185 Citing Levi, Agamben says that ethics became confused in Auschwitz, settling into a “gray zone” where “the oppressed becomes the oppressor and the executioner appears as victim.”186 As an example Agamben tells

Levi’s story about a group of Sonderkomando, Jews in the camp that were responsible for managing the gas chambers and crematoria. One day this group took a work break to play a soccer match between the SS and representatives of the Sonderkomando.

“This match might strike someone as a brief pause of humanity in the middle of infinite horror. I, like the witnesses, instead view this match, this moment of normalcy, as the true horror of the camp.”187

Omer Fast never points a finger to make clear juridical or ethical judgments relating to the Holocaust. Instead he plays a game with the truth value of storytelling, emphasizing the gray zone of its legacy. The game is set in a film about a film. But this game evokes

185 ibid., 17. 186 Ibid., 21. 187 Ibid., 26.

131 the gray zone of truth in both filmic and urban space. He reveals the complications of setting a fiction in a real space and the tourism industry that evolved around both fact and fiction. He also points to the ways that representations of the Holocaust inevitably live in this gray zone as well. Perhaps this is the true barbarism that Adorno warned was inevitable with any representation of the Holocaust. A filmmaker, tour guide or artist uses the Holocaust as a means for aesthetic, economic or ideological ends. Fast lays bare our desire to organize the messiness of traumatic memory and to produce something from it that can be easily consumed.188

But on the other hand, the gray zone between the real and the imaginary could merely be a closer picture of the ways that representation functions in relation to the world. As

I mentioned above, Juli Carson discusses Bartana’s JRMIP in terms of Lacan’s notion of the real, saying that if we think of the JRMIP as a presentation within a presentation, as opposed to a re-presentation of the real, then we both destabilize any objective understanding of the real as fact and empower the real potential of the imagined.189 So in terms of Lacan’s notion of the real, when Fast mixes Spielberg’s film played by actors and the narratives of the actors about their real lives, he is approaching, to a greater degree of clarity, the way that we understand the Holocaust through both individual and collective memory. He reveals the slippage and constant misrecognition of the truth of an event that is so often invoked to defend a variety of political positions.

188 Adrian Parr discusses this in depth in “Trauma and Consumption” in Deleuze and Memorial Culture: Desire, Singular Memory and the Politics of Trauma (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008) p p174 189 Juli Carson, “Art of the Impossible: The Jewish Renaissance Movement of Poland (JRMIP),” Yael Bartana: If You Will it, It is Not a Dream (Vienna: Secession, 2013)

132

In the last few scenes of Schindler’s List an ideological project emerges that proposes a possible endgame for the Holocaust, at least as it is presented within the film. The war is over and the Nazis have retreated. At the entrance to Kraków-Płaszów, the concentration camp, Schindler’s Jewish workers present him with tokens of thanks for saving them. The first is a letter signed by every worker trying to explain that he was not a Nazi sympathizer that he could use if he is captured by either Soviet or Allied Forces.

The second gift is a ring inscribed with the Talmudic phrase, “whoever saves one life saves the world in its entire” and Schindler breaks down realizing that he could have bought the lives of more Jews had he not been so greedy. He says that he could have sold his car for the lives of ten Jews and that he could have sold a gold pin for the lives of two more. He is weeping as he becomes aware of the base reality that a Jew’s life was so easily commodified and that he was complicit in reifying their exchange value.

After Schindler finally leaves, a Russian soldier comes to announce that the Soviet army has liberated the camp.190 He warns them not to go east because they are hated there and not to go west either. When one of the Jews asks for some food, he points to a town nearby and says that they could find some there. The next shot is of a line of Jews walking over a hilltop to that town and a song begins to play over this image. This song,

“Jerusalem of Gold” is sung in Hebrew. A montage follows, telling the story of what

190 This is a ridiculous and ironic gesture: a lone soldier riding on a horse through the open gates of an abandoned camp to declare that the Soviet army had liberated the survivors. It points to what would be become another chapter in Jewish persecution, this one under Stalin’s rule. This implication of a double occupation, from Nazi to Soviet, links this film to Bartana’s trilogy. This sentiment is echoed by one of the women that Fast interviews who says that after the war the Russians came. There is a pause and then she says “Well, I don’t have any good memories.”

133 happened after the war to its main characters. Text over the now empty Schindler factory tells us that in 1958 Schindler was declared a righteous person and invited to plant a tree at the Jerusalem Holocaust museum Yad Vashem in the Avenue of the

Righteous. The film cuts back to the group of Jews walking over a hilltop in Poland and then fades to color in 1993 Jerusalem where we see the surviving Schindler Jews walking over a crest at Mount Zion, in East Jerusalem. We then see these original Jews placing rocks on Schindler’s grave.

The song “ Jerusalem of Gold” was written in 1967 to celebrate Israel’s victory in the Six

Day War. Israelis refer to the 1967 war as “The Six Day War” while Palestinians and many Arabs refer to it as Al Naksa (the setback). This victory for Israel included the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and displaced thousands of Palestinians. By linking this song to the image of Holocaust survivors walking over Mount Zion Spielberg is explicitly advocating the Zionist teleology that begins with the Holocaust and ends with the triumph of the State of Israel. Spielberg then, is following the common argument that the founding of the State of Israel was legitimate despite the fact Jewish refugees produced Palestinian refugees. Furthermore, Spielberg’s final scene implicitly reasserts the claim that any attempt to criticize the state of Israel for the expulsions and occupations in 1967 delegitimize the State of Israel and threaten to reverse history and open up Jews to the type of genocidal violence experienced in the Holocaust. 191 In this

191 Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012) p26

134 sense, Schindler’s List functions more like a traditional monument, like Rapoport’s, celebrating a sense of Jewish nationalist ideology.

Unlike Spielberg, Fast has no interest in making a monument to Jewish suffering and heroism and unlike Yael Bartana’s work, Fast’s Spielberg’s List is not a new form of memorial that addresses the human rights of both Jews and Palestinians. He conspicuously sites Spielberg’s List in present day Krakow and in the real lives of the extras that played their parts in his film. But within this reality, he explored the ways that memory can be a suspect source for action or judgment. Even Primo Levi, a survivor famous for the books that he wrote about his experience during the Holocaust noted that the memory of suffering has a way of crystalizing as a story and that just as stories need to be constructed they have a way of restructuring memory to become too perfect, too adorned. Judith Butler has pointed out that Levi was suspect of the ways in which the memory of the Holocaust was instrumentalized to support Israeli militarism.192 While Omer Fast does not make this explicit connection, he shares Levi’s skepticism about storytelling and implicitly the ways that it can be used to further nationalist ideological projects.

Maria Muhle has argued that while Fast has made a number of videos that address key historico-political topics such as the Holocaust, Israel-Palestine or the US war in Iraq,

192 ibid p190

135 “Fast adopts them as a foil against which to investigate the status of the image.”193 She sais that he “does so in a very peculiar way: his work doesn’t so much address a specific historical situation, its internal tensions and its mediation by images but instead tackles the moral issue of what images can or cannot make visible.”194 In this sense, Fast approaches representations of the Holocaust in a different way than Bartana. Fast assumes that all images of the Holocaust are always already politically complicit with ideological projects. So, separate from both Spielberg and Bartana, he doesn’t make an explicit connection between the Shoah and Israel-Palestine. But that is not to say that he addresses images in a depoliticized way. On the contrary, Muhle says that Fast investigates images as things, “in their materiality, interfering in real life, influencing, even transforming it. And by addressing the image in its materiality, as an object of the world – and not as a reflection or representation of it – Fast undermines the distinction between the factual and the fictional, and reveals the equally artificial nature of both.”195 To explain this Muhle turns to Jacques Rancière’s dictum that “‘writing history and writing stories come under the same regime of truth,’ so that, in order to properly understand it, we as viewers must go beyond the distinction between truth told by history and the lies told by stories, beyond the hierarchical order established between fact and fiction.”196

193 Maria Muhle, “Omer Fast: When Images Lie…About the Fictionality of Documents,” Afterall Journal, Issue 20, Spring 2009, p 37. 194 ibid 195 ibid 196 ibid

136 But how does Fast investigate the status of an image and its materiality? And how does he address what images can make visible? In Spielberg’s List Fast uses the two-channel video format to make an explicit comparison between his documentary footage, shot in

Krakow in 2003, and Spielberg’s film, shot in Krakow in 1993. One tie that binds these two kinds of images is the set of actors that he interviews. As they tell their stories they constantly undo their own authority through the confusing and contradictory ways that

Fast presents them to us. He creates a sense of doubt in the otherwise seductive spectacle of Hollywood film but he also creates a sense of doubt with his documentary footage. It’s hard to know which images are creating the most accurate representation of this instance of the Holocaust.

Muhle continues to say that even though Fast says that his work is not political in the sense that it is a critique of a particular situation:

There is another fundamental aspect to the videos that might be deemed political, and that is their questioning of the ‘truth’ of the image by referring it back to the status of reality itself. How experiences turn into memory and how these memories, stories or images are put back into circulation are political issues, dealing directly with the status of reality in its potentiality, affected by history, stories, images and words.197

As we have seen through Rapaport’s memorial and the ending of Spielberg’s film, representations of the Holocaust can be used to link memories of the past with the contemporary reality of Israel-Palestine. By questioning the truth of images, Fast implicitly destabilizes these connections.

197 ibid p38

137

Memorializing the Holocaust: Instrumentalizion vs. Representation

The etymology of the word holocaust can be traced to the Greek word holaucostos, meaning completely burned. It is a term used by the early Christianity, which refers to a kind of sacrifice practiced by Jews in the time of the first and second temples in which the sacrifice was completely burned. This reference evolved to describe the sacrifice of

Jesus on the cross and ironically was first used to describe a pogrom or mass killing of

Jews in England in the 12th c. It refers not only to killing but more so, the ending of a being’s life at the service of some greater meaning. Primo Levi has said that he hates the term and that Eli Weisel was the one who coined it to refer to the genocide of WWII but later regretted it.198 For a survivor like Levi, the objection to the notion of the Holocaust being a sacrifice is rooted in the objection to the idea that the victims of the Holocaust were instrumentalized to serve some other purpose.

One issue with interpreting the Holocaust as a sacrifice is the problematic way that it takes away the agency of both its victims and survivors. Agamben has characterized the conditions in which Jews suffered in the camps as ‘bare life’ – a state in which a human being has been stripped of all rights and all agency. But Agamben says that one way in which survivors can transcended bare life is to use language as a tool to represent the conditions of the Holocaust and as a result to express their own agency. This is the

198 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 28.

138 condition that Agamben cites as the crucial sign of the witness survivor and furthermore, a rejection of Adorno’s worry about the barbarism of language in relation to Auschwitz. For Agamben, to be silent in relation to the Holocaust is to repeat the Nazi gesture, which sought to divorce the body from their humanity, a humanity and cultural belonging defined by language.199

Collective Memory – Counter-memory – Counterpublics

In Fast’s film, the speech acts that make up the various stories about the Holocaust, and stories about representations of the Holocaust through film and tourism, perform the agency that was denied by bare life. The problems of agency that these stories contend with have more to do with ideology and the ways in which the film or tourist industries play with the truth to serve various needs. In Bartana’s JRMIP congress, a group of

Poles, Israelis, and Germans debated the legacy of the Holocaust and as a result enacted their agency to shape its consequences. In both Bartana’s JRMIP and Fast’s film there is an acknowledgment that in representations of the Holocaust, collective memory is a powerful force in the construction of a public. Bartana especially seeks to construct a counter-memory through alternative narratives of the collective past of Jews, Poles and

Germans and as a result offers the possibility of a counter-public. As I described above, the notion of the public is very much at stake with Bartana and Fast’s work. The stadium, the park, the funeral/political rally, and the theater are public spaces that

199 Ibid p157

139 Bartana uses. They echo normative situations in which collective memory is produced and reproduced but they also speak to various specific publics that participate within them. For instance, in Nightmares Sierakowski speaks to Polish and Jewish publics and implicitly to Israeli and Palestinian publics. The funeral in The Assassination brings together multiple publics including the JRMIP and groups of immigrants other than

Jews. In Spielberg’s List, Fast documents the public of Krakow that contends with the collective memory of both the Holocaust and the filming of Schindler’s List. He also documents the public that converges around Spielberg’s film, including the press and the tourism that resulted from it.

Michael Warner defines publics in three ways. First there is the public, a social totality such as a city, a nation or a state. Then there is a public, a concrete audience such a crowd or a theater audience. Then there is third option – a public that is constructed through a text’s circulation.200 He also refers to counterpublics that are often constructed in opposition to the normative or dominant modes of organization that construct a public. Michael Warner says that a counterpublic:

maintains…an awareness of its subordinate status…Like all publics, a counterpublic comes into being through an address to indefinite strangers. (This is one significant difference between a counterpublic and a community or group.) But counterpublic discourse also addresses those strangers as being not just anybody. They are socially marked by their participation in this kind of discourse. 201

200 Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005) p65 201 Ibid p119

140 The kind of discourse that he refers to is that which is self conscious of its difference from normative discourse. I see the group that convened in the theater for the JRMIP congress as a counterpublic. If we remember Yossi Yonah’s rejection of the right of return based on the premise that it was unrealistic in normative political discourse and the response of both Reem Faada and Charles Esche, we can see that the goal of the

JRMIP congress was explicitly to produce an alternative to normative discourse around issues such as the right of return. Following Warner, the participation of a public in an alternative form of discourse produced a counterpublic. But in this case this counterpublic was explicitly organized in opposition to the dominant models of collective memory that address the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine.

But beyond the physical form of a public that included the audience and participants in the Hebbel am Ufer theater or even the publics that were constantly evoked such as

Germany, Poland, Israel or Palestine, Warner also includes the possibility of a public that participates in discourse through the dissemination of texts. If we transpose this form of a public from the reading of texts to the viewing of video then we might also be able to think of Bartana’s and Fast’s videos as discursive spaces that construct counterpublics as well. In this sense the dissemination of their works in museums and galleries presents the opportunity for alternative narratives to the dominant models of Holocaust representation.

141 Chapter 4. The Nakba: Signifying Catastrophe

This chapter looks at the ways that the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, what

Palestinians refer to as the nakba (the catastrophe), is interpreted by Palestinian artists and how these representations become mechanisms for both memorialization and activism. I will first look at the history of the term nakba and the multiple meanings that it implies. I will then turn to ways that the nakba is represented, using three projects as case studies. The first, The Key of Return was commissioned by Artur Zmijewski for the

2012 Berlin Biennial and organized by a group of Palestinians including an activist, an artist and a curator. I will look at the use of the key as a sign for the nakba in the context of a biennial that not only was devoted to art as activism but also sited in Berlin, the historical capital of the Third Reich and the center for the planning of the Final Solution.

I compare The Key of Return with Campus in Camps, an alternative school set in the

Dheisheh refugee camp in Bethlehem. I explain the ways that this school produces new forms of representation for camps and refugees that move beyond the victimization that the key has come to signify. I will then turn to the ruins of a destroyed Palestinian home as another sign for the nakba, using photographs by Dor Guez as a case study. As I will argue, Guez addresses not only a different representation for the nakba, but he also uses photography, a medium that has a unique ability to mobilize contemporary civic engagement with the legacies of past trauma.

142 1948 and The Palestinian Culture of Memory

The nakba is a term commonly used to refer to the events in 1948 including the Arab-

Israeli war, the establishment of the state of Israel and the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes. At the start of 1948, Arabs were the majority of the population of

Palestine between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River – 1.4 out of 2 million people.

At that time Palestinians owned 90% of the land but after the war, by October 1948, more than half the country’s Palestinians – 750,000 people – were expelled or forced to flee. After that, 150,000 remained and Israel controlled 78% of the former British

Mandate of Palestine. Those that remained quickly became a persecuted minority within an Israeli state whose population exploded because of Jewish immigration. The rest became refugees in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt and elsewhere. 202 While many refer to the 1967 war as the moment when Israel began its occupation of Palestine, because of its illegal seizure of the West Bank and Gaza, most Palestinians consider 1948 as the date that started the Israeli occupation.

The stories that Palestinian refugees and their decedents tell about the nakba have a number of commonalities. First there are stories of the violent dispossession of

Palestinian villages like Qula, which had a population of 1010 people including 172 houses, 2 mosques and a school. As Israeli forces approached Qula, most of the population fled on foot for the West Bank but they left the elderly that couldn’t make

202 Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2006), p1

143 the trip. The village elders who stayed behind were shot or burned to death in their homes.203 Stories like this often describe the frantic hustle to pack up a suitcase of clothes and a few essential items as Israeli forces approached. One refugee Hajja Safiyya

Husni Hasan from the village Surif explained in an interview for Voice of Palestine Radio:

“we took with us our clothes, a mattress and cover, and the clothes we were wearing, and we took the little kids and left.”204 These stories are documented and archived in a number of ways. One model of documenting these stories is through ‘memorial books.’

The custom of creating books to memorialize a destroyed village is common to a number of displaced peoples including Eastern European Jewish survivors of the

Holocaust and Palestinians after 1948. They include folk history, communal and personal photographs, drawings of vernacular architecture and other documents relating to the history of the place remembered.205

The stories of Palestinians fleeing Israeli soldiers also often refer to a family locking the door to their home and taking the key with them since many thought that they would be able to return once the violence had subsided.206 Palestinian refugees and their descendants often point to this key as the symbol and proof of the last moment that

203 Susan Slyomovics, “The Rape of Qula, a Destroyed Palestinian Village” in Nakba: Palestine, 1948 and the Claims of Memory eds., Ahmad H. Sa’di and Lila Abu Lughod (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), p33 204 Lena Jayyusi “Iterability, Cumulativity, and Pressence: The Relational Figures of Palestinian Memory” in Nakba: Palestine, 1948 and the Claims of Memory eds., Ahmad H. Sa’di and Lila Abu Lughod (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007) p111 205 Susan Slyomovics, The Object of Memory; Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998) p. xiii 206 Lila Abu-Lughod and Ahmad H. Sa’di “Introduction: The Claims of Memory” in Nakba: Palestine, 1948 and the Claims of Memory, Ahmad H. Sa’di and Lila Abu Lughod eds., (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), p13

144 they lived in their homes and homelands. As the poet Mahmud Darwish put it, “He felt for his key the way he would feel for his limbs and was reassured.”207

Some other tropes of these stories include nostalgic descriptions of the architecture or landscaping of the lost home. Often, an olive tree, a fig tree or a cyprus is invoked.208

Sandy Tolan’s book The Lemon Tree,209 about one such family’s exile from their home in al-Ramla, takes its name from this symbol. For Palestinians, trees represent a cyclical and sustainable way of living in and with the land. They represent a family’s long-term commitment to a place. Planting and tending to a tree that each year provided the fruit of this labor reveals an interrelatedness with the land. Jenna Layyusi recounted one example of this when she saw a Palestinian man on a 2004 newscast on the Arabiyya satellite channel being restrained as Israeli forces uprooted his olive trees. He “doubled over and [was] beating his head in pain as he laments, ‘The olives, the olives’ (meaning the olive trees), as though his own children were being herded off.”210

Stories of the nakba are typified by a deeply poetic nostalgia for the past and a frustrating sense of the impossibility of immediate return. When Rema Hammami, an

207 Mahmud Darwish, “The Eternity of Cactus” in Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone (Brooklyn: Archipelago Books, 2006), p28 208 For more on the importance of trees to Palestinian collective memory see Carol Bardenstein, “Trees, Forests, and the shaping of Palestinian and Israeli collective Memory” in Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe and Leo Spitzer, eds., Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1998) 209 Sandy Tolan, The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew and the Heart of the Middle East (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006) 210 Lena Jayyusi “Iterability, Cumulativity, and Pressence: The Relational Figures of Palestinian Memory” in Nakba: Palestine, 1948 and the Claims of Memory ed. Ahmad H. Sa’di and Lila Abu Lughod p125

145 anthropologist and second-generation Palestinian refugee, found her grandfather’s house in Jaffa turned into a school for Jewish special needs children. She said, “When I saw the arches, I had a sudden shock of recognition based on a family photograph taken in front of this veranda.”211 Or more famously, when Edward Said returned to his family’s home in Jerusalem in 1992 for the first time in forty-five years: “I remembered the house quite clearly: two stories, a terraced entrance, a balcony at the front…[but] I could not bring myself to go inside…it was as if there were a part my past which was really over and associated with the fall of Palestine which I couldn’t reinvestigate.”212

Raja Shehadeh, the Ramallah based writer and lawyer whose family lost their Jaffa home in 1948 said,

I was always reminded that we were made for a better life — and that this better life had been left behind in Jaffa. Jaffa, I was told, was the bride of the sea, and Ramallah did not even have a sea. Jaffa was a pearl, a diamond-studded lantern rising from the water, and Ramallah was a drab, cold, backward village where nothing ever happened.213

But in the early years immediately following 1948, the term nakba was not used so widely. Many Palestinians were humiliated by their dispossession during the Arab-Israeli war. In the 1950s Palestinians repressed these memories and declined to evoke the events of 1948 as a catastrophe because it would admit defeat. There was still a belief that Israel’s territorial gains were temporary and that the Palestinians who were now in refugee camps in Lebanon or Jordan or Syria would soon return to their homes. In the

211 Lila Abu-Lughod & Ahmad H. Sa’adi “Introduction: The Claims of Memory” in Nakba: Palestine, 1948 and the Claims of Memory ed. Ahmad H. Sa’di and Lila Abu Lughod, p1 212 As quoted in Susan Slyomovics, The Object of Memory; Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), p15 213 Raja Shehadeh, Strangers in the House (London: Profile Books, 2009) p3

146 1950s and 60s more euphemistic terms were often used such as al-ahdath (the events) or al-hijra (the Exodous) or lamma sharna wa tla-na (when we blackened our faces and left).214 Even in the 1970s in Lebanon, which was a center for Palestinian nationalism since it was the base for the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), the main message was one of optimism, revolution and renewal. It was not until the 1990s when

Yassir Arafat was negotiating peace treaties that the notion of remembering 1948 as the nakba was introduced to caution against letting go of the right of return for Palestinian refugees.

Thus the nakba not only refers to a moment in history but it also refers to the present plight of Palestinian refugees, most importantly, those that live in the camps set up by

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) like Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon or Aida, Dheishah and Qalandia in the West Bank. This use of the nakba does evoke nostalgia for houses and fruit trees to symbolize loss and the right of their reclamation.

But this use of the nakba also moves in the opposite direction, pointing to the present reality of the camps as a catastrophe, a state of affairs that includes abject poverty and the absence of agency associated with multiple generations of stateless refugees. Sandi

Hilal, Alessandro Petti and Eyal Weizman, who make up the collective Decolonizing

Architecture, have written about this temporal pivot when addressing the nakba, from future to present tense:

214 Diana K. Allan “The Politics of Witness: Remembering and Forgetting 1948 in Shatilla Camp” in Nakba: Palstine, 1948 and the Claims of Memory ed. Ahmad H. Sa’di and Lila Abu Lughod, p253-254

147 Return is a political act that is both practiced at present and projected as an image into an uncertain future. But return cannot be understood only as the suspended politics of an ideological projection, but also as a varied form of politics constantly practiced, grounding a future ideal in present day material realities. This represents a varied set of practices that we would like to call ‘present returns.’215

This sense of the nakba as a ‘present return’ pushes against the notion that camps are cities in waiting, in which refugees find themselves caught in the bind of either normalizing the occupation by bettering their daily lives or keeping the camp as a symbol of catastrophe and victimhood by maintaining their suffering.216

This finally, brings us to the last dimension of the nakba, which is its reference not only to a moment in 1948 but also to the present day conditions of occupation. This nakba refers to what Jeff Halper describes as “the matrix of control,” a nexus that includes checkpoints, segregated roads, a separation barrier (also referred to as “the wall”), housing demolitions, water rights, “green spaces,” and military zones – all of the characteristics of the constant power exerted by one sovereign nation over

Palestinians.217

The artist projects described below address the multivalent meanings of the nakba including the nostalgia that many Palestinians have for their homes before 1948; the

215 http://www.decolonizing.ps/site/site3-returns/ 216 Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti have acted on this problematic with an organization called Campus in Camps, which functions as an alternative university, an arts organization and a design office for Palestinian refugees in the West Bank. http://www.campusincamps.ps/ I will discuss this project in more detail below. 217 Jeff Halper, An Israeli in Palestine: Resisting Dispossession, Redeeming Israel (London: Pluto Press, 2008) p150

148 violent dispossession that occurred during the war; and the present state of exile and occupation; and the hope for return.

This discussion of the valences of the term nakba helps us to understand different strategies of representing particular meanings of the nakba. For instance, I will argue that The Key Of Return, within the context of the Berlin Biennial, was a representation of the nakba that had the potential to use the symbol of a key to leverage an activist stance towards the present conditions of occupation but instead functioned more like a memorial for a lost past. I will also argue that Dor Guez declines to make work that points in a nostalgic way towards a lost past and instead deals with a present condition of occupation by using photographs as a space for civic participation and political imagination.

The Key of Return

On March 12, 2012 a giant key was removed from the entrance to the Aida refugee camp in the West Bank in order to be delivered to and exhibited in Berlin. This project, entitled The Key of Return, was a collaboration between the 7th Berlin Biennale and the

International Academy of Art, Palestine. There were accompanying workshops in Berlin for local Palestinian refugees, which were supported by the Goethe-Institute, Ramallah.

149 There were also a number of discursive events218, such as lectures and panel discussions, at the Berlin Biennale to unpack the meanings of this gesture.219 This project was co-curated by the residents of the Aida Refugee Camp; Khaled Hourani,

Director of International Art Academy Palestine; and Toleen Touq, an independent curator, based in Palestine and Jordan.220

Figure 4.1. Still from David Rych, The Key of Return (2012)

The key sculpture, made in 2008, is a collective work by the refugees of the Bethlehem area and the Aida Youth Centre [Figure 4.1]. It is made of steel, measures nine meters in

218 By “discursive events” I mean conversations that are not ancillary to the “central” artwork but are part of the work itself. This term has been used by Paul O’Neil in O'Neill, Paul, Mik Wilson eds., Curating and the Educational Turn (London, Amsterdam: Open Editions-de Appel, 2010) or as defined by Liam Gillick: “A discursive model of praxis has developed within the critical art context over the last twenty years. It is the offspring of critical theory and improvised, self-organized structures. It is the basis of art that involves the dissemination of information. It plays with social models and presents speculative constructs both within and beyond traditional gallery spaces. It is indebted to conceptual art’s reframing of relationships, and it requires decentered and revised histories in order to evolve.” “Maybe it would be better if we worked in groups of three: Part 1 of 2: The Discursive” E-Flux Journal 2/2009, http://www.e- flux.com/journal/maybe-it-would-be-better-if-we-worked-in-groups-of-three-part-1-of-2-the-discursive/ 219 These included “the Key of Return in Berlin – A Talk with Khaled Hourani, Samah Jabr and Toleen Touq” on June 5, 2012 and “Nakba – The Palestinian Narrative in Political Debates in Germany” with Christian Sterzing, Tsafrir Cohen, Andrea Nüsse, and Nadija Samour on May 15, 2012. 220 http://www.berlinbiennale.de/blog/en/projects/key-of-return-probably-the-biggest-key-in-the-world- 19705

150 length, weighs about a ton and was made to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the nakba. It was originally set on top of “the gate of return” at the entrance to the Aida camp, just outside of Bethlehem and has text printed on it that reads “not for sale.” This phrase is meant to signify the hope that Palestinian refugees in the camp may one day return to their ancestral homes, and, at the same time, it signals the resistance to losing this right of return through the process of negotiation with Israel.

The key began its transport to Berlin in 2012 when it was taken off of its perch on the gate to Aida and lowered onto a flat bed truck. A film by David Rych documents the process of its transport and reveals a number of details. Surrounding this moment was a ceremony that included a large audience, Palestinian flags, the singing of the Palestinian national anthem, and a group of youngsters dancing the traditional dabka. After the ceremony the audience got up and gathered around the key to sign it. Children posed for pictures in front of the key and an old man in a black and white keffiye221 was raised onto the shoulders of two younger men and said, “I have pledged to God to go back to our land and eat from its soil.” A group of women in hijab222 threw flowers, shouting

“yallah!” [let’s go!]. A German and Palestinian flag were fastened to the key on the truck and it left the camp. Rych’s film then shows how the truck drove out of the West Bank, crossing checkpoints and moving into Israel. We can see this when road signs in Arabic shifted to signs in Hebrew. The truck arrived at the Tel Aviv shipping port, surrounded by

221 Traditional headdress worn by Arab men, made famous by Yasser Arafat. 222 Traditional headdress worn by Arab women.

151 shipping containers and a Jewish man, marked by his kippah223, drives the forklift that carries the key from truck to shipping container. An intertitle at this point in the film states that the key spent 15 days on a cargo ship and another 15 days in customs after its arrival in Germany.

Figure 4.2. Still from David Rych, The Key of Return (2012)

At this point in the film we see the key arrive at the Kunst-Werke (KW) Institute for

Contemporary Art, where the Berlin Biennial was held [Figure 4.2]. A woman in a hijab took pictures as a crane lifted it off the truck and lowered it past fresh spring blossoms on blooming trees into the courtyard of the KW. A male voice speaking German, translated into English in subtitles, stated the following:

223 Traditional headcovering worn by Jewish men.

152 This is a reminder to the suffering of the Palestinian people. Those few who spoke out against this action want to erase our memory. They don’t even want us to remember but the fact that this key arrived shows that we hold on to our rights. Our right to return and to nationality and to sovereignty. Enough is enough. The Palestinian people have the right like any other people on this earth. The right to autonomy, the right to sovereignty, to nationality. So Palestine finally, like any other country on this earth, take its place in dignity and freedom. Many thanks - Palestine will not forget this. And we hope that one day we will be able to receive you all, in Jerusalem, our capital city, to pay tribute to you appropriately.

The Berlin Biennale: art and politics

Before moving into an analysis of the specific structure, meaning, reception, or value of

The Key of Return, this project must first be contextualized within the Berlin Biennale itself. The 2012 iteration, entitled Forget Fear! was the seventh biennale and was curated by the Polish artist Artur Zmijewski along with associate curators Voina224 and

Joanna Warsza. The press release stated that they sought to “present art that actually works, makes its mark on reality, and opens a space where politics can be performed.”

This was in direct opposition to the idea that “art is not capable of making a visible social impact because of its formal ‘autonomy’—what Zmijewski identifies as an inherent alienation.”225 This position, that art should produce politics rather than represent politics grows out of a long tradition from the Paris Commune to the Russian Avant

Garde to Dada, The Situationist International, Viennese Actionism, Tucaman Arde,

Agosto Boal, The Artist Workers Coalition and many more examples from the twentieth

224 Voina is a Russian art collective known for provocative, politically engaged projects. Its members include Oleg Vorotnikov (aka ago), Natalia Sokol (aka Kozljonok or Koza), Leonid Nikolayev (aka Leo the Fucknut) and Kasper Nienagliadny Sokol. 225 Olga Kopenkina, “Administered Occupation: Art and Politics at the 7th Berlin Bienale.” Art Journal (Spring 2012) http://artjournal.collegeart.org/?p=3457#fnref-3457-3

153 and early twenty first century.226 These varied strategies to link art with politics are also reactions against what Theodor Adorno referred to as ‘autonomy’ – the term that the

Berlin Biennale press release says that it is reacting against. Adorno described what he meant by autonomy in the following statement:

Art becomes social by its opposition to society, and it occupies this position only as autonomous art. By crystalizing in itself as something unique to itself, rather than complying with existing norms and qualifying as “socially useful,” it critiques society by merely existing, for which puritans of all stripes condemn it. There is nothing pure, nothing structured strictly according to its own imminent law, that doesn’t implicitly criticize the debasement of a situation evolving in the direction of a total exchange society in which everything is heteronomously defined. Art’s asociality is the determinate negation of a determinate society.227

In this passage Adorno argued that the only way for art to negate a ‘total exchange society’ is to withdraw from it and this withdrawal is referred to as its autonomy.

Instead Zmijewski’s driving philosophy behind the Berlin Biennale is that art should intervene in society in order to change it. He argues that it can be a direct social action saying, “We were interested neither in preserving artistic immunity nor distancing ourselves from society…Art is a mechanism which works by combining the powers of intellect and intuition, with a desire for dissent. It might give rise not to strange and

226 See Gerald Raunig, Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century (Los Angeles: Semiotexte, 2007), Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells, Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012), Claire Doherty, Situation (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2009), Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette. Collectivism after modernism: the art of social imagination after 1945. (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), Gregory Sholette, Dark Matter Art And Politics In The Age Of Enterprise Culture. (London: Pluto Press, 2011), Will Bradley and Charles Esche, Art And Social Change: A Critical Reader (London: Tate Publications, 2007). Nina Felshin, But is it art?: the spirit of art as activism. (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), Marc James Léger, Brave New Avant Garde: Essays On Contemporary Art And Politics (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2012). 227 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: Bloomsbury, 1997) p308.

154 inscrutable artworks, but to substantive tools for acting in the world.228 Zmijewski’s notion of art and a strategy for dissent is akin to what Claire Bishop has referred to as antagonism.229

The Berlin Biennale: From the Holocaust to Israel-Palestine

Forget Fear! included artists whose work intervened in politics as well as activists such as a group called “Occupy Biennale,” which gathered participants from social movements in Germany, Spain and the US, including the M15 Movement, Indignados,

Occupy Wall Street, Real Democracy Now, and Arabian Spring, that used KW as their base for the duration of the exhibition. One gallery entitled “Breaking the News” showed videos from social and political protests around the world. Forget Fear! also included a number of projects that addressed the politics of Israel-Palestine. Zmijewski had spent some time in Israel-Palestine prior to the Biennale. He made A Pilgrimage

(2003), in collaboration with Pawel Althamer, about a Polish-Catholic traditional pilgrimage to the holy land. That same year he also made Itzik, a portrait of an Israeli who is virulently anti-Palestinian who believes that the Holocaust gave Israelis the right to enact revenge upon others. He also made Lisa (2003) about a girl that Zmijewski met in Tel Aviv that believes that in a former life she was a Jewish boy, murdered at the age of 12 by Nazis. Our Songbook (2003) is about elderly Polish immigrants in a Tel Aviv nursing home that he asks to sing the Polish national anthem and other songs. In 2009

228 Artur Zmijewski and Joanna Wasa eds. Forget Fear! (Cologne: Walter Koenig, 2012) p10 229 Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110, Fall 2004 pp51-79

155 he was a resident at the Israeli Center for Digital Art, producing the film Between Us, a film that focuses on the divisions within Lod, an Israeli town with both Jewish and

Palestinian residents. Finally, his film Democracies (2009), which documents protests around the world, includes a number of protests in Israel-Palestine. These experiences of travel, research and production reveal Zmijewski’s interest in this region and the inclusion of works that address Israel-Palestine are an extension of this cultural work. In addition to The Key of Return, one work addressing Israel-Palestine was by the

Palestinian artist Khaled Jarrar. His State of Palestine involved the artist marking visitor’s passports with an invented “State of Palestine” stamp. This action of marking an official national document with an invented stamp of nationality proposed the possibility of a

Palestinian state to not only visitors to the biennial but also to border guards who might look at this stamp while carrying out their official duties. As discussed in chapter three, the Israeli artist Yael Bartana staged The First International Congress of the JRMIP in

Berlin. Also included in Forget Fear! was Rebranding European Muslims, a project by

Public Movement. Public Movement is a Tel Aviv based ‘performative research body’.

Through large-scale performances in the public realm they challenge us to consider communal identities – national, religious and cultural. In 2012 they began the project

Re-Branding European Muslims to investigate conflict around Islam in Europe and the use of branding by nation states, such as the EU, in the management of multiculturalism. Public Movement gave three branding agencies the task to ‘rebrand’

European Muslims.230

230 Ellen Feiss, Afterall, November 4, 2013. http://www.afterall.org/online/artists-at-work-public-

156

As discussed in chapter three, representations of the Holocaust by Bartana and others are also deeply entwined with the politics of Israel-Palestine. Zmijewski’s curatorial decisions illustrate this point. He was very aware that he is from Poland, the site of the major killing fields of the Holocaust, organizing a biennial in Germany, the site where the Holocaust was planned and managed. Two projects included in Forget Fear! that dealt with the Holocaust were Zmijewski’s own Berek (1999), a video of a game of tag played naked in a gas chamber. Another one by Łukasz Surowiec, entitled Berlin-

Birkenau, (2012) brought 320 birch trees from the area surrounding Auschwitz to be planted in Berlin. Zmijewski invited Israeli and Palestinian artists that make work about the contemporary politics of Israel-Palestine to highlight the relationship between

European Jewish tensions with Arabs in the Middle East, their roots in the Holocaust, and contemporary tensions between Muslims in Europe and members of their traditionally homogeneous societies. This curatorial gesture is made evident not only in the siting of these works in the same exhibition but is also expounded in through interviews with Galit Eilat, Yael Bartana, and Gideon Levy as well as essays by Rafael

Żurek and Alison Ramer in an accompanying catalog to Forget Fear.231

movement. 231 Artur Zmijewski and Joanna Wasa eds. Forget Fear! (Cologne: Walter Koenig, 2012)

157 The Berlin Biennale: Critical reception

The reception of the biennial was decidedly mixed and focused primarily on the curator’s explicit position on politicizing art. Ana Teixeira Pinto, writing for Art Agenda called the project “left-wing positions through the enactment of right-wing methods and

“vigilante” rhetorics.” Like many critics, Teixeira Pinto saw the project as problematically an extension of Zmijewski’s work as an artist. The problem for her was that Zmijewski was acting like a libertarian “Cowboy Cop” loner that saw institutions and communal organization as inherently corrupt.232 Jörg Heiser, writing for Freize, also saw the biennial as a reflection of Zmijewski’s state of mind and objected to the ways that activists were treated like zoo animals, objectified for the edification of both curator and viewer.233 He did however say that “the Biennale must be credited with forcing people to judge it in terms of its own ethical and political rhetoric, rather than merely reaching a taste-based verdict.”234 Maaike Lauwaert called the biennial’s premise “a rather one- dimensional approach to politics, the political in art or even the political potential of art”235 and once again, claimed that the problems with the exhibition were rooted in the fact that Zmijewski treated it as one big artwork.

Writing for Art Journal, Olga Kopenkina took a somewhat more nuanced stance that was at once sympathetic to and critical of the activist aspirations of Forget Fear! She asks,

232 http://www.art-agenda.com/reviews/7th-berlin-biennale/ 233 http://frieze-magazin.de/archiv/kritik/berlin-biennale/?lang=en 234 ibid 235 http://metropolism.com/reviews/one-big-zmijewski-work/

158 “how is it possible now to draw the line between an art of resistance to the dominant powers and art emerging within the agendas of institutions financed by corporate capital?”236 Citing Alain Badiou, she proposed the possibility that “militant art” is more about the process, or the struggle of resistance than about a finite form. Artworks that are more about definite form are usually at the service of glorifying the state or the powerful. On the other hand, ‘militant art’ “privileges pure existence, or what is becoming – not the result”237 As a result, Kopenkina suggests, most criticisms came from critics or viewers who expected this exhibition to function more like a normative exhibition of images that could be taken in all at once in a relative short period of time, as opposed to the longer term engagement that a process and event based endeavor required. But even for some activists engaged with the project, like one member of the

Occupy Museums group, “The curatorial choice to represent sociopolitical movements through a curated ‘occupation’—in a space that was quarantined and ripe with restrictions and power relationships between the ‘owners’ of the space and the occupiers—inherently made the representation performative and symbolic, and can be destructive to the movements.”238

How do these reactions by the critics cited above to the biennale in general affect a reading of the Key of Return in particular? First, for the critics that objected to the overt politicization of the biennial, the Key of Return might be seen as more activism than art.

236 Olga Kopenkina, “Administered Occupation: Art and Politics at the 7th Berlin Biienale.” Art Journal (Spring 2012) http://artjournal.collegeart.org/?p=3457#fnref-3457-3 237 ibid 238 ibid

159 This criticism is highlighted by the fact that the sculpture of the key was originally made by a group from the Aida refugee camp that self identified as activists and not artists and as an activist object was brought into an art context by the collaborating curators and artists that worked on the project. On the other hand, following the comments from the Occupy Museums group, as an activist project, the Key of Return was too tightly controlled as an art project to be adequately used as a mechanism for activism. But the question of whether The Key of Return is too political or too aesthetic can quickly devolve into larger theoretical debates about the general relationship between aesthetics and politics. The Key of Return must be judged in terms of the its success in not only its ability to reference the specific political condition of the nakba but also how the particular context of this politicized biennial and its setting in Berlin generate a new understanding of the nakba in both its historical and present dimensions.

Re-contextualizing the key

As discussed in Chapter two, some artists working site-specifically account for the social dimensions of the spaces in which culture is produced. With this in mind I argue that

The Key of Return must be read in terms of its sitedness within the Berlin Biennale as an institution dedicated to a particular relationship between art and activism. Furthermore,

The Key of Return also existed within Berlin, an urban site with a particular social history.

Like Bartana’s use of the Warsaw Ghetto, the site of Berlin for a biennial has the potential to be addressed for its political history – a history that is loaded with the

160 baggage of WWII and the Holocaust. Also, like Zmijewski’s use of the body as site in

80064, his own identity as a Polish artist, curating an exhibition in Berlin brings with it the historical baggage of the Holocaust. But as I argued in chapter three, the Holocaust also produced another trauma, which is the nakba. So, the context of Berlin as a site opens up The Key of Return to a reading of the nakba that is quite different than its meaning in its original site at the entrance to the Aida Refugee camp in Palestine.

In this sense, The Key of Return, becomes what Peter Weibel calls “contextual art.”239

For Weibel a context is a frame within which an artist works, self consciously making the work about that context. He gives Robert Smithson as an example of an artist who worked with landscape as context and Gordon Matta Clark who used the city as a context. He then uses Hans Haacke and Michael Asher as examples of artists that use the museum as a context.240 Given these examples, The Key of Return is closest to

Asher’s work. In Asher’s 1979 project for the 73rd American Exhibition at the Art

Institute of Chicago, Asher moved a 1788 life-size Jean-Antoine Houdon sculpture241 of

George Washington from the outdoor Michigan Avenue entrance of the museum to an indoor eighteenth century period room with paintings and decorative arts. He was taking a sculpture that had been disconnected from his historical context and placed it in a period room with sculptures, paintings and decorative arts from the period in which

239 Peter Weibel, “Contextual Art: Toward a Social Construction of Art” in Situation, Ed. Claire Doherty (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009) p46-52 240 ibid 241 The sculpture was actually a bronze replica “cast and acquired by the museum in 1917 and installed in 1925 at the Michigan Avenue entrance. “ Michael Asher, Writings 1973-1983 on works 1969-1979, written in collaboration with and edited by Bejamin HD Buchloh (Halifax: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design/Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 1983) p. 207

161 it was originally made. But because the sculpture had been outside for so long it had a patina that set it apart from the well preserved objects that now surrounded it. Asher declared that he was “the author of the situation, not of the elements.”242 This project was also a comment on a trajectory in abstract painting and sculpture that he noticed.

Once the white cube came into being, Asher saw paintings and sculptures adapt to that context. But once he and his contemporaries began to make large heavy sculptures that might originally be shown in white cube galleries, collectors would often place them outdoors. Then artists changed to adapt to this new tendency, making works that could fit in this setting. Large scale public sculpture could exist as “contemporary museum sculpture or simply as a continuation of decorative outdoor sculpture. Or monumental outdoor sculpture could appear to be an individual production imposed into a public or collective space.”243 By changing its context, Asher tried to shift the Houdon sculpture from a monumental sculpture for decorative use into a museum scaled sculpture that was stripped of its monumentality and placed within its historical context.

This Asher project relates to The Key of Return in a few ways. First, the project is predicated on a contextual shift, a new situation, that is the heart of the artwork.

Secondly, it uses a monumental sculpture as a pawn in a conceptual game. Third, it uses a sculpture that is a representation of a heroic subject central to national identity.

Asher’s use of Houdon’s sculpture of George Washington referenced the fact that it was a bronze copy of a marble original that was intended to be a sculptural representation

242 ibid, p. 209 243 ibid p. 210

162 of a historical subject, the founding president of the United States. Similarly, The Key of

Return references the key, a sign that is central to post-1948 Palestinian National

Identity, referencing the thousands of keys hanging in the homes of Palestinian refugees. The key sculpture that sat on top of Aida’s gate doesn’t fit any door. It is not an original key. It is a sculpture that signifies both a history of exile and national aspiration and in turn, the KW situation references that key one step further by re- contextualizing it. So what does this re-contextualizing do? In its original context in Aida, the key’s signified a political urgency defined by the refugee camp, run by UNRWA and footsteps away from the separation barrier. In this context it was a sign among signs of the nakba in its broadest sense, collectively signifying the dispossession that occurred in

1948 and 1967, the refugees that these events produced, the ongoing occupation, and the right of return. But in the new context of the KW The Key of Return loses this specific localized political and social context. The new context is an art institution, a biennial whose subject is the general relationship between art and politics. On the one hand, you could say that The Key of Return sought to reproduce political resistance and solidarity.

But perhaps that is too vague and relies on the assumption that representations of political situations produce political activism. In a more radical and site specific sense, I think that The Key of Return created a situation linking Berlin to the nakba. Perhaps this situation produced in Berlin, the site at which the Holocaust was conceived, asked the civic community of Berlin to take responsibility for its role in producing some of the conditions for Jewish emigration to Palestine and the consequent displacement of

Palestinians from their homes. Perhaps the Key of Return asks the question, if the

163 Holocaust had never happened, might the original keys that locked Palestinian homes in

1948 have remained mundane objects of daily functionality, rather than the trumped up symbols that they have become for Palestinian national identity?

Returning to the Key: what does is mean? What does it do?

The key was a project that Zmijewski and his associate curators saw as a radical gesture that sat on the borderland between art and politics. For Zmijewski it was meant to exist as a kind of political activism, that is, it was meant to activate the politics surrounding the symbol of the key. For Palestinians who saw the key at the entrance to Aida, its physical and symbolic presence reaffirmed their understanding of the multiple valances of the nakba described at the start of this chapter. In Berlin, for Palestinian refugees and those in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for political agency and sovereignty it also reaffirmed their political beliefs. But to Germans and other international viewers unaware of the history of the nakba, the relocation of the symbol of the key from a

Palestinian refugee camp could prompt an awareness of the nakba and its relationship to the Holocaust. I believe that Zmijewski intended the visibility of this connection between the nakba and the Holocaust to be a provocation to European audiences to not only see their complicity with the nakba but to act in support of the Palestinian national struggle against Israeli occupation.

164 Jorg Heizer, writing for Frieze, was one such viewer provoked by Zmijewski’s criticism of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. His criticism of the Berlin Biennale didn’t address The

Key of Return per se, but he did react negatively to Khaled Jarrar’s project, State of

Palestine (2012) and some wall text accompanying it that implied that Jarrar supports the one state solution244, saying that this statement is “nothing less than a denial by

Jarrar of Israel’s right to exist.”245 Heizer’s sentiment was echoed by the Jewish publication Tablet, which published a piece about the Biennial and Hourani’s contribution to it stating that it advocates for the “right of return” of Palestinian refugees, which would likely result in the demographic destruction of the Jewish state.”246 So do these responses to works by Palestinians in the Berlin Bienniale reflect either greater political awareness or prompt political action? One could say that the fact that State of Palestine and The Key of Return enraged their critics because of the threat posed by the right of return points to a success of these works. In this sense they are communicating a political message that caused a reaction rather than reaffirm passive complacency. But on the other hand these reactions reflect the usual discourse around

Israel-Palestine based on entrenched ideological positions that quickly devolves into pro-Palestine vs. pro-Israel. So does that mean that The Key of Return and Zmijewski’s

244 The political proposal of a “one state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has informally been around for almost as long as the conflict itself but two articles brought the idea back to prominence. See Tony Judt “Israel: The Alternative” New York Review of Books http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2003/oct/23/israel-the-alternative/ and Virginia Tilley, “The One-State Solution,” The London Review of Books, Vol. 25 No. 21, November 6, 2003. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n21/virginia-tilley/the-one-state-solution For sources that expand on this proposition, arguing that it in effect is already the state of affairs on the ground, see also Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir, The One-State Condition: Occupation and Democracy in Israel/Palestine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013) and Ed. Adi Ophir, Michal Givoni and Sari Hanafi, The Power of Inclusive Exclusion: Anatomy of Israeli Rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (New York: Zone Books, 2009) 245 http://frieze-magazin.de/archiv/kritik/berlin-biennale/?lang=en 246 http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/98794/holocaust-agitprop-in-berlin

165 inclusion of other works that address Palestinians failed? In terms of activating either substantial changes in discourse or mobilizing political change through activism, these gestures did fail. But in terms of memorializing the nakba, both its past and present condition, The Key of Return succeeded. The events depicted in Rhys’s film including the ceremonial departure of the key in Aida and its arrival in Berlin reveal rhetoric and aesthetics typical of nakba day247 rallies in Palestine that memorialize the events of

1948 and their implication in the present day occupation. The question is, what is achieved through yet another memorial for the nakba? Did The Key of Return activate political change in the ways that Zmijewski claimed all work in Forget Fear was intended to?

Like Decolonizing Architecture’s skepticism about Palestinians mourning of a lost past, prefering the notion of the ‘present return,’ Khaled Hourani has mixed feelings about symbolizing the nakba in terms of the past: “I am waiting for the day when we no longer need to mark its occasion; that is, when the occupation will end. Because the memorials of the nakba remind you of the problems in Palestine – you are only a victim.”248 The replication and dissemination of symbols of the nakba, through symbols such as the key, have the potential to reify and replicate the victimhood implicit in the narrative of

Palestinian displacement. But for Hourani, there is an element of empowerment at play once we start to look at the project from the perspective of authorship. He explains,

247 Nakba Day is generally commemorated by Palestinians on May 15, the day after Israel Independence Day, which is celebrated by Israelis. 248 Khaled Hourani, “Rethinking Representations of the Nakba,” in Transmission Annual: Catastrophe, Ed. Michael Corris, Jaspar Joseph-Lester, Sharon Kivland, and Noah Simblist. (London: Art Press, 2012) p.73

166 At the early stages of this process I used to call a taxi driver to take us from Ramallah to Bethlehem when we would meet with the people from Aida to discuss the project. We asked the driver to wait with us so that he could take us back. So he came into the meeting with us. For a while he sat quietly and listened. But at one point, when some people in the meeting were skeptical about the project, this taxi driver spoke up. He is an older gentleman and very distinguished, and everyone in the room listened to him intently. He said, ‘you must do this project because it’s very important.’ This guy knows nothing about art and was talking about the biennial without knowing what it even is. But he understood the importance of the symbolic act of transporting this key to be seen by people outside Palestine.249

Within this story there are a few things that become apparent. First of all, the authorship of this project was shared by the “Aida Refugee Camp,” which involved the original group that designed and made the key, a group of activists and community organizers that organized the Key project in Berlin; Hourani who is an artist and director of the International Academy of Art in Ramallah; and the curator, Toleen Touq. The communal nature of the very decision by artists, curators and community members is crucial to this project. Hourani was proud that a tipping point in the process of developing this project was brought about by a taxi driver, signifying both a lack of art world elitism and a kind of proletarian authenticity.

The taxi driver’s comments point to two things. First, that this project would break the isolation that many Palestinians feel after sixty plus years of occupation without any real progress in finding a solution to their situation. In this sense, his comments reflect a frustration with the turgid state of the Palestinian national project, let alone the

249 ibid

167 question of human rights under Israeli occupation. Second, Hourani’s comments illustrate the belief that an art project carries the possibility of producing political awareness and possibly even action, reflecting an optimistic attitude toward the political potential of culture.

But beyond the communal nature of the genesis of this project, it was important for

Hourani that the project not only make the Palestinian situation evident to an international audience but that it should also continue after the bienniale, providing a structure for discourse among Palestinians in the West Bank.

With this project, it’s not about the key per se, but about the wider conversation that surrounds the key as a symbol. So, after the key is taken to Berlin and back, it will begin an exhibition in which documents and a film about the process will be shown. There will also be workshops with students from Aida to talk about the nakba, the right of return and the symbolic meaning of the key. 250

But these events never did come to pass.251 Like many projects within the biennial circuit, its life was not one of a long-term engagement related to a particular community and instead began and ended along with the biennial itself. For this reason, this project wasn’t able to achieve its goal of working with a local Palestinian audience that would have become participants in rethinking the meaning of the nakba and the ways that it is symbolized. Instead it remained a reproduction of standard representations of the nakba and was directed primarily to an international audience.

250 ibid. p. 74 251 Interview with Khaled Hourani in Ramallah on July 22, 2013

168

Campus in Camps: an alternative to The Key of Return

Figure 4.3. photo: BraveNewAlps (Campus in Camps) (2012)

In contrast to The Key of Return, a project that succeeded in generating a discussion with Palestinians around the meaning of the nakba is Campus in Camps, a program of Al

Quds University and hosted by the Phoenix Center in Dheisheh refugee camp in

Bethlehem. It was initiated by Sandi Hilal and Alesandro Petti from Decolonizing

Architecture and according to Hilal, “Campus in Camps explores and produces new forms of representation of camps and refugees beyond the static and traditional symbols of victimization, passivity and poverty.”252 Zmijewski and his team originally approached Hilal to work with him on The Key of Return but Hilal and Petti declined the offer because they not only thought that it was a project in which a European artist/curator was instrumentalizing Palestinian suffering but also because they thought

252 http://www.campusincamps.ps/en/about/

169 that The Key of Return reinforced the problematic aspects of traditional symbols of the nakba. Campus in Camps represents an alternative to The Key of Return in a few ways.

First, its main audience is a constituency of Palestinians living in refugee camps in the

West Bank as opposed to a mostly international audience in Berlin. It functions as an alternative university in the Dheisheh refugee camp where both local and international scholars and artists run seminars on refugees, human rights, architecture, and urbanism

[figure 4.3]. Campus in Camps seeks to find a third space between the binary options of treating refugee camps in ways that either normalize the occupation on the one hand or embrace the victimhood of the refugees on the other. This third space allows for the camps to be sites that give the refugee agency to determine the nature of the space in which they live. Most importantly, Campus in Camps seeks to produce a space of the common. The ‘common’ is a term related to a wide array of theory that Campus In

Camps engages in, including writings by Massimo De Angelis and Stavros Stavrides,253

Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt,254 and Hannah Arendt255. The ‘common’ (or alternately, ‘the commons’) is a term that emerged in medieval England, referring to cultural and natural resources such as air water, and land that are held in common and available to all members of society. The term has recently been extended to describe a political space outside of neoliberal capitalism.

253 “An Architektur. On the Commons: A Public Interview with Massimo De Angelis and Stavros Stavrides.” e-flux journal June-August, no. 17 (2010): 1-17 254 Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. Commonwealth. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2009) 255 Hannah Arendt, “The Public Realm: The Common” The Human Condition (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1958) pp 50-57

170 One of the projects that Campus in Camps has embarked on is the creation of a

Collective Dictionary,256 written collaboratively by students and faculty, which includes terms that help to flesh out the meaning of a phrase like ‘the common’ through both

Western theoretical texts and Arab cultural history. For instance the Arabic word Al

Jameah, translates to ‘university’ but has a literal meaning of ‘public space.’ So Campus in Camps is an informal university whose goal is education that also creates a public space through discourse. Similarly, another word in their collective dictionary is

Mujaawara, which could mean either neighboring or forming and being a part of a community. This subtle play between the idle and the active senses of social spatiality allows for an examination of the present reality that exists within the camps as a means to leverage its more positive aspects. According to Allesandro Petti “The participants claim that the Collective Dictionary is their constantly amended ‘constitution’; it is their theoretical and practical reference, the guide for their actions within the camps.”257

Other terms in this dictionary include: vision, participation, responsibility, citizenship, relation, knowledge, ownership and sustainability.

In addition to the creation of this Collective Dictionary, the theoretical groundwork for this project involves lectures and seminars by global and local scholars. One visiting scholar, Michel Agier, is a French anthropologist that has studied refugee camps around the world, especially in Africa. He has proposed that the administration of refugee

256 This notion of a set of terms or phrases providing a kind of political lexicon has echoes in both Raymond William’s Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society Rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) and the legendary Whole Earth Catalog. 257 http://www.campusincamps.ps/en/about/

171 camps is often reminiscent of totalitarianism, keeping the undesirables out of sight and in a state of permanent emergency.258 But Campus in Camps extends these theoretical and historical examinations through practice-based investigations of urbanism. These initiatives are divided by Campus in Camps into the garden, the square, the bridge, the pool, the pathways, the stadium and others. For instance, in the Garden, Campus in

Camps focused on the Al Feniq center in the Dheisheh refugee camp, which opened a garden in 2004. According to a pamphlet about this project published on their website,

“This Campus in Camps initiative aims, in this sense, to deliver a new program of activities supported by design elements, to redefine the dynamics between the garden and the refugee camp as well as inside the garden itself, in order to bring it back to the common.”259

While the garden initiative is predicated on practice, it is also rooted in research for the historical context in which this building is planned. Like many of the projects conducted as a part of Campus in Camps, this research is documented on their website and through free downloadable booklets.260 The Al Feniq center is built on Anton Mountain, not far from Bethlehem. Until 1967, Jordan used the mountain as a military base, after the 1967 war when Israel occupied the West Bank, it became an Israeli military base and in 1994, following the Oslo accords, The Palestinian Authority used it as a police station.

In 1997, the Dheisheh Popular Committee petitioned the Palestinian authority to use

258 Michel Agier, Managing The Undesirables: Refugee Camps And Humanitarian Government (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2011) 259 http://www.campusincamps.ps/en/projects/01-the-garden/ 260 http://www.campusincamps.ps/en

172 this land to construct housing in order to relieve the overcrowding at the camp. This wish was granted eventually in addition to the mandate of setting up a cultural center.

In 2002, during the Second Intifada, the Israeli Military destroyed the center and once again established it as a base. In 2005 it was rebuilt once again as a cultural center and through 2011, a garden, coffee shop, fitness center and library were organized to construct a sense of civic space but the garden remained the least utilized. Campus in

Camps set out to redesign the garden to maximize its use as a public space. They identified five issues: visibility and accessibility, spaces for different activities, shading, interaction, and safekeeping. In addition to redesigning physical spaces like the benches or walls surrounding the garden, they also redesigned the social spaces of the garden by programming lectures and seminars on literature and public art and establishing an outdoor cinema.

This garden project speaks to the larger project of the refugee camp as a laboratory for citizenship. For Agamben, the camp is exemplary of the modern experience261 and the refugee provides a model of statelessness that might help us out of the problems of nationalism. Agamben, following Hannah Arendt, posits that there is a problematic relationship between the “Rights of Man” and the nation state whose laws protect those rights.262 The refugee, a stateless individual, exists within a state of exception from both nationhood and, as a result, its juridical protection of rights. The refugee

261 Giorgio Agamben, “The Camp as the Nomos of the Modern” in Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber eds., Violence, identity, and self-determination (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997). 106-118. 262 Giorgio Agamben, “We Refugees” Symposium, 49:2 (Summer 1995) p114

173 reveals the rupture that exists within the supposed universal protections of human rights in a system predicated on nationalism. A community such as the refugee camp has the potential to offer another model for citizenship outside of nationalism. A stateless public, constituted by the Palestinian refugee camp has the potential to create a common sense of agency that offers potential rewards for Palestinian civic life but also for the very notion of public space in general. Campus in Camps sets itself up as a forum of both theory and practice to develop concepts of the common for Palestinian refugees.

In contrast to The Key of Return, Campus in Camps focuses its energies on the nakba as a present return by working with a Palestinian refugee constituency to actively change the conditions of the nakba. Campus in Camps does so by thinking through the ways that a public can be constituted through both discourse and design. In the next section, I will turn to the work of Dor Guez, an artist whose work uses the image of the destroyed

Palestinian house as a symbol of the nakba. As I will argue, he uses photography as a public space for discourse, using Al-Lydd, a particular city that was affected by the legacy of 1948. Through the example of the ruins of this city, Guez shows us another kind of Palestinian public space other than the refugee camp, which both The Key of

Return and Campus in Camps reference.

174 Dor Guez: Pictures of a ruined home

As I have argued, the problems with the Key of Return have to do with a backward looking nostalgia for a lost Palestinian past, in particular the lost home. Andreas

Huyssen reminds us that the word nostalgia “is made up of the Greek nostos = home and algos = pain” and is defined as “homesickness” or a “longing for something far away or long ago.” Furthermore, he says that “the architectural ruin is an example of the indissoluble combination of spatial and temporal desires that trigger nostalgia.263

Following Huyssen’s definition, we could see nostalgia and lost or destroyed homes as integrally linked. Dor Guez has photographed ruins of Palestinian homes as a way to signify the nakba but while these ruins could be read literally as a nostalgic trigger for lost Palestinian homes, the medium of photography has the potential to activate

Decolonizing Architecture’s notion of the “present return” through what I will describe below as a “civil contract of photography.”

In 2010 KW hosted another exhibition that addressed the nakba, entitled Dor Guez: Al-

Lydd. Guez’s work is about his family’s political history, a rich layered story that blurs the boundaries between identity positions such as Jewish, Arab, Christian, Israeli and

Palestinian. The KW exhibition focused on Guez’s mother’s side of the family, the

Monayers, who are Palestinian, Christian, and from Al-Lydd. After the Israeli occupation of Al Lydd in 1948, Guez’s family decided to stay and as a result became Israeli citizens.

263 Andreas Huyssen, “Nostalgia for Ruins.” Grey Room 23 (2006) p7

175 Israel changed the name of this town from Al-Lydd to Lod, to reflect the shift in its identity from Palestinian to Israeli territory. Guez’s work focuses on his family’s history and as a result is predicted on his own hybrid identity as a Palestinian-Israeli.264 Guez uses the city of AL-Lydd/Lod as the subject of two groups of photographs. Al-Lydd (2010) includes thirteen photographs that were included in the 2010 KW exhibition. Lydd Ruins

(2009) includes ten photographs that were included in his 2012 exhibition at the Rose

Art Museum. These two groups of works by Guez use architecture as a sign for the history of his identity, and his personal relationship to the nakba. I will argue that these photographs of architectural ruins signify not only Guez’s individual relationship to the past of Al-Lydd but also a collective memory of that place in relation to the nakba.

264 Israelis such as Dor Guez, who are Palestinian in origin but have Israeli citizenship, are sometimes referred to as “Arab-Israelis” or “48 Palestinians.” The term “Arab-Israeli” is more often used in mainstream Israeli society but it denies the notion of a Palestinian identity and replaces it with the more general descriptor, “Arab,” to refer to an ethnic identity rather than a national one. “48 Palestinians” is more often used to admit to the identification that Palestinians with Israeli citizenship feel with the larger umbrella of Palestinian nationalism and as a result they feel connected to Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza and in the Diaspora. I am using the term “Palestinian-Israeli” to refer to the hybrid national identity that Palestinians such as Guez experience. One thing that is central to the identification that Palestinian- Israelis have with Palestinians outside of Israel is the shared experience of the nakba. As the story of Guez’s family illustrates, even though Palestinians such as those in Al-Lydd/Lod were able to remain in Palestine, they also experienced the trauma of displacement. Furthermore, Palestinian-Israelis, who currently are about 20% of the population, have experienced discrimination as a minority in Israel since 1948. For more on Palestinian-Israeli history and identity see As’ad Ghanem, The Palestinian Arab Minority in Israel, 1948-2000 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001); Nadim Rouhana, Palestinian Citizens in an Ethnic Jewish State: Identities in Conflict (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); and Ilan Papé, The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011)

176

Figure 4.4. Dor Guez, Al-Lydd #9 (2010)

The Al-Lydd series includes thirteen black and white photographs measuring 35 x 50 cm

[Figure 4.4]. They depict scenes from Lod in 2010 that seem like relatively ordinary snapshots of a poor Israeli town. For instance, Al-Lydd #1 is a horizontal image of an unpaved lot. At the horizon we can see a grouping of crumbling cement buildings, groups of cars parked outside, sagging electrical lines, and a few palm and Cyprus trees.

Al-Lydd #2 is also an image of an unpaved sandy lot with a decrepit one story stone building and a leaning palm tree at its center. This image is divided geometrically with the forced perspective of electrical lines that recede towards an apartment building in the distance at the center left of the image. In Al-Lydd #7 we get a closer view of some ramshackle one and two story buildings that are made from a combination of cement, stone and corrugated metal. Al-Lydd #9 is an image of a destroyed, uninhabited home made of stone and cement. Small scraggly bushes push out from its foundation, a torn cardboard box and bits of metal and plastic detritus are strewn about in the foreground,

177 and there is a gaping hole at the center of the house. Through this aperture we can see another palm tree in the distance. All of these images are bright and sunny with bulbous white clouds that rise up from the horizon. Guez was interested in depicting scenes that seem empty at first but upon closer inspection reveal traces of an absent presence: the destroyed homes of Palestinians who were evicted in 1948. For instance, he saw a

“hovering floor in a sea of thorns (Al-Lydd #11) or the remnants of a lone Arab house with no inhabitants (Al-Lydd #9). In other photographs, the viewer sees other sorts of traces: a recess in the ground where a house used to be (Al-Lydd #12) or leftover gravel from another demolition (Al-Lydd #6).”265

In contrast to the Al-Lydd series, photographs from Lydd Ruins are printed at 120 x 150 cm and are in color. The images included in Lydd Ruins are dark brooding nocturnal landscapes populated by ruins and overgrown vegetation. For instance, the distinct Arab vernacular architecture exemplified in Lydd Ruins 3 (2009), includes a limestone archway depicted at dusk, with weeds and wildflowers overtaking its structure. Lydd

Ruins 7 also includes an archway that takes up the right two thirds of the image. It is a large hulking structure made up of large stone blocks, their ragged edges illuminated by the glowing reflections of streetlights. In contrast to these images of abandoned overgrown houses, Lydd Ruins (Market Square) 10, depicts a contemporary apartment building with satellite dishes that point upwards towards a silvery gray-blue sky. The building seems aged and unkempt, surrounded by the tatters of a broken down chain

265 Dor Guez and Susanne Pfeffer. Dor Guez: al-Lydd (Berlin: KW, Institute for Contemporary Art, 2010), 39.

178 link fence. In the foreground we can see fire emanating from some trash, its red-orange flames lick at the pile of unidentifiable debris. In all of these images, we can see architecture in a state of decay. Most of the photographs in Lydd Ruins focus on the ruins of abandoned Palestinian homes from 1948. But with this last image, Lydd Ruins

10, Guez shows us another state of decay that is not only physical but social, the impoverished conditions in which present day Palestinians in Lod live. This contemporary condition is marked by both the ruins as traces of dispossession and the rumpled urban fabric of the Palestinian-Israeli underclass.266

The Occupation of Al-Lydd

The Lydd Ruins series were shot at night to evoke the raid on the evening of July 13,

1948 when Israeli forces invaded and conquered Al-Lydd. The events that led up to this moment help to understand the history embedded within the spaces that Guez photographed in Lod.

On May 25, 1948 Israeli military planes bombed Al-Lydd, destroying one house, killing three and wounding eight. This began a series of attacks over the next few weeks that were meant to induce panic and force the inhabitants of Al-Lydd to flee to Arab held territory to the east. On July 9-10, The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) began aerial bombing

266 In 1993 the average Israeli-Palestinian family‘s income was 72 percent of Jewish families in Israel and the percentage of Israeli-Palestinian families living beneath the poverty line was 2.26 times more than Jewish Israeli families. As’ad Ghanem, The Palestinian Arab Minority in Israel, 1948-2000 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001) p3

179 and shelling and forced the majority of the inhabitants of Al Lydd to flee. On July 11,

300-400 IDF troops entered the town and were given orders to shoot anyone seen in the streets. In addition to some Arab Legion casualties, dozens of unarmed detainees in the mosque and church were killed. On July 12 David Ben-Gurion267 ordered the expulsion of the remaining inhabitants and IDF troops went from house to house, rounding up able-bodied males. By the morning of July 13, most of the remaining inhabitants of Al-Lydd left, headed on foot toward areas controlled by the Arab

Legion.268 Between Al-Lydd and the neighboring town Ramla, 70,000 people were expelled, an action that Illan Pappé called a “large scale ethnic cleansing.”269 The 1030 people that remained were rounded up into a small area around the St George church in

Lydd. This space was surrounded by barbed wire and placed under military rule until

April 1949.270 According to Guez, this area was called the Lod Ghetto.271

The changing of the name of the city from Al-Lydd to Lod reflects a desire on the part of the Israeli regime to not only mark the shift in the town’s national sovereignty but it also is an example of a larger strategy to erase the history of Palestinian culture from the urban fabric of the newly established Israeli state. Ilan Papé has pointed out that starting in 1920, an ad-hoc group of Jewish scholars used Hebrew names to rename

267 Ben Gurion was the first Prime Minister of Israel and during the 1948 war he lead the military operations. 268 Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem 1947-1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) pp 203-211 269 Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006) p156 270 Haim Yacobi, The Jewish-Arab City: Spatio-Politics in a Mixed Community (London: Routledge, 2009) p 39 271 Dor Guez, “This is a Photograph of Lod Ghetto” ed. Gannit Ankori and Dabney Hailey, Dor Guez: 100 Steps to the Mediterranean (Waltham, MA: Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, 2012) p42

180 places purchased by new Jewish immigrants to Palestine. In 1949, David Ben Gurion reconvened this committee, which consisted of archaeologists and biblical experts, and officially made it a subdivision of the Jewish National Fund. This Naming Committee’s main task was to re-name Palestinian villages and towns that had been destroyed during the war.272 While historians such as Benny Morris, Ilan Pappé, Walid Khalidi273 and

Rashid Khalidi have relied on textual documents to recuperate obscured Palestinian histories in Israel such as that of Al-Lydd, art historians like Ariella Azoulay have relied on photographs as documents of pre-1948 Palestinian culture as well as photographs of

Israeli soldiers forcibly displacing the Palestinian population in the 1948 war. Dor Guez’s work is related to both the practice of the political historian and that of the art historian but as I will argue below, rather than using documents to prove certain historical facts, he uses traces of history to set up a symbolic space that uses the photograph to prompt civic discourse that actively engages with the contemporary repercussions of history.

Ruins

The images in Guez’s Al Lydd and Lydd Ruins tell the story of the occupation of Al-Lydd through the image of the ruin. According to Ariella Azoulay, “the ruin carries the memory of the destruction, yet distances the possibility of acknowledging the conditions that created it…This quality of the ruin renders it akin to a trap for the

272 Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006) p226 273 Walid Khalidi, All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (Washington DC: Institute for Palestinian Studies, 1992)

181 photographer or the viewer, who might fix it in its settingness, and erase its historicity.

This trap, however, is not a quality of photography. The photograph presents a ruin, yet it does not prevent the spectator from reconstructing its context or embedding it within a narrative.”274 Following Azoulay’s analysis which differentiates between the ruin itself and images of the ruin, we can see Guez’s photographs of the ruins in the Lydd Ruins series as a recuperation of the memory of the invasion of Lydd, the expulsion of most of its population, the destruction of hundreds of its homes, and the internment of its remaining population. Furthermore, Guez has exhibited these photographs within a larger context, embedding them within the narrative of his own family history. These photographs have been shown in exhibitions at institutions such as KW, The Rose Art

Museum and The Petah Tikva Museum in relation to his family’s personal archive of photographs and documentary films that include interviews that Guez has conducted with members of his family about their memories of 1948. For instance, Scannogram #1

(2010), included in both Guez’s KW and Rose Art Museum exhibitions is a print from a scanned image of his grandparent’s wedding in the Lod Ghetto, the first Christian wedding in the newly dubbed city of Lod. In his video Watermellons under the Bed

(2010), Guez’s grandmother and grandfather talk about the process of assimilating into

Israeli society after they left the Lod Ghetto and built a new life under Israeli sovereignty. They recount the fear that his family had of talking about politics and the desire to blend in with their new Jewish society.

274 Ariella Azoulay, “The Revolutionary Potential of the Ruin: On Dor Guez’s Photographic Series of Lydd Ruins”, Drorit Gur Arie ed. Georgiopolis (Petah Tikva, Israel: Petah Tikva Museum of Art, 2009)

182 Guez uses images of ruins to depict the traumatic moment of the invasion and occupation of Al-Lydd. But how does an image of destroyed architecture represent a moment of individual and collective trauma? Robert Bevan has pointed out that part of the horror of seeing a destroyed building is its shocking blow to the assumption that a building is meant to outlast the lifespan of human beings. When we see its destruction, the trace of an untimely end, this experience has the effect of representing not only violence against one family but to a whole community.275 Ariella Azoulay has also noted the relationship between the individual and the collective - between private and public experiences of space - that emerges from a contemplation of a ruin. Azoulay recalls

Hannah Arendt’s discussion of the division between public and private domains, which she characterizes as a necessary split between equality and difference. For Arendt, the public domain is based on equality and the private domain is based on difference.

Arendt believed that public and private realms must necessarily be split because if the public realm overtakes the private realm then the singularity of each individual would be erased by a public regime that sees each individual as the same. Azoulay extrapolates from Arendt saying, “Ethnic cleansing is the ultimate solution for the creation of an emancipated world of sameness because it strives for the complete removal of difference and the eradication of all of its traces.”276 Echoing Illan Papé’s claim that the expulsion of Palestinians from Al-Lydd and the destruction of their homes was an action of ethnic cleansing, Azoulay is saying that the destruction of a private Palestinian home

275 Robert Bevan, The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War (London: Reaktikon Books, 2006) p13 276 Ariella Azoulay. Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography (London: Verso Books, 2012) p138

183 by breaking through its walls severs the separation between public and private, exposing the Palestinian families that lived in these homes to the public space governed by the newly sovereign Israeli regime and thereby erasing each Palestinian family and each Palestinian subject of individual differences. They all became “Palestinians,” identical Arabs to the Israeli regime as opposed to individuals who might be differentiated based on religion, class or other characteristics. So when we look at

Guez’s Al-Lydd #9, a photograph depicting a Palestinian home with a huge hole in a wall, we can see the rupture that occurred between public and private space for one particular family. Also in Guez’s case, we can understand further the power of his willful insistence of the unique identity of his family as Christian Palestinians in distinction from

Muslim Palestinians, which were the majority of the population of Al-Lydd before 1948.

Again, for the Israeli regime they were all Palestinians but Guez wants to recuperate some of the difference that existed within the private realm of his family’s home.

But the rupture between public and private didn’t just deny Guez’s family the right to a private space defined by individual difference, it also took away their right to participate in the public realm. Azoulay explains,

When a phenomenon like the massive demolition of houses is in question, a case in which a sovereign power treats the private domain of its subjects as it were a theater of military action depriving them of the right to participate in public space, the critical response might consist…in enunciating the claim that the first form of relation between the public and the private…no longer exists. But if we accept the ontological claim that a certain form of relation between the private and the public domain is always preserved, it becomes necessary to find other means of thinking

184 through the empty and necessary relation in order to render account for a situation which it no longer seems to obtain.277

Azoulay is arguing here that a means of thinking through the relation between private and public is a photograph of a demolished house. Each image of a ruin potentially becomes a public forum for Palestinians to gather together around “a common referent of the gaze.”278 The referent of the ruin is common to a Palestinian gaze because of the ubiquity of housing demolitions as a method of Israeli domination of Palestinians, a practice that began in 1948 and continues to this day.279 Because of the continuity of the creation of Palestinian ruins by the Israeli regime they signify not only the nostalgic loss of homes in 1948 but also the repeated destruction of Palestinian homes throughout an ongoing occupation. But for Azoulay, the communal act of gathering around has the potential to create a moment of political imagination. For instance, the

Romantic darkness in Lydd Ruins

invites the spectator to observe them through the nocturnal veil enwrapping them, to realize that their settingness is not a lie whose removal would render the truth accessible. If the ruins have a truth, it does not lie in the remnants themselves, but rather in the very ability of many to take part in the generation of truth. Without an act of political imagination, the black veil will emerge as an incidental, external interruption, which under certain conditions might be overcome and removed, and not as part of the way in which the ruins appear to the gaze.280

277 ibid p140 278 ibid p153 279 The Israel Committee Against Housing Demolition (ICAHD) both researches the demolition of Palestinian homes by Israel from 1948 till today and protests these practices through the re-building of destroyed homes as an act of civil disobedience. http://www.icahd.org/. Eyal Weizman has written that ICAHD’s methods “show that research produced from within architecture, can itself become architecture – moreover, architectural practice that turns against architecture.” Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (New York: Verso, 2007) p261 280 Ariella Azoulay, “The Revolutionary Potential of the Ruin: On Dor Guez’s Photographic Series of Lydd Ruins” in Drorit Gur Arie ed. Georgiopolis (Petah Tikva, Israel: Petah Tikva Museum of Art, 2009) p 172

185

Here Azoulay is saying that first the setting of the ruin, the city of Lod, is a lie. Lod as a renamed city is part of a wider system of the erasure of the Palestinian cultural history in Al-Lydd. But that is not to say that simply removing the ruin from that setting automatically reveals the truth of the conditions of its history of architectural and cultural destruction. The truth lies not in the image per se but in the potential that the gaze of the spectator activates, a collective gaze that is an act of political imagination.

But again, this can’t be any kind of gaze. Azoulay wants to reorganize the gaze so that it is constituted by a civil contract. She doesn’t want Guez’s photographs to provoke an

Israeli or international audience at the KW or Rose Art Museum to feel empathy, shame, or compassion. Instead, she wants these photographs to provoke a conversation among

Palestinians or Israelis or international viewers about the past and present conditions of the occupation that these ruins signify.

The Civil Contract of Photography

At the core of Azoulay’s notion of the civil contract of photography is the relationship between citizenship and photography:

Citizenship is not merely a status, a good, or a piece of private property possessed by the citizen, but rather a tool of a struggle or an obligation to others to struggle against injuries inflicted on those others, citizen and noncitizen alike – others who are governed along with the spectator. The civil spectator has a duty to employ that skill the day she encounters

186 photographs of those injuries – to employ it in order to negotiate the manner in which she and the photographed are ruled.281

So when the civil spectator encounters Guez’s photographs of the ruined remains of

Palestinian houses in Lod, Azoulay is saying that the spectator has a duty to employ their citizenship as a tool of struggle to negotiate the conditions under which both she and the photographed are ruled. In the case of Guez’s exhibition of these photographs at the

Petah Tikva Museum, that would mean that an Israeli citizen who views Guez’s work has the duty to employ their rights to renegotiate the conditions of occupation that govern the Palestinian citizens of Lod. In the case of American viewers at his exhibition at the

Rose Art Museum or German viewers at the KW, that would mean that their citizenship should also be negotiated under the policies of their respective governments in relation to Israel-Palestine and the conditions of occupation that Guez’s photographs depict. But

Azoulay wants the civic space of photography to go beyond the national citizenships that Israelis, Americans or Germans might have. Instead, she believes that photography can reveal a civic space of gaze, speech and action in which we can address one another instead of the ruling power.282 This also allows stateless persons such as Palestinians unlike Guez and more like the refugees in Aida refugee camp that created the Key of

Return or the Palestinian refugees that participate in Campus in Camps to participate in an expanded notion of citizenship within the civic space of photography. Furthermore,

Azoulay posits that the subjects of a photograph are not static facts but rather subjects that actively engage their viewers. Thus the ruins in Guez’s photographs are not

281 Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008) p14 282 ibid. p17

187 evidence of the nakba in general or even the particular circumstances of the invasion and occupation of Al-Lydd. Instead, they call on us as viewers to open up a conversation about the meaning of these ruins and the nakba that they symbolize. They call on us to think through the historical and contemporary dimensions of the nakba and the specific implications that they have on Palestinian-Israelis living in Lod such as Guez’s family. The civic space of these photographs can help us to renegotiate the conditions of Guez’s own citizenship.

The photograph in context

As I mentioned above, Guez has exhibited these photographic works in relation to his videos, which include interviews with members of his family. This context helps to leverage the civic potential of these photographs by presenting a discourse around the nakba and the specific case of the Palestinian Christian minority in Israel. In Guez’s video

July 13 (2009), Jacob Monayer, Guez’s grandfather, tells the story of the Israeli invasion of Al-Lydd in 1948. He says that he remembers that he and his family stayed in the rooms farthest from the road to avoid the bullets and eventually went to the church to find that it was packed with people. He says that all the Christians of the town went to the church because they though that it wouldn’t be attacked but went on to live in the church for four years until 1953.283 Later he notes that his children are now Israeli. In

Subaru Mercedes (2009) Guez interviews one of Jacob Monayer’s children, Sami, who

283 Dor Guez and Susanne Pfeffer. Dor Guez: al-Lydd. (Berlin: KW, Institute for Contemporary Art, 2010) p 81

188 described the nature of his Israeli-Palestinian identity saying that for Jews in Israel he is

Palestinian but when he might go to the West Bank or Jordan that Palestinians there consider him Israeli and in some cases might be considered a traitor.284

These interviews help us to see both the past and present loss contained in the photographs of ruined homes. According to Guez:

The series Al-Lydd presents the necessary connection between ethics and aesthetics. I think that the two are inseparable. The old city of Lod, which is in fact the Arab City of Al-Lydd, is slowly being eaten away and ruined. I am not referring to the 1948 war, which was traumatic for us all, but also a longer, more complex process of erasure and denial of Arab history that continues to this day…At first glance these photographs are about emptiness. They depict erased plots where Al-Lydd used to be. These lots, however, are not empty. They hold an indexical arrangement of signs and testaments”285

When Guez describes the Al-Lydd series as an illustration of the necessary connections between ethics and aesthetics, he recalls Jacques Rancière’s description of the relationship between these two terms. For Rancière, ethics is rooted in ethos, which is

“the dwelling and the way of being, the way of life corresponding to this dwelling.” 286

So in the context of a house such as the ones that Guez depicts, ethics refers to both the house and the way that one lives in it. For Rancière, ethics “establishes the identity between an environment, a way of being and a principle of action.” In this sense, ethics blurs the boundary between aesthetics, which describes a way of being, and politics,

284 ibid. p. 85 285 ibid. p 39 286 Jacques Ranciere, “The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics” Critical Horizons 7:1 (2006) p 2

189 which is defined by the actions that one takes about the way that one lives. Ethics and aesthetics become intertwined for Rancière because there is a political battle around what is permissible to say or show. Furthermore for Ranciere, “Politics exists when the figure of a specific subject is constituted.”287 By showing the destroyed homes of

Palestinians in Al-Lydd/Lod in the context of interviews by Palestinians in Lod, his own family no less that are struggling for equal recognition within the Israeli regime, Guez embraces Ranciere’s metaphor. He shows us the ethos of Al-Lydd/Lod, which is defined by a way of life defined by living in and around the ruins of Palestinian past. Guez’s photographs engage the politics of aesthetics by defiantly showing a Palestinian-Israeli citizenry and insisting on our awareness of the historical and contemporary Palestinian presence within Israeli society. Ranciere’s notion of the political power of the image of visualizing an unrecognized political subject adds to the political power that Azoulay’s notion of the civic contract that the photograph allows. When we consider both

Ranciere and Azoulay’s ideas about the political power of a visual artwork then we can imagine Guez’s photographs as political in two respects. First, their visuality helps to resist the willful Israeli erasure of all traces of the Palestinian subject from the landscape of Israel- Palestine, a political act in itself. Secondly, once the image exists it opens up the possibility of civic engagement to reconstitute the nature of the Palestinian subject.

287 Jacques Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sesible (London: Continuum, 2000) p51

190

Chapter 5: Shooting Back: Lebanon through the lens of a camera, the sight of a gun

Stories can have a life of their own. They are told, heard, told again, written down, archived, recorded and gathered together with supporting documents, photographs or film. A story, especially in the context of war, can fragment, multiply and turn into a series of mystifying contradictions. The veracity of a story’s truth becomes increasingly elusive when one has to choose between an individual’s partial understanding of a situation and the unreliable grand narratives told to us by power brokers who are, first and foremost, driven by ideology. In the case of Lebanon’s Civil War, which included multiple Lebanese sectarian factions as well as Syria, Israel, and other nations, there is even disagreement about when it ended, or if it has ended at all. Some suggest that the war didn’t last from 1975-1990 but instead lasted until 2000 when Israel withdrew from

Southern Lebanon. Some also suggest that the term civil war doesn’t address the international nature of the war including the involvement of the U.S.288

In this chapter I look at the stories told about the Israeli invasion and occupation of

Lebanon in 1982 through a series of works by Akram Zaatari. In these works Zaatari acts as a historian who documents war as a series of ruptures, questioning the veracity of any seamless narrative of the past. He also proposes that conversation could be a model for the slow repair of these historical ruptures. I frame the discussion of these projects

288 Hannah Feldman and Akram Zaatari, “Mining War: Fragments form a Conversation Already Passed” Art Journal, Vol. 66, No. 2 (Summer, 2007) p 48

191 with Jalal Toufic’s notion of “the withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster,” which questions the reliability of the historian, the documentarian and the archivist in the wake of trauma.289 Zataari’s All is Well on the Border (1997) is an homage to Jean

Luc Godard’s Ici Et Ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere) (1972), a film originally made by the invitation of Fatah that ended up as a deconstruction of the propaganda of revolutionary movements.290 The ‘elsewhere’ for Zaatari is the southern zone of

Lebanon occupied by Israel, but like Godard he simultaneously is sympathetic to and suspect of representations of Lebanese experiences under this occupation. This Day

(2003) similarly unpacks the ideological strains in three sets of images: Zaatari’s personal photos recording the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982; an Orientalist group of photos of Bedouins from the 1950s; and images found online during the Al Aqsa intifada from 2000-2002. In This Day, we see the ways in which a recent past haunts the political present on both a personal and communal level. These two works set up two later projects based on the triangulation of Israel-Lebanon-Palestine. His book project, A

Conversation with an Imagined Israeli Filmmaker (2012) and film/video installation,

Letter to a Refusing Pilot (2013) both hinge on his memory of the Israeli bombing of his hometown of Saida and its intersection with the stories of the Israeli filmmaker Avi

Mograbi and the Israeli architect Hagai Tamir. These last two works are predicated on conversations between citizens of countries at war. I argue that these conversations are not only the research necessary for this work to be produced but, following Grant

289 Jalal Toufic, The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster (Forthcoming Books, 2009) 290 Fatah is now, and was in 1972, the largest and most influential party of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). Fatah is a reverse acronym of “Harkat al-tahrir a-watani al-falastini” – The Palestinian National Liberation Movement. Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998) p253

192 Kester’s notion of dialogical aesthetics, conversation is at the core of the meaning and methodology of the artwork.291

Israel-Palestine-Lebanon

While this dissertation focuses on Israel-Palestine, there are a number of aesthetic and political relationships between Israel-Palestine that Lebanon and Beirut in particular help to illuminate. Edward Said called the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians a “curious symbiosis…nurtured in Lebanon.”292 The modern history of Lebanon’s relationship to Israel-Palestine is both deep and complex but major touchstones include the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) moving its base of operations there in

1971; the Israeli and Palestinian involvement in the Lebanese civil war from 1975-1990; the Israeli invasion in 1978 and occupation of southern Lebanon until 2000; the massacres of the Sabra and Shatilla Palestinian refugee camps; and the Israeli invasion in 2006.293 For Said, Israel’s invasion and occupation of Lebanon “is nothing more than a continuation…of its war against those innocent Palestinian civilians who were driven from their homeland in 1948.”294 While I won’t describe the incredibly complex

291 Grant H. Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) 292 Edward Said, “Palestinians in the Aftermath of Beirut,” Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 12, No. 2. (Winter, 1983) p5 293 See Samir Kassir, Beirut (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon (New York: Atheneum, 1990), and Sune Haugbolle, War and Memory in Lebanon (Cambridge University Press, 2010), Asher Kaufman, Contested Frontiers in the Syria-Lebanon- Israel Region: Cartography, Sovereignty, and Conflict (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013) 294 Said, “Palestinians in the Aftermath of Beirut,” p4

193 intricacies of this political history, I will use Zaatari’s work to tell relevant parts of its story.

Beirut: The Postwar Generation

Many Lebanese artists, concentrated in Beirut, have focused on the civil war and its aftermath as the subject of their work. Much has been written about this “postwar” generation of artists and the ways that their work has addressed the ways that memory, history, and the archive become spaces where fact and fiction collide.295 Most internationally recognized is Walid Raad’s Atlas Group, a fictional collective that gathered photographs, documents, and videos to tell the story of the civil war. But beyond Raad’s project, the rest of the postwar generation has also integrated into a global art network. As Sarah Rogers has noted,

The End of the Lebanese civil war coincided with the art market’s celebratory globalism, and in the following decade contemporary postwar artists garnered the attention of the European and American art world. In 1997, French curator Catherine David included Lebanese artists in her Documenta X. Five years later David initiated her continuing project Tamáss: Contemporary Arab Representations by profiling work from Beirut. Since then, the international exhibition roster for Lebanese artists has included the Venice Biennale (2003), DisORIENTation: Contemporary Arab Arts from the Middle East at the Berlin House of Cultures (2003), Laughter at the London Film Festival (2004), Out of Beirut at Modern Art Oxford (2006), the Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville (2006), and the Bienal de Sao Paolo (2006). Articles and reviews in Artforum International, Art News, Flash Art, The New York Times, a 2002

295 See TJ Demos, “Out of Beirut: Mobile Histories and the Politics of Fiction” in The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Crisis (Duke, 2013), Carrie Lambert-Beatty, “Make Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility” October 129, Summer 2009 pp 51-84, and Vered Maimon, “Third citizen: On Models of Criticality in Contemporary Artistic Practices” October 129, Summer 2009 pp 85-112

194 special edition of the US based College Art Association’s publication, Art Journal further excited an interest in Lebanon.296

This postwar generation has created an incredibly vibrant scene including the exhibition space and art school Ashkal Alwan, The Beirut Art Center, the Arab Image Foundation, and a small group of commercial galleries, most notably Sfeir Semler. Curators such as

Christine Tohme, who runs Ashkal Alwan and organizes Home Works, Rasha Salti, who has organized film festivals, Kirsten Scheidt at the American University of Beirut, and the critic Kaelen Wilson Goldie have been essential to the critical dynamism of art in Beirut.

One interesting thing about this art scene is the ways in which the institutions and artists are interdisciplinary, conceptually based, with a tendency towards politics. In addition, the post war scene has produced artists that are writers, curators and the founders of institutions. Akram Zaatari, Fouad el-Khoury, and Walid Raad were founders of the Arab Image Foundations. Walid Sadek and Jalal Toufic, both artists, have published writing that has been influential to the internal discourse of the Beirut art community. Rasha Salti was a collaborator on a number of projects including many films by Akram Zaatari. Additionally, many of these institutions have become centers for art being made in and about the region. For instance, Home Works has included participation by Ayreen Anastas and Emily Jacir and their archive, combined with the video archive at the Beirut Art Center is an index of artists from the Middle East and

North Africa.

296 Sarah Rogers, Postwar Arts and the Historical Roots of Beirut’s Cosmopolitanism (PhD dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 2008)

195

As Rogers notes, the cosmopolitanism of the postwar Beirut art scene was linked to an increasingly globalized art world. Keeping this in mind it is important to note that many of the players in this scene have had varying degrees of locality in relation to Lebanon.

For instance, Walid Raad has been based in New York for many years, Jalal Toufic is in

Istanbul, Rasha Salti has spent a great deal of time in Berlin and Walid Sadek was educated in the US.

Postwar artists include Tony Chakar, Joanna Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Lamia

Joreige, Bilal Khbeiz, Elias Khoury, Rabih Mroué and Lina Saneh, Walid Raad, Marwan

Rechmaoui, Walid Sadek, Jalal Toufic, Akram Zaatari. While many of their works address

Israel and Palestine in relation to both the historical and contemporary politics of

Lebanon, Akram Zaatari’s work has a particular set of through lines that poignantly touch on the complexity of these relationships. Zaatari grew up in southern Lebanon and a number of his works have dealt with both the Israeli invasion and occupation. He also has touched on the ways that Lebanese prisoners in Israeli jails have told their stories through letters and testimony. Other themes include archaeology, architecture, and the archive, including both letters and photographs as documents of history.

All is Well on the Border

Zaatari’s All Is Well on the Border (1997) opens with the following text:

Between 1978 and 2000, the Israeli army occupied a major part of South Lebanon, and isolated it from the rest of the county. This area designated

196 at Al-Sharit (the band) was being slowly deserted by its people who were forced to leave.

In 1982 the Lebanese Resistance Front was formed out of many secular political parties, and aimed to force the Israeli army out of South Lebanon through military resistance. Many of those resistant-fighters were caught and detained by the Israelis while executing operations.

The film’s structure includes scenes with actors as well as archival footage. Three actors read testimonies of Lebanese prisonerswho were caught executing military operations against Israel, who at the time of filming were held in Israeli jails. 297 In addition to these testimonies, another actor reads the letters of Nabih Awada sent to his family from

Askalan prison.298 The archival footage is from the military occupation of al Sharit al-

Hududi (the area bordering Israel and amounting to one tenth of Lebanon’s territory) as well as footage shot by Zaatari of everyday life in Hay el Sollom, a suburb to the south of

Beirut that is home to the refugees of Hubbariya, a village in al Sharit. The film is a meditation on the subject of the Israeli occupation of Southern Lebanon through narratives of invasion, occupation, resistance, capture and imprisonment. But Zaatari is especially interested in the ways that these stories are told through various filters (oral testimony and written correspondence), how images and narratives serve ideology, and the resultant tension between fact and fiction.

297 Mohamad Abu Hamman, Riad Issa, Jamal Mahroum, Kamil Daher, Bilal Khbeiz, and Walid Haidar Ahmad were prisoners in Askalan prison in Israel and Khiam prison in South Lebanon. 298 Nabih Awada joined the Labanese resistance with the Communist Party in 1986. He was captured while taking part in a military mission against the Israeli army in Deir el Seian, South Lebanon. He was interrogated for 100 days at a military intelligence center in Sarafand Israel and then moved to a series of prisons before finally being sent to Askalan prison in 1990, just before his eighteenth birthday. He was released in 1998 and he returned to Lebanon.

197 For instance, Awada’s letters are written on stationary provided by the Israeli prisons and structured by the rules that govern prison correspondence.299 At the top of each of these letters is a message in English and Arabic: “Family News of a Strictly Personal

Nature.” The Israelis ask the prisoners to self-censor based on the notion that there is a division between the personal and the political. As a result the nature of the correspondence is greetings of love to a mother or memories of the last time that he saw his sister. Awada decorates these letters with colorfully lyrical drawings of flowers, giving an image to the sugarcoated nature of their content. These letters become complex artifacts of the intermingling of fact and fiction. They relay factual thought and feelings but the most crucial aspects of the life of a prisoner can’t be conveyed, thus while they don’t lie per se, these letters are fiction by virtue of omission. Zaatari presents them in the film through voiceovers by actors who read them against the backdrop of archival footage from the invasion and occupation of Al Sharit, allowing these images to fill in the redacted political subtext.

Zaatari gathered the prisoners’ testimonies through audio interviews and compiled a more frank description of the conditions within the jails and the political activities that led to their capture. The first testimony, read by X, is played by Khalil Hanoun, a tall thin soft-spoken man who is seen in silhouette against a yellow monochromatic background, a photograph of a military base.300 He starts off with the following memory:

299 Awada gave these letters to Zaatari after he was released from prison. They also serve as the basis for a photographic series that has been shown together with All is Well on the Border. 300 Hanoun is a television producer and film director based in Beirut

198 In 1982, the Israelis invaded the country. I was 12 years old, coming of age. They entered and ravaged every fruit tree on their way and then started shelling. I had a feeling that, no doubt, this is an enemy army…Inside the occupied area, you can’t easily recognize who is an Israeli agent and who is not. Agents could be soldiers wandering around without any weapons. They could even be a part of any security agency anywhere, always disguised. It could be a merchant, a shopkeeper or the taxi driver who drives you home from the crossing. It could be the person that carries your luggage from one side of the crossing to the other side. It could be any citizen, newspaper or lottery seller. It could be a key person, even a mayor. And, inside detention centers, it could be one of the detained, like you.301

This notion of disguised agents offers yet another filter through which reality and fiction collide. But when X describes the occupied zone of southern Lebanon he shows how the supposed freedom of everyday life is an illusion:

One feels as if in a large prison, where one is free to move inside it but not outside. Most of the people inside are controlled. One needs a permit for one’s car to move in and out of Al-Sharit, or else you must travel by taxi. While crossing by car, the plate number of your vehicle needs to be changed…There should always be two persons in the car, it is forbidden to drive one’s car alone…We used to go to school, sit in the classroom, totally distracted. One isn’t at ease, and the students can’t learn anything. They were always waiting for something to happen. The Israelis could intervene while the teacher led the class. They could come and besiege the school to abduct people and exile others…They exiled a group of people from the village, old men, including blind people, the mayor, my uncle, and many others…In 1989, there was a big campaign against those who refused to cooperate, even if they weren’t active in the party. Those who refused were detained, exiled and that’s how I was imprisoned.302

X describes a condition of occupation that ultimately led him to be jailed in an actual prison, not the metaphorical prison of Al Sharit. Later another actor, Ali Hammoud, reads the testimony of Y, shown in full light in black and white against a red

301 Akram Zaatari and Karl Bassil eds. Earth of Endless Secrets (Frankfurt: Portikus, 2009) p32 302 ibid

199 monochromatic background of a hillside. He doesn’t look at the camera and is reading off of a teleprompter to the side of the camera. He describes a mission in which he had to enter Israel for an attack along with another member of the Democratic Front. The two of them meet another contact in Jerusalem that is supposed to join them in the mission, but he turns out to be an Israeli Intelligence agent. They are captured and interrogated, but Y states that he was glad that he had watched so many detective movies so that he was familiar with the setup of an interrogation cell, including the one- way mirror. Later in his testimony, he adds that Mohammad Assaf, another prisoner, came up with the idea for an escape from Khiam prison after watching The Great

Escape, a 1963 Hollywood film about a group of US and British soldiers that escape from a Nazi POW camp. Once again, the reality of an interrogation of prison escape is mediated through fantasy, inspired by the fiction of film and TV.

Finally, the testimony of Z is read by the architect, artist, and theorist Tony Chakar. He is also seen in full light against a blue monochromatic background, which has the image of a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling of a nondescript room. He tells stories of the harsh treatment that prisoners would experience. They were beaten regularly and received little medical treatment. They shared a bucket as a toilet that they had to sleep next to, gradually becoming numb to the acrid smell. To survive they would pray, hearing the call to prayer from the nearby village and would teach each other English.

But most of all, they planned and implemented an escape.

200 Zaatari uses the prisoner’s testimonies and correspondence to tell a series of stories.

But because he uses actors to portray the prisoners, and directs them to reveal the artifice of their performance, the truth of what they are saying is deferred to the point that we as viewers are unsure whom to believe. Furthermore, by referencing Hollywood movies such as The Great Escape, Zaatari seems to be suggesting that even the prisoners themselves, the actors in their own very real drama, might have moved between reality and fantasy both in the moment and in its recollection. Finally, the testimonies seem to suggest that the experience of being under occupation might in itself be a liminal state, between reality and fiction and between sovereignty and submission. For instance, one isn’t sure where one is. One is still in Lebanon but has to change the markers of civic organization such as license plates because of Israeli control in the territory of Al Sharit.

One is unsure if someone is who they say they are and who is a spy, pretending to be someone else. Just as occupation blurs the clear borders between autonomous states, it also blurs the edges between identity positions.

Zaatari intercuts these prisoners’ letters and testimonies with recitations by young schoolchildren in the classrooms of Hay el Sollom. A young boy reads from an essay that he wrote about the village Hubbariyah that his parents fled:

The village is like a mother. Words would never do her justice. How shall I start, describe its beauty, its location, or its glorious resistant history that led to massacres. The first was one that resulted in ninety persons being martyred in one house. But I don’t know, I’ll try to describe it through my mother’s eyes, in tears every time I ask her about our village. Her heart is full of grief. She feels nostalgic for her childhood and brings a photo

201 album with photos of green valleys, the hills, and old mud house of her relatives. She says: Look, this is your village that we were deprived of by occupation.

Two things are notable in this passage. First, it echoes narratives by Palestinians about their own lost way of life - the martyrdom, the nostalgia for a village that was pure and verdant, and the older generations teaching their children to mourn for a past that has been destroyed by occupation. Second, the use of a photo album to archive documents of this lost past is a trope that Lebanese and Palestinians share as a methodology to signify the traces of trauma.

Here and Elsewhere

Figure 5.2. Still from Jean-Luc Godard, Ici et Ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere) (1972)

202

All is Well on the Border was influenced by Jean-Luc Godard’s 1972 film Ici et Ailleurs

(Here and Elsewhere), which Zaatari saw as a meditation on the ideology of representation [Figure 5.2].303 In 1970 Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin were invited by

Fatah to make a film about their revolutionary struggle. He traveled to refugee camps in

Jordan, Lebanon and Syria and documented their everyday life. It was first titled Until

Victory, echoing popular revolutionary slogans of the time. But following Black

September, Godard rethought the project.304 He partnered with Anne-Marie Miéville to use this footage to describe a relationship between French and Palestinian revolutionary movements in terms of their use of visual imagery to serve their political purposes. The title of the film, Here and Elsewhere, was meant to describe a number of dislocations.

There were Palestinians in Jordan who were fighting for a return to their homes; there were the Jordanians that saw Palestinians as outsiders who were ultimately expelled; there were the filmmakers that were traveling to an “other” place to describe it to a

Western audience; and there was the space of utopian promise that existed on the proverbial horizon, always elsewhere from the present moment. The disjunction between the French and Palestinian experience is made plainly clear when we see

Godard intercut between a French family watching television together and a group of

Fedayeen fighters sitting in a clearing under the shade of some trees.

303 Rasha Salti “The Unbearable Weightlessness of Indifference” in Akram Zaatari and Karl Bassil eds. Earth of Endless Secrets (Frankfurt: Portikus, 2009) p12-21 304 Black September refers to the violent removal of the PLO from Jordan from 1970-1971. See John Cooley, Green March, Black September: The Story of the Palestinian Arabs (London: Cass, 1973)

203 Zaatari saw Southern Lebanon as another space that was both here and elsewhere. As an occupied zone it had overlapping sovereignty of both Lebanon and Israel. The occupation of Al Sharit also prompted the displacement of Lebanese refugees, fleeing the fighting and the oppression of the Israeli military and the Southern Lebanese Army.

So like the Palestinians in Jordan and Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Lebanese refugees from the south are always pining for a lost home, an elsewhere that is romanticized through poems, pictures and stories. But representations of this distant elsewhere can be deceptively conflated with the present moment, to give the audience the impression of being in that place that is referred to. This illusion of the past being present or the far being near creates a sense of pleasure and resolution with the viewer and because of this, it is a tactic used by both the culture industry and state and revolutionary propaganda. Zaatari says:

In cinema, the sound of an explosion is conventionally transmitted immediately with its image, as if the spectator were seeing it from a zero distance. In the cinematographic representation of the explosion, the lag between sound and image resulting from distance is eliminated, another topography emerges, its relief flattened, and the effective distance denied until zero point. Cinema usually claims to bring the spectator to the event. In All is Well on the Border, I wanted to accentuate the presence of this distance because the viewer is neither inside nor outside the event nor inside the occupied zone. This was an indication that all we see in the occupied zone is exposed to interference because of this distance that separates the occupied zone from the rest of Lebanon. I wanted to translate that distance cinematographically using two clear devices; firstly by featuring the testimonials of prison detention as a script prompted to actors, a commentary on the televised transmission of these testimonials; secondly by tampering with the use and replay of archival footage to impede their visual perception. The legibility of the images is rendered more difficult through the use of text imprinted on the image, or through tampering with the speed of the videoplayer, to underscore that it is impossible to come close to the occupied zone

204 without going there, without bringing the viewer to a zero distance from it.305

When Zaatari describes his resistance to the cinematic convention of flattening the distance between the viewer and a filmic representation, he is talking about a formal strategy that affects the way that the message of the content is delivered to, and experienced by, the viewer. So the positions of “here” and “elsewhere” do not only refer to the locations between subjects depicted within the film but also between the location of occupied Lebanon as depicted in the film and a viewer. Zaatari plays with the distance between the viewer and Al Sharit, the subject of All is Well on the Border, by doing two things. First, he translates the direct reality of prisoners’ testimony through reenactment in a manner that resists a suspension of disbelief. Second, he shoots and edits footage of the landscape of Al Sharit in such a way that it pushes away the viewer from the space, rather than giving us the impression that we have been brought closer to it. Thus Zaatari constructs a situation for viewers that is simultaneously aware of a space of occupation and their distance from it, just like Godard. For instance, in one scene, Zaatari films a man who has a video camera pointed at us, the viewers, on a tripod and he explains how to use the zoom and how to change the exposure. This scene, which suggests that we are being watched, cuts to archival footage from the

Lebanon war in 1982, in which we see tanks crossing a UN checkpoint, and two helicopters flying over a valley. This juxtaposition prompts us to read this archival footage in a different way. The camera pointed at us activates the viewer and then shifts

305 ibid, p19

205 to a scene taken from television journalism, but in this context we potentially read it more critically, looking for where the camera is shooting from and what it is shooting.

This attention to points of view in terms of both form and content here is the key to understanding the depth of the influence that Godard’s film had on Zaatari’s practice.

Irmgard Emmelhainz has pointed out that Godard used Here and Elsewhere as a way to work through the tension between objective and engaged attitudes towards political filmmaking.306 When he and the Dziga Vertov Group first started shooting in Jordan in

1970, they were working in solidarity with Fatah’s Fedayeen based on a flattening of the ideological distance between May 68 and the Palestinian resistance. Furthermore, the formal strategy was realism, to flatten the physical distance between a French audience and Palestinian fighters in Jordan by holding up a microphone to a resistance fighter and allowing them to speak directly through the camera to a family watching in a theater in

Paris. In this mode, all formal devices were stripped away to reveal the content of the message, because of a sense of political urgency. To use Zaatari’s metaphor, the voice of the Fedayeen fighter was like an explosion that erupted for the viewer in real time.

Emmelhainz notes that this was also a Maoist approach, where a filmmaker or intellectual would work in the factory or alongside the proletariat, rejecting the exteriority of discourse in favor of the interiority of practice.307 So once again the spatial metaphor of Here and Elsewhere is at work, this time alluding to a choice of tactics for

306 Irmgard Emmelhainz, “Between Objective and Engaged Cinema: Jean-Luc Godard’s Militant Filmmaking” (1967-1974) Part 1. E-flux Journal #34, April 2012. 307 ibid

206 artists that work with political subjects. Emmelhainz notes that the other approach to the immediacy of realism would be a materialist mode of working, emphasizing the formal properties of the cinematic apparatus. For instance, in one scene of Here and

Elsewhere, a group of people is lined up in a television studio, each person holding a black and white photographic print depicting the PLO in Jordan up to a camera. There is a voiceover that talks about the relationship between a single image, a succession of single images, and a complete moving image. The voiceover says that with the moving image, one still image replaces the other, somehow containing the memory of the previous one. This formal exposition on the difference between still and moving pictures is addressed as a metaphor for the functionality and vitality of representations of political struggle. The Dziga Vertov Group was interested in a space between realism and materialism, a process that they called “materialist fictions,” which addressed the viewer in a Brechtian manner so that they could be an active agent in decoding the film and reacting to the political content. They did this by combining a wide range of techniques and images. There are realist scenes combined with materialist scenes in

Here and Elsewhere but overall there is such an abundance of approaches that the

“and” between “here” and “elsewhere” becomes the operative word to describe the film, a montage that constructs a multiplicity of meanings about the ways that film can mediate both an immediate experience of revolution and historicize it. Emmelhainz says,

The “and” is literally in between images, it is the re-creation of the interstice, bringing together the socio-historical figures along with the

207 film’s diverse materials of expression in a relation without a relationship. Godard differentiates images by de-chaining them from their commonsensical chains of signification and re-chaining (or recoding) them in such a way that their signifiers become heterogeneous. Such heterogeneity resists the formation of a visual discourse resonant with the commonsensical image of the Palestinian revolution found in photojournalistic and documentary images visible in the French mass media.308

This point about a cinematic approach that resists the most common forms of representing the Palestinian revolution is key here in a number of ways but most importantly to understand a link between Godard’s film and All is Well on the Border.

Godard set out to document the Palestinian revolution but then realized the problematics related to any representation of political struggle. Zaatari’s film is about the history of an Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon that was predicated on the

Palestinian Revolution. Zaatari worked as a television producer in Lebanon early in his career so he was very familiar with the common visual approaches to represent the

Palestinian revolution and its relationship to Lebanon. The standard strategy of television journalism that Zaatari learned was to tell a story in such a way that it speaks with a loud voice and captures the attention of the audience.309 So as a way to tell a

Lebanese history of Israeli occupation, he borrowed from Godard, a self-conscious cinematic approach that combines multiple points of view, some so subtle that the viewer has to work to tease them apart.

308 Ingrid Emmelainz, “Between Objective and Engaged Cinema: Jean-Luc Godard’s Militant Filmmaking” (1967-1974) Part 2. E-flux Journal #35, May 2012. 309 Interview with the artist, July 14, 2013

208 In the title of Godard’s film the word “and” exists at the borderland between “here” and

“elsewhere.” Or to use Emmelhainz’s language, it is the interstitial link between two signifiers. Perhaps this is another way of thinking about Zaatari’s relationship between his film, All is Well on the Border, and Godard’s Here and Elsewhere. The borderland of

Al Sharit is defined by multiplicity, it is “here,” as in Lebanon, but also “there,” meaning

Israel. But the borderland that Zaatari’s title refers to could also be the borderland between genres of filmic imagery: realist, materialist, journalistic, poetic, or agitprop.

Figure 5.1. Akram Zaatari, Still from All is Well on the Border (1997)

209 The last scene of All is Well on the Border perhaps provides the most direct connection to Here and Elsewhere. We see a young boy standing on a white plastic chair in a schoolyard [Figure 5.1]. He raises his fist and says:

The enemy might slaughter us But we will follow the line of our Imam el Khumayni We believe in the base he set us Kill us, thus our people will be more conscious

This moment is a reference to a scene in Godard’s film that focuses on a little girl, dressed in military fatigues who stands in the ruins of Karameh and recites a poem by

Mahmoud Darwish.310 As the girl furiously and defiantly reads the poem with grand flourishes of her arms a French woman’s voice says:

First you should talk about the set and the actor on the set. Where does this drama come from? It comes from the 1789 French Revolution…making demands in public. That little girl is acting for the Palestinian revolution obviously. She is innocent but perhaps this kind of drama is less so.

Zaatari wants to ask similar questions of the boy who delivers his soliloquy in All is Well on the Border. Is he not an actor playing his part, reading from a script written by

Hezbollah? Like the little Palestinian girl, this boy’s innocence is in direct conflict with a professed desire for martyrdom. Furthermore, a martyrdom that is tied to the Iranian revolution, signaled by the desire to follow Imam el Khumayni, the leader of the 1979

Iranian revolution. Through this reference, Zaatari points out that there is an aesthetic structure for revolutionary rhetoric: the child, the soap box, the demands shouted in a

310 Karameh, a town in Jordan near the Allenby bridge and the border with Israel was the base of operations for the PLO before Black September in 1970.

210 public sphere, and a lineage of revolutions that include, but are not limited to French,

Iranian and Palestinian struggles. By revealing the aesthetic structure of revolutionary rhetoric, Zaatari stands at a distance from its demands, preferring instead to act as an historian, cataloging its various components.

This Day

Like All is Well on the Border, Zaatari’s film This Day (2003) deals with the ways that images are circulated. In particular, it focuses on a set of photographs that Jibraiel

Jabbur took of Bedouins in 1950; photographs that Zaatari took of the Israeli invasion of

Saida, Lebanon in 1982; and images emailed to him from Palestinians in the West Bank in 2000-2002 during the second intifada. As a whole, a tension emerges between images that support a nostalgic view of an idealized past and a war torn present. As a result, the particular day that the title of the film refers to is ambiguous.

Jibrail Jabbur was a professor of Arabic literature and Semitic studies at American

University in Beirut. The book that Zataari drew from for This Day is The Bedouins and the Desert: Aspects of Nomadic Life in the Arab East.311 Norma Jabbur, Jibrail Jabbur’s daughter donated the photographs related to this book project to the Arab Image

Foundation and the film opens with Zaatari going through both the book and the

311 Jibrail Jabbur, The Bedouins and the Desert: Aspects of Nomadic Life in the Arab East (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995) Zaatrai uses both the original Arabic and the English translation.

211 archived images.312 We see his hands in white gloves, pulling out small, slightly yellowed black and white photos wrapped in glassine. He chooses a few depicting a car in the desert, and Norma Jabbur begins to describe in a voiceover the car and the camera as

Western devices in relation to the desert and camels that are Eastern. Through this sequence, the groundwork is laid for a particular vision of the past and the ways in which a modern cosmopolitanism has begun to creep in. One might think that this is the beginning of a standard Orientalist narrative, similar to Passolini looking for the true

Middle East. But we must remember that Jabbour was narrating an Arab perspective on an Arab identity, and this isn’t simply a western essentializing of Arab identity.

Sarah Rogers has written about cosmopolitanism as a Lebanese trait that is manifest in its visual arts.313 She contends that Lebanese artists like Zaatari that emerged on the international art scene following the civil war were said to come from a culture that was characterized as a tabula rasa, with no institutions, scholarship or market for visual culture. Rogers argues that this is a myth and that in fact artists like Zaatari are part a continuum that includes a long history of Arab cosmopolitanism. Following Kwame

Anthony Appiah, she defines cosmopolitanism as an erosion of national boundaries, allowing for the free exchange of capital, technology, or culture and charts these tendencies in Lebanon through the Ottoman Empire and the French Mandate. Jibrail

Jabbur’s scholarship and the photographs that he took are a part of this history.

312 The Arab Image Foundation, founded in 1997 in Beirut is a non-profit organization whose mission is to collect, preserve and study photographs from the Middle East, North Africa and the Arab Diaspora. It was co-founded by Akram Zaatari, Walid Raad, Faoud Elkoury, and Samer Mohdad. 313 Sarah Rogers, Postwar Arts and the Historical Roots of Beirut’s Cosmopolitanism, PhD dissertation, (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2008)

212

Zaatari travels to find the people depicted in Jabbur’s photographs, much like the way that Ayreen Anastas followed Passolini’s path. He finds Janna Istfan, whom he found in a photograph with a group of young women taken in Syria in the 1950s, dressed in long black dresses and holding ceramic water jugs on their heads and shoulders. The woman is now almost eighty years old and Zaatari asks her to hold a similar water jug on her head to recreate the image in the photo. In this scene, she is standing next to a huge satellite dish but in the same clothes as the original photo. Both her age and the presence of new technologies limit the ability of the original to be duplicated, and as a result, the notion of the timelessness of Arab culture, suggested by the initial source image by Jabbur, is strained. After this scene, the film cuts to Zaatari’s hands shuffling through prints of Jabbur’s photographs. Then he looks at Jabbur’s negatives shown on a lightbox. The film goes back and forth between Jabbur’s prints and negatives and

Zaatari’s attempts to recreate them in the present day. But through these multiple perspectives of a woman and a water jug, the idea of a singular timeless oriental essence that these representations might embody is shattered.

213

Figure 5.3. Akram Zaatari, Still from This Day (2003)

Zaatari then seeks out a Bedouin named Abu Saad, who is a camel shepherd in the

Syrian desert [Figure 5.3]. In a voiceover to this scene, Janna Isfan says that Jabbur photographed camels a great deal:

They symbolize or represent a whole atmosphere and environment. The desert meant a great deal to him. As the camel, the whole context of Arab civilization, which is desert, was what he studies, what he was interested in.314

It’s important to note here that Isfan is saying that Jabbur saw the desert and the camel as symbols of the timelessness of Arab civilization. In the film, Zaatari tries to speak to

Abu Saad, but because of the radical difference in their dialect, they need a guide to act as a translator. This reveals a rupture showing a difference that exists between the supposed universality of Arab identity that the desert and the camel represented to

314 Zaatari, p142

214 Jabbur. Zaatari is also an Arab but he is a cosmopolitan, internationally recognized artist based in Beirut. When he tries to speak to the Bedouin camel shepherd of the desert, a man that according to Jabbur’s should epitomize Arab identity, Zaatari can’t even understand what he is saying. This gulf in language, predicated on a cultural gulf between Zaatari and the shepherd, signals a fracturing of Jabbur’s notion of a singular

Arab essence. The inclusion of this instance of misunderstanding might also offer a question to Jabbur’s photographs. What do these camels and desert scenes really represent in his work? Is it some essential part of Arab identity? If so, what does the lacuna between Zaatari and this Bedouin say about Jabbur’s images of camels and the desert? Perhaps it reveals a difference in attitude between Jabbur and Zaatari regarding tradition and its relationship to identity. For Jabbur, the traditions related to the camel and the desert are co-present with Arab identity. But for Zaatari, these traditions are diachronic, they exist through history and as a result evolve and shift depending on various contexts. Zaatari is subtly critiquing Jabbur’s pan-Arabism, drawing on the postmodern skepticism of metanarratives of identity. Like Godard’s early intentions in

Ici et Ailleurs, Jabbur believed in solidarity but like Godard’s later realizations, Zaatari sees that difference can emerge depending on temporal and spatial contexts. One context in Jabbur’s photographs is the position of the photographer, which Norma

Jabbour said is inherently western. Norma explains her father’s intentions for his photographic series:

He believes that Arabic culture stems from Bedouin life, and that they are linked to understanding something that is vanishing, the sources of this culture. Because as they vanish, then, also will the understanding…You have a living lens to look at what the sources of such a culture are. And

215 they are what remains of the Bedouins. And their ways, their way of life. Their way of speaking …their morals are the basis of Arab civilization, and that there is something whole and noble to them. It was important to document them. He saw them as vanishing.

This quote reveals something about Jabbur’s attitude towards the Bedouins. He is aware that the Bedouin way of life is changing with modernity. But because he sees them, along with the camel and the desert, as symbols of some essential notion of Arab identity that is ahistorical, he uses photography to preserve them as a symbol that exists both as a moment of origin and one that exists out of time. When Zaatari tries to recreate Jabbur’s photographs he puts people back in time. His interaction with the

Bedouin shepherd implicitly asks, what is the connection between various Arab peoples? For the purposes of the larger questions of this chapter, what does this question of essential notions of Arab identity say about the connection between

Palestinians and Lebanese? To address this question, one must first look at the strains of orientalism from both outsiders and insiders that seek to essentialize Arab identity.315

But secondly, we must look at the actual histories of political relationships and similarities that exist between Palestinians and Lebanese. In one sense, the common thread is less about a common idealized distant past and more about the commonality of Israeli invasion and occupation.

315 Walid Sadek has noted that there is an orientalist tendency for a number of European curators who have been at the forefront of giving wide international exposure to Zaatari and Sadek’s post-war generation of Lebanese artists. For Sadek this trend is connected to identity based politics, something that he thinks needs to be challenged. Stephen Wright, “Territories of Difference” in Suzanne Cotter ed. Out of Beirut (Oxford: Modern Art Oxford, 2006) p.60. This idea is also brought up in relation to Catherine David’s Arab Representations project in Sandra Dagher, Catherine David, Rasha Salti, Christine Tohme and TJ Demos, “Curating Beirut: A Conversation on the Politics of Representation” Art Journal, Vol. 66, No. 2 (Summer, 2007), pp. 98-119

216 The second section of This Day is based on photographs that Zaatari took in 1982 during the Israeli invasion of Saida, his hometown. Zaatari was a teenager at the time and was learning how to use his father’s camera. We see blurry black and white images of jet planes flying overhead along with audio that he recorded at the time. After these images Zaatari writes on a computer screen:

In 1982, while watching an air battle over South Lebanon, I saw an Israeli plane launching a missile into a Syrian one, which exploded immediately. That was the most spectacular scene I saw in my life.

Walid Sadek has said that “Watching the Lebanese skies is a popular form of entertainment…almost daily one is privy to some expansive designs of white smoky streaks left behind by neighboring jet fighters, a free spectacle of calligraphic eloquence.316 Since both Zaatari and Sadek have described airborne battle as a spectacle, we should pause to think about the meaning of this term. Guy Debord described it as a product of the culture industry, a mechanism to lull viewers, who habitually function like consumers, into passive repose. In this sense, violent scenes lose their valence as lived experience and become images to be beheld. But Debord also thought that “The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather it is a social relationship between people mediated by images.”317 In this sense, Zaatari and Sadek were relegated to passive viewers of battles between Israeli and Syrian warplanes, battles

316 Quoted in Kaelen Wilson Goldie “The Archaeology of Rumour” in Akram Zaatari: Letter to a Refusing Pilot (The Pavilion of Lebanon at the “55 Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte – La Biennale di Venezia”) 317 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone, 1994), p 12

217 that became spectacular images. This position reflects the very real circumstances in which Lebanon was used as a space for a number of proxy wars to be fought. In

Debord’s sense, Lebanon became a spectacular space in 1982, in which a social relationship between individuals was predicted on and mediated by images of war.

In a later scene in This Day, Zaatari flips through a photo album from 1982 and we see color prints of destroyed buildings, Israeli tanks and jeeps and more images of fighter planes roaring through the sky. These photographs are notably different from Jabbur’s photographs. Jabbur was an academic embarking on an explicit ethnographic exercise.

Zaatari’s images were taken by a young sixteen-year-old boy documenting his surroundings. It just so happened that his everyday life included a war, a situation based on social and political forces much greater than he could understand at the time.318 As a result, these photographs are taken from a relatively naïve perspective based on raw experiences. He wasn’t looking for anything. The camera allowed him to document the violent intrusion of political forces that he was just beginning to understand. But when

Zaatari returns to them, he is looking at them with more knowledge and context.

After these images of the 1982 Israeli invasion we see a blank computer screen. He types “P-A-L-E-S-T-I-N-E” in Arabic. We hear a patriotic song accompanied by portraits of

Palestinian resistance fighters that had their pictures taken holding rifles and sporting victory signs at Studio Hashem al Madani in Saida. What follows are a series of images

318 This confluence of adolescent naivite, seeing the Lebanese civil war through a camera, is also the premise of Ziad Doueri’s film West Beirut (1998)

218 from his diaries, two page spreads accompanied by a voiceover of Zaatari reading these entries from twenty years ago:

April 13, 1982. The United States assured Lebanon that Israel would not invade its territory…Today, April 18, marks the eighth commemoration of the Lebanese civil war, which started in 1975. Today I watched my twelfth film for this year: All That Jazz.

June 6, 1982. Today air strikes continued heavily, starting at 6:30am on Darb el Sim. At noon, the Israelis advanced on the Lebanese border. Air raids continued to target Palestinian presence in the South and Chouf in an average of one raid every five minutes

January 28, 1983. This morning we heard that the French actor Louis de Funès had died.

These passages reveal a teenager fascinated with movies but also monitoring the news of the conflict that he is in the middle of. Later, Zaatari worked as a producer for Future

TV in Lebanon and intercuts audio and video from his time there in 2002. At this time there is a great deal of news from the West Bank at the height of the second intifada. So the carrier of information shifts from photographs to diaries to news footage and finally to emails from Palestinians under Israeli siege in the West Bank.

This final series of images were compiled from emails sent to Zaatari from Marina

Barham and Mona Hamzeh-Muhaissen documenting the Israeli invasion of the West

Bank 2000-2002 distributed by Inad Theater, Beit Jala through Free Palestine Network.

Zaatari shows these images in quick succession, so fast that it is difficult to pick out individual photographs. They include a number of images of Israeli soldiers in tanks and jeeps or walking through the streets of Ramallah, Nablus, or Jenin. They are shooting at

219 Palestinians. We see the bloodied and dead bodies of a few. Some of these images have graphics overlaid, with text in Arabic or English pointing to the Israeli aggression. But one image of Ariel Sharon dressed as Hitler, in an SS uniform with a small mustache, sticks out. It speaks to the overwhelming shadow of the Holocaust over the Israeli-

Palestinian conflict and human rights in general. As I will explain later, this image of

Sharon the Nazi also becomes a part of the story behind another more recent work by

Zaatari, Letters to a Refusing Pilot.

The emails recording the 2000-2002 Israeli incursions into Palestinian areas of the West

Bank echo the diary entries and news reports from the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon:

October 24, 2000. The helicopter felt like it was in the room with me and I felt like I was in a game of Russian roulette. What is their next target? Will Dheisheh be on their list tonight? Will our house get bombed? Should I get out of bed and try to hide somewhere? Where?

December 12, 2000. Two days ago, the head of the Israeli army issued a crazy order saying that no Palestinian is allowed to drive or travel in his private car between cities. Any private Palestinian car driven on roads between, let’s say, Bethlehem and Hebron will be shot at by Israeli soldiers and settlers

In the narrative of these emails Palestinians play either victims or heroic resistance fighters to an Israeli occupation. But so far in Zaatari’s work Israel is a faceless military machine and its soldiers are a part of that force. This is no surprise given the political and cultural chasm that exists between Israel and

Lebanon. But Zataari’s Letters to a Refusing Pilot (2013) finds a rift in this border.

220

Two Point Perspective: Letter to a refusing pilot

In the summer of 1982, during Israel’s incursion into Southern Lebanon, a story swirled around the port town Saida – a rumor that acquired a wide array of mythological flourishes. Israeli fighter jets were sent to bomb a set of targets. One of these planes was sent near Ain El-Helweh, a Palestinian refugee camp just south of Saida. As the plane approached the target, the pilot recognized the building as a school that he had attended as a child. It was said that his family had lived in Saida for generations, as a part of its now disappeared but once thriving Jewish community. The pilot swerved away at the last minute and headed towards the sea where he dropped three bombs into the water. A few hours later the school was destroyed by another pilot.

Akram Zaatari’s Letter to a Refusing Pilot, a film and video installation first shown at the

2013 Venice Biennale that combined archive and allegory, is based on this story. Zataari grew up in Saida and in 1982 stood on a balcony watching Israeli warplanes bomb the nearby hillside. He was learning to use his father’s Kiev camera and captured images of smoke billowing up from between the cedars on the horizon. His father had been the director of the school that this story revolves around, Saida Public Secondary School, for

20 years. Because of Zaatari’s awareness that he was a teenager at the time of the bombing and knowing of his father’s connection to the site, Letter to a Refusing Pilot combines the intimate, quiet playfulness of adolescents with a violent rupture

221 emanating from the sky. It also is about the intersecting points of view of two people. In an accompanying publication to the exhibition Zaatari quotes Jean Luc-Godard in his film Notre Musique (2004) who says:

In 1948, the Israelites walked in the water towards the Promised Land. The Palestinians walked in the water to drown. Shot and reverse shot. The Jewish People join fiction. The Palestinian people, the documentary.319

With this quote, Zaatari likens the Israeli-Palestinian relationship to the Israeli-Lebanese relationship but he does so by quoting Godard’s filmic metaphor. Zaatari continues this

“shot and reverse shot” by dwelling on his and the pilot’s intersecting points of view.

Zaatari was influenced by Albert Camus’ “letters to a German Friend” which he also quotes in the Venice publication,

Because you were tired of fighting heaven, you relaxed in that exhausting adventure in which you had to mutilate souls and destroy the world. In short, you chose injustice and sided with the gods…I, on the contrary, chose justice to remain faithful to the world.320

Camus wrote this “letter” as an unsigned editorial in an underground newspaper during the German occupation of France during WWII. By making the comparison between the

Nazi invasion and occupation of France and the Israeli occupation and invasion of

Lebanon, Zaatari is following suit with the tendencies described in chapters three and

319 Akram Zaatari: Letter to a Refusing Pilot (The Pavilion of Lebanon at the “55 Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte – La Biennale di Venezia”) 320 Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death (New York: The Modern Library (1960). p21-22

222 four. WWII and the Nazi become the primary standard that all other occupations, displacements, discrimination and other human rights violations allude to. When we combine this with Zaatari’s inclusion of the image of Ariel Sharon dressed up as a Nazi in

This Day, we can see how he is aware of this throughline in Palestinian representations of Israel. But in terms of the content of the quote, Zaatari seems to be saying that the

Israeli pilot chose not to bomb the school out of exhaustion rather than a sense of justice. But he wants to emphasize Camus’ plea “I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.”

The installation includes a large video projection, a looped 16 mm film and an empty theater seat [Figure 5.4]. The seat waits for the pilot, the sole audience member for whom these films were made. As the seat remains empty, it keeps the work open like an unanswered letter.

Figure 5.4. Akram Zaatari, installation view of Letter to a Refusing Pilot (2013)

223

The 16 mm film, Saida June 6, 1982, consists of a tracking shot of a composite image.

This composite is made up of the photographs that Zaatari took of the bombed hillside in 1982. It is based on the same photographs featured in This Day but they have taken a couple of turns. First, the photographs were shown in This Day as discrete entities, snapshots that were records of a moment and kept in a photo album. But when Zaatari created the new composite image from them he took these disparate images and created a new whole that was self consciously constructed, laying bare its artifice.321

Zaatari then made a video from this composite and created a tracking shot across it, as if to lead our eye from one point to another within the image. As a result, we are moved from one explosion to another, passing between the violent ruptures, pausing on interstitial resting points such as Cyprus trees or a clear blue sky. The 16 mm film version is the latest iteration of this work, once again revisiting these images and this moment remembered.

The large video projection at the center of Letter to a Refusing Pilot begins with a camera mounted on a drone that rises from the roof of a building in the seaside Beirut neighborhood of Raouche. It cuts to black and white aerial shots of architecture in Saida and then a lightbox, much like the opening shots of This Day.322 As the lightbox is turned on in the video, florescent tubes flicker on around the room of the installation and it is

321 TJ Demos, The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Crisis (Durham: Duke, 2013) p188 322 In the early 1960s Michel Ecochard, an architect and planner flew over the site of Frères Maristes College in Rmeileh, near Saida. He was documenting the process of its building through photographs. On the ground below his collaborator Amine El-Bizri supervised the construction.

224 as if we are in or on the box, complicit with the narrative on the screen. Since Zaatari has such a history with the photographic archive, he is not only resisting the passive spectatorship of film, he is bringing us into the archive, a space dedicated to the organization of the visual and material culture of history. A pair of hands with white gloves moves a set of photos across the backlit surface. We see family snapshots of a woman posing with two kids, a mother helping a toddler to pet a dog and a teenager mugging for the camera. Then the hands take a piece of white paper and make a couple of pencil line drawings on paper, an enigmatic structure fills one, and another seems to be a image of two trees in front of a building. A school bell rings, and the next drawing is made of a paper airplane.

In the next scene of the video students line up for school at Frères Marieste College, where Zaatari went to school, under the watchful gaze of a teacher. They chatter amongst themselves as they rush through the halls and into their classrooms. After these scenes of a typical day at school the video cuts to a group of boys that run through the streets, into a building, up its stairs, finally climbing onto the roof. There they carefully fold paper airplanes from marked up exam papers. When they are done, they throw their paper airplanes off the roof. The paper planes flutter in the breeze and float slowly on their tiny winged expanses towards the ground. At one point another group of boys fold and fly some more, but this time the paper airplanes gather and converge like jet planes in formation. An innocuous game turns quickly into a militaristic gambit and a boyhood fantasy intersects with the roar of jet engines as we see archival photographs

225 of the school taken from above along with an iPad playing an Israeli documentary on a lightbox. As we hear the Israeli documentary narrator proudly describing the military operation against Ain El-Helweh in Hebrew a hand reaches and touches the photograph of the school. With each touch of the hand’s outstretched finger, a digitally rendered flame emerges from the photograph, and we imagine, along with this archivist, the explosive destruction of the school despite the refusal of the pilot.

The pilot

The pilot in this story is Haggai Tamir. While it is true that he flew this mission and chose not to bomb the school it wasn’t because he grew up in Lebanon. He made the decision because he was an architect and recognized the structure as a school and not the military target that his commander had sent him to destroy.323 Tamir grew up on

Kibbutz Hazorea and as a boy wanted nothing but to be able to fly. He finished flight school in 1968 and says that he was trained in a European manner, which emphasized the elegance of flight, making use of aerodynamics as opposed to engine power. As a result he says “The concept of a plane as a platform for weapons was foreign to me so I enjoyed the aerobatics much more than I did dropping ordinance. Even during my compulsory service as a young pilot, I didn't derive any pleasure from it."324 Tamir served as an Israeli air force pilot in the 1967-70 War of Attrition and says that he felt

323 It should be noted that Zaatari was also trained as an architect and this was a point of commonality that he was interested in. 324 Avihai Becker, “Why We Refused” Haaretz Sept 25, 2002

226 like something happened in this period that shifted the Israeli air force from what he calls a European model based on formal elegance to an American model, which relies on brute force. By 1971 he was discharged from the army, and he quickly went backpacking around Europe and became somewhat of a hippie until he was called up for reserve duty in 1973. In one mission in the Sinai, his plane was shot down, and he ejected, parachuted down while Egyptian ground forces shot at him and finally was picked up by an Israeli tank, not long after he landed. After this war, he enrolled at the Technion to study architecture and at the time of Zaatari’s show opening in Venice he still was practicing, specializing in remodeling projects.325

When Tamir was called up for reserve duty again for the Lebanon War, he was suspicious of the motivations for this war and found that many of the soldiers that he served with were “trigger-happy and gonzo for battle” and he remembers saying to them “Who knows better than me, an architect, how hard it is to build a city? So at least, don’t rejoice when you destroy houses. It takes a lot longer to build a city than it does to strike a target.”326

When he was sent on the operation at Ein El-Hilweh near Saida he says,

We flew in tandem above the place. The liason officer who was with the ground forces informed me of the target, a large building on top of a hill. I looked at it and to the best of my judgment, the structure could have

325 Tamir lives and works in Jaffa in an old Arab house that he remodeled himself. 326 Becker, “Why We Refused”

227 only been one of two things – a hospital or a school. I questioned the officer and asked why I was being given that target. His reply was that they were shooting from there. There were a thousand reasons why I didn’t think I should bomb the building. I asked him if he knew what the building was. He said he didn’t. I insisted that he find out. He got back to me with some vague answers.

Tamir did not release the bombs, saying that they had malfunctioned, but two jets that followed him went ahead and leveled the building that he was sent to destroy. There was an investigation into the matter, and Tamir said that he would never drop a bomb on a school or a hospital.

In July of 1982 he sent a letter of solidarity to Colonel Eli Geva, an armored brigade commander who refused to take part in an attack on Beirut. Tamir wrote,

This is the third war that I have taken part in and, psychologically and morally, it has been the hardest. From my experience, I can attest that things were done in this war that were not done up to now. Targets were bombed that I have no doubt were not military targets. More troubling is the fact that not enough questions have been asked about what is going on, including by people whom I expected would behave differently. In light of all this, your ability to say ‘no’ attests to personal integrity and moral strength worthy of profound appreciation.327

In February 1983, when the commission of inquiry regarding the Sabra and Chatilla massacres was published, it led to Ariel Sharon stepping down as defense minister. This restored Tamir’s faith in the Israeli military, and in 1988, when he was 42, he was released from having to participate in military service because of a series of cutbacks.

327 ibid

228 Tamir’s story was kept quiet within the military, and only his immediate circle of friends and family knew anything about what happened in Saida. But in 2002, following the targeted assassination of Saleh Shehadeh, which involved an F-16 dropping a one-ton bomb that killed 15 people and injured 100, Tamir was disturbed by the killing of innocent civilians and decided to speak out.328 He was interviewed in Haaretz and told the whole story of his military career, from his love of flying to his ultimate questioning of the reasoning behind Israeli military decisions.

The meeting

In April 2010, Zaatari was in residence at Le Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers in France.

During this time he had a public conversation with Avi Mograbi, an Israeli filmmaker, he retold this story and the conversation was published in a small orange book, A

Conversation with an Imagined Isaraeli Filmmaker. In July 2012, Seth Anziska, an

American historian, was conducting research at the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut and found the book published based on the conversation between Mograbi and Zaatari.

In the book Zaatari recounts the story about the refusing pilot, and Anziska realizes that he knew that the pilot that he was talking about was Hagai Tamir. Anziska had met

Tamir two years prior while he was doing research in Israel. Anziska had met Tamir’s wife in a grocery store, and they struck up a conversation. She asked Anziska what he

328 On July 22, 2002 an Israeli plane dropped a one-ton bomb on a house in Gaza city, killing Saleh Shehadeh, the military wing commander of Hamas and an aide as well as thirteen Palestinian civilians. In response to objections to this action by the Israeli NGO Yesh Gvul and others, an Israeli panel set up by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert found that the military acted appropriately. Barak Ravid, “Israel’s 2002 hit of Hamas leader was justified, despite civilian casualties” Haaretz, Feb 27, 2011

229 was doing in Israel and he told her that he was researching the Lebanese and Israeli perspectives of the war in 1982. She said that he should meet her husband who was a pilot in the war and not long afterward Anziska conducted hours of interviews with

Tamir.

Anziska then contacted Zaatari and let him know that the pilot is Tamir and asked if he could send Tamir a copy of the A Conversation with an Imagined Isaraeli Filmmaker.329

Zaatari says yes and adds, “maybe that would open a continuation of the conversation.”

Since there is no mail between Israel and Lebanon, Zaatari sent Anziska a copy in

London to then send to Tamir in Jaffa. By September of 2012, Tamir and Zaatari had begun an email correspondence. Anziska was copied on these emails and says that

“Each note that arrived in my inbox felt like the slow repair of a historical rupture.”

Eventually, Zaatari asked if the two could meet. Because it is impossible for either of them to enter the country of the other, given that the two nations are still in a state of war, they had to meet in a third space. In this case that was Rome, and over the course of a few days they talked for hours in the lobby of a hotel. Tamir asked Zaatari if he should bring anything, and Zaatari responded that it would be great for them to look at old photographs, drawings and other documents and letters from their family albums and from the time of the 1982 war. This request is in keeping with Zaatari’s persistent engagement with the archives of both personal and public histories and also served as

329 Akram Zaatari, A Conversation with an Imagine Israeli Filmmaker Named Avi Mograbi (Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Kadist Art Foundation, Sternberg Press, 2012)

230 the starting point for a conversation between two men that met each other as subjects that were a part of but not beholden to the history of war between their two countries.

Some of these exchanged photographs are included in the video Letter to a Refusing

Pilot and in the accompanying publication. In the publication, the images of Zaatari’s childhood are reproduced but Tamir’s are absent, reduced to textual descriptions of six images, written in the third person. One describes a black and white image of Tamir at the age of 18 or 19 taken at the beach of Haifa or Yaffa. Another is a black and white family picture:

Hagai’s Father is on the far left, his arms crossed over his chest, and next to him sits Hagai at 16, wearing a dark shirt and shorts. His hands are crossed close to his waist. To the far right, Hagai’s mother sits on a wooden chair with both hands posed gently on her right knee. She wears a dress and is slightly inclined to the left, where Hagai’s younger brother stands with his left hand on the back of the chair. He seems slightly inclined toward his mother, as though they were posing alone. They all smile a bit. It is clearly summer. In the center of the picture is a small square table upon which there is a vase of white flowers. In the background there is a painting on the wall. It looks like a fortress by the sea. 330

This description, like the others, functions as a linguistic corollary to a photographic image. Each person and the space are described in a rather straightforward manner, but a few details begin to suggest relationships, like when Zaatari describes Hagai’s brother and mother’s closeness to one another. Another photograph depicts a landscape containing nine identical houses in Kibbutz Hazorea. A page of an album with four

330 Zaatari, Akram Zaatari: Letter to a Refusing Pilot (The Pavilion of Lebanon at the “55 Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte – La Biennale di Venezia”)

231 photographs shows Tamir’s father, who was a builder, working in the kibbutz where they grew up. Zaatari groups these images of Tamir’s family together with the following text:

The first picture shows him in rocky terrain. In the back of the picture young trees are lined up as a sign that the land has been worked. He is alone in the landscape, holding a big stone and walking with it toward the left side of the picture.

The second picture shows him with a level, inspecting the verticality of a masonry wall. He is wearing a hat.

The third picture shows him in an office, his right hand over his head as if looking for a solution to an architectural problem while looking at a drawing or drawings.

The fourth picture shows him wearing a hat and shorts, walking toward a building that looks like a school. We see him from the back. He is holding a handbag.331

This set of descriptions is interesting in that it exemplifies the Zionist ideal: a worker on a kibbutz, tied to the landscape through physical labor. When he highlights these photographs, is Zaatari merely describing the way that he imagines Tamir’s childhood on a kibbutz through imagery in photographs or films that he has seen elsewhere? Or is

Zaatari allowing Tamir to present his own self image through these photographs?

Perhaps it is both.

Two photographs depict Tamir in military uniform. One is of him in aviation school, standing with his helmet against his waist. The other is of Tamir in uniform but talking

331 Ibid

232 on the phone. These are images of the pilot as a man of the Israeli military but cast in a more banal way than the imagined refusing pilot, in his airplane flying over Lebanon.

There are five photographs that Zaatari includes in the publication, images that are also used in the video. 332 They show Zaatari as a child including one in which he is sitting in a garden at the age of two next to another child the same age. They are surrounded by flowers and smiling. Another image in which he is four years old and wearing a blue floral shirt tucked neatly into gray slacks, shows him smiling with happy squinted eyes, with his hands down at his sides and looking straight into the camera. Two other images show him with his mother. A caption for these tells us that he spent the attended Frères

Maristes College as a student but spent his weekends with his family in the garden of the Saida Secondary School, which his father was the director of for twenty years. So this caption tells us that for Zaatari, this school was also a garden of childhood memories for him. One photograph shows him as a teenager, standing in front of a sculpture that is also featured in the video. A caption tells us that it was made by Alfred

Basbous and given as a gift to the school by the Ministry in Education to acknowledge the students’ academic achievements.

These photographs and their descriptions are the main record that we have of the conversation between Zaatari and Tamir. They are also an essential structural component of Letters to a Refusing Pilot. Following Ariella Azoulay’s notion of the ‘civil

332 It is interesting to note that the publication for the exhibition is printed on newsprint in the form of a newspaper, the primary form of news during the Lebanon civil war.

233 contract of photography,’ we might understand these photographs, or more specifically the overlapping archive of Zaatari’s and Tamir’s photographs that Zaatari uses, as a space for discursive democracy.333 As I discussed in chapter four, Azoulay, believes that photography can open up a civic space constituted by gaze, speech and action, where we can address one another instead of the ruling power.334 In this sense, these photographs that revealed Zaatari and Tamir’s childhoods to one another constructed an expanded definition of the national subject that each was taught. Zaatari revealed his own personal relationship to the school that, up until this point, Tamir had only seen through the crosshairs of a fighter plane. Zaatari expanded this view to include a pastoral image of a family playing in its garden or a sculpture proudly displayed in its courtyard. Tamir revealed his personal history that included a relationship to flying and architecture. Zaatari symbolically pantomimes this discourse in the video when he turns on the lightbox and moves photographs on and off its surface, as if displaying them to someone. But this action invites us as viewers into a conversation about the meaning of these images, taking the place of Tamir.

Points of view: the dialogical exchange

Letters to a Refusing Pilot self-consciously uses a number of literal and metaphorical points of view. The image that opens the video was made by strapping a HD camera onto a drone that rises above a building. The aerial shots of Saida were taken from a

333 Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008) 334 ibid p17

234 plane for architectural purposes. Israeli television news footage stands in for the Israeli public’s point of view. Hashem El Madani’s old photographs of Saida depict its Idyllic landscape.335 Zataari’s 1982 photographs of the bombing on the hillside are literally taken from an individual point of view but also that of the metaphorical subject.

Kaelen Wilson Goldie has pointed out that the position of the pilot is absent from

Lebanese life.336 The small country only has four old fighter planes that are rarely used.

During the civil war, aerial combat was fought primarily between Israeli and Syrian planes. Today, Hezbollah fires rockets and launches drones and Israel still flies across

Lebanese airspace. There are no private helicopters and the only civilian aircraft belong to Middle East Airlines.337 As a result Lebanese citizens must imagine the point of view of the pilot. Zaatari conjures this imagination through the eyes of young boys who eagerly craft paper airplanes and drop them from their rooftops.

But Zaatari responds to the absence of a pilot’s point of view from within his own lexicon of experience, one that must be understood instead, through conversation with an actual pilot. In this case, it was by contacting one of the pilots that flew the planes that he had watched overhead as a boy, more specifically, the pilot that he had heard

335 The Lebanese photographer Hashem el-Madani went to Haifa in 1947 and was an assistant to a Jewish immigrant photographer named Katz. Because of the events of 1948 he returned to Saida and photographed daily life in the city. Seth Anzika “Letter to a Refusing Pilot” in Akram Zaatari: Letter to a Refusing Pilot (The Pavilion of Lebanon at the “55 Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte – La Biennale di Venezia”) 336 Kaelen Wilson Goldie “The Archaeology of Rumor” in Akram Zaatari: Letter to a Refusing Pilot (The Pavilion of Lebanon at the “55 Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte – La Biennale di Venezia”) 337 Zaatari focused on these aircraft in the closing scenes of This Day

235 fabulous rumors about. He sent an email, which, unlike the paper airplanes dropped from a rooftop, came back to him. As a result, he starts a relationship with a once imaginary and now real subject through conversation.

While the main artwork Letters to a Refusing Pilot can be described as a film and video installation, I believe that it also is constituted by a dialogical work – a conversation between Zaatari and Tamir. This was the most powerful and innovative aspect of the work both politically and aesthetically. Zaatari went far beyond the representation of a story. He engaged in a conversation that was illegal and even potentially dangerous for him. This is why the meeting between him and the pilot was constantly addressed in press reactions to the work. Negar Azimi, writing for the New York Review of Books describes the work in relation to the conversation between Zaatari and Tamir: “In the half light of the bar, Tamir revisited that day, explaining that he had been trained as an architect and had recognized that the building was either a school or a hospital by virtue of its boxy institutional profile.”338 Nina Siegal, writing for The New York Times emphasized Zaatari’s desire for this work to be centered on the pilot, not as a fictional character in a story but as a real subject. Siegal quotes Zaatari saying “The importance of the story is that it gives the pilot a human face…it gives what he is about to bomb,

338 Negar Azimi, “A Pilot’s Refusal, Reimagined,” New York Review of Books, June 26, 2013, http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/jun/26/akram-zaatari-memory-war-flight/

236 which is considered terrorist ground; it also gives that a human face. I think that it’s important to remember in times of war that everyone is a human being. “339

I borrow the term dialogical from Grant Kester who defines dialogical art practices as those that are centered on conversations based on reciprocal openness.340 But how do we know that a conversation is based on reciprocal openness, and what makes it an art practice? Kester says that according to Kant, aesthetic perception is a mode of being in which we transcend our specific identities as subjects (including our desires and self interest) and see things from the point of view of the universal.341 Kester then compares this attitude to Jürgen Habermas’s notion of the public sphere, a discursive space that is predicated on equality and the suspension of the individual interests of each subject participating in dialogue. For Kester, the way to create an egalitarian dialogical space is through a physical and psychological framework that sets it apart from daily discourse.

For Zaatari and Tamir, this was done in two ways. First, they needed to find an extraterritorial space and used Italy as a third country that was external to Israel and

Lebanon. Furthermore, the primary space of their conversation was a hotel lobby, a heterotopic space that is a public sphere, in between the private homes and homelands of each individual. Secondly, on Zaatari’s suggestion, they used old photographs and documents as an archival structure to set up stories about each other’s upbringing and

339 Nina Siegal, “Lebanese Artist Explores ‘Human Face of Conflict: ‘Letter to a Refusing Pilot’ by Akram Zaatari” The New York Times, June 19, 2013 340 Grant H. Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) p90 341 ibid p107

237 their time on opposite sides of a war. It is the shared framework of photographs that reveals the disjunction between the two participants of this conversation.

But beyond these circumstances we don’t know the actual content or structure of the conversation between Zaatari and Tamir. It was not recorded, and there is no transcript.

But the conversation between Zaatari and Avi Mograbi that lead to the meeting between Zaatari and Tamir is parallel, interrelated, and was more explicitly set up as an artwork. It was performed on a stage in Aubervillies, France and documented in the form of a book. Contrary to the conversation between Zaatari and Tamir, the fact that there is a concrete record of their discourse allows us to see it in more detail and also probe more deeply into its nature as a dialogical work.

In the script entitled, A Conversation with an Imaginary Israeli Filmmaker, Zaatari states that he is not Akram Zaatari and that the Israeli filmmaker is not Avi Mograbi. They play roles because of the political situation between Israel and Lebanon. He says, “This is why we could only be individual voices, fictive because we don’t represent. In fact we misrepresent. Fictive because we are out of synch with national entities. Our voices are our nations’ imagination(s), rather than realities.”342 In this statement, Zaatari reverses the late Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri’s statement that “Lebanon is more than a nation; it is an idea.”343 It also reverses Benedict Anderson’s notion of nationalism as an

342 Akram Zaatari, A Conversation with an Imagine Israeli Filmmaker Named Avi Mograbi (Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Kadist Art Foundation, Sternberg Press, 2012) p3 343 Tony Chakar, “Living in an idea” Parachute: Contemporary Art Magazine. (Oct. 2002) p60

238 imagined community that is collectively beheld by its constituent subjects.344 For

Zaatari, the subjects are imaginary but the nations of Lebanon and Israel are real. But if we combine these two attitudes, the imaginary national communities of Israel and

Lebanon tend to produce constituent imaginary subjects that are enemies. The fact that

Zaatari and Mograbi are collaborating is out of sync with their respective national ideological positions. But for Zaatari, if they are imagined characters then they simply have the option to take on different points of view, like a different script for an actor. He then goes on to note that as documentary filmmakers, both Zaatari and Mograbi are aware of the blurry line between fact and fiction and the play between the two in this performance is an extension of that aspect of their work.

Zaatari then starts telling his own personal story. He was born in Saida in 1966. His mother was from Tripoli, but her great grandfather was from Turkey. His Father was born in Saida, but his family was originally from either the Arabian Peninsula or

Palestine. These personal facts already start to explode any kind of essentialized national identity. By revealing the fact that his family is from Libya, Lebanon, and potentially Palestine, Zaatari is showing how families in the Middle East and North Africa used to move more freely between cities. He then goes on to note that he was born one year before the 1967 war and grew up hearing only bad stories about Israelis. He never met an Israeli until he was sixteen years old when he saw tanks driving up his street.

At the age of sixteen, I recall standing by the entrance of the building where we lived, waiting in total silence to watch the first Israeli tanks

344 Anderson, Imagined Communities

239 drive up the street. These were the first Israelis I saw in my life – young victorious soldiers riding their noisy tanks. Despite the deafening noise, I remember the scene in total silence. 345

Zaatari then tells us of a particular instance when he saw an Israeli soldier

We lived on the sixth floor of a building, facing south, so the balcony was almost like a theater seat for me, and explosions were the spectacle. I grew up hearing the same warnings over and over: don’t stare at the Israelis from the balcony. We were told that the Israelis were the snipers of the sky, that they saw and heard everything. And I always wondered why they would want to shoot at a young boy holding a camera!346

Then Mograbi intervenes via Skype.

Actually, I remember this incident very well. We were driving down a street in Tzidon. I know you call it something else but we call it Tzidon in Hebrew. I pulled my head out of the tank’s hatch and saw a teenager with a camera on one of the balconies. He was wearing a blue and gray Adidas shirt, and he was aiming his camera at me. I remember I shouted in Hebrew, al Te’tzalem! Ma yesh lekha le’tzalem? Don’t shoot! What have you got to shoot at?347

This last line is interesting because the Hebrew words for shooting pictures (the word, le’tzalem, that Mograbi said he used) and shooting guns are different but in the text of this book, printed only in English, the ambiguity of “shoot” is preserved. Mograbi goes on to describe his exasperation at this boy taking pictures. Mograbi was under orders to shoot at anyone because he was told that the most innocent looking person could be dangerous. So as the teenager on the balcony is shooting pictures, Mograbi is hoping that he doesn’t have to shoot him and curses the kid’s parents for letting him hang

345 Akram Zaatari, A Conversation with an Imagine Israeli Filmmaker Named Avi Mograbi (Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Kadist Art Foundation, Sternberg Press, 2012) p5 346 ibid 347 ibid p8

240 outside and thus forcing Mograbi to shoot him. But at the last minute the boy runs inside.

Since Zaatari pronounced this performance a fiction from the outset, we are immediately suspect that this amazing coincidence could have occurred. But nonetheless, the imagery is incredibly powerful and whether or not the actual Zaatari and Mograbi were looking at one another in Saida/Tzidon, one down a machine gun’s scope and the other through the lens of a camera, they still represent the symbolic national subject positions of the characters in this story. If they weren’t the people in this story, they could have been.

Zaatari ignores the story that Mograbi tells and then continues to say that prior to the moment of Israeli invasion in 1982, he had only seen Israelis on TV, through an Israeli television station’s signal that reached Saida. He tells us that he grew up with a natural affiliation with the Palestinian cause and loved the Palestinian fedayin, but also remembers the chaos once Palestinian military factions took over southern Lebanon. He says that he took pictures of destroyed buildings, Israeli vehicles and damaged cityscapes but never soldiers. It wasn’t until later that he saw press images of Israeli soldiers with humanity – eating, drinking or washing clothes. The only ones that he could imagine like this at the time were Palestinians.

241 He says that he grew up with a great love of cinema including Hitchcock, Truffaut,

Fassbinder and Pasolini and that he considered cinema, like the arts to be outside of geography and citizenship. In 1997 he presented a short video at a film festival in

Pesaro, Italy. Mograbi was also there and showed his film, How I learned to Overcome

My Fear and Love Ariel Sharon (1997). After the screening there was a dinner and

Zaatari says that he sat down next to Mograbi and introduced himself. At this point in the performance, Mograbi enters the stage with his laptop in hand and says that he remembers this event differently and that there were actually two people sitting in between them and that they never said more than hi to one another. Again, Zaatari ignores him and says that Lebanese artists and officials used to get annoyed when

Israelis insisted on talking to them after the Oslo accords. These gestures of friendship were seen as a result of guilt because of Israel’s occupation and constant wars in

Lebanon or possibly because they wanted to recruit Arab intellectuals and artists to become spies for Israel. But after Zaatari saw Mograbi’s film and heard him speak in the

Q&A he decided that he needed to talk to him but to turn the tables; it was to recruit him.

Mograbi interrupts again and says that he wants to return to Zaatari’s comment about

Godard’s metaphor of the shot and reverse shot but to do so he wants to show some pictures. Mograbi then shows the audience old family snapshots. The first is of his father

Gabi and his mother Rivka standing and smiling next to a man that looks Palestinian.

Mograbi tells us that this picture was taken some time between 1949-52 in Haifa. He

242 says that the first time that he saw this photograph he was surprised because his father was a right wing Zionist who fought with the Irgun and was jailed and deported by the

British to Eritrea because of these activities. Mograbi then shows another picture of his mother in the Gallillee surrounded by a group of Palestinians who are all smiling. Then

Mograbi says that the following photograph is the reverse shot, a portrait of his father

Gabi with a gun in his belt. He then shows another photograph of a smiling Gabi, still with a gun in his belt, with a glum looking Palestinian who is holding up a black board up to his chest with the number 239 written in white chalk across it and another man taking his pictures. Mograbi then says that these last two pictures are documents, but we know how documents can be fictions. He returns to the Godard quote and asks,

“what happens when you suddenly find both the documentary and the fiction at the same frame? Like in those photos or like here now? Godard would have absolutely said that you Akram are the documentary and that I am a total fiction.”

What is Mograbi saying here? What is it about this last photograph that combines documentary and fiction at the same time? And what is it about that photograph that is analogous to the conversation between Zaatari and Mograbi? In the most straightforward manner, he is saying that using Godard’s analogy, the Jew (fiction) and the Palestinian (documentary) are found in the same frame as opposed to the model of shot and reverse shot. Furthermore, if we extend the analogy between Zaatari and the

Palestinian then he serves as the documentary. In this sense the narrative is structurally different. The stories of two people, two nations, two enemies, is no longer about

243 separated point and counterpoint. When found within one frame, or on one stage, the narrative of two characters is interconnected. As a result the diametric opposition becomes more discursive and potentially dialogical. This process is evident through a series of doubles found within Mograbi’s last photograph. First, it is a photograph of a photograph being taken. One photograph presumably serves the administrative purpose of tracking a Palestinian subject. The other photograph documents the Israeli subject acting in this situation, in this case, Mograbi’s father. Second, the main characters are

Gabi and the unnamed, but numbered, Palestinian. The photographer frames this pair.

Finally, there is an image of militant violence of the gun that sits in Gabi’s belt, capable of shooting in one sense and the administrative violence of the photographer shooting in another sense, documenting and archiving a Palestinian subject of Israeli occupation.

This last double is closest to the shot and reverse shot of that story that Mograbi tells of the boy on the balcony and him in the tank, but it combines the two senses of shooting into one frame.

After Mograbi presents these photographs, Zaatari says that he wasn’t in contact with

Mograbi since that meeting in Pesaro in 1997, but he did take his business card and carefully hid it just in case it might be found by the Lebanese authorities. But in 2005,

Zaatari was included in a group email from Yousry Nasrallah, an Egyptian filmmaker, about Mograbi’s son Shaul, who refused to serve in the Israeli military. Nasrallah was asking for the contacts on this email list, a group of Arab artists and intellectuals, to show solidarity with Mograbi. Nasrallah also noted that he knew that this gesture would

244 contradict the popular opinion that solidarity with Israeli leftists would be an action of normalizing the occupation but that he thought it essential to support what he considered to be a brave action. Zaatari replied to the group email to echo this solidarity and got an email back from Mograbi immediately. This began a correspondence during which they exchanged DVDs of their work, a relationship that was reinforced during the war between Israel and Lebanon in 2006. During this correspondence, Zaatari asks

Mograbi to see if he can find some original footage that he had seen traces of in the media during the 2006 war. These were videos from the point of view of Israeli missiles as they approached their targets. These cameras were mounted on to the missiles to help with guidance but were destroyed along with the bomb. Zaatari calls these “suicide cameras” and was fascinated by the creation of one more point of view that combines the shooting of a camera with the shooting of military ordinance. Something about the idea of the point of view of this camera reminds Zaatari of the story of the pilot in 1982, whom we now know was Tamir.

Mograbi then responds with some more photographs. He shows one with his father’s mother’s family when they lived in Beirut. He explained that they then moved to

Palestine in the mid 1920s and that one member of this side of the family was married to a Jewish Egyptian. He shows another photograph with Gabi in Beirut in a family picture. He says that every summer his father would go to Beirut to visit family. He did this up until the mid-1940s when the British government deported him. Mograbi then shows a photograph of the Mograbi clan in Damascus and says that these relatives of his

245 look Arab and asks if they are and, if his great grandfather was Arab, then what does that say about him? Is he an Arab as well? Mograbi doesn’t answer this question but this revelation complicates the shot and reverse shot analogy. It means that not only when

Mograbi and Zaatari are on the same stage as a Jew and an Arab in the same frame, but

Mograbi contains these two identity positions within the frame of his self.

The notion of the Arab Jew has been addressed by a number of artists and intellectuals, most notably Michael Rakowitz, who has made a series of projects that are related to his identity as a diasporic Iraqi Jew. Ella Shohat has noted that “The Zionist denial of the

Arab-Moslem and the Palestinian East…has its corollary the denial of the Jewish

“Mizrachim” (the “Eastern Ones”) who, like the Palestinians, but by more subtle and less obviously brutal mechanisms, have also been stripped of the right of self- representation.”348 The dominant discourse in Israel about Mizrachim, or Jewish Arabs, is that they were saved by the harsh rule of their primitive captors in Arab countries after 1948.349 But the photographs that Mograbi shows us reveal an alternative narrative in which Jewish Arabs in Beirut and Damascus, Cairo or Jerusalem had a thriving cosmopolitan existence. Furthermore this existence mirrored that of Zaatari’s family in terms of the mobility pre-1948 throughout the Arab world. When Mograbi questions himself and perhaps Zaatari or the audience, looking at the photographs of his family in Beirut and Damascus, whether he is an Arab or not, he also mirror’s some of

348 Ella Shohat, “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the standpoint of its Jewish victims,” Social Text, no. 19/20 (Autumn, 2988), p1. 349 Ibid p3.

246 the questions that Zaatari asked in This Day. When Zaatari looks at Jabbour’s photographs of Bedouin and then seeks out the subjects in present day, he asks what the binding characteristics are for Arab peoples.

The conversation between Zaatari and Mograbi ends when Zaatari tells the story of another task that he gave to Mograbi. Following up on his film All is Well on the Border,

Zaatari wanted to return to a border zone that he could not reach, the area of Shebaa farms. This area, at the intersection of the Lebanese and Syrian borders and the northern Golan Heights, was occupied by Israel, starting in 1967 and is still disputed territory. Despite the fact that Israel withdrew from its occupation of southern Lebanon in 2000, it did not withdraw from Shebaa Farms, which Israel claims is part of the Golan

Heights. Hezbollah disputes this claim. Zaatari asks Mograbi to film interviews with older locals in the area and gives him a list of specific places to find. In response, Mograbi makes a short film The Other Side of Shebaa Farms (2008) but it is a record of failure. In this short film, whose transcript is included in the book about their conversation,

Mograbi can been seen driving around unable to find any of the places that Zaatari asked him to find and instead only encountering mine fields and electronic fences. The imagery of this film, which ends the conversation between Mograbi and Zaatari is the actual border, militarized and fenced off, that sits between the nations that Mograbi and Zaatari represent. By ending here it is as if they want to make concrete, to remind each other and us of the very real gulf that lies between the two despite their attempts at communication.

247

When Kester describes Habermas’s notion of discursive democracy he notes that

Habermas assumed an ideal set of circumstances for discourse and didn’t account for various power dynamics.350 In the conversation between Zaatari and Mograbi they are clearly trying to account for the power dynamics built into the situation. As I mentioned earlier, Zaatari said that in the 1990s Israelis would constantly try to collaborate with artists and intellectuals of the Arab world and that one potential reason for this was to recruit them to be spies. Zaatari and Mograbi acknowledge this playfully through

Mograbi being sent on various exercises on the border. Kester is also suspect of the assumption that Habermas makes that all discourse is naturally subject to the force of reason, positing instead that counterpoised models of argument where each interlocutor seeks to identify with the position of the other are more productive. When

Mograbi reveals the photographs of his Arab Jewish family, he is identifying with

Zaatari’s Arab position. They are also looking to identify with the other when each of them refers to their mutual engagement with experimental documentary film. This attention to the structure of the conversation as a model where each subjects’ national interests are suspended reveals that a dialogical aesthetics is at play.

But Hagai Tamir didn’t feel that the same kind of mutuality as Mograbi did in his conversations with Zaatari.351 This is evident in the absence of the pilot’s voice from the

350 Grant H. Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) p 113 351 Interview on July 29, 2013

248 video or its accompanying publication. Tamir felt used as material for an artwork and felt like he told Zaatari much more about himself than he learned from the artist. Zaatari invited him to come to the opening of the Venice Biennial to see the finished work but

Tamir declined, worried that since this was a part of the Lebanese national pavilion that he might be instrumentalized for a political purpose. Furthmore, one thing bothered

Tamir about Zaatari’s work. At the outset of their correspondence, Zaatari sent him

DVDs of his work and in one of them, This Day, Tamir saw the image of Ariel Sharon made to look like he was a Nazi. The idea that an Israeli would be compared to a Nazi was too much for him. He acknowledges that his understanding of art doesn’t extend to video art or appropriation and in my view, Tamir didn’t understand that Zaatari was not himself making the comparison but instead looking at the ways that imagery was used for propaganda purposes during the second Intifada. But regardless, the seat in the installation of Letter to a Refusing Pilot sat empty. For these reasons, the dialogical exchange between Tamir and Zaatari was a failure and didn’t reach the same level of mutuality of Mograbi and Zaatari’s conversation. But in this sense it was a more accurate reflection of the current political condition under which Israel and Lebanon exist. Like Mograbi driving around the north of Israel, endlessly bumping into mine fields and electric fences, Tamir met his own roadblocks with Zaatari. But perhaps this was because each of them held a widely different set of expectations for the encounter. The border between them wasn’t based on national politics but the politics of aesthetics –

Tamir is a modernist humanist who believes in truth, essentialism, originality and its relationship to expression. Whereas Zaatari is interested in appropriation and plays with

249 the borders between things such as documentary and fact, point and counterpoint, or author and reader.

Jalal Toufic offers a way of thinking about Zaatari’s use of appropriation that is particular to their experience as post-war artists. Toufic claims that the phenomenon of an appropriated copy might seem like a repetition of something but actually is a resurrection of a lost tradition in the context of what he calls a “surpassing disaster.”352

A resurrection occurs when the original is no longer available, a situation that follows wars like the civil war in Lebanon, during which countless museums, archives, and artworks were destroyed along with the historians, artists and intellectuals that were killed. Toufic argues that the disaster of war destroys tradition and in effect, constructs a poststructuralist condition in which all representations become part of a chain of signifiers. For Toufic, another example of a resurrection is the ruin:

I along with my two siblings and my mother deserted the family apartment during the 1982 Israeli Invasion of Lebanon. Did this make the apartment a ruin? Yes, and not because it was severely damaged and burned during the last days of the offensive: even after it was restored it remained a ruin.353

The renovated apartment is a copy of what it was before it was deserted and destroyed but that copy can never be the original and as a result always points to its destruction. In this sense the true ruin is the new building. To illustrate this idea, Toufic tells a story about a vampire in post-war Beirut who is looking for the perfect ruin and goes from

352 Jalal Toufic, The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster (Forthcoming Books, 2009) 353 Jalal Toufic, “Ruins” in Catherine David ed. Tamáss I: Contemporary Arab Representations: Beirut/Lebanon (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 2002)

250 one destroyed building to another, constantly dissatisfied until he finds a brand new building and buys it. The realtor was confused but at that moment saw the seemingly young vampire as old and the seemingly new building as a ruin. In this sense, the newly constructed building is haunted by the destruction that led to its construction, its becoming.354

When Zaatari includes the image of Sharon dressed as a Nazi in This Day, he is quoting from a realm of visual activism for Palestinian solidarity, an impulse that uses email blasts with images attached to them instead of film, as in the case of Godard in Here and

Elsewhere. But when we recall that Zaatari was interested in Godard’s critique of militant filmmaking, his use of the visual activism that produced the image of Sharon dressed as a Nazi most probably is following a similar critique and skepticism towards activism’s use of visual culture. Furthermore, Zaatari is reproducing an image from an email that in itself is a reproduction of Nazi imagery. In Toufic’s terms Zaatari is resurrecting the image of the Nazi in Palestinian solidarity discourse, a repetition that produced a counterfeit, without the real power of the original, a copy that occurs in the wake of the surpassing disasters of both the Shoah and the Nakba.355 This model of repetition/resurrection is used throughout Zaatari’s work. In All is Well on the Border, he has actors read the words of the prisoners. In This Day, aside from the Sharon image, he also attempts to reproduce Jubril’s photographs. In Letters to a Refusing Pilot, he reuses

354 ibid p20 355 For Toufic, an example of the withdrawal of tradition after the surpassing disaster of the Holocaust is the tendency in the early years of the State of Israel for Holocaust survivors to be marginalized in a society that wanted to forget Jewish weakness and replace it with Jewish strength. Ibid p46

251 the photographs that he took in 1982 and depicted in This Day to construct a film.

Tamir’s misreading of the use of repetition was to believe that Zaatari intended to repeat the initial equation of Nazi and Israeli political violence. But Tamir also misinterpreted the repeated image by assuming that it held some sort of original power.

Zaatari works like a historian, archaeologist, or an archivist of a situation in the wake of war but like Toufic says, “with regard to the surpassing disaster, art acts like the mirror in vampire films: it reveals the withdrawal of what we think is still there.” Zaatari believes that we might look for a document of an original thing but what we are left with is a record of nothing.356 For instance, in Letters to a Refusing Pilot, Zaatari focuses on a school that is now destroyed, an architectural volume that has been punctured and now is only a flattened mass of ruble, only existing through photographs, stories or through the approximations of the new school that replaced it. Toufic asks if all we have is absence, “does this mean that we should not record?”357 He answers that we must record the nothing, because the absence of the original referent is something that we can hold on to. Zaatari traces the shape of this absence through photography, architecture, correspondence, and conversation. He does so by using photographs from the archive of The Arab Image Foundation; archival news footage from 1982; letters written by Lebanese men in an Israeli prison; and conversations with a filmmaker and a pilot. These conversations chart the space between two subjects. This dialogical space,

356 ibid p 57 357 ibid

252 like the liminality of Al Sharit, is also nothing in particular but it can be characterized as a particular kind of remembering that alters the present.

* * *

In the introduction to this dissertation, I stated that my goal was to chart the relationship between art and politics in the case of Israel-Palestine and Lebanon. In this chapter there are a few moments where this was elaborated. First, in the case of

Zaatari’s engagement with Godard’s Ici et Ailleurs, we can see the tendency toward art acting in concert with activism and then that impulse being complicated once the distance between agents acting in solidarity is revealed. Second, when Tamir recoils at the image of the Nazi in Zaatari’s film we see not only the haunting legacy of the

Holocaust on contemporary politics but also the politics of aesthetics, in Rancierre’s sense, being played out. Finally, like the Orientalism at play in Pasolini’s film about the holy land, revealed by Amir Yatziv and Ayreen Anastas, Orientalist attitudes are also at play in essentialized views of Pan-Arabism within the Arab world. We see this in

Zaatari’s This Day through his revisiting of Jabbur’s photographs. In many of these cases history is an ever-present force as evidenced through both personal and cultural memory. Furthermore, the histories of traumatic pasts provoke a series of reactions.

Some are aligned with Freud’s notion of mourning but often we see history repeat itself rising again and again like an apparition. But in the instance of Zaatari and Mograbi’s conversation we can see the possibility of conversation, and more specifically dialogical aesthetics, to break this cycle.

253 Conclusion

In this dissertation I discussed the ways that a group of contemporary artists addressed four historical moments in relationship to contemporary politics. I chose to use their works as a way to narrate the histories of Israel-Palestine and Lebanon and in the chapters above I have shown how these histories, and thus these artistic practices, are linked. This historical framework begins with works by Avi Mograbi, Gilad Efrat, Amir

Yatziv and Ayreen Anastas that look at the Roman occupation of Palestine from the first century BCE through the fourth century CE. I then jumped to the Holocaust through works by Yael Bartana and Omer Fast, particularly looking at the German occupation of

Poland in the 1940s. I then moved to the nakba or the 1948 war in Israel-Palestine through works by Khaled Hourani, Campus in Camps and Dor Guez. Finally, I addressed the Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon from 1982-2000 through works by Akram

Zaatari. These histories set up a contemporary political history within which the artists that I discuss functioned.

But in many ways the history of the establishment of the Oslo Accords in 1993 and their collapse in 2000 is the dominant historical framework from which these artists most recently emerged. As a result of these accords, the Palestinian Authority was established as an interim government that presided over Gaza and areas A and B of the West Bank.

The Oslo period of 1993-2000 was a time of great optimism in which a number of initiatives developed, predicated on economic and cultural cooperation. As a result,

254 artists such as Gilad Efrat, the Israeli art historian Gannit Ankori, the Palestinian curator

Jack Persekian and Khaled Hourani and others were involved in a number of exercises of cultural bridge building. But when the peace process collapsed in 2000 and the Second

Intifada emerged, dialog and cooperation was suspected by many Palestinians and other in the Arab world as a pretext for an expansion and normalization of the occupation. In

2000 Israel unilaterally disengaged from Southern Lebanon and in 2005 unilaterally disengaged from the Gaza Strip. In 2005 Palestinian civil society called for a campaign of boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) and not long after that Israel and Lebanon were again engaged in a war during the summer of 2006. Wars between Israel and

Hamas in Gaza occurred in 2008-2009, 2012, and 2014.

Over the course of these events that began in 2000 many of the artists that I discussed became disenchanted with a political system that had failed them and as a result took on a series of interventions in political discourse. They also operated in a profoundly different way than leftists in the 1960s and 1970s, embodied by the Situationist

International and filmmakers like Pasolini or Godard, adopting instead a postmodern skepticism of utopian revolutionary rhetoric. The Oslo Accords and the withdrawal of

Israel from Lebanon in 2000 could have been seen as victories for Palestinian and

Lebanese revolutionary struggles but instead the political reality that followed was far more complex than the simplifications that utopian revolutionaries projected. The Oslo

Accords were based on dialog between Israelis and Palestinians, ending a period when contact between Israelis and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was

255 forbidden or illegal. Because of the failure of the greatly emphasized methodology of dialog in the Oslo accords, many of the artists that I discuss are not satisfied with discourse per se but instead go deeper into the particular structures of discursive frameworks.

Many of the theoretical devices that I use in this dissertation became part of the rhetoric that artists, curators, critics, activists and art historians used to make sense of a political moment in the region post-2000. With regard to discourse, I relied on a range of theories including Grant Kester’s dialogical aesthetics, which I used to take a closer look at the discursive structures employed by Akram Zaatari in his conversations with

Abi Mograbi and Hagai Tamir. I used Kester because I was interested in seeing if there was a politically motivated social practice embedded within Zataari’s process, given that he is an artist usually known in terms of video and photography. I found Ariella

Azoulay’s notion of civic imagination useful because it looked at the ways that political discourse moves around photographs. This was useful to me because Azoulay addressed another hallmark of the political discourse of Israel Palestine, the use of photography by journalists, NGOs and politicians, but shifted the focus to the civic possibilities of aesthetic structures.

Another set of theories that I found useful were ones that reimagined the ways that discourse could be leveraged to reimagine the way that a public or a common could be constructed. Hannah Arendt’s discussion of the public sphere and the role of collective

256 memory through Halbwachs were useful for me to think through two examples of public discourse: Bartana’s JRMIP congress in Berlin and Campus in Camps. In the case of

Campus in Camps, I was interested in their use of “the commons,” a term that became ubiquitous in discussions around globalization post-2000. Specifically, I was interested in the ways that they redefined it in terms of the refugee camp, an extra-national, and as a result an extra-judicial, space through the Arabic term Al Mashà, rooting a globalized phrase in relation to local politics.

In addition to theories of discourse and publics, I also found a set of theories in relation to the politicization of space to be useful. I am greatly indebted to Nadia Abu El-Haj’s study of archaeology in Israel-Palestine, Facts on the Ground. The title of this book is a diplomatic phrase that is most commonly used to describe Israeli settlements but El-Haj repurposed it to think about archaeological sites. This link is crucial for my discussion of archaeology as a tool for political ideology, not unlike Eyal Weizman’s discussion of the ways in which civilian forms of architecture and urbanism are instrumentalized to expand the infrastructure of a military occupation.

Because this dissertation addresses works that represent a range of subject matter and methodology, including photography, architecture and urbanism, archaeology, film, photography, and socially engaged practices, I have woven together a wide range of theoretical models. But the overwhelming multiplicity of theories was driven by the goal

257 of illuminating the multiplicity of meanings hidden within the strata of artistic practice with regard to Israel-Palestine and Lebanon.

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