Archival Imperialism: An Analysis of Racial Hierarchy in the Six Day War Files
by
Tamara N. Rayan
A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Master of Information Faculty of Information University of Toronto
© Copyright by Tamara N. Rayan 2020
Archival Imperialism: An Analysis of Racial Hierarchy in the Six Day War Files
Tamara N. Rayan
Master of Information
Faculty of Information University of Toronto
2020 Abstract
Using a theoretical framework of critical race theory, settler colonialism, and symbolic annihilation, this research investigates how records creators and archivists of the Six Day War Files
Collection have constructed their own narrative of the War, thereby legitimizing a racial hierarchy between Palestinians and Israelis and sustaining Israeli imperialism. Chapter One problematizes why there is little written about Palestine from the archival perspective, despite the abundance of scholarship on the colonial power of the archive. Chapter Two analyzes the content of the Collection, investigating how records creators used symbolic annihilation to construct Palestinians as a racialized Other. Chapter
Three analyzes the context of the Collection, investigating how archival practices have sustained the colonizer’s representation of the colonized and furthered racial inequality. This thesis offers a novel perspective to the current archival scholarship regarding Palestine, revealing how symbolic annihilation in the archive extends, and is an extension of, systemic annihilation.
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Acknowledgments
This thesis is dedicated to my mother and my maternal grandmother for all the sacrifices they made so that I could be living this life as a second generation Palestinian-Canadian. Throughout my research into the Six Day War I often thought about the butterfly effect of decisions that you both have made during your lives that led to me being in a position to produce this thesis. I hope that one day I can say that I have been half as strong and capable as you both.
I want to thank my thesis committee for all the support they have shown me over the past two years. Thank you to Dr. Wendy Duff for agreeing to supervise this thesis. Thank you for creating a warm, receptive space for me to see the value in my half-formed thoughts and for pushing me in the right directions without any handholding. Thank you also to Dr. T.L. Cowan, my second reader, for painstakingly going through each line of this thesis with me and for your endless words of encouragement. Thanks to you both I’m a far more confident writer than I ever could have imagined at the start.
Finally, I want to thank my friends, work colleagues, mentors, and fellow iSchool students for being my network of support. Thank you for being here alongside of me throughout this journey, for asking questions just to hear me go off about a topic I am passionate about, and for lovingly berating me for taking it upon myself to complete a second master’s degree (with a thesis, no less). Thank you to my loving partner, John, for your patience, your humour, and your encouragement to just slow down. It’s a blessing to have a partner who makes you remember how to feel like a human again and not just a schedule of deadlines. Finally, thank you to Boris the cat, who curled up beside me during many mornings, afternoons, and evenings of writing.
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Statement of Positionality
This research is a study of the Israel State Archives and seeks to explore its recordkeeping practices through the critical lens of the settler colonialism that has disenfranchised Palestinians from the region’s documentary heritage over the course of the past 72 years. Palestine is largely understudied within archival scholarship, and in general, academics who choose to specialize in studying Palestine typically see their work vilified as anti-Semitic.1 In the tradition of feminist and critical race theory, which work to dismantle the pretense of neutrality in professional disciplines by placing value on “the knowledge gained through lived experience,”2 I begin this study first and foremost by positioning myself. I am a second generation Canadian of Palestinian heritage. Like many other Palestinian families, in 1948, my maternal grandparents were forced to leave Jaffa under the threat that if they remained, they would be murdered by the approaching Israeli military. When the military arrived in the town, they decreed all the homes to be willfully “abandoned” and to this day their legitimate Palestinian owners have been denied the right to return. My mother’s family were placed in a refugee camp just outside of Ramallah in the West Bank, where my mother and most of her siblings were born and raised in poor conditions until my grandfather could afford a plot of land to build a home on the outskirts of the small village of Al-Bireh. As a result of being raised with this intergenerational trauma while making sense of my own racialized identity within diaspora, I seek to empower Palestine and Palestinians through my work. The parameters of my critique, however, are focused upon Israel’s recordkeeping practices, Zionism as an ideology, and Israel as a state, not Israelis as a people.
1 For a notable example, see Nadia Abu El-Haj and the controversy sparked by the publication of her work Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society. 2 Michelle Caswell, “Dusting for Fingerprints: Introducing Feminist Standpoint Appraisal,” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 3, no. 1 (2019): 1. iv
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ...... iii
Statement of Positionality ...... iv
Table of Contents ...... v
Introduction: Race is a Construct, but it is Made Real in the Archive ...... 1
Background ...... 4
Methodology ...... 6
Theoretical Framework ...... 7
Outline ...... 9
Chapter I: Finding Palestine in Archival Literature ...... 11
Archives and Settler Colonialism ...... 11
Reworking Archives of the Past ...... 14
Mobilizing Archives as a Site of Resistance ...... 16
Redefining Recordkeeping Practices for the Future ...... 18
Conclusion ...... 21
Chapter II: Disturbing the Specter of Imperialism Within the Records ...... 23
Transcripts of the Full Cabinet ...... 24
Transcripts of the Security Cabinet...... 29
Conclusion ...... 32
Chapter III: History Belongs to Those Who Archive It ...... 35
Analysis of Archival Description...... 36
Analysis of Censorship and Restriction ...... 41
Analysis of Appraisal for Digitization Purposes ...... 44
Conclusion ...... 47
Conclusion: Mitigating the Bulldozer of History ...... 50
Bibliography ...... 56
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Introduction: Race is a Construct, but it is Made Real in the Archive
A common tactic that imperial nations use to assert their sovereignty within another nation is to construct and perpetuate representations that depict that nation and its people as unfit to govern themselves. European colonization has employed this tactic time and time again by dismissing Indigenous peoples as “primitive,” “savage,” and “animals.”3 By disqualifying them as humans or capable of any civilized self-governance, the colonizer makes space for their own invasive settler society. This denial of humanity has “enabled distance to be maintained and justified various policies of either extermination or domestication,”4 while replacing the Indigenous population with their own people and settlements. Canada’s first Prime Minister, John A. MacDonald, for example, left a long legacy of violence through the dehumanization and forced assimilation of First Nations people. One notable instance of such is on July 6, 1885, as the House of Commons were debating how to approach the problem of “half-breeds” causing a “disturbance” in the Northwest Territories. MacDonald delivered a speech, stating “we cannot change the barbarian, the savage, into a civilized man… we could not always hope to maintain peace with the Indians; that the savage was still a savage, and that until he ceased to be savage, we were always in danger of a collision, in danger of war, in danger of an outbreak.”5 MacDonald strips the Indigenous protesters of their humanity and therefore their right to outrage against the injustices and violence done to them in the name of “civilization.”
This tactic has its parallels in the present day settler colonial situation in Palestine, whereby dehumanization and vilification are used to enforce the subjugation of the region’s indigenous6
3 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 2nd Edition (London and New York: Zed Books, 2012), 9. 4 Ibid., 27. 5 Third Session, Fifth Parliament of Canada, Official Reports of the Debates of the House of Commons of the Dominion of Canada, volume 20 (Ottawa, ON: MacLean, Roger & Co., 1885), 3119. 6 Throughout this thesis, I refer to Palestinians as indigenous to the region currently occupied by Palestine and Israel, meaning they have a historical continuity with the land prior to Israeli colonialism. In this context I have chosen not to capitalize “indigenous” when referring to Palestinians to demarcate the cultural, racial, and social differences between Palestinians and Indigenous peoples (First Nation, Inuit, Metis, and Native peoples of Turtle Island). 1 population of Palestinians.7 During a tour of a new security barrier erected in February 2019, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vehemently defended the need to build such a separation between Israel and Palestine:
“At the end, in the State of Israel, as I see it, there will be a fence that spans it all,”... “I’ll be told, 'this is what you want, to protect the villa?' The answer is yes. Will we surround all of the State of Israel with fences and barriers? The answer is yes. In the area that we live in, we must defend ourselves against the wild beasts.”8
By constructing and perpetuating misrepresentations that depict the colonized as savage beasts unfit to rule themselves or their land, settler colonial governments justify their continued presence within a land and state that they are not indigenous to. The continued existence of the indigenous population over time are seen as a threat while the existence of the settler becomes something to be defended at all costs by separating the two populations with apartheid walls, security fences, and reserves.
Controlling the idea of the colonized goes beyond stereotypes, extending into the archive and becoming truth in a nation’s official documentation. Since pre-Statehood, Israeli settlers have strategically disseminated propaganda that the land was “a desert supposedly empty of indigenous inhabitants,” before they arrived, which supported “the biblical ideology designed to establish the Jewish people’s ‘historical right’ to the land.”9 Since the 1930s, Palestinian records and cultural assets that pose contradictory narratives have been seized by the Israeli military from official archives, non-profit institutions, and even personal archives.10 These have either been destroyed, held within Israeli archives and confiscated indefinitely, or tampered with through censorship. This is not a novel tactic of imperialism, for the archive has always existed simultaneously as “a physical place to store Indigenous materials and a political representation of policies of displacement and destruction of Indigenous cultural practices,
7 Rona Sela, “The Genealogy of Colonial Plunder and Erasure – Israel’s Control over Palestinian Archives,” Social Semiotics 28, no. 2 (2018): 212. 8 Jack Khoury and Barak Ravid, “Netanyahu’s ‘Wild Beast” Quote was Apartheid Speak, Says Chief Palestinian Negotiator,” Haaretz, 10 February 2019, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/erekat-pm-s-wild-beast-quote-was- apartheid-speak-1.5402778 (accessed 20 August 2019). 9 Rona Sela, “The Hump of Colonialism, or The Archive as a Site of Resistance,” in Decolonising Practices, edited by Nick Aikens et al., pp. 50-57 (L’internationale Online, 2016), 52. 10 Sela, “The Genealogy of Colonial Plunder and Erasure – Israel’s Control over Palestinian Archives,” 201. 2 languages, and ways of life.”11 In recent times, these materials are scanned and then returned to Palestinians after all relevant information has been mined for intelligence purposes. As curator Rona Sela has uncovered within her research into Israeli imperialism, Israeli records that document human rights violations, such as the 1948 genocide of Palestinians in the village of Dir-Yassin, are willfully destroyed, classified, or censored from the public.12 These tactics of archival control are used to suppress and delegitimize the history of the colonized, because “material of Palestinian importance” has “the potential to crack the colonizer’s narrative,”13 by providing evidence that reveal its fabrication. Uncontested by contradictory archival evidence, the colonizer’s narrative goes unquestioned as truth. The monopolization of archival material is the colonization of information, an intentional tactic used to regulate, control, and subjugate the colonized alongside the theft and remapping of their territory. If Palestine exists in the minds of the people as “empty” for two thousand years since biblical times, then Israeli resettlement simply becomes settlement.
Though these acts of archival imperialism have been occurring unimpeded for 72 years, archival scholars have largely ignored the recordkeeping practices of Israel. In this thesis I address this lacuna of scholarship by investigating the ways in which Israeli authorities use archival practices and records to further settler colonialism. Specifically, I analyze how a hierarchy of race is constructed within the Israeli archive and perpetuated as truth within society and law, which is then used to further the State of Israel’s imperialist goals at the expense of Palestinians being marginalized as a people and Palestine being erased as an autonomous state. I do this by conducting an internal examination of Israel’s existing records about Palestine in order to arrive at an understanding of the tools of hegemony used to legitimize the everyday epistemologies, methods, and knowledges of their imperial rule. The analytical focus of this study is the Six Day War Files, a digital archival collection within the custody of the Israel State Archives that, despite being created in 1967, has only recently been declassified and digitized in 2017. The Collection is comprised of 5 series: The Transcripts of the Full Cabinet; The Transcripts of the Security Cabinet; “Back to the Cisterns” a photo exhibition by Yehuda Eisenstark; Films and Recordings; and the Israel Broadcasting Authority’s Radio Recordings.14 The extent of the Collection comprises approximately 150
11 Kimberly Christen, “Relationships not Records: Digital Heritage and the Ethics of Sharing Indigenous Knowledge Online,” in The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities, edited by Jentery Sayers (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), 403. 12 Sela, “The Genealogy of Colonial Plunder and Erasure – Israel’s Control over Palestinian Archives,” 209. 13 Ibid., 209. 14 The Transcripts of the Full Cabinet, Transcripts of the Security Cabinet, Films and Recordings, and Israel Radio Recordings are predominantly in Hebrew. All the archival descriptions for the Collection can be found in both 3
000 pages of textual material, 1000 photographs, 600 audio recordings, and 185 audiovisual records. An examination of this entire extent is not feasible; therefore, I have chosen to limit the scope of this study to an internal examination of the two textual record series in the Collection: The Transcripts of the Full Cabinet and The Transcripts of the Security Cabinet. Through my analysis of these series as well as the archival processes imposed upon the Collection as a whole, I answer the following three key questions: 1) What larger imperial goals do the records creators’ representations of Palestinians as a race in the content of the Six Day War Files serve? 2) How do specific archival practices of appraisal, description, access, restriction, and digital preservation sustain the imperialist ideologies established during the creation of the Six Day War Files? 3) How do the interventions of both the records creators and archivists serve to contribute to an ongoing hierarchy of race that positions the Jewish population above that of the Arab population in Palestine and Israel? In answering these questions, I hope to illuminate that the recordkeeping initiatives of Israeli archives are just a single cog in a much larger apparatus of systematic racial oppression, the existence and success of which is hinged upon ensuring the ongoing control of Palestinian bodies and their representation.
Background
The Six Day War occurred from June 5 to June 10, 1967 with Israel fighting against Jordan, Egypt, and Syria. The main cause of the War was the contention caused by Egypt’s decision to block access to the Straits of Titan from Israeli ships and the subsequent mobilization of military forces along the border between Israel and Egypt by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. After Israel launched a successful airstrike that destroyed Egypt’s air force, the Israel Defense Forces invaded Egyptian territory and Nasser was forced to evacuate the country’s residents from the Sinai Peninsula. Under Egyptian command, the Jordanian army then launched an attack on the Israeli occupied area of Jerusalem, but after a series of offenses initiated in response by Israel, Jordan was forced to withdraw and cease fire. Overall, the Six Day War set into motion territorial changes that have since defined the area as we know it in the present, for in Israel’s victory they captured the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria.15 The results were devastating for those living in these regions as two hundred thousand Palestinians were forced to become refugees,
Hebrew and English. In the analysis of the content of the textual records of the Collection, all items used in this thesis were initially translated using Google Translate to find examples relating to Palestinian subjects and then officially translated by May Levi, a Hebrew-language speaker. 15 Michael B. Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 308. 4 many for the second time after the exodus of 1948, and fled to Jordan or the remaining territory of the West Bank.16
The official records of this cataclysmic moment in history were placed under high restriction status since their creation by the Israeli government in 1967. The records were finally released to the public on May 18, 2017 and three years later most of the material has been digitized. Upon their declassification, chief archivist Yaakov Lozovick stated that “for the first time in 50 years it will be possible to closely follow the dynamic within the government regarding the Six-Day War… What were the ministers' initial positions regarding the future of the territories?”17 The intent behind the public release of the Six Day War Collection was to fill in the historical gaps of Israel’s history of statehood. However, knowledge of the decision-making processes of Israel’s most powerful political authorities found within these records, especially during the days following the Six Day War when the ministers deliberated how to administer their conquered Palestinian territories, are also extremely telling of the nature of their colonial rule. Even in instances wherein suggestions regarding the implementation of policies, matters of intelligence, and security objectives did not come to fruition, the stream of consciousness offered in these records depict the thoughts and feelings of their minds at work as they reacted to the events and the aftermath of the Six Day War in real time, uninterrupted by political objectivity.
The only scholar to have published material examining the Six Day War Files Collection has been the chief archivist of the Israel State Archives himself,18 in which he refers to the appropriation of Palestinian land in his two-part article as an “accidental occupation.”19 This rich body of archival material has not been carefully investigated by archival scholars, despite depicting a pinnacle event in Palestinian and Israeli history. This Collection offers a unique opportunity to understand how and for what purposes the settler constructs racial representations of the colonized within archival documents. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic posit that race relations become deeply embedded within “thought processes and social
16 Peter Dodd and Halim Barakat, “Palestinian Refugees of 1967: A Sociological Study,” The Muslim World 60, no. 2 (1970): 123. 17 “Thousands of Six Day War Documents Declassified,” Arutz Sheva: Israel National News, 18 May 2017, http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/229841 (Accessed 20 April 2019). 18 Yaacov Lozovick, “The Secret Transcripts of the Six-Day War, Part I,” Tablet, May 17, 2017 https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/234352/secret-transcripts-six-day-war-1 (Accessed 1 December 2019). 19 Yaacov Lozovick, “Israeli Security Cabinet Secret Transcripts Part II, The Accidental Occupation,” Tablet, June 7, 2017 https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/236531/israeli-security-cabinet-secret-transcripts-part- 2 (Accessed 1 December 2019). 5 structures” to the degree that ‘“ordinary business”’ of society—the routines, practices, and institutions that we rely on to effect the world’s work—will keep minorities in subordinate positions.”20 Therefore, the process of untangling how Palestinians were initially racialized within this historical documentation is key to understanding Israeli society’s larger mechanisms of institutional racism and how they have been subsequently disenfranchised within the region’s current archival laws, legislation, and institutional policies.
Methodology
In exploring the reasons behind how and for what purpose Palestinians are represented in these Israeli records, I apply a qualitative, interpretive framework of historical research method to the Six Day War Files Collection. This line of critical inquiry requires the researcher to carefully examine and interpret historical events, so as to uncover findings that assist in understanding the past and the present, and to a limited extent, “facilitate planning for the future.”21 The steps of historical research method include: first identifying a problem of historical significance and one’s hypothesis, collecting data from relevant primary and secondary sources that support this line of inquiry, verifying the authenticity and validity of the data, organizing and analyzing the data, and finally investigating one’s interpretation of the data and findings against their hypothesis.22
The problem of historical significance pertaining to the Six Day War is thus: that the state records documenting these events have been classified for the past 50 years since their creation and their contents have been purposefully restricted from public accountability and reframed within colonial bias. This is a problem because, as International Law states regarding archives displaced by colonization and decolonization, “every national community should be able to rely upon the assistance of other states owning sources related to its history… countries holding information will forward that information to the citizens of other countries who need it to protect or assert their rights.”23 Palestinians have undergone 50 years without access to the records of the Six Day War Files and have been unable to dispute their contents. My hypothesis, then, is that these records have allowed for a hierarchy of race to be established
20 Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 22. 21 R.K. Bhatt and S.C. Bhatt, “Application of Historical Method of Research in the Study of Library and Information Science: An Overview,” Annals of Library Science and Documentation 41, no. 4 (1994): 156. 22 Ibid., 156-157. 23 Charles Kecskemeti, “Archives Seizures: The Evolution of International Law,” in Displaced Archives, edited by James Lowry, pp. 12-20 (London and New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2017), 14-15. 6 that obstructs the rights of Palestinians as citizens and residents, allowing for the unimpeded continuation of settler colonialism in the region.
In order to support this hypothesis, I utilize the records within the Six Day War Files Collection as my primary sources for research, for as Wolf states, “items created during the era under study… contain the evidence that will help [researchers] fulfill the study’s aims.”24 First, I compile instances of when, where, and how the colonized are mentioned within the content of the Six Day War Files to reveal themes in how they are represented by Israeli authorities. Second, I examine how the archivists of the Israel State Archives have chosen to process the records through their appraisal, arrangement, description, and access decisions to understand how Palestinians are racialized within the records’ archival representation and disenfranchised within the archive’s policies. I then contrast this data against secondary sources of information that document the Palestinian experience lacking in Israel’s records, for, as Bhatt and Bhatt state regarding historical method, “secondary sources of information are the best tools for rounding out the setting or filling in the gaps between primary sources of information.”25 Finally, I analyze Israel’s current policies, laws, and regulations that have been impacted by the decisions decreed in the Six Day War Files to arrive at an understanding of how Israel perceives and disenfranchises Palestinians as a race within the present day context of settler colonialism.
Theoretical Framework
I primarily engage a critical race theory framework in my analysis of the Six Day War Files Collection in relation to Zionism and Israeli settler colonialism. By using the term “settler colonialism,” I refer to the contestation of land seen in the demolition of Palestinian homes, establishment of illegal Israeli settlements, surveillance of Palestinian bodies and their movement using the identity card system, the higher rates of Palestinian incarceration, and murder of Palestinian civilians by the Israel Defense Forces. Critical race theory had its beginnings in the civil rights movement in the 1970s, as African Americans questioned the foundations of American social order which “organizes itself along racial lines and hierarchies,”26 privileging white dominance. By the 1980s, it became a theoretical movement used by Black law students and professors in American universities to attend to the racial injustice of there being
24 Jacqueline H. Wolf, “Historical Methods,” Journal of Human Lactation 34, no. 2 (2018): 284. 25 Bhatt and Bhatt, “Application of Historical Method of Research in the Study of Library and Information Science: An Overview,” 156. 26 Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 3. 7
“only one Law, a law that in its universal majesty applied to everyone without regard to race, color, gender, or creed.”27 The movement was led by Derrick Bell of Harvard Law School and was quickly taken up by other legal scholars such as Richard Delgado, Mari Matsuda, Charles Lawrence, and Patricia Williams.28 While originally born out of the Black experience, critical race theory also attends to how different ethnic minority groups are “racialized in [their] own individual way and according to the needs of the majority group at particular times in its history.”29 In this case, critical race theory can be applied to the context of Jewish-Israeli and Arab-Palestinian social order, as I argue the Jewish majority in Israel has racialized its Arab constituents according to their needs of securing power as settlers.
In conjunction with the work of critical race theory, I also employ the theory of symbolic annihilation in my analysis of the Six Day War Files Collection. Symbolic annihilation was first theorized by communications scholar George Gerbner to bring attention to how the lack of media representation of certain groups of people based on race, gender, class, and other identity markers signifies an annihilation of their social existence.30 Feminist and queer theory media scholars have since taken up the idea of symbolic annihilation to give name to the process by which media denies the social existence of specific identities to perpetuate existing social, gender, and racial inequalities.31 The theory has also entered archival scholarship to speak of absences in the archive, for example as Michelle Caswell states, “American repositories were ignoring or overlooking materials that document South Asian American history, treating the community simply as if did not exist.”32 In examining the misrepresentations and absences of Palestinians documented within the Six Day War Files, I argue that Israel has symbolically annihilated the social existence of Palestinians in order to condone systemic racism and colonial power.
27Angela Harris “Forward,” in Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (New York: New York University Press, 2001), xix. 28 See Derrick Bell, Race, Racism and American Law (Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1973); Richard Delgado, The Coming Race War?: And Other Apocalyptic Tales of America After Affirmative Action and Welfare (New York: New York University Press, 1996); Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights: A Diary of a Law Professor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991); Mari Matsuda and Charles Lawrence, We Won’t Go Back: Making the Case for Affirmative Action (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). 29 Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, 70. 30 George Gerbner and Larry Gross, “Living with Television: The Violence Profile,” Journal of Communication 26 (1976): 182. 31 Lance and Paschyn 2018; Tuchman 1978; Millward, Dodd, Fubara-Manuel 2017; Klein and Shiffman 2009. 32 Michelle Caswell, “Seeing Yourself in History: Community Archives and the Fight Against Symbolic Annihilation,” The Public Historian 36, no. 4 (2014): 27. 8
It is more common within archival scholarship to utilize decolonization and postcolonial theory rather than critical race theory to address how tactics of settler colonialism have compromised the representation of the colonized in the records of the colonizer.33 However, one must bring attention to the fact that the situation in Palestine is far from being ready to adopt a “postcolonial” or “decolonization” discourse, since imperialism still actively underlies the policies and ideologies of the ruling state. Postcolonial theory “examines all the mechanisms whereby imperial colonialism functioned in the past as well as its after-effects in the present,”34 while decolonization “in the settler colonial context must involve the repatriation of land.”35 Israel is currently in no position to fulfill either of these criteria. This study does draw upon knowledge from decolonization/postcolonial theory, however critical race theory and symbolic annihilation provide the main lens through which to analyze the racial inequality found within the content and archival interventions of the Six Day War Files. As I demonstrate in the following chapters, racism is deeply embedded within Israeli recordkeeping practices, archival laws and legislations, social structures, thought processes, and institutional policies, together which serve to actively establish and sustain the colonial interests of Israel.
Outline
The creators and subjects reflected in these records have wielded significant authority over how the events of the Six Day War will be remembered in the future. However, they are not the only agents that have had a hand in the processes of knowledge production. Archivists cultivate and preserve the semantics of historical truth by appraising certain documents over others, digitizing and increasing the visibility and reach of certain types of records, and describing such records within the parameters of certain types of knowledge systems.36 In doing so, archivists establish a particular idea of the past that has “implications of silence for the groups that are excluded, and [an] impact on societal memory in general.”37 Shared systems of knowledge, identity, and race consciousness in turn cultivate ideas regarding what is normative, including a society’s structures of dominance, subjugation, and control.
33 Ghaddar and Caswell 2019; Buchanan 2007; Luker 2017; Genovese 2016; Cushman 2013; El Shakry 2015. 34 Dino Franco Felluga, Critical Theory: The Key Concepts (New York, NY: Routledge, 2015), 223. 35 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 7. 36 Katie Shilton and Ramesh Srinivasan, “Participatory Appraisal and Arrangement for Multicultural Archival Collections,” Archivaria 63 (2007): 88 37 Rodney G.S. Carter, “Of Things Said and Unsaid: Power, Archival Silences, and Power in Silence,” Archivaria 61 (Spring 2006): 217. 9
In consideration of this, my analysis of the Six Day War Files Collection focuses upon both of these parameters: 1) the creators and subjects reflected in the provenance and informational content of the records and 2) the archivists and their practices that have shaped the evidential context of the records. Thus, the outline of my study is as follows: Chapter One, titled “Finding Palestine in Archival Literature,” comprises a literature review of relevant scholarship dealing with colonial archives and Palestinian documentary heritage; Chapter Two, titled “Disturbing the Specter of Imperialism Within the Records,” is an analysis of the particular representations of the colonized established by the subjects and creators of the records within their provenance and informational content; Chapter Three, titled “History Belongs to Those Who Archive It,” is an analysis of how archival practices of description, access and restriction are used to frame and reframe the context of events of the Six Day War; Chapter Four titled “Mitigating the Bulldozer of History” is a synthesis of this study’s findings, explaining how a hierarchy of race is constructed through the Israel State Archives’ recordkeeping, which socially, culturally, and racially marginalizes Palestinians in the interest of Zionism.
As I demonstrate in the following literature review of existing archival scholarship about Palestine, scholars have consistently shied away from critically delving into how Israeli archives have been the breeding ground for the birth of laws, policies, and societal norms that have formed Israel’s multi-pronged imperial stronghold over the region. Much of these policies and laws have their origins in the Six Day War Files, defining what it means to be a Palestinian living on Palestinian or Israeli territory. Beverley Butler firmly believes that if the Palestinian historical record is to be decolonized, the “grand narrative” must “be relinquished in terms of a more humane therapeutics.”38 I believe that archival scholarship must also follow this cue and adopt a more humane approach to its analysis. Archival analysis of the Palestinian record tends to limit its scope to the record and the archive, choosing to view such subjects removed from the gritty context of settler colonialism in which they lie. In this study I aim to explain how a hierarchy of race is constructed within the Six Day War Files Collection. In doing so, however, I also pay tribute to the region’s overarching policies and politics as well as to Palestinians on the ground. Palestinians, as defined by Edward Said, are remarkable in that though “we are without a territory of our own, we have been united as a people largely because of the Palestinian idea.”39 Archival intervention into a moment in history as traumatic as the Six Day War cannot be divorced from the Palestinian idea and this study seeks to honour it as such.
38 Beverley Butler, “Palestinian Heritage ‘to the moment’: Archival Memory and the Representation of Heritage,” Conservation and Management of Archaeological Sites, vol. 11, no. 3–4 (2009): 258. 39 Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), xxxvi. 10
Chapter I: Finding Palestine in Archival Literature
Archives and Settler Colonialism
Like many other professional disciplines, in the 1970s archival theorists and practitioners turned the reflexive gaze upon themselves. In doing so, they discovered their primary goal to curate an impartial record of the present by adopting a “self-conscious stance of neutrality and objectivity”40 was in truth merely a veneer under which they were accomplishing the exact opposite. Archivists were not working with intention, but with reactivity that resulted in the representation of only the most accessible, dominant, and easily recorded parts of society.41 In practicing “neutrality” archivists were in reality practicing “passivity,” the consequence of which provided members of the most vulnerable and marginalized positions of society with marginalized positions within the archive.
When considering archives of settler colonial states, this longstanding problem becomes compounded. Settler colonialism has had heavy influence upon knowledge production in addition to the territorialization of land. In Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, Linda Tuhiwai Smith has produced one of the most influential studies about how imperial power and knowledge production have worked in tandem to colonize Indigenous peoples. In privileging her own lived experience as a Maori researcher, Tuhiwai Smith untangles the complex and violent process by which Western settlers “desire, extract and claim ownership of our ways of knowing, our imagery, the things we create and produce, and then simultaneously reject the people who created and developed those ideas and seek to deny them further opportunities to be creators of their own culture and own nations.”42 Archival scholars have taken up this thread within their own studies of colonialism and the archive. Kirsty Reid and Fiona Paisley have investigated the relationship between “knowledge, power, and empire” as they
40 Terry Cook, “Evidence, Memory, Identity, Community: Four Shifting Archival Paradigms,” Archival Science 13 (2013), 97. 41 F. Gerald Ham, “The Archival Edge,” The American Archivist (1975): 6. 42 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 2nd edition (London and New York: Zed Books, 2012), 1.
coalesce in the imperial archive, asserting that throughout history colonial states have been “intent on gathering information about peoples and places in order to conquer, govern, and rule them.”43 This connection between research and colonial expansion has resulted in a cultural bias toward Western thought and a gap within the archival record as Western powers and colonizers neglected to record Indigenous knowledge.44 Theoretical ethnocentrism has impacted the shape of archival methodology and practice as information gathered about the colonized was used not just to establish sovereignty, but also to provide justification for carrying out genocide, the theft of land, and the theft of cultural artifacts.45 Archives mirror the power structures in which they are situated, and in colonial states they function as institutions of hegemony whereby “modern archival methodology [has taken] on the role of bureaucratizing history in order to establish superiority over the colonized.”46 When operating within colonial power structures the biases involved in archival processing are therefore increased exponentially.
In short, institutional archives, in addition to offering little support for Indigenous legal and land claims, are sites of historical evidence that support colonial authority and the regulation and marginalization of Indigenous peoples. Multiple scholars have speculated upon how to restructure both the nature and practices of the archive to address the demand for decolonization. In her investigation of Canadian and Australian acts of reconciliation, Trish Luker calls for a recognition of new modes of provenance, the right to correct or destroy records, the right to reply and collaborate in the description of records, broadening the parameters for what constitutes a records creator, and allowing colonized subjects the right to access information about themselves.47 Delva and Adams assert that archival theories regarding creation, ownership, and authorship are deeply embedded in Western colonial thought. Western ideas of preservation and access typically do not consider the needs of Indigenous communities that never would have wanted certain records documenting their histories to exist in the first place. Therefore, in disrespecting Indigenous cultural protocols, archival practice serves to undermine its own goal of
43 Kirsty Reid and Fiona Paisley, “Introduction,” in Sources and Methods in Histories of Colonialism: Approaching the Imperial Archive, edited by Kirsty Reid and Fiona Paisley, pp. 1-12 (London and New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2017), 2. 44 Taylor R. Genovese, “Decolonizing Archival Methodology: Combating Hegemony and Moving towards a Collaborative Archival Environment,” AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, vol. 12, no. 1, (2016): 33. 45 Ibid., 34. 46 Ibid., 34. 47 Trish Luker, “Decolonising Archives: Indigenous Challenges to Record Keeping in ‘Reconciling’ Settler Colonial States,” Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 32, no. 91–92 (2017): 114. 12 pursuing justice for traditionally colonized peoples.48 Echoing the need for large-scale restructuring, Duarte and Belarde-Lewis posit the introduction of Indigenous ontologies to institutional cataloguing and classification. The ontology of “imagining” begins with Indigenous people imagining an active future for themselves and their ways of knowing, an act of resistance to the colonial expectation that Indigenous people only exist in the past as artifacts. This encourages the representation of Indigenous epistemologies within state-level archival description and cataloguing practices which in turn acknowledges the value of Indigenous knowledge.49
The decolonization of the settler colonial archive has been researched extensively, however what is clear from a brief review of this body of archival writing is that the predominant focus is upon case studies of Indigenous peoples within Canada, the United States, and Australia.50 There is a lacuna of investigation into the state archives of non-Western settler colonial nations, with the exception of Njabulu Bruce Khumalo’s (2018) investigation of Zimbabwe’s archives in relation to genocide and Viviane Frings-Hessami’s (2019) study into the appropriation of the Khmer Rouge Archives. Despite its ongoing, 72 year-long occupation, Palestine in particular has been given attention by only a few scholars. Caitlin M. Davis, Ann Stoler, Beverley Butler, Beshara Doumani, Khaldun Bshara, Farah Aboubakr, Nick Denes and Rona Sela have all carefully investigated the issue from various interventions. Israeli curator Rona Sela has been the most prolific researcher of how colonialism manifests itself within Israeli recordkeeping through her extensive list of written works (2000; 2007; 2009; 2017; 2017; 2018), curated exhibits (2000; 2003; 2009; 2010; 2011; 2013; 2016), and documentary film (2017).
In reviewing the existing literature that does examine Palestinian and Israeli archives, the initial challenge that one is presented with is the fact there is little literature to begin with. What is even more interesting is that very little of this scholarship originates in the field of archival studies and instead is found within other social science and humanities disciplines such as cultural studies, anthropology, and history. At the outset, this belies an inherent gap within the field of archival studies. Through this literature review I seek to bring scholarly attention to this lacuna while also highlighting the work of researchers that counter this inequity. My objectives are the following: to identify and trace the
48 Melanie Delva and Melissa Adams, “Archival Ethics and Indigenous Justice: Conflict or Coexistence?” in Engaging with Records and Archives: Histories and Theories, edited by Fiorella Foscarini et al. pp. 147-172 (London: Facet Publishing, 2016), 157. 49 Marisa Elena Duarte and Miranda Belarde-Lewis, “Imagining: Creating Spaces for Indigenous Ontologies,” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, vol. 53, no. 5–6, (2015): 691. 50 Schwartz and Cook 2002; Buchanan 2007; Thorpe 2014; McCraken 2015; Stoler 2009; Luker 2017; Genovese 2016. 13 progression of existing scholarship that examines the subject of archives in Palestine and Israel, then evaluate each source based on its evidence, methods, and contribution to the understanding of the subject, and finally to identify the gaps present in this literature and situate my own research within this context.
In the process of identifying and evaluating this body of scholarship, I divide the works under review into three thematic categories: Reworking Archives of the Past; Mobilizing Archives as a Site of Resistance; and Redefining Recordkeeping Practices for the Future. Scholars attending to the archives of Palestine and Israel tend to employ the archive as a temporal site in which to decolonize or resist Israeli imperialism. This has taken the form of reading records against the dominant, imperial narrative to evoke the historic Palestinian presence within its gaps and misrepresentations, analyzing art and activist initiatives that reinterpret records in acts of resistance against contemporary injustices, and finally reconceptualizing current recordkeeping within the region and set the foundation for equitable, therapeutic, and respectful archival practices in the future. By summarizing, placing into conversation, and evaluating each source based on its contributions to each conceptual category, I highlight the intellectual progressions of the field’s research of Palestinian archives and hopefully point the way for the execution of further critical scholarship.
Reworking Archives of the Past
In the hands of authority, archives are notorious for reaffirming the positions of those who are dominant and those who are marginalized. Those who occupy the minority, the defeated, the vulnerable, and/or the oppressed positions of society have little power over how they will be written into the documentary record (if at all), resulting in gaps, misrepresentations, and harmful derogatory stereotypes. This act of control is used to “reproduce the power of the state”51 and legitimize the reasons behind the governance of its colonized subjects. However, as much as the colonizer attempts to scrub the record clean of counternarratives, the presence of the colonized subject in and of itself calls into question the legitimacy of the colonial narrative. Investigation into colonial archives have subsequently been dominated by the ontological approach of “reading against the grain,” to “subvert the privileged position,” and activate “the voices of the marginal” that have been repressed.52 By reading against the grain of Israel’s dominant historical narrative, scholars have been scrutinizing Zionist biases and bringing
51 Rona Sela, “The Genealogy of Colonial Plunder and Erasure – Israel’s Control over Palestinian Archives,” Social Semiotics, vol. 28, no. 2, (2018): 202. 52 Rodney G. S. Carter, “Of Things Said and Unsaid: Power, Archival Silences, and Power in Silence,” Archivaria 61 (2006): 224. 14 attention to contradictions. In presenting alternative readings of the material, Palestinians are given the representation they have been denied and the historical record can subsequently be re-written.
One tactic that Israel has used to center the Zionist worldview is to reframe or destroy any evidence that belies information contrary to “Zionist-propagandist” ideals, while shaping an official “Israeli reality” that suppresses the “numerous wars and tragedies endured by [Palestine] and its residents.”53 In one of her first articles on the topic, “Presence and Absence in ‘Abandoned’ Palestinian Villages,” Sela interrogates the archives of the Jewish National Fund, the Government Press Office, and the Israel Defense Forces. Reading against the grain of photographs from 1948, she illuminates remnants of the lives of the rightful, yet absent, Palestinian owners of these villages, thereby contradicting the Zionist narrative that Palestinian houses and villages were anything but “abandoned property”54 when Jewish settlers arrived. Sela’s recent work, “The Genealogy of Colonial Plunder and Erasure – Israel's Control over Palestinian Archives,” resumes this discussion by investigating plundered archival material belonging to the colonized. Israel's military has a long history of seizing Palestinian records, which are then controlled within their own archives by recontextualizing their content, reframing them within Israeli classification systems, and restricting their exposure and use.55 Sela posits that the authenticity of such items must be restored by digging through the layers of colonial bias to highlight the original culture's practices, rituals, and representations.56 Archivist Caitlin Davis shifts the discussion towards reading against the normalization of discriminatory methods and policies through which Palestine has been archived. Using her own experience of attempting to navigate the intentionally confounding architectural layout of Jerusalem City Hall, Davis elucidates how Israeli archives’ “layouts operate (sometimes purposefully, other times unwittingly and haphazardly) in conjunction with…the quotidian practices of civil servants to enact ‘government.’”57 In analyzing the policies surrounding how archival documents are managed and accessed, her goal is to explore their connection to architectures that engender new realities of Israeli governance.58
53 Rona Sela “Presence and Absence in ‘Abandoned’ Palestinian Villages,” History of Photography, vol. 33, no. 2, (2009): 95. 54 Ibid., 95. 55 Sela, “The Genealogy of Colonial Plunder and Erasure – Israel's Control over Palestinian Archives,” 202. 56 Ibid., 216. 57 Caitlin M. Davis, “Archiving Governance in Palestine,” Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies 3 (2016): 7. 58 Ibid., 8-9. 15
By reading between the layers of colonial bias in the settler’s records and recordkeeping practices, these scholars subvert archival processes of erasure and illuminate history’s hidden voices of the colonized. This symbolic subversion of privilege, however, does not always extend to subverting the subjugated status of contemporary Palestinians. In both her works, Sela connects symbolic acts of archival erasure with physical acts of violence such as the ‘Absentee Property Law’ that was “designed to prevent Palestinian refugees from claiming their property,”59 and the Israeli military that dispossesses Palestinians of their archival heritage. Davis’ argument, however, falls short in that the dichotomy of public-facing service vs. private-storehouse is simply an inherent quality of archives in general, not an aspect that is unique to the colonial situation in Israel. Archival theorist Adrian Cunningham states that historically, “decision makers viewed archives as primarily places of storage and preservation, with access to and use of the archives being only a secondary consideration;”60 a priority that has affected how and where the location and layout of archives in general have been designed. Reading against the grain of archival erasure depicts a more comprehensive analysis of the workings of Israeli imperialism when connected to archival policies that parallel the larger discriminatory laws of the nation-state from which they are born.
Mobilizing Archives as a Site of Resistance
Reading against the grain is just one example of how a record can be utilized for purposes beyond the activities that gave rise to its creation. Reinterpretation is resistance, for as archival theorist, Eric Ketelaar, states, “no longer can we regard the record as an artefact with fixed boundaries of content and contexts… every interpretation of the archive is an enrichment, an extension of the archive.”61 Artists, activists, and citizens have been mobilizing records as a site of resistance through acts of subversion and manipulation that then critique society’s oppressive orders of political, state, and sovereign power. Scholar of visual culture in the Middle East, Anthony Downey, has noted that this approach has often been used by Middle Eastern artists to voice resistance against their political climates, whereby the archives’ “epistemological fissures have offered a productive aperture for artists to situate their research
59 Sela “Presence and Absence in ‘Abandoned’ Palestinian Villages,” 95. 60 Adrian Cunningham “Archives as Place,” in Currents of Archival Thinking, edited by Heather MacNeil and Terry Eastwood, p. 53-81 (Santa Barbara: Libraries Unlimited, 2017), 54. 61 Eric Ketelaar, “Tacit Narratives: The Meanings of Archives,” 138. 16 and subsequent forms of engagement.”62 These acts of everyday manipulation have been studied and theorized by scholars as a means through which to produce counternarratives that work to dismantle the authority of colonial ideologies.
Palestinian architect and anthropologist, Khaldun Bshara, for example, has studied how historic Mamluk buildings in Jerusalem have been adapted into contemporary residences to protect the Jerusalem identity cards of its residents in the face of possible eviction. Palestinians are only permitted to build homes in regions governed by the Palestinian National Authority and are quickly running out of available land in which to do so. This has forced them to repurpose cultural heritage sites for contemporary political purposes, “in order to help Palestinian Jerusalemites sustain a permanent address” or else have “their Jerusalem identity cards threatened by the Israeli policies.”63 In another example Nick Denes analyzes the artistic trajectory of Palestinian liberation posters and films created between 1965 and 1982 to identify the functional and aesthetic departures of the movement itself. The two media forms borrowed images, political fervour, and aesthetics from each other and worked in tandem to convey the expression of the revolution, through "the poster's power to rapidly convey condensed political-aesthetic codes… [and] the scope and speed with which film mobilized its cacophony of revolutionary signs."64 In focusing upon political art as archival material, Denes presents the street as the exhibition and provides a unique lens through which to view and understand Palestinian history. Sela also examines various experimental film and art initiatives that have engaged with Israeli archives to create visual counternarratives of the occupation. Some of these include: creating postcards using scenes from 1970s and 1980s Israeli and American films that contain the last remaining images of neighbourhoods and buildings in Jaffa before they were destroyed,65 editing actors and scenes in Israeli films to create a new narrative of Palestinian struggle,66 and exposing minutes from government discussions that deal with cases of looting, rape, and
62 Anthony Downey, “Contingency, Dissonance and Performativity: Critical Archives and Knowledge Production in Contemporary Art,” in Dissonant Archives: Contemporary Visual Culture and Contested Narratives in the Middle East, edited by Anthony Downey, pp. 13-42, (London & New York: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., 2015), 14. 63 Khaldun Bshara, “Heritage in Palestine: Colonial Legacy in Postcolonial Discourse,” Archaeologies 9, no. 2 (2013): 309. 64 Nick Denes, “Measures of Stillness and Movement: The Poster in Cinema of the Palestinian Revolution,” in Dissonant Archives: Contemporary Visual Culture and Contested Narratives in the Middle East, edited by Anthony Downey, pp. 71-90 (London & New York: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., 2015), 77. 65 Rona Sela, “The Hump of Colonialism, or The Archive as a Site of Resistance,” in Decolonising Practices, edited by Nick Aikens et al., pp. 50-57 (L’internationale Online, 2016), 53. 66 Ibid., 54. 17 murder by printing them onto military blankets.67 In these analyses scholars demonstrate how film, art, and architecture can be used in strategic ways to reinterpret and redefine archives that were formed for entirely different, colonial purposes.
While this approach is effective in its purpose, its target is limited to archival records at the point at which they have already been created, used, and preserved indefinitely after the activity for which they were created has ended. The processes of archival production and colonial knowledge production have only been addressed in these examples after they have had their intended effect on social consciousness and these acts of manipulation are merely fingerprints that leave smudges on the record after the fact. Though their effects have little bearing upon the overarching mechanisms of colonial control solidified in policy and law, these artists’ and activists’ work do give voice and agency to those that are affected the most, which should not be downplayed. The repurposing of heritage buildings in Jerusalem have not revoked the limitations of the Oslo Agreement, but it has protected the identity cards of Palestinians living in precarious situations. The insertion of missing Palestinian narratives of struggle and injustice into Israeli films do not return the homes stolen from them in Jaffa, but they do affirm the identities they have been denied in the rewriting of the land. While artists and activists perform this work upon the ground, much of the time scholars’ “easy adoption of decolonizing discourse by educational advocacy and scholarship” turns “decolonization into a metaphor,” as Tuck and Yang rightfully discuss, uncoupled from action and devoid of “the repatriation of Indigenous land and life.”68 The limitation of this approach, to investigate how artists and activists engage with the archive, is that the resulting critical analyses are theoretical, abstract, and removed from the material reality of the archive’s production of power. Such analyses have little tangible effect on changing the operations of the colonial Israeli archive and serve predominantly to amplify Palestinian voices of insurgency.
Redefining Recordkeeping Practices for the Future
As another possible solution for more equitable archiving, archival scholars analyzing Palestine have speculated on the boundaries of the archive itself. By setting the terms of what constitutes an official archival record, archivists have long established the authority of certain pieces of evidence over others, bestowing value on those that “follow the logic of the archive,” are “coherent and linear” and “fit within a
67 Ibid., 54. 68 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1. 18 particular set of rules.”69 In practice, this typically discredits the value of oral histories, objects, cultural narratives, and other memory aids that do not follow the logic of the Western archive. By broadening the concept of an archival object to include intangible and “unofficial” material while adjusting acquisition and appraisal practices to facilitate this reconceptualization of the record, archivists have sought to rectify historical gaps. Archival scholars have applied this concept to the Palestinian record, and in doing so, have sought to facilitate resistance to erasure and make space for a “complex understanding” of Palestinian identity in relationship to “the common experience of diaspora and exile” found only within the personal, the intangible, and the everyday.70
Scholars have taken up this conceptual mantle from various disciplines, yet all have arrived at the same conclusion: that the Palestinian archive must embrace the “un-archival” in order to compensate for the lack of archives. Linguist and scholar of the Middle East, Farah Aboubakr, stresses the importance of oral culture to Palestinians and presents traditional folktales as a means for contemporary Palestinians to document their lost history in the face of erasure caused by the Israeli occupation and the absence of official Palestinian archival records.71 Beshara Doumani, a historian, argues for broadening the concept of archival material to include family papers, oral history, and material culture such as “the built environment,” “artisan production,” “consumption patterns,” “sartorial regimes,” “food, music, bodily decoration, medical practices and so on,” in addition to official Palestinian “legal texts,” “historical texts,” “literary texts,” and “personal texts.”72 By incorporating these unofficial sources of historical documentation, he posits that historians would be able to re-write Palestinians into archival history while also providing a greater focus on the social lives of families and residences. Beverley Butler, a cultural heritage scholar, argues that in the process of broadening the idea of what can be included in the archive, archivists must also incorporate new frameworks that recognize both “tangible and intangible heritage resources” through “heterogeneous collective and individual strategies of representation,” as well as “reinvest in the aspirations and realities of an archival language and practice committed to a complex
69 Martine Louise Hawkes, Archiving Loss: Holding Places for Difficult Memories (London and New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018), 85. 70 Beverley Butler, “Palestinian Heritage ‘to the moment’: Archival Memory and the Representation of Heritage,” Conservation and Management of Archaeological Sites, vol. 11, no. 3–4 (2009): 252. 71 Farah Aboubakr, “Peasantry in Palestinian Folktales: Sites of Memory, Homeland, and Collectivity,” Marvel & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies 31, no. 2 (2017): 217. 72 Beshara Doumani, “Archiving Palestine and the Palestinians: The Patrimony of Ihsan Nimr,” Jerusalem Quarterly 36 (2009): 9. 19 understanding of the agendas of healing, recovery, and rehousing memory-in-exile.”73 Finally, anthropologist Ann Stoler pushes this concept further by positing a Palestinian counter-archive built entirely upon dissent and that would include the intangible, such as “bodies at checkpoints,” “village roadblocks,” and “arbitrary blackouts,” as well as the tangible in everyday objects, such as “deeds, scraps of paper, messy fragments of an oral account.”74 In doing so, she argues that the oppressive orders and rules of archives in the region can be dismantled and “imbued with the subversive, creative, and bold energies,” of everyday life.75
The point of collapse with all these scholars’ approaches to reconceptualising the Palestinian archive, is that most end at the point of conceptualization. As Butler admits of her own work, it is “envisaged as a ‘thought piece… of thinking more broadly in terms of the archive,”76 in order to bring about a more “humane” representation of Palestinians in the midst of a documentary heritage that has been skewed by Israeli bias and monopolization. Stoler too, concedes that her own reworking of the archive begins and ends at the point of conceptualization and within the boundaries of the archive – “a speculative reflection on an archive in formation that must remain virtual to [her].”77 Much like the approach of reading against the grain to uncover the lost and silenced voices of Palestinians, broadening what constitutes archival material to fill those gaps arrives at the same limitation. No matter how far we dig into the contextual layers of the past or push the boundaries of the archive, we are left with solutions that are ill-equipped to attend to the larger forces of colonialism and imperialism that function outside of, yet have their bearing upon, the archive. How does a Palestinian archive, even with its practices and holdings broadened to encompass the intangible, contend with the authority of laws, policies, regulations, and societal norms that legitimize real world racism by establishing a racial hierarchy at which Palestinians and their histories are forced to occupy the lowest rung? How does this conceptualized, equitable Palestinian archive contend with Israeli archives which use their practices and holdings to fashion racial discrimination into the truth by which society conforms itself?
73 Butler, “Palestinian Heritage ‘to the moment’: Archival Memory and the Representation of Heritage,” 252. 74 Stoler, “On Archiving as Dissensus,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 38, no. 1 (2018): 46. 75 Ibid., 44. 76 Butler, “Palestinian Heritage ‘to the moment’: Archival Memory and the Representation of Heritage,” 236. 77 Stoler, “On Archiving as Dissensus,” 43. 20
Conclusion
The reoccurring theme that emerges throughout this discourse of the Palestinian archive is that the focus is placed upon the archive in and of itself, as something that must be refashioned, revolutionized, reread, and redefined if the Palestinian historical narrative is to be decolonized in both the past, present, and future. By reading against the grain of history’s documentary record, scholars hope to insert the historical Palestinian presence where they were willfully excluded, but this does not negate the imperial power that symbolically annihilated them in the first place and continues to erase them in the present. By bringing attention to artists’ manipulation of archives for the purposes of activism, scholars affirm acts of resistance on the ground, but this merely contributes to the ongoing discourse of decolonization without consummation. Finally, by reconceptualising current archival practices to fit the needs of Palestinians living under occupation and in diaspora, scholars are working towards more equitable recordkeeping, but these practices are ineffective if unadopted by the Israeli archives continuing to perform archival imperialism. Acquisition policies, appraisal criteria, and descriptive standards of institutional archives are deeply entwined with the processes of government bodies, whereby the records that they house “strength[en] the governing institutions that creat[e] them, constructing and reproducing social structures, political institutions, and values.”78 If colonial power within the archive is to be neutralized I argue that we must not limit our focus to the boundaries of the archive, but extend the analysis to the larger apparatuses of governance within which the archive operates. Philosopher Michel Foucault has deliberated heavily upon how this relationship between power and knowledge is manifested as social control by society’s institutions. Power and subjugation as they present themselves in society exist within a “multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization.”79 Israeli archives are implicitly linked to the operations of larger authoritative organizations such as the Knesset, the Cabinet, and the Israel Defense Forces. This is shown in how Palestinian records are considered to be dangerous to the priorities of the state and as a result are “concealed and restricted in military archives as enemy resources and are subjugated to military rules.”80 Archives, in and of themselves, are just one node of power within a hegemonic system of rule that cannot be divorced from other state apparatuses.
78 Francis X. Blouin Jr. and William G. Rosenberg, Processing the Past: Contesting Authorities in History and the Archives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 17. 79 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 92. 80 Sela, “The Genealogy of Colonial Plunder and Erasure – Israel's Control over Palestinian Archives,” 224. 21
In order to untangle the archive’s position within this web of power, Foucault advises that “it is in this sphere of force relations that we must try to analyze the mechanisms of power.”81 Critical race theory, which has not been deployed thus far by any archival scholar examining Israeli archives, can be used to analyze society’s mechanisms of control while specifically attending to how the “system is designed to support the dominant class at the expense of marginalized, subaltern groups.”82 It attends to how racial discrimination is built into every facet of society’s network of force relations, which “reproduce symbolic racial violence” “through legal structures.”83 I argue that archival analysis must overthrow the neutrality of its methodological approach and instead position the discussion of race and racism at the forefront of its interventions into Israeli archives. In my own work regarding the Israel State Archives, I situate the archive’s acts of symbolic racism within the nation’s greater scheme of systemic and institutional oppression. In doing so I demonstrate how settler colonialism is furthered by the hierarchy of race that has been strategically constructed by Israel and highlight how archives have sustained this process. Glenn Adams and Phia S. Salter state that if we are to supplant the authority of the colonizer, we must “proceed from a foundation of consciousness about the racial domination and colonial violence that have constituted modern society.”84 Systemic racism does not begin nor end within the state archive, it is merely a connecting point in an intense network of settler colonial domination, and as archival scholars we must do the work to look outside the walls of our archives to understand its position in this network.
81 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, 97. 82 Dino Franco Felluga, Critical Theory: The Key Concepts (New York, NY: Routledge, 2015), 61. 83 Dwanna L. McKay, “Masking Legitimized Racism: Indigeneity, Colorblindness, and the Sociology of Race,” in Seeing Race Again: Countering Colorblindness Across the Disciplines, edited by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, et al., pp. 85-105, (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2019), 86. 84 Glenn Adams and Phia S. Salter, “They (Color) Blinded Me with Science: Counteracting Coloniality of Knowledge in Hegemonic Psychology,” in Seeing Race Again: Countering Colorblindness Across the Disciplines, edited by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, et al., pp. 271-292, (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2019), 274. 22
Chapter II: Disturbing the Specter of Imperialism Within the Records
The scope of archiving is forgivably human, even when it does riddle the documentary heritage full of gaps and missing voices. However, when the provenance and content of an archive’s appraised documents are purposefully curated to bolster and venerate an imperial legacy, the reasons become violent in preserving these histories over the ones that speak the voices of the colonized. History as it exists in the archive with many of its voices muffled by colonial power is a reality that we must accept. But how do we engage with problematic collections knowing that, like the Six Day War Files, they are still valuable sites of inquiry despite being moored to imperialism? Anthony Downey advises that once we come to terms with these unsavoury conditions, such problematic archives can be “used to explore conflict and the reconstruction of individual and collective histories, be they revolutionary or national.”85 Though histories of the colonized can be pushed down so deep that they may appear nonexistent, the stories of their struggles and revolutions can always be reconstructed from the information left behind. In this chapter, I analyze the content of the Six Day War Files, reading between the layers of imperial language used by the records creators and subjects to highlight where information about Palestinians was purposely not documented or was misrepresented to justify acts of imperialism. In order to establish the colonial narrative of Zionist-Israel and the ideology of Jewish right to Palestinian land, the discourses documented within these records followed certain rules of what could be said and what must be excluded from history so Israeli sovereignty could take root in the middle of largescale territorial upheaval.
The scope of this chapter is limited to an analysis of the content of the two textual record series of the Six Day War Files: The Transcripts of the Full Cabinet and The Transcripts of the Security Cabinet. The reasoning for choosing these two series are that they can be read in tandem to trace the trajectory of the decision-making process of those in Israel’s seat of power, as plans were proposed within the Security Cabinet and then put before the Full Cabinet for approval and implementation. The information held within these records, like all colonial records, ascribe to “systems of classification and representation [which] enable different traditions or fragments of traditions to be retrieved and reformulated in different contexts as discourses, and then to be played out in systems of power and domination, with real material
85 Anthony Downey, “Contingency, Dissonance and Performativity: Critical Archives and Knowledge Production in Contemporary Art,” in Dissonant Archives: Contemporary Visual Culture and Contested Narratives in the Middle East, edited by Anthony Downey, pp. 13-42 (London & New York: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., 2015), 14.
consequences for colonized peoples.”86 Through an analysis of the representations and misrepresentations of the colonized that have been immortalized by the records’ subjects and creators, I argue that the resulting portrayal of race has worked to actualize racial hierarchy within the laws of the nation-state.
Despite the Cabinet ministers’ victory, the transcripts are full of tensions that reveal their anxiety over how to deal with the Palestinian bodies that also came part and parcel with their conquered land. As I show in the following analysis, in order to systemically annihilate Palestinians on the ground the Cabinet ministers evoked two tactics when representing the colonized as a subject within the records. The first is that they symbolically annihilated the idea of Palestinians, a process Michelle Caswell defines as “what happens to members of marginalized groups when they are absent, grossly under-represented, maligned, or trivialized”87 in the archive. Then, in order to legitimize Israel’s war crimes and the implementation of discriminatory new policies following the aftermath of the war, the ministers employed the “organization of hate” within their meetings, theorized by Sara Ahmed in The Cultural Politics of Emotion as the mobilization of hateful discourse by a group against a subject that they imagine poses a threat to their rights and existence.88 In my reading of these two series, I illuminate how the ministers both erased and constructed an image of their new Palestinian constituents as a threat to the security of Israel’s new borders and thereby reversed the roles of victim and villain, indigenous and settler, and armed the state with tools to ensure the continued suppression of the numbers and rights of the Palestinian minority.
Transcripts of the Full Cabinet
The Cabinet is effectively the Government of Israel which exercises executive authority over the state. It is led by the prime minister and is comprised of his appointed ministers approved by the Israeli parliament, known as the Knesset. During the Six Day War, the Cabinet was in its 13th iteration with 21 ministers led by Prime Minister Levi Eshkol. These chosen cabinet ministers were responsible for the operations of their designated government agencies in accordance with Israel’s main legislature, the Basic Law, but in 1967 they had the added responsibility of coordinating their offices with the progression of the war. The Transcripts of the Full Cabinet convey the decisions of these powerful figures alongside the events leading up to, during, and after the War regarding the various skirmishes, campaigns, occupations
86 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 2nd edition (London and New York: Zed Books, 2012), 46. 87 Michelle Caswell, “Seeing Yourself in History: Community Archives and the Fight Against Symbolic Annihilation,” (2016): 27. 88 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 42. 24 and conquests that led to Israel’s victory. What is significant to note about the Full Cabinet’s meeting minutes, is that neither Palestine nor Palestinians are mentioned in any of the records dating between June 1 and June 18, 1967. This is not to say that Palestine and Palestinians were not relevant to the topics of discussion within these meetings. The following deliberations had great impact upon the Palestinians living within Israel’s new territory, however they were not properly acknowledged by those in the seat of power.
One of these instances can be seen in the meeting minutes of June 11, 1967, whereby the Cabinet ministers discussed how to maneuver the political and legal status of Jerusalem to ensure that both the Old City and new city remained united under Israeli control:
Minister of Police, E. Sasson: I am in favor of hurrying as much as possible to hold our political debate on peace goals in general, and we will not divide things into parts: today, Jerusalem, tomorrow Gaza and the next day, elsewhere. We need to hurry and set goals as much as possible. Regarding Jerusalem - If you want to connect the new city with the Old City to provide the services, you can do so without declaring annexation.
Minister of Justice, Y.S Shapira What you are suggesting is a war crime.
Minister of Police, E. Sasson: I do not know if this is a war crime; we provide services to the Old City. In our war, we have gained the esteem and sympathy of almost the whole world, to what our army has done, and I think we should add and maintain as much as possible of that sympathy and esteem, and not do things that might upset the entire Christian world and the Muslim world. This committee will formulate our peace goals, and as I said before, we should do so as soon as possible, if possible, within two or three days. The world will not collapse if, for these two or three days, we do not declare annexation of Jerusalem and operate according to a fixed and planned plan, and no military government will be established separately in Sinai, Gaza, and Jerusalem alone. We need to ask our military first to determine the Land of Israel's security map, and today we have the whole Land of Israel. It is the first time after nineteen years that Israel's entire land has joined and is under Jewish rule. In my opinion, the military should determine the security map we need. If we discuss and consider our peace goals, I do not think we want to keep everything we conquered plus a million and a half Arabs when there is no Aliyah89, and here the Arab population multiplies.
Minister M. Begin First, regarding Jerusalem. Following the statement of the Minister of Justice, I would suggest that we in no way use the term "annexation." The translation of the word annexation is a grasping of land where we do not have the same rights we have here. It is reminiscent of Bosnia's famous annexation. This word should be deleted from our dictionary. If we were to
89Aliyah, a tenet of Zionism, refers to the immigration of Jews from the diaspora to Israel. 25
use it concerning Jerusalem, you would not hear of other parts of Israel. I think the original and main offer of the Minister of Justice should be accepted, to enact a law called the Jerusalem Law of the Capital of Israel and in the first section let's say that the complete Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. Then all the terminology problems fall away.90
In this excerpt the ministers debated whether to use the military occupation of the Old City of Jerusalem as a pretext for annexation, a unilateral act whereby a state forcibly acquires another’s territory and proclaims their sovereignty. Prior to this moment, only the new city of Jerusalem was within Israel’s domain, however the Old City is where the majority of Jewish, as well as Muslim and Christian, holy sites are located. After more discussion about enacting an honor guard of Israel Defense Forces in the Old City and potentially having “a number of Arab dignitaries for the entire Jerusalem municipality,”91 the Cabinet eventually agreed to the annexation of Jerusalem and the proposal for a “Jerusalem Capital Law” be brought to the Knesset in a week.92 As Minister of Justice Ya’akov Shimshon Shapira explicitly points out, annexation “is a war crime.” However as seen in similar cases such as Turkey seizing Cyprus (1974), Indonesia seizing East Timor (1975), and Russia seizing Crimea (2014), annexation is legitimized if the act is condoned through enough support from other nation-states. Since this war crime was carried out, Israel has been protected from International Law due to support from the United States. Beginning in 1970, 43 resolutions against Israel proposed by the United Nations Security Council have been vetoed by the United States, “to shield Israeli actions from opprobrium, while blocking Palestinian efforts even to join anodyne international agencies.”93 As Sasson predicted, Israel was able to gain enough sympathy and esteem during the War to condone their war crimes.
The records created during the first two weeks of June 1967 avoided any direct discussion of Palestinians. Regions of Palestine were hacked up by Israel after their victory in the War, yet the voice of Palestinians themselves have been excluded from the records. As Caswell reminds us, “the symbolic annihilation marginalized communities face in the archives has far-reaching consequences for both how communities see themselves and how history is written for decades to come.”94 Annexation has been
90 Prime Minister’s Office, “Minutes of the Government’s Meeting/Reflection Minutes – C of Sivan 5766 – 11.6.1967,” translated by May Levi, digitized 2017, Six Day War Files Collection, Israel State Archives at Jerusalem, Israel, p. 20-21. 91 Ibid., p. 22. 92Ibid., p. 23. 93 Susan Watkins, “Annexations,” New Left Review 86 (2014): 7. 94 Caswell, “Seeing Yourself in History,” 36. 26 deemed illegal under article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and while the Minister of Justice’s own admission of this war crime is documented on record, public knowledge of this utterance is fifty years too late. Archives scholar Martine Louise Hawkes stresses that after traumatic events such as war crimes have occurred, “what will facilitate reconciliation will be the production of a full record of what took place, [with] the trials and the punishment being the processes that will bring about reconciliation.”95 The war crime of annexing Jerusalem after the Six Day War never had a chance to be fairly put on trial, because though a full record of what took place can be found in these transcripts, they have been protected from public scrutiny under their restricted status. “Annexation,” as well as the lives and homes of the Palestinians implied within this unilateral act was simply terminology that the ministers, and subsequently history, had the privilege to ignore.
Beginning on June 18, 1967, the Full Cabinet’s topics of discussion changed gears entirely and were spent addressing what they referred to as the “problem” of Palestinian refugees. For example, in the transcripts of the June 18, 1967 meeting, the agenda for this session included: the political and legal status of Jerusalem, the problem of Palestinian refugees, Israel’s foreign relations, and the early implications of the Six Day War. Referring to Israel’s population of displaced Palestinians as a “problem” is not merely an administrative term, for it is also used to describe Palestinian refugees as a literal problem for what the ministers imagined would be a Jewish nation-state. In these minutes, the Minister of Development and Tourism, Moshe Kol, vehemently outlined what the outcome will be if the Committee of Ministers decide to allow Palestinian refugees citizenship within Israel:
Minister Begin told the committee that we should now talk about it because it would change the image of the State of Israel. If instead of 400,000 Arabs, which now exist, we will have 1,700,000 Arabs, including Gaza and the West Bank, we approach a bi-national state. I do not want that, and there were other members of the committee who said they did not want it. If only some of the Gaza Arabs and the triangle96 remain, plus those in the Old City, we will reach 700,000 - 900,000 Arabs. Some said it would not be an integral part of the State of Israel, and others said that they would all belong to the State of Israel, and five or six years later would grant citizenship. We noted that this was not practical because a few years later, all citizens would be equal, and we could not have different types of citizens. Therefore, I say that what is written here about Jordan and the West Bank is not the committee's conclusion.97
95 Martine Louise Hawkes, Archiving Loss: Holding Places for Difficult Memories (New York: Routledge, 2018), 22. 96 The “triangle” is an area in central Israel that Israel was given from Jordan during the 1949 armistice agreements. 97 Prime Minister’s Office, “Minutes of the Government Meeting/Reflection Session – 18.6.1967,” [Digitized 2017], Six Day War Files Collection, Israel State Archives at Jerusalem, Israel, p. 47. 27
Though the decision of citizenship rights for Palestinians did not reach consensus this meeting, the dilemma returned the next day in the June 19, 1967 meeting, as the ministers deliberated over the inclusion of both the West Bank and Gaza Strip into the State of Israel. Trepidation was expressed by Minister of Information, Yisrael Galili, who stated “if we say the inclusion of the Gaza Strip in the State of Israel, even if we want to find a solution for refugees in the Gaza Strip, such a decision means we prefer the inclusion of the Strip with its population over the separation of the Strip because of its population.”98 Eventually, Haim-Moshe Shapira, Minister of Internal Affairs, agreed to “leav[e] this population without citizenship in the State of Israel, and search for different formulas of self-government, without [the West Bank] being the core of an independent Palestinian state.”99 Throughout these discussions a strict division of race is constructed by reframing and misrepresenting Palestinians as their ethnicity rather than their nationality, i.e. using the term “Arabs” instead of “Palestinians.” By symbolically annihilating their national identity and suppressing any explicit reference to “Palestine” or “Palestinians” within official government archival documentation, Kol, Galili, and the other ministers in the Cabinet are able to displace large volumes of “Arab” populations to Jordan and the West Bank because they unmoor the Palestinian identity from Palestine. The Palestinian population becomes disconnected Arab localities in Gaza, the Sinai Peninsula, and Jerusalem, while any connection to a larger Palestinian nation is ignored.
The ministers’ decision to deny political sovereignty to the remaining Palestinian territories and deny its people rights as citizens of Israel means that Palestinians have since been left in a vulnerable position. When racial inequality becomes embedded within a society’s structural foundation such as within its legislation, this “keeps dominant identity groups from having to address the real, everyday injustices or even the systemic mechanisms (e.g., standardized tests, police profiling, legal precedence) that deny subaltern groups power, status, respect, and wealth.”100 Israeli settler colonialism lays claim to land to which its people are not indigenous, while simultaneously exiling the indigenous population for Israeli settlements to be established. In order to justify the ethics of this agenda, Israeli ministers construct and perpetuate a misrepresentation of Palestinian identity as a race without a nation and all the rights
98 Prime Minister’s Office, “Minutes of the Session of the Government – Formulation Committee – 11th in Sivan 5765 – 19.6.1967,” translated by May Levi, Digitized 2017, Six Day War Files Collection, Israel State Archives at Jerusalem, Israel, p. 12. 99 Ibid., p. 14. 100 Felluga, Critical Theory: The Key Concepts, 63. 28 associated with such a status, thereby erasing the devastating trauma that underlies their displacement and rendering the land free for Israeli ownership and a Jewish majority population. In these excerpts from the meetings of the Full Cabinet, the ministers engage various tactics to justify the physical and political separation of the population in the region based on race. By creating an imagined Other that represents the Palestinian-Arab population as a budding danger, Israel provides justification for anticipating and containing such a future threat to the nation’s security. Any possibility of an Israeli population comprised of significant Palestinian numbers, generates anxiety and a need for fabricating “a differentiation between ‘us’ and ‘them’, whereby ‘they’ are constituted as the cause of ‘our’ feeling of hate… Bodies surface by ‘feeling’ the presence of others as the cause of injury or as a form of intrusion.”101 The role of hate in these proceedings reify a demarcation between what the ministers perceive as “their people” and “not their people,” citizens and residents, newcomers and refugees. Though these boundary formations are continuously asserted by the ministers, their anxiety still trickles through, revealing the man-made construction of the narrative to which they ascribe.
Transcripts of the Security Cabinet
While the Full Cabinet functions as the official Government of Israel, there also exists an inner cabinet known as the Ministerial Committee on Security, or simply the Security Cabinet. The meeting minutes of the Security Cabinet are of special interest because, according to Israel’s Basic Law, the function of this ministerial committee is to be an advising body to the Cabinet during a state of emergency.102 In 1967 it comprised 13 members, including: Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan, Minister of Labour Yigal Allon, Minister of Foreign Affairs Abba Eban, Minister of Finance Pinchas Sapir, Minister of Internal Affairs Haim-Moshe Shapira, and Minister without Portfolio Menachem Begin. Tasked with making quick decisions regarding matters of intelligence, the Security Cabinet takes over responsibility for the military, diplomatic relations, and security objectives and operations.103 During the events of the Six Day War as well as the events leading up to and proceeding the aftermath, the Security Cabinet met twice, sometimes three times a week, from January 3, 1967 to December 31, 1967. The trajectory of the Security Cabinet’s meetings mirrored the topics of
101 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 48. 102 “Basic Law: The Government – 2001,” The Knesset, https://www.knesset.gov.il/laws/special/eng/basic14_eng.htm (Accessed 26 April 2020). 103 “Basic Law: The Government – 1968 (Original Version),” The Knesset, https://www.knesset.gov.il/laws/special/eng/basic1_eng.htm (Accessed 20 April 2019). 29 discussion that the Full Cabinet dealt with during their own meetings as the two were meant to work in tandem. The main difference between these two series is that the smaller forum of members in the Security Cabinet allowed for a more nuanced and affective negotiation of security matters pertaining to the ministers’ corresponding government agencies which could then be shaped into strategies for the Full Cabinet to implement. It is here, in the transcripts of the Security Cabinet that emotions and anxieties over the war were in their most potent form before being distilled and presented to the Full Cabinet for approval.
While tensions ran high before and during the fated days of war in June, the ministers’ responsibilities were not eased in the aftermath despite their victory. Instead, they were presented with a new set of problems that spurred new opportunities for debate and argument. As demonstrated in the previous section analyzing the Transcripts of the Full Cabinet, the Government of Israel was forced, despite its disdain, to attend to the Palestinian population that was now amalgamated into the State of Israel’s polity. This same issue was deliberated heavily first by the Security Cabinet, on June 15, 1967, wherein after a discussion of how to secure peace and security for the region moving forward, Minister with Portfolio and leader of the right-wing Gush Herut-Liberalim party, Menachem Begin, came forward with a blunt proposition:
Now, the main question is, what to do with the Arab population? We need to consider this question seriously. I would recommend considering it by the following order: not all of them can get Israeli citizenship. I hope that in the future, we will be able to call it "the Land of Israel" (Eretz Israel) and not "the State of Israel."104
Why don't they need to receive citizenship? Because even in peace conditions, in America, nobody gets citizenship before five years have passed, and those people [the Arabs] have not reached out to us (on eagle's wings) with good faith; the contrary, they were educated for nineteen years on war and hatred. If we give them citizen status, a very respectable class, they will get all the rights. Since they are not "good-will people," if we decide that for seven years, they will be residents and non-citizens, I think the world will accept it with complete understanding. That way, they will not participate in the next three elections to the Knesset, nor to the seventh, eighth, or ninth Knesset.
What are we going to do in those seven years? There is no need to be alarmed by this addition if we want to maintain peace and security. We should not be worried about the fact that we [the Jewish population] will be the majority. All the Zionists have dreamed that we will have a majority in the land of Israel. Herzl, Nordau, and Jabotinsky dreamed that we
104 Within Zionist ideology, “Eretz Israel” refers to the belief that the full territory occupied by Israel and Palestine is the land handed down to the Jewish people by God. 30
would be the majority. We are the majority, and we need to ensure that they will not become the majority.105
While Minister Galili of the Full Cabinet stated three days later that he preferred not to include the Gaza Strip in the State of Israel based on the race of its population, Minister Begin provides a more nuanced expression of the same underlying sentiment. He describes the Palestinians as “educated for nineteen years on war and hatred” and are therefore undeserving of citizenship because they would threaten the “peace and security” being shaped by the Government of Israel. Begin constructs the potential Palestinian citizen as an imminent danger, and as Ahmed states, “such words generate effects: they create impressions of others as those who have invaded the space of the nation, threatening its existence.”106 If, as Begin hopes, Israel is to fulfill the dream of the fathers of Zionism, Herzl, Nordau and Jabotinsky, then there can be no room for anything more than a Palestinian minority. Anything more would threaten the delicate balance of ethnonationalism that the ministers began planting in 1967 when they conquered enough land to secure territory for a continued Jewish majority.
In this same meeting, Minister Begin went on to outline a three-pronged plan that to this day defines the policies of the State and its residents. This plan set out to 1) attract Jewish tourists to visit Israel to see the Holy Places and Western Wall in Jerusalem, which would boost the economy and encourage immigration, 2) encourage Jews experiencing anti-Semitism in Russia to immigrate to Israel, 3) provide large grants to multi-child Jewish families in Israel to encourage higher birth rates. Begin expressed “that [it] should be the policy to decrease any panic of having a larger Arab minority. In the meantime, [the Arabs] will have municipalities, schools, institutions, period. Seven years is a reasonable time, and at the end of the seven years we can humanely ask if whether he wants to be a loyal citizen, or maybe he wants to go to another country.”107 By deeming Palestinians to be undeserving of full rights under the “respectable status” of Israeli citizen, Begin effectively silences any Palestinian political opposition for the next twelve years. Discriminatory citizenship rights have continued well beyond this twelve-year period into the present. Since 1995, the Ministry of Interior has imposed unfair residency
105 Israel Security Cabinet, “Minutes of the Meeting of the Subcommittee of the Ministerial Committee on Security -7th Session 5767 – 15.6.1967 (Morning),” translated by May Levi, digitized 2017, Six Day War Files Collection, Israel State Archives at Jerusalem, Israel, p. 5. 106 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 46. 107 Israel Security Cabinet, “Minutes of the Meeting of the Subcommittee of the Ministerial Committee on Security -7th Session 5767 – 15.6.1967 (Morning),” translated by May Levi, digitized 2017, Six Day War Files Collection, Israel State Archives at Jerusalem, Israel, p. 5. 31 standards that are nearly impossible for Palestinians in Jerusalem to meet, causing the revocation of thousands of Israeli resident identity cards.108 Moreover in 2003, the Ministry of Interior enacted the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law, which despite being proclaimed as a temporary provision, remains active 17 years later. This law bans the unification of married couples if one spouse is a Palestinian with Israeli citizenship and the other a resident of the West Bank or Gaza, forcing Palestinian families to either split apart or renounce their Israeli identity cards.109 The panic that the ministers felt in 1967 towards their already low Arab numbers have since pushed the government to reprehensibly curtail the rights of Palestinians so that the population continuously lives under threat of potential deportation.
This emotional reading of the Security Cabinet’s social construction of the Palestinian people showcases how a hated “Other” is imagined, one “whose proximity threatens not only to take something away from the subject (jobs, security, wealth), but to take the place of the subject.”110 This provides justification for Israel to claim a position of victim because the presence and existence of a Palestinian population in Israel has been constructed as a threat to the peace and security of the nation. In turn, this allows for the implementation of measures and policies that serve to protect the nation-state from an imagined danger. The racial hierarchy of Jewish-Israeli majority and Arab-Palestinian minority must be maintained at any cost. Monetary incentives encourage Jewish families to procreate and tourism inspires Jewish immigration to Israel while the current Palestinian population has their citizenship and all the rights it comes with curtailed. Then, if Palestinians have not already emigrated after living under seven years of oppression, to gain citizen rights they must prove they are willing to become a “loyal citizen” and submit to Israeli authority and ethnocracy, or else “go to another country.” By inducing panic about the numbers of their Palestinian neighbours, Israel is imagined as a victim in danger, despite in actuality being a powerful nation-state that had just tripled its size due to the strength of its military, thereby justifying even harsher violence to be inflicted on the already subjugated Palestinian population.
Conclusion
Racial domination is the accomplice to imperialism, whereby Robert E. Park states “the interracial adjustments that follow such migration and conquest are more complex than is ordinarily
108 Yael Stein, The Quiet Deportation Continues: Revocation of Residency and Denial of Social Rights of East Jerusalem Palestinians, (Jerusalem: B’Tselem and HaMoked, 1998), 8. 109 “The Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law (temporary provision) 5763 – 2003,” The Knesset, https://www.knesset.gov.il/laws/special/eng/citizenship_law.htm (accessed June 18, 2020). 110 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 43. 32 understood.”111 Both processes are intertwined in their functions, creating the infrastructure and rationale for the other’s structures. When one nation assumes control over the nation of a racialized Other, the awareness of racial difference is heightened and taken advantage of in order to create and maintain the conditions under which each racial group conceptualizes themselves and their status in the nation. As seen in the records of the Six Day War Files Collection, the ministers were operating under the assumption that Israeli settlers should and would have more status and rights in the new state than Palestinians. By accentuating the racial difference between the two groups, i.e. by continuously referring to them as “Arabs” and “residents”, the ministers sought to achieve a resulting hierarchy within the social order that would come to be fixed in custom, law, and the archive.
In analyzing the content of the transcripts of the Full Cabinet and the Security Cabinet, I have sought to trace the anxieties felt by the ministers towards their unavoidable responsibility to the new Palestinian constituents that did not fit into the imagined State of Israel. As the ministers deliberated over issues including: how to annex their newly conquered territory to ensure Israeli control while deflecting international censure; whether to exile Palestinian refugees to Gaza and the West Bank or outside of the region entirely; whether it would be a larger burden to subsume the entire region and all its Palestinian population within Israeli sovereignty or allow for a Palestinian nation-state to exist physically separate but dependent on Israel; and how to ensure the physical and political suppression of the Palestinian population within their new borders that they could not exile. The panic and anxiety the ministers express over having to contend with anything more than a Palestinian minority reveal the racial hierarchy that the State of Israel has been devised upon because every decision recorded in these transcripts was made to support the growth of a Jewish-Israeli majority. These decisions arrived at in the records, to debilitate any future independence of a Palestinian nation-state while exiling and denying citizenship to Palestinians in Israel, needed justification or else their ethics could be called into question. Therefore, Palestine and Palestinians needed to be symbolically annihilated from the discussion when possible and when they could not, they were represented as a threat needing to be contained. The policies and laws established in these transcripts are based on the organization of hate and “hate works by providing ‘evidence’ of the very antagonism it effects.”112 The ministers not only created their own defense against allegations of racism, but created the foundation for systemic racial inequality that defines the State of Israel to this day. Instead of bestowing leniency on a nation that saw its people exiled and its cities occupied by a foreign
111 Robert E. Park, “The Nature of Race Relations,” in Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader, edited by Les Back and John Solomos, pp. 105-112 (London: Routledge, 2013), 109. 112 Ibid., 52. 33 military, the ministers implemented policies and strategies that paved the way for continued violence and oppression because they firmly and passionately believed in their own narrative that their people were the victim and needed these policies to protect them from imminent danger.
While this defensive narrative works to construct the image of the Other, it also has a bearing on the image of the self. This hatred of the Other and positioning of “them” as separate is key to forming the existence of Israel as an identity and a nation, meaning that it asserts itself as “Jewish,” not “Arab,” and it is nothing less than a “Jewish” nation-state. In as much as the organization of hate “produce[s] the character of the hated as ‘unlikeness,”113 it also is “a fantastic investment in the continuation of the image of the self in the faces that together make up the ‘we’.”114 In a time when Israel dramatically changed its borders through imperialism, war, and illegal annexation, it also needed to solidify these changes as the new convention. The ministers needed to demarcate at the very beginning of the decision-making process what the ethos and borders of the State of Israel were and were not and this image needed to be given political, if not legal, weight. The strength of this reification is seen in how “there were never any geographic imperatives that sanctify the 1967 lines,”115 yet even Palestinian leaders have used these demarcation lines as basis for international recognition of Palestinian borders. The racialized Other and their consciousness of status in a society is a construct, yet it is made real by being etched in stone in the archive.
113 Ibid., 52. 114 Ibid., 52. 115 Alan Baker, “The Fallacy of the ‘1967 Borders’ – No Such Borders Ever Existed,” Jerusalem Issue Briefs 10, no. 17 (2010): 1. 34
Chapter III: History Belongs to Those Who Archive It
As the well-known aphorism states: history belongs to the victors. But, the victors’ vise-grip on the past is given evidential weight by archival agents who decide what narratives will become preserved as historical fact. By imposing a linear and cohesive narrative upon the past, records become “material for promoting integrated knowledge, social identity, and the formation of group consciousness.”116 Shared systems of knowledge, identity, and collective consciousness in turn cultivate ideas regarding what is normative, including a society’s structures of dominance, subjugation, and control.
In the previous chapter, I examine the two textual series of the Six Day War Files Collection to demonstrate how the records creators and subjects symbolically annihilated and misrepresented Palestinians as a threat rather than a victim. This representation of the colonized within the content of the records paved the way for racially oppressive policies of the State that are still being upheld today. Though these records were created in 1967, the colonial ideologies that they introduce have been sustained and continued through archival processes. The Six Day War Files Collection has had 50 years in which to be carefully appraised, arranged, described, preserved and digitized by state archivists far from the eyes of public accountability during its exceedingly long restriction period. Now, the Collection has emerged into public consciousness and access as a highly mediated artifact, having undergone various premeditated interventions to frame its contents within an Israeli-Zionist worldview. How do we, as present-day scholars, archivists, and citizens begin to delineate the trail of rupture and interference?
It is well established in archival scholarship that archivalization, defined by Eric Ketelaar as “the conscious or unconscious choice (determined by social and cultural factors) to consider something worth archiving,”117 is a biased process that positions select historical narratives as truth within collective memory. However, as Linda Tuhiwai Smith posits in Decolonizing Methodologies, there are always signs that reveal how certain “truths” are constructed, and “whilst there may not be a unitary system, there are ‘rules’ which help make sense of what is contained within the archive and enable ‘knowledge’ to be
116 Brien Brothman, “The Past that Archives Keep: History, Memory, and the Preservation of Archival Records.” Archivaria 51 (2001): 62. 117 Eric Ketelaar, “Tacit Narratives: The Meanings of Archives,” Archival Science 1 (2001): 133. 35 recognized.”118 In this chapter, I amplify this decolonial thinking to investigate how archival practices extend and are an extension of the ideologies of the settler colonial state, which in the case of Israel and the Six Day War Files, serve to construct a racial hierarchy within its populace. I provide an examination of the archival practices of appraisal, description, access and restriction as they apply to the different levels of arrangement within the Six Day War Files Collection.119 I analyze the records beyond their content to showcase how the archivalization of the Six Day War Files have precipitated a set of structured conditions governing access and restriction that give priority to Israelis within the subject matter of the records and to Israelis who are affected by the records. Understanding how records about Palestinians are made and framed by those with the colonial power to name is key to understanding the mechanisms of colonialism.
Analysis of Archival Description
To uncover how an archival item accrues meaning within the affective space generated by its political, organizational or social environment, we must take a step backwards and examine the archival practices within which it has been immersed. Archival description in particular is “closely linked to societal processes of remembering and forgetting, inclusion and exclusion, and the power relationships they embody,”120 because the language that is used to describe an archival item is based in the knowledge structures that define a particular culture and society. As archivists, we can only describe with the knowledge in which we have been habituated, and these include political ideologies, cultural values, learned social behaviors, manners of speech, and ideas of worth. As I descend down the levels of archival description that have been imposed upon the items of the Six Day War Files Collection, the intention behind my analysis is to unearth the processes of forgetting, exclusion, and framing that have worked to transform Israel’s colonial narrative into historical fact.121
118 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 2nd Edition (London and New York: Zed Books, 2012), 45. 119 The levels of arrangement used by the Israel State Archives are limited to the collection-level, series-level, and item-level. Except for the “Back to the Cisterns” photo series, the series in this collection are devoid of their own specific level of description and are instead described within the collection-level. There are files present within the collection, however these are items that have been compiled together digitally based on their shared subject matter, do not correspond to the same series, and are not provided with an overarching archival description. 120 Sue McKemmish, Anne Gilliland-Swetland, and Eric Ketelaar, “‘Communities of Memory’: Pluralising Archival Research and Education Agendas,” Archives & Manuscripts 33, no. 1 (May 2005): 1. 121 Though there are many archival descriptive standards (RAD, ISAD(G), DACS, etc.) all outline four to six hierarchical levels of description ranging from the collective entity to the single unit that will form the physical and intellectual arrangement of the archival material. 36
I begin this examination at the broadest unit of description for the Six Day War Files, the level of the collection. Written by Jacob Lazubick, an archivist at the Israel State Archives, the description of the collection provides information about the records at the series level as well as outlines the historical background of the Six Day War, including the events and tensions that led to the War, the pinnacle moments that occurred during it, and the aftermath that it spawned. In the Collection’s description of these events, however, there is no mention of Palestine or Palestinians despite the cataclysmic effects inflicted upon them during the Six Day War. Lazubick states that “victory had a heavy price: 779 soldiers fell, nearly 2,600 wounded, 15 captured,”122 however these numbers make no mention of the 18 300 Syrians, Egyptians, Jordanians, and Palestinians killed during the conflict. Moreover, this archival description does not make reference to the 200 000 Palestinians forced to leave their homes to become refugees in the West Bank and Jordan during the war.123 The act of recording which lives are lost in war is premeditated based on the power relations of those fighting, because as Judith Butler states, “if certain lives are deemed worth living, protecting, and grieving and others not, then this way of differentiating lives cannot be understood as a problem of identity or even of the subject. It is rather a question of how power forms the field.”124 By symbolically annihilating the number of Arab deaths (and therefore the lives they belong to) in the writing of the nation’s official historical narrative, Israel is able to represent themselves in glorifying terms: “a small country with narrow boundaries [that] tripled its territory.”125 The use of language in this description bestows Israel with passivity and innocence: it ‘tripled’ its territory, rather than seized another territory’s land and displaced the original inhabitants in order to provide settlement for its own. Archival practices have historically paved the way for acts of imperialism to occur unquestioned, for as Taylor R. Genovese states, “imperial powers [have been] able to secure and maintain power by controlling the information that was recorded, essentially deliberately creating an archival gap by omitting – either explicitly or implicitly – the ideas of the conquered.”126 If this narrative of the Six Day War, imbued with the honour of imperial victory, is to be given legitimacy and weight,
122 Jacob Lazubick, “Introduction,” Israel State Archives https://www.archives.gov.il/p67/%d7%94%d7%a7%d7%93%d7%9e%d7%94/ (Accessed 22 August 2019). 123 Peter Dodd and Halim Barakat, “Palestinian Refugees of 1967: A Sociological Study,” The Muslim World 60, no. 2 (1970): 123. 124 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London and New York: Verso, 2009), 163. 125 Jacob Lazubick, “Introduction,” Israel State Archives, https://www.archives.gov.il/p67/%d7%94%d7%a7%d7%93%d7%9e%d7%94/ (Accessed 22 August 2019). 126 Taylor R. Genovese, “Decolonizing Archival Methodology: Combating Hegemony and Moving Towards a Collaborative Archival Environment,” AlterNative (2016): 34. 37 then Palestinians and any trace of their experiences, ruin, and lives lost must not be allowed to be recorded and therefore grieved.
Descending one level of archival arrangement, the series of photographic material entitled “Back to the Cisterns: Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria after the Six Day War through the camera lens of photographer Yehuda Eisenstark,” is the only series to be given a series-level archival description. Immediately, there is an obvious instance of erasure found in the title. The use of “Judea” and “Samaria” are the Israeli government’s terms for areas of the West Bank that were conquered in the Six Day War. To align this historical moment with the Zionist narrative that the Jewish people have returned to the Jewish homeland, since 1967 these terms have been evoked to reframe Israel “to be in accord with its nationalist and collectivist orientation as a biblical historical Jewish symbol.”127 Two tactics are being employed here, the first is that the prioritization of biblical terms for these regions, rather than the Arabic name “ad- Diffah I-Garbiyyah (West Bank),” links the current Israeli sovereignty to the Kingdom of Israel. This affiliation allows the settlers to claim the right of the indigenous even though the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah historically only existed from roughly the 10th century BC to the 7th century BC.128 Rather than the “theft” of Palestinian land it is a “return,” as seen in the language of the series description, which states “we returned to Hebron and Shiloh, Bethlehem and Anatot, Jericho and the Jordan Passages,” and celebrates “the renewed encounter with the biblical and historical sites in Jerusalem and throughout Judea and Samaria.”129 The second tactic being employed is the renaming of these sites with Jewish names as an attempt to substantiate the ethno-national identity of the State of Israel as a Jewish majority. As Lebovitz has found in his research into the discourse used in the framing of these regions since 1967, the logic of a Jewish ethno-state becomes unstable when confronted with the reality of Palestinians also living within this region, stating that when Israeli authorities “frame JSGS [Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip] as an existential burden on Israel, they mean, as noted above, its endangerment both as a Jewish and a democratic state.”130 In the archival description, the archivist refers to the Jewish return to Hebron,
127 Asaf Lebovitz, “Regional Framing: Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip in the Eyes of the Security Elite,” Israel Affairs 21, no. 3 (2015): 425. 128 H.G.M. Williamson, “History of Ancient Israel,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion, September 2015 https://oxfordre.com/religion/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.001.0001/acrefore-9780199340378-e-20 (Accessed 14 March 2020). 129 “Back to the Cisterns: Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria after the Six Day War through the camera lens of photographer Yehuda Eisenstark,” Israel State Archives https://www.archives.gov.il/exhibition/%d7%91%d7%97%d7%96%d7%a8%d7%94-%d7%90%d7%9c- %d7%91%d7%95%d7%a8%d7%95%d7%aa-%d7%94%d7%9e%d7%99%d7%9d/ (Accessed 13 February 2020). 130 Lebovitz, “Regional Framing: Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip in the Eyes of the Security Elite,” 428. 38 known as Al-Khalil in Arabic. During the Six Day War, Israel occupied Al-Khalil and established a military government that to this day has never been dissolved. Al-Khalil/Hebron is now divided into two sectors, the first of which is under the control of the Palestinian Authority and the second under Israeli military control. Even though the population of Al-Khalil/Hebron is comprised of 80% Palestinians and 20% Israelis, the Israeli military has been forcibly shifting these numbers to eventually establish a Jewish majority. Palestinians in the second sector are continuously being pushed out of the city due to forced curfews, military barriers, and checkpoints that restrict and surveil their movements.131 In supplanting the history of Al-Khalil with the identity of Hebron, which carries biblical allusions to Abraham, Solomon’s Temple, and the Tribe of Judah, the archivists set roots for Al-Khalil to be forgotten and subsumed by today’s new Hebron of Israeli control. The existence of the Palestinian population and the Palestinian- controlled West Bank endangers the stability of Israel as a Jewish ethno-state because it is a reminder that Israel has not always existed and for 2000 years the land has been Palestinian. Palestinian bodies must be continuously forced out and the Zionist narrative must be continuously asserted through the renaming and reframing of lands if the logic of settler colonialism is to fully take root.
I now turn to the lowest level of description, that which is used to describe the item and is the most specific in terms of its scope and content. Much like the content of the textual records analyzed in the previous chapter, the archivists have chosen to symbolically annihilate the Palestinian idea by either neglecting their narrative, stripping them of their Palestinian nationality, and misrepresenting them as a danger to Israeli security. During the Six Day War, the Israel Broadcasting Authority – Israel’s state- operated public radio broadcaster – provided media coverage of the War while interviewing Israel Defense Forces soldiers and government ministers. Approximately 600 of these audio recordings are housed within the Israel State Archives. The description of one recording, created in the days following the end of the Six Day War, reads:
First Recording: Nasser's speech on the resignation of Foreign Minister Abba Eban as he returns from the United Nations. Second Recording: Chaim Herzog, military commentator, talks about the first steps being made to restore order in the Arab states and the greatness of fighters who have occupied Jerusalem, while condemning the various gypsies who interrupted the city's order and even lost their lives. Third Recording: A breakthrough from Gush Etzion to Be'er Sheva.132
131 Chloe Yvroux, “The Impact of the Geopolitical Situation on How the Populations of Hebron-al-Khalil (West Bank) Inhabit the City,” L’Espace Geographic 38, no. 3 (2009): 240. 132 Channel sound clips of the Israel State Archives, “2813-1 Six Day War,” YouTube video, 6:39, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIjXm0GxcN0&list=PLfGUD39jUthokpXlMWWSkjJCW0lPl8e1j&index=14 0 39
The archivist describing this recording denotes the state of Jerusalem occupied by Israel Defense Forces and under Israeli sovereignty to be considered normative. In this description the idea of “order” is highly meaningful, because as Linda Tuhiwai Smith states regarding imperial order, it “provides the underlying connection between such things as: the nature of imperial social relations; the activities of Western science, the establishment of trade, the appropriation of sovereignty; [and] the establishment of law.”133 Those critical to structures of imperial power and the idea of colonial order, such as cartographer Malkit Shoshan, instead see the “transformation of [Jerusalem’s] borders, and the progressive appropriation of the eastern Palestinian parts of the city by Israel… A complex system of separation and surveillance – walls, towers, and checkpoints – supposedly unifies a greater Jewish Jerusalem, but in reality slices the city into Israeli and Palestinian enclaves.”134 While Israeli imperialism subsumes such acts as normal under their sovereignty, all indigenous Palestinians who oppose this new order are vilified by the archivists as “gypsies” senseless enough to lose their lives.
This reframing of Palestinian identity for the purposes of legitimizing Israeli imperialism is echoed in the item-level description for the June 14, 1967 meeting of the Security Cabinet, which reads:
Gideon Rafael and Abba Eban gave a detailed report of the activities of the UN during the war. This was followed by a long discussion about the immediate and intermediate future. It was decided: a sub-committee would try to formulate a draft of Israel's positions regarding the fate of the newly acquired territories (next transcript); Jerusalem is to be re-united; the Jewish Quarter of the Old City is to be rebuilt; a decision was not yet made about the Arabs who had moved in since 1967; no agreement was reached on the freedom of individual ministers to publicly state positions on the territories; not to allow the return of the UN to its Jerusalem headquarters yet; to send Eban not Eshkol to head the delegation at the UN.135
Once again, in this archival description we see the archivists use the term “reunited” to describe the annexation of the city of Jerusalem as well as the use of the term “acquired” to describe the forcible acquisition of Palestinian territory by Israel. In describing this acquisition, the archivists do not mention where and from whom this territory was acquired, just that it has been passively “acquired.” The history of the territory’s previous owners, Palestine, are erased in this description, creating the impression that
133 Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 29. 134 Malkit Shoshan, Atlas of the Conflict: Israel – Palestine (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2010), 276. 135 Israel Security Cabinet, “Minutes of the Meeting of the Ministerial Committee on Security – Friday Session 5766 – 14.6.1967,” Israel State Archives www.archives.gov.il/archives/#/Archive/0b0717068031be32/File/0b0717068526a92b/Item/090717068526a9aa (accessed 15 February 2020). 40 this land was unpossessed prior to Israeli ownership. The appropriation of Palestinian land is not seen as an imperialistic move, but a “re-unification” of an Israel that had always been in existence, while the Palestinians who have lived generations and generations upon the land are merely “Arabs” without legitimate ties to a nation or the city of Jerusalem.
Traditional archival description is fraught with contention because typically a single individual bears the responsibility for framing events that yield material consequence for all of society. In advocating the benefits of a participatory approach, scholars Katie Shilton and Ramesh Srinivasan instruct that “the archivist who has acquired multicultural narratives must now explore methods of arrangement and description that resist objectification and instead actively empower the records, projecting voices spoken by and for the community.”136 It is clear in these examples of archival description, however, that the archivists are speaking for a community and are seeking to empower the history of Israel through the symbolic erasure of Palestine. This erasure paves a path for increased surveillance of Palestinian bodies, the exile of Palestinians from their traditional land, and the positioning of Palestinians as a lower class without the protection of the same rights that Israelis are given. In short, through the establishment of an Israeli sovereignty with jurisdiction over the lion’s share of the region, a racial hierarchy between Arab- Palestinians and Jewish-Israelis is established. Critical race scholar Robert Miles defines the process of racialization and racial categorization as “social relations between people [that] have been structured by the signification of human biological characteristics in such a way as to define and construct differentiated social collectivities.”137 Critical race theory helps us to understand the Palestinian context when comparing the different realities lived between Palestinians and Israelis. The process of archivalization seen in these examples of description serve to extend this Israeli sovereignty through tactics of reframing that provide the Zionist narrative with unimpeded evidential weight, thereby justifying the resulting racial hierarchy.
Analysis of Censorship and Restriction
Archival description is not the only practice that archivists utilize to exert control over records in their custody. Often colonial governments employ censorship and restriction when information within
136 Shilton and Srinivasan, “Participatory Appraisal and Arrangement for Multicultural Archival Collections,” 93- 94. 137 Robert Miles, Racism, (London: Routledge, 1989), 75. 41 their records prove to be too incriminating to be reframed after decolonization.138 Though Palestine is far from decolonization, there exists a great deal of information compiled within Israel’s official records that is pertinent to the rights of Palestinians yet is inaccessible to the public. Israel’s process of declassification is dictated not by the region’s Freedom of Information Law, but by the Law of Archives which has remained largely unchanged since 1955. Section 10.c.2 of the Law of Archives states that information can be restricted in order to protect the security of the state or the privacy of individuals. Furthermore, a special committee of Cabinet ministers may decide to classify specific files beyond the customary 50-70 year restriction period.139 Trish Luker has noted within her own research of settler colonial archives that it is typical of such archives to assert “an ongoing proprietary right to determine access to colonial records.”140 In analyzing what information is censored within the Six Day War Files and why, I aim to expose the ongoing, clandestine cycle of violence whereby settler states inflict violence upon the colonized, refuse accountability by obfuscating their records of such violence, and proceed to inflict further violence without repercussions.
The Collection is riddled with blatant censorship; however, the Cabinet meeting of June 11, 1967 is significant because it contains a partially censored argument over how to proceed with unifying Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty and how to deal with the status of Palestinians living in the city. In this meeting, Minister of Housing Bentov expressed that if Israel is “a democratic state…the Arab residents of the second part of Jerusalem will become citizens of Israel.”141 In order to circumvent accepting Palestinians into Israel’s polity, Bentov suggested that the Cabinet “should consider the possibility of unification between the two parts [of Jerusalem], with the first and foremost being expressed by declaration or by law.”142 This approach was defended by Bentov as the best way to avoid “internal complications” because though “we [the Cabinet] could have run [Jerusalem] for a long time by a military government, it would not be possible to divide one city so that some residents belong to one government and some
138 Mandy Banton, “Displaced Archives in The National Archives of the United Kingdom,” in Displaced Archives, edited by James Lowry, pp. 41-60. (London and New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2017), 45. 139Law of Archives 1955 s.10.c.2 https://www.archives.gov.il/wp- content/uploads/2016/03/%D7%97%D7%95%D7%A7- %D7%94%D7%A8%D7%90%D7%9B%D7%99%D7%95%D7%A0%D7%99%D7%9D-1955.pdf (13 February 2020). 140 Trish Luker, “Decolonising Archives: Indigenous Challenges to Record Keeping in ‘Reconciling’ Settler Colonial States,” Australian Feminist Studies 32, nos. 91-92 (2017): 119. 141 Prime Minister’s Office, “Minutes of the Government Meeting/Meeting Ministers – 11.6.1967,” translated by May Levi, digitized 2017, Six Day War Files Collection, Israel State Archives at Jerusalem, Israel, p. 30. 142 Ibid., p. 30. 42 residents to another.”143 Denying the citizenship rights of Palestinians remains the main sticking point in these negotiations, and after Bentov’s speech a large section of the transcript is redacted by the archivists. We can deduce that this missing section pertains to one of the ministers having doubts about unifying the city under Israeli law and the status of Arab residents because Minister without Portfolio Yosef Sapir stresses that if there is doubt, then Israel would be pressured to return Jerusalem:
First, we need to decide around this table that if anyone has any doubt, it could be that we will face pressure to return Jerusalem. We must first decide on it. If there is no doubt about it, then the problem is both political and practical.144
One can only offer speculation about the specific information that was censored; however, what is more significant than the content itself is what the Israel State Archives’ censorship decisions reveal about Israel’s colonial rule. The denial of citizenship rights to Arab-Palestinians discussed in this meeting is significant because Palestinian residents have since been left in a vulnerable position, governed by a separate administration than Jewish citizens in Jerusalem, and without the same housing rights. Not only were Palestinians not represented at the negotiating table of this pinnacle moment, but for the archivists to willfully censor the archival documentation means that Palestinians are further denied their rights by being unable to access this information. The demarcation that archives erect between those who do and do not have access to information both reflects and sustains power relations that exist outside of the archive. The restriction of information through censorship is an extension of colonial power, wherein this is simply another means through which to restrict, control, and monitor the movements of the colonial subject. Archival scholar Caitlin M. Davis has also found Israeli archives to be an apparatus of governance, whereby documents are deemed “public” or “secret,” thereby shaping and reflecting “the relations between and among different participants inside and outside of the government.”145 Peter Johan Lor and Johannes Jacobus Britz delineate access to information as a marker of social equity, in which “the denial of access to information is therefore no longer merely a denial of access to the ideas held by others or suppression of freedom of expression. It also marginalizes people’s participation in the various economic, political and socio-cultural activities.”146 Though the Israel State Archives have declassified
143 Ibid., p. 30. 144 Ibid., p. 32. 145 Caitlin M. Davis, “Archiving Governance in Palestine,” Journal of Contemporary Studies 3 (2016): 9. 146 Peter Johan Lor and Johannes Jacobus Britz, “Is a Knowledge Society Possible without Freedom of Access to Information?” Journal of Information Science 33, no. 4 (2007): 392. 43 the Six Day War Files Collection, authorities still exert their control over the dissemination of knowledge according to their own interests.
Analysis of Appraisal for Digitization Purposes
In an archival context, appraisal is the process of determining the enduring value of a record. Traditionally, this process has been applied to the practice of selection, whereby the archivist identifies what items, files, series, collections, or entire fonds have enough value to be accessioned into the archive. As the Society of American Archivists state, “appraisal can take place prior to donation and prior to physical transfer, at or after accessioning,”147 however this limits the archivist’s practice of appraisal to a single point within the archival process: the decision over what is worthy of preservation. I argue that this responsibility and agency on the part of the archivist does not end after a record has been safely stored in the archive’s custody. In the current hybrid archival environment where archivists must wield virtuosity in both textual and electronic formats, they must also perform appraisal when deciding whether a textual record is worthy of digital preservation as well. The process of archivalization is extended into this arena of archival agency, as once again the archivist must consciously or unconsciously decide based on social, political and cultural factors, what records are valuable enough to have their reach, access, and use increased exponentially by the conditions of possibility offered by digitization.
The Six Day War Files were under restricted status for a length of time so prolonged, that by the time 50 years had passed the archivists were tasked with a situation where they were required to perform an additional appraisal of the records, asking: what records are to be publicly accessible in physical form and what records are to be digitized for global access in electronic form? The internal appraisal report for the accession, arrangement, and description of the Collection is not available to the public, therefore in this section of my analysis I address this second question of appraisal for digitization. The entirety of the textual material in the Collection, namely the Transcripts of the Full Cabinet and the Transcripts of the Security Cabinet, have been digitized in their entirety and are fully accessible apart from the many instances of censored information within the records. The series entitled “Back to the Cisterns,” which is comprised of entirely photographic material, and the series entitled “Films and Recordings” which comprises audiovisual material from various Israeli government departments and private donations is also fully digitized. Curiously, the only series not fully accessible to the public are the Israel Radio
147 Society of American Archivists, “Appraisal,” www2.archivists.org/glossary/terms/a/appraisal (accessed 2 February 2020). 44
Recordings. Each of the hundreds of audio recordings within this series can only be accessed by special request by completing a form through the Israel State Archives website. In an initial experiment, I directed multiple requests to the archivists to attempt to gain access to different items within the series, however only received one response:
Dear Tam Rayan
Subject: Your request to view a file Your request from 22/09/2019 08:58 number CAS-152687-F3B8M1. We are happy to inform you that the file you requested (see the name and code number in Hebrew below) has been scanned and is available on the Israel State Archives youtube channel.
(Six Day War) מלחמת ששת הימים Name of file Code, box and file number טס171/29- ISA-moc-IsraelBroadcast0010- i8k signature For your convenience, we attach a link to the file: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xv28IpIOT0Q
Thank you for using the services of the Israel State Archives. Please do not reply to this mail. Best wishes, The ISA staff 148
The subject of the recording that I was given access to is about the proposed construction of a channel that would have connected the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean. All other forms that I had sent requesting access to recordings with explicitly Palestinian content were promptly ignored. What I did gain through this cumbersome online retrieval system was knowledge about an official Israel State Archives YouTube channel that was not explicitly mentioned within the Israel Radio Recordings series. The situation is obfuscated further because none of the descriptions for the YouTube videos match the archival descriptions promoted on the website. This YouTube channel houses 659 of the Israel Broadcasting Authority’s recordings from 1967 and are fully accessible to the public, if one knows of the existence of the channel and can somehow match the videos to their official descriptions based on their content, that is. Few clearly do. The average engagement for each video ranges from as low as 26 views to as high as 1000. The Israel State Archives’ decision to host this series of the Six Day War Files Collection on an obscure YouTube channel rather than with the rest of the Collection on the heavily promoted official website is highly suspect.
148 Israel State Archives Staff, email message to Tamara Rayan, September 25, 2019. 45
Analyzing what records and information has been appraised to be hidden, yet not quite restricted, is key to understanding what information has been recorded by the colonial state but is deemed to be undesirable for official memory. Though appraisal is shaped by the conditions of the archivist’s environment, it is also guided by institutional, technological, and practical factors that weigh into storage and management capabilities. These factors have changed with the emergence of digital archiving and “since the late 1980s issues of technological obsolescence and data and system authenticity, reliability, migration, and emulation have guided the archives profession’s decisions on what constitutes good preservation and curatorial practices for these fragile digital assets.”149 If we consider these qualities of authenticity and reliability as they apply to the Israel Radio Recordings, the archivists’ choice to preserve the records using YouTube does not constitute good preservation and curatorial practices. If it was not for the Israel State Archives staff guiding me directly to the YouTube channel there would be no way to guarantee its authenticity because anyone can create a YouTube channel and label it “Channel sound clips of the Israel State Archives.” The fact that the digitized records are disconnected from the rest of the Collection and their YouTube descriptions do not match their official scope and content breaks the chain of custody. The choice of YouTube video for data migration hardly constitutes a reliable legacy format. Finally, YouTube superimposes its own metadata onto all videos hosted on its platform, therefore the authenticity of the records’ metadata is jeopardized by a third party.
The outcome of this appraisal decision has far greater impact than to simply call into question the preservation and curatorial practices of the Israel State Archives, for it is telling of the willful obstruction of the accessibility of the records to the public. When implemented effectively, digitization increases the accessibility of a textual record that normally could only be viewed in-person at a single site. For nations that have undergone political conflict and have had ruptures in their archival heritage, ensuring the continuity of access to documentation becomes increasingly important. For instance, Charles Kecskeméti in his analysis of International Law as applied to archives that have become displaced under European colonialism stresses “the crucial importance of professional cooperation for reconstituting the archival heritages dismembered during the Second World War and for getting on with the preservation and opening up of occupying military authorities’ archives.”150 Digitization in these circumstances has been key in facilitating access and joint custody to archives restricted within a nation’s former colonizer. However, in the situation of the Six Day War Files, digitization has been utilized to render the
149 Bethany Anderson et al., “Archival Appraisal and the Digital Record: Applying Past Tradition for Future Practice,” New Review of Information Networking 20 (2015): 4. 150 Charles Kecskeméti, “Archives Seizures: The Evolution of International Law,” in Displaced Archives, edited by James Lowry, pp. 12-20 (London and New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2017), 15. 46 appearance of accessibility while in actuality impeding the public’s access to the records. Clearly the Israel State Archives have both the original and digitized versions of these records within their custody, so why is the digital copy not available on their archive website? Why are their YouTube locations not publicly disclosed? The implication of this appraisal decision, to only disclose the digital existence of some records and not others, is that the Israel State Archives can now maintain a sense of control over who has access to this series. More importantly, it means that the Israel State Archives can compile a record of who is requesting to view these records.
Conclusion
In 1985 Israel was decreed to be both a Jewish and a democratic state in its Basic Law: the Knesset,151 yet how can the state claim democracy when its non-Jewish citizens are hindered from accessing information pertaining to their own history? Palestinians have been excluded from the archivalization process imposed on the Six Day War Files Collection despite the information within the records having real world consequences for its Palestinian subjects. According to John Solomos and Les Back, a racial hierarchy can be deduced through the analysis of “structured conditions” such as “unusually harsh class exploitation, strict legal inter-group distinctions and occupational segregation, differential access to power and prestige” that are established “in such a way as to produce a racially structured social reality.”152 Differential treatment forms the everyday experience of Palestinian life. This is demonstrated in how Israel applies its residency standards disproportionately against Palestinian East Jerusalem residents “so that many of them do not receive their entitlements, including health insurance.”153 Moreover, faced with the West Bank’s economic reliance on foreign funds and a lack of local employment opportunities, many Palestinians are forced to migrate to Israel for work and accept occupational segregation. Palestinian migrant workers are ineligible for many social insurance benefits, such as unemployment insurance, occupational disease insurance, and nursing mothers’ insurance that Israeli coworkers receive, despite having 4.9% of their wages deducted to fund the national insurance
151 Basic Law: The Knesset (2003), 7.a.1 https://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/mfa-archive/1950-1959/pages/basic%20law- %20the%20knesset%20-1958-%20-%20updated%20translatio.aspx (accessed 14 February 2020). 152 John Solomos and Les Back, “Introduction: Theorising Race and Racism,” in Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader, edited by Les Back and John Solomos, pp. 1-28, (London: Routledge, 2013), 5. 153 Yael Stein, The Quiet Deportation Continues: Revocation of Residency and Denial of Social Rights of East Jerusalem Palestinians (Jerusalem: B’Tselem and HaMoked, 1998), 4. 47 program.154 These examples of differential treatment that result in the eviction of Palestinian residents and the exploitation of Palestinian migrant workers are defended by the Israeli government as necessary to preserve the “demographic balance” of a Jewish majority.155 Scholars Abu-Laban and Bakan trouble Israel’s assertion of being both a democracy and an ethno-state, stating that “there is an inherent contradiction in a polity that claims to be simultaneously open and inclusive, or democratic, while positing an exclusive core mission – insisting on Israel’s national identity as a distinctly ‘Jewish’ state rather than a state of all its citizens.”156 At its core, this is an issue of race, not democracy, with material consequences for Palestinian bodies attempting to navigate Israeli mechanisms of control. With this being the normative social reality, why would the Israel State Archives operate any differently in its approach to the archivalization of the Six Day War Files than to privilege its Jewish and Zionist interests?
In an interview with The Atlantic, chief archivist Lozowick expressed that the large-scale digitization efforts of the Israel State Archives will “enable[e] the citizens to have free and easy access to their documentation – within the obvious constraints – [and] will enrich the public discourse and strengthen Israeli democracy.”157 However, democratic archiving, as defined by archival theorist Terry Eastwood, is archiving that facilitates a “retrospective understanding of the actions of the government as one of the means of fostering enlightened understanding in a democratic polis,” in addition to “foster[ing] the recognition and identity of cultural communities in their midst.”158 Through an analysis of the various forms of power and privilege pervading the archivalization of the Six Day War Files Collection, I have sought to emphasize how this process has been anything but democratic and has instead established differential structured conditions between the Palestinians and Israelis affected by these records. At the collection-level, series-level, and item-level, there is an apparent pattern within their archival descriptions whereby the archivists have erased Palestinian history, land names, and land rights in favour of Zionist remapping and deterritorialization. By reframing Al-Khalil as Hebron, Palestinians as “Arabs,”
154 Michael S. Perry, “Worker and Trade Union Rights of Palestinian Arabs from the Occupied Territories,” Israel Yearbook on Human Rights 23 (1993): 31-32. 155 Stein, The Quiet Deportation Continues: Revocation of Residency and Denial of Social Rights of East Jerusalem Palestinians, 5. 156 Yasmeen Abu-Laban and Abigail B. Bakan, Israel, Palestine and the Politics of Race: Exploring Identity and Power in a Global Context (London: I.B. Taurus, 2020), 178. 157 Robinson Meyer, “How the State of Israel is Bringing its Analog History to the Web,” The Atlantic, July 4, 2012 https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/how-the-state-of-israel-is-bringing-its-analog-history-to- the-web/259415/ (Accessed 15 February 2020). 158 Terry Eastwood, “Reflections on the Goal of Archival Appraisal in Democratic Societies,” Archivaria 54 (2002): 59. 48 occupation and settler colonialism as “victory” and a “return,” and the annexation of East Jerusalem as “re-unification,” the archivists of the Israel State Archives are not fostering recognition of the identity of the different cultural communities in their midst. By censoring information within the records that likely contain incriminating actions and statements about Palestine in addition to willfully impeding public access to an entire series through poor appraisal decisions the archivists have not sufficiently recorded the Israeli government’s actions for the benefit of the public’s understanding or enlightenment. One of the highest tenets of archiving is to ensure the authenticity and integrity of the archival bond, the relationship that each archival record has with the other records that form its fonds or collection. Yet, the archivists of the Six Day War Files Collection have decided against preserving this important bond to the detriment of the records’ provenance and context. Despite Israel’s claim to be a democratic state, its archivists have fell short of democratic archiving and instead have offered the public a product of finely crafted archival imperialism.
49
Conclusion: Mitigating the Bulldozer of History
The creators, subjects, and archivists who all placed their interventions upon the Six Day War Files Collection sought to position their own interpretations of the events of 1967 while stifling any counternarratives from Palestine. When Palestinians are purposefully excluded from this context of record creation and archival processing, it becomes easy to exclude any other interpretation of events. Throughout my analysis of the records, I continuously ask “where are Israel’s representations of Palestinians?” because there are so few instances of Palestinian creators or subjects to represent themselves within this Collection. One must look outside the Collection to find Palestinian subjects in the Israel State Archives. One such item is from the Collection of Telegram Photos and it is linked by the Israel State Archives to the Six Day War Files Collection through a subject guide titled “The Problem of Palestinian Refugees.” The caption of the photograph, written by the Telegram and echoed in the item’s archival description, depicts an unnamed Palestinian family migrating “of their own free will” to Jordan on June 22, 1967159:
159The Telegram, “An Arab family voluntarily travels to Jordan through the destroyed Allenby Bridge,” [Digitized 2017], Collection of Telegram Photos, Israel State Archives at Jerusalem, Israel. 50
This photograph is a rare instance in the Israel State Archives because the subjects of the record are not an Israeli representation of Palestinians, they are Palestinians. Both the creator of the record and the archivist still attempt to mediate the experience of the subjects of the record, stating that their decision to leave their home was voluntary. As we look at the family traveling across the ruined Allenby Bridge into Jordon to likely be placed in a refugee camp, bringing no possessions other than the clothes on their back and a bundle balanced upon the mother’s head as she struggles to carry her youngest of four children, one would be hard-pressed to agree that such a state of affairs would be voluntarily chosen by anyone.
At the onset of this investigation I identify three key questions that shape the trajectory of my thesis: 1) What larger imperial goals do the records creators’ representations of Palestinians as a race in the content of the Six Day War Files serve? 2) How do specific archival practices of appraisal, description, access, restriction, and digital preservation sustain the imperialist ideologies established during the creation of the Six Day War Files? 3) How do the interventions of both the records creators and archivists serve to contribute to an ongoing hierarchy of race that positions the Jewish population above that of the Arab population in Palestine and Israel? In attending to the first key question, I analyze the Collection’s two textual record series by examining the tensions and anxieties evoked by the Cabinet and Security Cabinet ministers in their efforts to establish a new sense of imperial order that favoured the rights and growth of the Jewish-Israeli population. To do this the ministers symbolically erased Palestinians from the historical documentation by excluding them or reframing their identity to deny them their rights as Palestinian or Israeli citizens. In answering the second key question, I analyze the archival descriptions of the collection at all levels of arrangement, illuminate where instances of censorship influence the public’s understanding of the records, and examine the Israel State Archives’ appraisal decisions in impeding full access to certain digitized records in the Collection. In doing so, I show that the process of archivalization has rendered differential structured conditions between the Palestinians and Israelis affected by the records. Whereas Israeli independence is asserted, Palestinian history is subsumed and erased within the new settler colonial narrative. The policies established during 1967 to preserve this racial hierarchy and Jewish majority were defended over the next 50 years by the archivists and records creators who reconstructed displaced Palestinians as a threat needing to be contained.
Finally, to answer the third key question, I analyze both the content of the records and the context of their archivalization. In doing so I have sought to illuminate how both have worked in conjunction to establish racial inequality in Palestine and Israel at the onset of a drastic territorial and political restructuring. By reading between and along the lines of Israel’s colonial narrative as it has been ignited in these records, I have kept the major aim of critical race theory in mind, which is to provide a “critical
51 interrogation [of] the rationalization of racial inequality.”160 In order to firmly establish the sovereignty of a settler colonial nation within stolen territory, “one group finds it possible to seize advantage, or to exploit another. They do so and then form appropriate collective attitudes to rationalize what was done.”161 This rationalization of racial hierarchy and segregation is hinged upon perpetuating an idea of the colonized as an inferior, dangerous race. As the records creators and archivists rationalized the discriminatory policies implemented during the Six Day War, they also framed what it means to be a Palestinian. The “Arab” Palestinian has become one who has been “educated on war and hatred” and who will undoubtably threaten the peace (in the words of Minister Begin), one who is a “gypsy” (in the words of the Israel state archivists), and one who must therefore be segregated and denied citizenship (in the words of Minister Kol). Racial categories such as “Arab” “correspond to no biological or genetic reality; rather, races are categories that society invents,”162 by accentuating difference between each group’s relationship to society, culture, jurisprudence, and the state. These racial categories are not just prejudicial, they become violent when spoken by the heads of state and archived within official state memory. In short, the Six Day War Files show that Israel has constructed a racialized Other out of the Palestinian identity, one that establishes them as an inferior racial category, thereby justifying their subjugated position in society and the unequal distribution of material benefits and resources. This racial hierarchy in turn secures the material advantage of Jewish-Israelis, perpetuates the cultural poverty of Palestinians, and furthers the exploitation of Palestinians according to the needs of Zionist imperialism. Moreover, by symbolically eliminating the identity of Palestine, Jewish settlers thereby provide justification for their colonialism – asserting that the land they have settled contains no other country, just a race of Arabs without ties to a nation. By bringing the constructed nature of the racial categories that define Israel’s social organization to the forefront, it has been my aim to unsettle their seemingly fixed and natural presence.
What I wish to make clear is that while the explicit racism found within the content of the Six Day War Files is a problem of historical significance, it is not the largest ramification resulting from their existence. It is that the records are evidence of government decisions that have been withheld from public knowledge until well after resulting policies and laws have been implemented. During such restriction,
160 Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, “Unmasking Colorblindness in the Law: Lessons from the Formation of Critical Race Theory,” in Seeing Race Again: Countering Colorblindness Across the Disciplines, edited by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, et al., pp. 52-84 (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2019), 52. 161 Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 18. 162 Ibid., 7. 52 the actions engendered by the decisions in these documents could not be challenged by the affected Palestinian population and even when the records were released to the public, they were highly mediated with Israeli-Zionist bias in their arrangement and description, censored, and given selective access permissions. In reflecting upon the documentary heritage in Canada, Terry Eastwood stresses that archivists must ensure proper recognition of Indigenous communities and ethnic minorities in the records because “these communities often have grievances against the larger community, some of them longstanding. That the preservation of archives appears to be in the clutches of that larger community does not instill confidence in them that diverse interests will be served.”163 Palestinians have been entirely excluded from the archival processing of these records, which despite their Israeli provenance, have had a large bearing on Palestinian interests. The Six Day War set into motion the Basic Law: Jerusalem (1980), the Capital of Israel (1980), The Land Law (1969), and various residency laws such as the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law (2003), which prohibits residency or citizenship status to Palestinians from the West Bank or Gaza who are married to Israeli citizens. International Law states that displaced archives are of “crucial importance” in “reconstituting the archival heritages dismembered” when one nation is impacted by colonization, war, or military occupation.164 If archival holdings are created by an administrative body of the colonizing nation but hold information about the governance of the colonized, the occupied nation at the very least should “have equal access and moral property rights”165 to the records because its citizens still require such information to protect and assert their civil liberties.
Instead, the Six Day War Files have been kept hidden, selectively appraised for digitization, and censored. Not only have Palestinians been excluded from the creation and archivalization of these records, but they have also had access to the records restricted after their release and digitization. If any Palestinians wish to access the records of the Israel Broadcasting Authority, they must consent to be surveilled and first offer their personal information to the Archives staff. Despite the Israel Broadcasting Authority’s records being deemed publicly accessible, the Archives decides which requests for access are to be fulfilled. This has its parallels to larger relations of power in Israeli society, whereby restrictions placed on Palestinian movement “are legitimated by a security rhetoric” that necessitates the surveillance
163 Terry Eastwood, “Reflections on the Goal of Archival Appraisal in Democratic Societies,” Archivaria 54 (Fall 2002): 70. 164 Charles Kecskemeti “Archives Seizures: International Law,” in Displaced Archives, edited by James Lowry, pp. 12-20 (London and New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2017), 15. 165 Ibid., 15. 53 of racialized bodies.166 In investigating the impact of records documenting human rights abuses, Michelle Caswell argues a survivor-centered approach to rectifying the damage, whereby survivors and victims’ family members are active participants in decisions of appraisal, description, digitization, and access.167 By placing survivor needs above those of state actors, researchers, and stakeholders, the archive becomes 168 accountable and can “most ethically serve communities coming to terms with violent pasts.” Access to and involvement in the decisions made pertaining to the Six Day War Files, a collection that has greatly impacted what it means to identify and live as a Palestinian, is of the utmost importance if equality, democracy, and healing is to happen.
In this thesis I seek to provide an intensive study into the various power structures that have produced the Six Day War Files Collection as it exists in the present, unsettling the imperial ideologies that have sustained the current racial hierarchy within Israel and Palestine. Previous investigations into Israel’s recordkeeping practices predominantly analyze Israeli archives in and of themselves, thereby overlooking the deeper reasons behind how and why Palestinians are subjugated through recordkeeping. This study is meant to fill a gap in the research that has come before by first and foremost placing the discussion of racial inequality at the forefront. Then, by situating the Israel State Archives within the larger processes of systemic discrimination that occur in Israeli society, I bridge the connection between operations of the Israel State Archives and the legitimization of settler colonialism on the ground. The scope of this study has been limited mainly to the textual records series in the Collection. Therefore, future research could build upon its findings by applying this lens to the Collection’s other three graphic, audio, and audiovisual series or by investigating entirely different records created by Israel. As I demonstrate in this study, Israeli settler colonialism is deeply imbedded within the legislative framework of the State. Applying this critical lens to the military archives of the Israel Defense Forces, for instance, would provide valuable insight into not only how Israeli colonialism is rationalized, but also policed.
In 2006, two years prior to his death, Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish published his final work, Fī Haḍrat al-Ghiyāb (In the Presence of Absence). An elegy written for his own funeral, Darwish weaves historical narrative, poetry, and autobiography to reflect upon his life and that of the exiled Palestinian people. In it, he speculates upon poetry as a tool to defend narrative and memory:
166 Nadera Shalhoub-Kevokian, Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 3. 167 Michelle Caswell, “Toward a Survivor-Centered Approach to Records Documenting Human Rights Abuse: Lessons from Community Archives,” Archival Science 14, no. 3 (2014): 319. 168Ibid., 320. 54
For what can a poet do before history’s bulldozer but guard the spring and trees, visible and invisible, by the old roads? And protect language from receding from metaphorical precision and from being emptied of the voices of victims calling for their share of tomorrow’s memory on that land over which a struggle is being waged. A struggle for what lies beyond the power of weapons: the power of words.169
I believe that Darwish’s advice has as much relevance to the archivist and archival scholar as it does the poet. The bulldozer of both history and the colonizer is inevitable, but the least we can do to mitigate its damage is offer up space in the archive for the voices of those in its path.
169 Mahmoud Darwish, In the Presence of Absence, translated from the Arabic by Sinan Antoon (Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books, 2011), 93-94. 55
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