The Idea of Israel and My Promised Land – review by Avi Shlaim

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/14/idea-israel-ilan-pappe-promised-land-ari-shavit-review

by Avi Shlaim       14 May 2014           The Guardian

The separation wall on the West Bank that divides Palestinians and Israelis. Photograph: Pedro Ugarte/AFP/Getty

Zionism achieved its greatest triumph with the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. The Zionist idea and its principal political progeny are the subject of deeply divergent interpretations, not least inside the Jewish state itself. No other aspect of Zionism, however, is more controversial than its attitude towards the indigenous population of the land of its dreams. Chaim Weizmann, the first president of the state of Israel, famously said that it is by its treatment of the Palestinians that his country will be judged. Yet, when judged by this criterion, Zionism is not just an unqualified failure but a tragedy of historic proportions. Zionism did achieve its central goal but at a terrible price: the displacement and dispossession of the Palestinians – what the Arabs call the Nakba, the catastrophe.

The authors of these two books are both Israelis, but they approach their subject from radically different ideological vantage points. Ilan Pappé is a scholar and a pro-Palestinian political activist. He is one of the most prominent Israeli political dissidents living in exile, having moved from the University of Haifa to the University of Exeter. He is also one of the few Israeli students of the conflict who write about the Palestinian side with real knowledge and empathy.

Pappé places Zionism under an uncompromising lens. In his reading it was not a national liberation movement but a settler colonial project imposed on the Palestinians by force with the support of the west. From this premise it follows that the state of Israel is not legitimate even in its original borders, much less so within its post-1967 borders. To correct the injustice, Pappé advocates a peaceful, humanist and socialist alternative to the Zionist idea in the form of a binational state with equal rights for all its citizens.

Ari Shavit is a member of the editorial board of the liberal Zionist paper Ha'aretz, and one of Israel's most influential columnists. He is an eloquent exponent of liberal Zionism, but he also exemplifies its ambiguities, inner contradictions and moral myopia.

Pappé has published a large number of books on the history of Arab-Israeli conflict of which the most widely read and most controversial isThe Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. The Idea of Israel is not a history book but a close study of the role of Zionist ideology in the making of modern Israel and of the continuing relevance of this ideology today inpolitics, the education system, the media, the cinema and Ashkenazi-Sephardi relations. The book thus offers a broad survey of the main critical schools of thought on Israel. Two chapters deal directly with the Palestine question: the historiography of the first Arab-Israeli war, and the uses and misuses of the Holocaust.

History is usually written by the victors, and the Middle East is no exception. Pappé himself is a leading member of the group of "new" or revisionist Israeli historians that emerged in the late 1980s and included Simha Flapan, Benny Morris and myself. In our different ways we all challenged the dominant narrative, the narrative of the victors. Using recently released documents we debunked many of the myths that had come to surround the birth of the state of Israel and the 1948 war. Intentionally or otherwise, our work thus lent credibility to the Palestinian historical narrative about the war for Palestine.

In his new book, Pappé deals with recent developments in the historiographical sphere, especially on the origins of the Palestinian refugee problem. The big question has always been: did they leave of their own accord or were they forced out? Israeli governments have always denied that they drove the Palestinians out. In his ground-breaking 1989 book on the subject – The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 – Morris presented incontrovertible evidence of Israeli involvement in creating the refugee problem. Evidence subsequently gathered by Morris points to an even higher degree of Israeli responsibility. But following the outbreak of the second intifada, Morris veered to the right and radically changed his views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He concluded it was a mistake not to expel all the Palestinians from the Jewish state in 1948. Pappé argues that the new documents prove that the expulsion of 730,000 Palestinians was more premeditated, systematic and extensive than Morris had ever acknowledged. In short, he claims that when war provided an opportunity, the Zionist idea was translated into the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

The role of the Holocaust in empowering the struggle for Jewish statehood is another sensitive issue in the debate about the past. Pappé denounces any political manipulation of the Holocaust as a means of moral blackmail designed to silence legitimate criticism of Israeli policies. His sharpest comments are reserved for Israeli officials who have perfected such manipulation as a diplomatic tool in their struggle against the Palestinians. His deeper concern, however, is to understand the impact and significance of the Holocaust memory in constructing and marketing the idea of Israel. Israelis have harboured an exaggerated sense of themselves as victims, and this self-image, he argues, has prevented them from seeing the Palestinians in a more realistic light, and impeded a reasonable political solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. The argument that what happened to the Palestinians was just a small injustice to rectify a greater injustice (the destruction of European Jewry) is rejected with some vehemence. The only hope Pappé sees of making peace with the Arabs is for Israelis to free themselves of their Shoah mentality.

Ari Shavit is one of Israel's most influential columnists. Photograph: Sharon Bareket/Courtesy of Spiegel

Shavit's position is more conflicted and therefore more opaque. He is a passionate but not uncritical Zionist. His book is also not a history of Israel but a series of stories of individuals and significant events that shed a great deal of new light on the making of the Jewish state. Among the cast of characters on whom Shavit draws to construct his picture of Israel are Holocaust survivors; a youth leader who helped to turn Masada into a symbol and shrine of post-Holocaust Zionism; an enigmatic engineer who was instrumental in building the atomic bomb in Dimona to defend the Jews against the threat of a second genocide; the zealous religious Zionists who spearheaded the settler movement; leftwing academics in Jerusalem; and pedlars of sex and drugs in Tel Aviv nightclubs. But, above all, this is a personal story. As the author explains in the introduction: "This book is the personal odyssey of one Israeli who is bewildered by the historic drama engulfing his homeland. It is the journey in space and time of an Israeli-born individual exploring the wider narrative of his nation."

The most vivid illustration of Shavit's attitude to this wider narrative is his account of the expulsion by the nascent Israeli army of 50,000-70,000 of the Arab residents of Lydda and the massacre of 70 civilians in a small mosque in July 1948. The grisly story has been told many times before, but Shavit's reconstruction is riveting. His original contribution consists of interviews with the Jewish brigade commander and the military governor in which they speak frankly about their strategic and moral dilemmas. Shavit refers to this episode as "our black box" in which lies "the dark secret of Zionism". But he goes on to say that the conquest of Lydda and the expulsion of its inhabitants "were an inevitable phase of the Zionist revolution that laid the foundation for the Zionist state". "Lydda," he asserts, "is an integral and essential part of our story." Like Morris, Shavit evidently thinks that the end justifies the means; I don't. The massacre of innocent civilians can never be justified under any circumstances. It is a heinous war crime and it must be denounced as such even if the perpetrators are Jews and, yes, even if they are Holocaust survivors.

Both authors engage with the essence of Zionism as well as with its more problematic parts. While Pappé represents the cutting edge of radical anti-Zionism, Shavit exposes the dissonance, the double standards and intellectual incoherence of liberal Zionism. Shavit, by his own acronym, is a Wasp – a White Ashkenazi Supporter of Peace. His liberal credentials were burnished by serving as chair of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel in the early 1990s. In addition, he enjoys the great advantage of writing like an angel. The smoothness and beauty of his prose is all the more remarkable given that English is his second language. But the brilliance of Shavit's style tends to conceal the ethnocentric character of his commentary and his inability to confront the moral consequences of the triumph of Zionism.

On one thing the two authors agree: the current status quo between Israel and the Palestinians is unsustainable. Both of them see the writing on the wall. The occupation, the relentless expansion of illegal settlements, the construction of the monstrous "security barrier" on the West Bank, the demolition of Palestinian houses in East Jerusalem, the flagrant violations of international law, the systematic abuse of Palestinian human rights and the rampant racism – all are slowly but surely turning Israel into an international pariah. No sane Israeli relishes the prospect of living in a pariah state that maintains an apartheid regime. But few Israelis are ready for a truly honest historical reckoning with the people they have wronged and oppressed and whose land they continue to colonise. To blame the victims for their own misfortunes, as the people in power habitually do, is both disingenuous and despicable. This is no way for any nation to behave, especially one with such an acute historical memory of the bitter taste of victimhood.

• Avi Shlaim's Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutationsis published by Verso.

• Ari Shavit's book My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, published by Scribe, is available from the Guardian bookshop.

The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge by Ilan Pappe

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"Nablus: an architectural history" by Nasser Arafat

It’s been very exciting to get my first look at the real, in-the-flesh version of my good friend Naseer Arafat’s architectural history of Nablus. It’s a huge and beautiful book, 300 pages long and in coffee-table format, and comes in both Arabic and English editions, packed with images of this wonderful, historical city (probably my favourite in Palestine). I’ve been helping Naseer with the English text for the book since 2009, and it’s been a fascinating journey, learning about Nablus itself but also the development of architecture in Palestine, its interrelationship with society, and details such as Arabic architectural terminology. At the moment the book is available via Naseer’s organisation in Nablus and is on sale at the Educational Bookshop and American Colony Hotel bookshopin East Jerusalem, but obviously we hope to find a way to distribute it more widely.

A particularly exciting aspect of the publication is that the book has been printed in Nablus itself, so as well as raising awareness about the history of the city, it helps to support its economy.

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Nablus was "the center of everything": interview with architect Naseer Arafat

http://electronicintifada.net/content/nablus-was-center-everything-interview-architect-naseer-arafat/12267

Daryl Meador 

The Electronic Intifada 

Nablus 

12 March 2013

Nablus was once a center for commerce and science.

 (Naseer Arafat)

Palestinian architect Naseer Arafat has dedicated much of his life and work to the restoration and preservation of buildings in the occupied West Bank city of Nablus. Last year, his extensive research and work came to fruition as Nablus, City of Civilizations, an impressive and extensive architectural and historical survey of the ancient city.

Through twelve detailed units, the book describes Nablus’ long history, from the Canaanite era to the second intifada, when many of its historical buildings were demolished or damaged during the Israeli invasion. Historical photographs, maps and building plans describe the many architectural treasures of the city. Beyond this, through oral stories, Arafat includes a social history that breathes life into the city as it exists today.

Published in Nablus by the Cultural Heritage Enrichment Center, the book is available in Arabic and English. Arafat recently spoke to The Electronic Intifada contributor Daryl Meador.

Daryl Meador: Can you speak a little bit about your history and relationship with Nablus and architecture?

Naseer Arafat: It’s the city where I live; I was born here. The relationship with architecture was built by the stories I got from my parents. They lived in a big house, 675 square meters, three floors; it was demolished by the British in 1938. So not only my parents, but my aunts and uncles from both sides were all living together in that house. My aunt, whenever the house was mentioned, she would sadly remember the moment when, with her hair wet, she was tossed out of the house into the street, and the British blew it up.

Also, my father’s uncle all the time spoke about the visitors who would come to the house because he was selling costumes and clothes out of it. Visitors would stay in the guest part of the house for three days, fed and hosted.

So that memory of the place, of the building, made me always imagine the size of the house and the situation of my family in it. I sadly connected this with loss, especially because where I live now is in a house that is in the garden of the old house. The old house is partially now a garden and partially a street where I used to walk every day. I would imagine which part of the house I was walking on. So that was the passion towards an ancient house and what it meant to my family.

I studied architecture at Birzeit, and volunteered to bring visitors to the university on tours in Nablus. After that I worked as an architect responsible for the national register of historical buildings in Palestine. This enabled me to discover Nablus as a treasured place with an urban fabric, with monuments. This was not known to me before. The more I worked in the city, walked through the alleys and streets, I discovered the richness of it.

Then as I worked, I decided I would write something about the city. I started collecting data and photographs, maps — whatever I could collect on the city.

DM: What kind of resources did you use?

NA: At that time I went to the Rockefeller museum in Jerusalem and saw documents and old photos of Nablus. Later I went to study restoration at York University and I visited what is called the Palestine Exploration Fund, which is a small association off Oxford Street in London. There I found huge old photographs of Nablus printed on glass.

I managed to collect unique photographs from the Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem, which is the French antiquities school. I managed to collect photos from Istanbul, the archive of the Sultan Abd al-Hamid II, from Berlin, the antiquities department and the Mandate Museum in London. At all these places I could find old photos of Nablus and use some for the book.

I also collected family photos. From some families you have photos of their houses and there was an Austrian researcher who came to Nablus in ‘96, and took photos of all of the houses in Nablus. So I managed to find some photos of houses destroyed by the Israelis in 2002. This was very emotional for the people whose houses were lost.

Two soap factories which were demolished, I managed to find photos of these as well. And by chance I was able to survey one factory before it was demolished, so its plan and façade are in the book.

DM: Does the book discuss the Israeli invasion and destruction?

NA: Yes it does. What the Israelis are doing to Nablus and the old city has been continuous since the occupation started. So the book is not just architectural; it starts with an architectural description, but also has social, political, economical, cultural interpretations of the buildings described. This is, I think, what makes the book special. I am an architect, so the starting point of my research and writing was architecture. But architecture is just a building, and it is a rigid description to just talk about the look and materials of a building. I felt that the richness of the building is the social life of the building, maybe the economical life of the market, also the cultural livelihood of the fabric.

So whenever there was a linked story to a building, I never hesitated to write it.

DM: And how did you find the stories?

NA: From people. Especially elderly people, I interviewed many of them. And they told me real stories.

DM: What are some examples of the personal stories linked to buildings?

NA: There are so many — one of them is about a mufti, he had the highest seat in Islam, who was from Nablus, appointed by the Ottomans. The British commander in Nablus wanted to meet the community leaders in Nablus. This man made an appointment to meet the sheikh. The reception is always downstairs and the house is above, all the time. So he gathered community leaders of Nablus to meet the guy, and when they were waiting, the mufti was nervously walking and not relaxed. People were asking what was wrong with him. All of the sudden, he went upstairs to his house.

The people were surprised because this is not the way you receive your guests, but they couldn’t have a word with him; he was upstairs in his house. The British commander came, they called upon the mufti and he came down and had a chat and the people left.

But the Nabulsis still didn’t understand, and they asked the mufti why he did that. He said, “Guys, if I was sitting and waiting for the guest, when he came I would have to stand up to respect and welcome him. But I went up, and when he came I came down to him, and he stood up for me. That’s how we should receive the occupier.”

Another story that is very nice is related to what we call in modern times, gender-sensitive issues. In one of the Turkish baths, if you look at the sides of the main hall there is a higher stage where people sit. When I surveyed this in 1992 — I was a student then — there used to be couches, fancy and relaxing seats, not like the stones on the other side. It indicated that this was a special place for people to sit.

The wife of the judge in Nablus, which was the highest position in town, she wanted to have a bath here. The lady who looks after the guests told her “Madam, you can’t sit there, this is only for VIPs, you are not allowed to sit there.” The wife of the judge left angry and didn’t have a bath.

She told her husband, and as the story goes he slapped the table, and he said “I will show them.” What can we expect from the most powerful person in town? He built a special bath for his wife. And he built a tunnel in between his house and the bath so that the bath is only reserved for her, and so that no one can see her when she leaves.

DM: Does the bath still exist?

NA: Yes, and it’s called al-Qadi; it means “the Judge” bath. It is used as a sweets factory now, not as a bath.

130312-nablus-clock-tower.jpg

An inscription on the Ottoman clock tower in Nablus’ old city.

 (Naseer Arafat)

DM: The book features poems that are inscribed on buildings in Nablus. Are those common on all historical buildings?

NA: Every monument in Nablus, and some of the houses, have a written inscription which most of the time is a poem. This poem is the most honest documentation of the building date. So I managed to read some, [and] copy what others have read from what were lost.

From the poems I could calculate when the building was built. In Arabic, every letter has a corresponding number — alif is one,ba is two, etc. So if you take the letters of the last phrase of the poem, and you find the equivalent number of each letter and sum them up, you get the year that each building was built. It is a brilliant way of writing a poem.

DM: And they are included in the book?

NA: All of the poems are included with a photo and a copy of the text of the poem.

DM: Can you say one final thing about why Nablus is unique, historically and architecturally?

NA: There is a lot to say about Nablus. I would say that Nablus, at the time that it was built as an Islamic city, during the Mamluk Ottoman period, it was the center of everything. It was the capital of trade. The city was well known for its powerful economy that attracted not only the plans for making the olive oil soap from Jordan, but also the costumes that were exported to Europe and exhibited during the Ottoman period.

The fields of Nablus were where olive trees and cotton plants were planted, because we have four water springs and cotton needs a lot of water.

Also, it was the center of science. Students from Azhar [University] in Egypt would come study in Nablus. There were four schools in the old city of Nablus.

In modern history, before Israeli occupation, there were four buses leaving Nablus every morning — one to Beirut, one to Damascus, one to Jerusalem, and one toAmman. Every morning. My father used to say he would arrive in Damascus before shops opened. The Hijaz train, which took pilgrims from Palestine, Jordan and Syria to Saudi Arabia, started from Nablus. So I could say simply, Nablus was the center of everything for the neighboring countries. You could say it is a unique city.

Daryl Meador is a recent graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who is currently living and volunteering in Nablus.

Unfree in Palestine Registration, Documentation and Movement Restriction

by  Nadia Abu-Zahra, Adah Kay

http://www.plutobooks.com/display.asp?K=9780745325279

Based on first-hand accounts and extensive fieldwork, Unfree in Palestine reveals the role played by identity documents in Israel’s apartheid policies towards the Palestinians, from the red passes of the 1950s to the orange, green and blue passes of today.

The authors chronicle how millions of Palestinians have been denationalised through the bureaucratic tools of census, population registration, blacklisting and a discriminatory legal framework. They show how identity documents are used by Israel as a means of coercion, extortion, humiliation and informant recruitment. Movement restrictions tied to IDs and population registers threaten Palestinian livelihoods, freedom of movement and access to basic services such as health and education.

Unfree in Palestine is a masterful expose of the web of bureaucracy used by Israel to deprive the Palestinians of basic rights and freedoms, and calls for international justice and inclusive security in place of discrimination and division.

About The Authors

Nadia Abu-Zahra is Assistant Professor of Globalisation and Development at the University of Ottawa. She is currently on the Board of Directors for the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences and has worked across the Middle East, Asia, and Central America. She is the author of 12 articles and book chapters on mobility in Palestine.

Adah Kay is Honorary Visiting Professor at Cass Business School, City University, London. An anthropologist and urban planner, she has worked in local government, universities and UK NGOs. During 2002-6 she lived and worked in the West Bank. She is the co-author of Stolen Youth: The Politics of Israel’s Detention of Palestinian Children (Pluto, 2004).

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“PALESTINIANS IN ISRAEL” Segregation, Discrimination and Democracy

By Ben White   Pluto Press  2012

    

Review by Abe Hayeem

Palestine News   Autumn 2012

Ben White, in this indispensable handy companion to his earlier book on Israeli Apartheid,  has distilled with forensic research from volumes of evidence, the myth of Israel’s claim to be a European style democracy. His wry and lucid commentary, under several headings, highlights the absurdity and paradoxes of Israel’s laws fabricated to institutionally discriminate against Palestinians’ true equality as Israeli citizens. Israel is in reality an ethnocracy, giving pre-eminence to its Jewish citizens. Palestinians are given inferior status as a favour rather than a right, with some trappings of democracy.

Especially in the fields of land and home ownership, labyrinthine and Kafkaesque laws like the Absentee Property Law, expropriated the bulk of land from Palestinians in 1947/48, prohibiting Palestinian ‘citizens’ from living in 93% of Israel. Apart from seven sub-standard Bedouin townships, there has never been a new Arab town planned, in comparison with hundreds of towns for Jewish Israelis, which, in law deter Palestinians from living in them.

Currently, in its drive to further ‘Judaise’ the Negev and Galilee, in effect continuing the Nakba of 1948, the Bedouin are being driven from the unrecognized villages like Al-Araqib, using draconian laws. In this process of ‘de-Arabisation’, Jewish settlers are even infiltrating Arab neighbourhoods in the mixed cities like Jaffa and Acre, parallel to events in East Jerusalem and Bedouin areas of the Hebron Hills in Area C. This is all to counteract the ‘demographic threat’, using extreme force and dispossession, to ‘ensure the homogeneity of Jewish national identity, free from Palestinians with a collective identity.’

Further chapters detail the vast inequalities in provision of education, civic and social services. The unequal legal regime, backed by military brutality was exemplified by the deliberate shooting of Palestinians in the October 2000 protests in solidarity with the Intifada, where the IDF escaped justice. A whole new tranche of discriminatory laws further erode any freedoms.

The paranoid fears of equality are expressed by MK David Rotem :“I am not ashamed that I want to maintain this country as a Jewish and democratic state. In your way there would be no state. Israel is a Jewish and democratic state, not a state of all its citizens.”

Ben’s talent at unearthing damning quotations, reveals the sheer unabashed racism of not only today’s far-right MKs, but of Israel’s founding fathers. His concluding chapter links the situation of Palestinians on both sides of the green line, and asks us to consider the only scenario that can change the current situation of relentless colonization by ‘re-imagining the Jewish and Palestinian presence in Palestine/Israel and a future based on a genuine co-existence of equals, rather than ethno-religious supremacy and segregation’.

From PALESTINE TO ISRAEL: A Photographic Record of Destruction & State Formation 1947-50

by Ariella Azoulay      translated by Charles S. Kamen                                    

Pluto Press 2011

"Arabs Fleeing" from IDF and Defensive Archives                                                        Photographer not identified.

Review in Palestine News       Winter 2012        by Abe Hayeem

The events that led to the violent foundation of the Israeli state are wrapped in layers of mythology and propaganda, which are still being promoted and advocated today.

Ariella Azoulay’s fascinating book and recent exhibition at the Mosaic Rooms in west London, combines detailed research and analysis of the history and politics of the whole period that preceded the Partition of Palestine before 1947 and the succeeding years. It lifts the lid off the prevailing mythology, using photographs mainly from the Haganah archives, hidden for more than six decades, and provides a revealing new commentary on them. By its pioneering methodology of using a ‘civil imagination’ and re-interpretation, it rejects the nationalist narrative that the photographs are meant to portray to the Israeli public in concealing the unfolding disaster it created, and reconstructs the reality of the ‘Nakba’ that was caused to the Palestinians.

Until today, Israelis in general were encouraged to think of the events that happened to the Palestinians as a ‘catastrophe from their point of view’. Azoulay’s intention by revealing the truth of the events hidden by the photographs’ banal original captions, is to lift their ‘colonial aphasia’- the difficulty in generating the appropriate vocabulary to the appropriate events, concepts and things - and use the proper understanding of these events that affected both peoples, as a way to formulate a new reality that would bring about a move towards  eventual reconciliation.

The UN resolution that created the partition of Palestine in 1947, designed only by the Zionist leadership and the UN, was vehemently opposed by most of the country’s Arab inhabitants of 90 percent of the land who were never consulted, and ‘not an insignificant number of Jews.’ The Palestinians were not wanted in the new state that was declared, and the Zionist leadership and its enforcers, the Haganah, were bent on erasure of the Palestinian presence and the physical evidence of their habitation, agriculture and customs. Their war crimes included the  destruction of  hundreds of beautiful villages and towns, including large parts of Ramle, Lydda, Jaffa, Haifa and Beersheba, reducing them to rubble, which the new Jewish immigrants from Europe helped to move, level and use as a base to rebuild new homes, if not taking over the ones that were retained, after the inhabitants were expelled.

In a typical photograph, as Azoulay comments. “the official caption that reads ‘Beit Sha’an abandoned’ doesn’t serve to display for us a town abandoned, rather than one whose inhabitants are to be returned, a town that no longer belongs to those who built it or who until yesterday lived there. It refers to the achievement that created a ‘valley that’s entirely Jewish’ “.

The author’s commentary, often in elegant, challenging and intriguing prose, that replaces the existing bland and often misleading euphemisms in the archive photographs, exquisitely captures the nightmare of the expulsions, the mood and feelings of the dispossessed, and the casual arrogance of the dispossessors. It makes one feel a witness to the events which unfold in these haunting, surrealistic tableaux. The pictures depict the corralling of the refugees behind barbed wire enclosures, the long queues directed out of emptying villages, the buses employed to move them to Jordan, Lebanon, and Gaza across newly established lines that once were open land or borders. Then followed the registering of refugees in locations they were allowed to stay but still confined to ghettoes, all these were ‘mechanisms of subordination’ and then socialization carried out with pre-planned ruthlessness.

Much of this has ironic echoes of what is still continued with the Occupation today, with the matrix of control, the identity cards, the checkpoints and the Separation Wall in the West Bank, the dispossession of the Bedouin in the Negev and the West Bank, and the house evictions and demolitions in East Jerusalem.

 Azoulay describes the events between 1947 and 1950, and subsequently, as “a civil malfunction - the way citizens relate to the man-made disaster in whose continuing reproduction and preservation they participate.” This original book is an indispensable tool to unraveling the dystopia created by the Israeli state and illuminates the way to a new future of justice and hope.

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Ariella Azoulay directs the Photo-Lexic Project at Tel Aviv University. She is the author of a number of books on Photography including 'the Civil Contract of Photography(2008) and 'Civil Imagination: A Political  Ontology of Photograohy(2012). 

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