Constituent Violence 1947-1950 - Ariella's Cargo 5/13/16, 3:40 PM

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Constituent Violence 1947-1950

Ariella Azoulay offers a new perspective on four crucial years in the history of Palestine/Israel. She reconstructs the processes by which the Palestinian majority in Mandatory Palestine
became a minority in Israel, while the Jewish minority established a new political entity in which it became a majority ruling a minority Palestinian population. She does so by reading
some 200 photographs from that period, most of which have never been seen by the Israeli public. Almost all the photographs in this book come from State archives. Through the use
of photography, Azoulay recounts the events and the stories that for years have been only partially acknowledged by Israeli Jews, that have been silenced, denied or distorted, pushed
to the margins of the hegemonic tale of “building the country.”

Azoulay’s approach challenges two principal narratives: the Zionist narrative, that opens with the dream of returning to Zion and culminates in the establishment of the state of Israel,
and the Palestinian narrative (which many post-Zionists have also adopted) that views the nakba as the foundational event in Palestinian existence and identity, but ignores the
contribution of the Palestinian catastrophe to the establishment of the Israeli regime and to shaping its modalities of violence. These contradictory narratives assume as self-evident a
rigid division between Jews and Arabs. Since both accept this division as an accepted fact, neither is capable of reconstructing the process by which this division itseld came into
existence. Azoulay uses the photographs to tell that story. She sees the nakba – the disaster that befell the Palestinians – as the event that made the division between Jews and
Arabs possible, while that division, which gradually became fixed, is seen as responsible for the fact that this catastrophe was viewed by the Jews as the unavoidable price of the war
for Jewish sovereignty and a disaster only from the Palestinian perspective. Azoulay rejects this view; for her, the nakba is an absolute catastrophe, and she explains how its
transformation into “what they see as a disaster” became an essential component in the establishment of the Israeli regime.

Images from the exhibition:

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Constituent Violence 1947-1950 - Ariella's Cargo 5/13/16, 3:40 PM

Constituent Violence 1947-1950

The Catastrophe, Lectures by Ariella Azoulay and Issam Nasser, Documentary Forum, Berlin link

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Constituent Violence 1947-1950 - Ariella's Cargo 5/13/16, 3:40 PM

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