Visual Occupations: Violence and Visibility in a Conflict Zone (Perverse Modernities: A Series Edited by Jack Halberstam and Lisa Lowe) - Hardcover

Hochberg, Gil Z.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822359014 ISBN 13: 9780822359012

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2015

Synopsis

In Visual Occupations Gil Z. Hochberg shows how the Israeli Occupation of Palestine is driven by the unequal access to visual rights, or the right to control what can be seen, how, and from which position. Israel maintains this unequal balance by erasing the history and denying the existence of Palestinians, and by carefully concealing its own militarization. Israeli surveillance of Palestinians, combined with the militarized gaze of Israeli soldiers at places like roadside checkpoints, also serve as tools of dominance. Hochberg analyzes various works by Palestinian and Israeli artists, among them Elia Suleiman, Rula Halawani, Sharif Waked, Ari Folman, and Larry Abramson, whose films, art, and photography challenge the inequity of visual rights by altering, queering, and manipulating dominant modes of representing the conflict. These artists' creation of new ways of seeing—such as the refusal of Palestinian filmmakers and photographers to show Palestinian suffering or the Israeli artists' exposure of state manipulated Israeli blindness —offers a crucial gateway, Hochberg suggests, for overcoming and undoing Israel's militarized dominance and political oppression of Palestinians.

About this title

About the Author

Gil Z. Hochberg is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Gender Studies at UCLA. She is the author of In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs and the Limits of Separatist Imagination.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Visual Occupations

Violence and Visibility in a Conflict Zone

By Gil Z. Hochberg

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2015 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-5901-2

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, 
Introduction | Visual Politics at a Conflict Zone, 
Part I. Concealment, 
1. Visible Invisibility | On Ruins, Erasure, and Haunting, 
2. From Invisible Spectators to the Spectacle of Terror | Chronicles of a Contested Citizenship, 
Part II. Surveillance, 
3. The (Soldier's) Gaze and the (Palestinian) Body | Power, Fantasy, and Desire in the Militarized Contact Zone, 
4. Visual Rights and the Prospect of Exchange | The Photographic Event Placed under Duress, 
Part III. Witnessing, 
5. "Nothing to Look At"; or, "For Whom Are You Shooting?" | The Imperative to Witness and the Menace of the Global Gaze, 
6. Shooting War | On Witnessing One's Failure to See (on Time), 
CLOSING WORDS, 
NOTES, 
BIBLIOGRAPHY, 
INDEX, 

CHAPTER 1

Visible Invisibility

On Ruins, Erasure, and Haunting

The [Palestinian] villages that no longer exist were pushed out of the [Israeli] public sphere. They carry new names of Hebrew settlements (yeshuvim ivriyim). But these villages left some traces in these new settlements ... a stone fence, bricks of ruined houses.

—Azmi Bishara, "Between Place and Space"

To be sure, the Nakba exists in the landscape. There are hundreds of ruined Palestinian villages throughout Israel, many of which are still surrounded by the sabra cactus ... but for some reason the ruins of villages across the countryside [fail to] register among the Jewish Israeli population.

—Neve Gordon, "Erasing the Nakba"

There is an ambivalence [that] lays deep at the heart of Israeli thinking and culture ... a denial of the persistent, ghostly presence of the Palestinian absentees amid the ruins of their homes and their neglected fields.

—Yehudit Kirstein Keshet, Checkpoint Watch: Testimonies from Occupied Palestine

This book deals with questions of vision and visibility, particularly the ability to see and be seen. But the parameters by which we determine what is or isn't included within the realm of the visual is itself a matter open to dispute. Following the image of the ruins of depopulated Palestinian villages within the Israeli public sphere and culture, this chapter investigates how a certain failure to see or to appear generates an alternative mode of visuality associated with the sociopolitical power of ghostly haunting.

Informed by the work of Avery Gordon, Jacque Derrida, and Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, I suggest that haunting expands the realm of the visible to include the visibility of the invisible. The chapter engages several key Israeli literary and artworks to examine how the unresolved and ongoing historical violence associated with the Palestinian forced exile of 1948, referred to in Arabic as the Nakba (the catastrophe), is seemingly erased or hidden from Israeli eyes, and yet nevertheless finds its way into the Israeli visual field as a haunting presence of a visible invisibility.

To be sure, the dominant Israeli visual field—not unlike that of other settler colonial societies—is created, guarded, and sustained through various state-governed blinding mechanisms that conceal and erase the history of past inhabitants' relationship to the land. In the case of Israel, these erasures include rhetorical acts such as the replacement of the Arabic names of villages with new Hebrew names, the use of the term "present absentees" to denote Palestinians who fled their homes in 1948, and the replacement of the term "Palestinians" with the term "Israeli Arabs" in reference to Palestinian citizens of Israel. The erasure also takes the form of particular spatial arrangements, such as the planting of numerous national forests over the remains of Palestinian villages; and the separation of Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Israelis so that the visibility of the other remains as minimal as possible, including the construction of the Separation Wall, which keeps the Palestinians of the West Bank out of the Israeli visual field, and the construction of distinct road systems for Israeli Jews and Palestinians, which again minimizes the visibility of the other through the imposition of two radically separate geopolitical realities on the same territorial landscape (see Weizman, "Politics of Verticality").

And yet, unlike what we might consider other, more successful settler colonial projects, the Zionist Israeli Jewish enterprise failed both in removing the original inhabitants of the land and in concealing their traces. This means, among other things, that compared to Australia, New Zealand, or the United States, Israel has not succeeded in generating a myth of a unified democratic collective origin, or in hiding the ongoing violence involved in the state's establishment. It also means that despite Israel's ongoing and persistent attempts to cover up, remove, hide, and eliminate anything Palestinian, the "stubbornly persistent Palestinian presence" nevertheless manages to invade almost every aspect of everyday Israeli life (Makdisi, "The Architecture of Erasure" 527). Indeed, the common Hebrew phrase is kfarim netushim, which literally translates to "deserted villages." Focusing on the image of the ruins of depopulated Palestinian villages within Israeli culture, this chapter traces the growing visible invisibility of the Palestinian Nakba as a ghostly haunting that continues to taunt the Israeli visual field despite the state's elaborate attempts to do away with it once and for all.

The Landscape of Ruins

For anyone familiar with the Israeli landscape, the sight of ruins of destroyed Palestinian villages is not unusual. Usually one finds but a few remaining structures: an arch, a gate, a half-standing house, a broken water tank. It is true that a great number of the more than the four hundred Palestinian villages depopulated following the 1948 war were completely demolished by Israel, leaving no trace behind. But there have also been instances in which ruins have been left visible, and in some cases they have even been carefully preserved and exposed as parts of touristic sites open to the general public. If the majority of the ruins were thus destroyed in a process of historical erasure, others were erased in a more complex manner: while the ruins were left visible, they were incorporated into the hegemonic Zionist narrative through a process of resignification. At times this process of resignification involved the transformation of the Palestinian ruins into symbols of biblical times, whereby the ruins are imagined as ancient remains that offer an insight into the life of the Israelites. At other times, the ruins were preserved and presented as an organic part of the landscape: "a-historical natural entities, like rivers or water pools" (Kadman 70–71).

The image of Palestinian ruins has found its way into numerous Israeli landscape paintings, films, and literary texts, becoming an integral part of the projected new Israeli landscape and a significant element of so-called authentic Israeli culture (Ofrat 19). Examining the status of Palestinian ruins in these cultural texts, one finds a similar tendency to resignify, dehistoricize, and naturalize. Thus, in many of the Israeli abstract landscape paintings from the 1950s and 1960s, Palestinian ruins are included in the frame but only through the selective gaze of the new colonial settlers who overlook the immediate historical context of violence and destruction and instead incorporate the ruins as elements of a lyrical and abstract composition (see figure 1.1).

A similar tendency characterizes many Israeli literary texts. Consider, for example, a scene from Amos Oz's novel A Perfect Peace (Menucha nekhona, 1982) in which the narrator (Yonatan Lifshitz), who often visits the ruins of the Palestinian village Sheikh Dahr, bordering his kibbutz, appears to be taken by the force of a sudden melancholy: "On the hilltop, against the sky, backed by blue clouds, stood the ruins of Sheikh Dahr, light slashing through the gaping windows like an eviscerating sword, the out-of-doors just as bright on the side of the smashed, charred, homeless walls as on the other. Rubble from fallen roofs lay in the heaps. Here and there an unsubmitting grape vine had run wild, clung with bared claws to a remnant of a standing stonewall. Above the ravaged village rose its shattered minaret" (127). Yonatan is taken by the image of the ruins and is reminded of his childhood sense of uncanny feelings each time he sees them. But Oz's language depicts this experience with such a romantic flair that it reads more like an encounter with nature's sublime forces than with a concrete and recent history of violence and destruction.

The figure of speech "the deserted Arab Village" (ha-kfar ha-aravi ha-natush) is also prevalent in 1950s Hebrew poetry. The expression functions as a paradoxical means of memorialization and erasure. On the one hand, the ruins are repeatedly mentioned, but on the other hand they are described as "deserted," a term that hides the fact that Palestinians were forced out of their villages and suggests instead that the villages were deserted by their past inhabitants for some unknown and mysterious reasons—as if "the ruins rather than the villagers are the actual victims of this process of ruination" (Hever, Al Tagidu 14).

These repeated attempts to erase, resignify, and evacuate the historical meaning of the Palestinian ruins, characteristic of these dominant Israeli modes of representations, nevertheless fail (they are bound to fail) to successfully repress the haunting impact that these ruins continue to have over Israelis and Israeli culture. Thus, despite the fact that Palestinian ruins have been manipulatively incorporated into the master Zionist narrative of Jewish return (to the land and to history) as either symbols of an authentic Israelite biblical time, or as a symbol of a pastoral, simple way of living associated with the Orient, a closer look reveals the fact that in effect these ruins continue to animate resistance. As a poetic device, ruins highlight an unobservable tension that disturbs, haunts, and taunts the Zionist national narrative from within. I shall demonstrate this by tracing the figure of the Palestinian ruin in three key Israeli literary texts: S. Yizhar's novella Khirbet Khizeh, first published in 1949, A. B. Yehoshua's novella Mul ha-ye'arot (Facing the Forests), first published in 1963, and Yeshayahu Koren's novel Levaya ba-tsohora'im (Funeral at Noon) from 1974. My readings highlight the allegorical function of the figure of the ruins within the texts as a poetic device that unearths the ghostly presence of the Palestinian Nakba within the Israeli visual field despite its ongoing erasure and concealment. Specifically, I will show how a certain failure to appear (the failure of the Nakba to become fully visible and accountable within Israeli texts) translates into a growing visible invisibility: an invisibility that calls attention to itself as such. The second part of the chapter moves from literature to painting to propose a correlated political utilization of failed vision.

Haunting and (In)visibility

"Haunting," Avery Gordon tells us, "describes that which appears to be not there," but it is a "not there" that nevertheless acts on and meddles with "taken-for-granted realities" (8). Haunting takes place when we encounter a ghost, itself a presence unlike any other presence: a presence "seemingly not there to our supposedly well-trained eyes" (8). Freud also famously mobilizes the language of haunting in order to account for the sudden emergence of the repressed from its long hibernation in the unconsciousness and into a sudden return of a view ("The Uncanny" sec. 3: 222). What seems to me to be most significant about these accounts is that they capture not only the fact that being haunted has to do with coming to terms with something that has been previously repressed, but also the fact that through the psychic experience of haunting something happens to visibility. Something happens that puts into question the borders between the visible and the invisible, the known and the unknown, that which is clearly present and that which continues to escape our eyes. Another way to say this is to suggest that the psychic experience of being haunted involves not only the sudden resurfacing of the repressed, but also the appearance of a visible absence or a visible invisibility that draws attention to itself, "however symptomatically" (A. Gordon 15).

Taking this understanding as my point of departure, I describe the ghost that runs through many key Israeli cultural texts not simply in terms of a concrete figure or image (the ruins) but more significantly in terms of a certain crisis of visibility. I ask: What kind of seeing could possibly render this ghost visible? What kind of seeing could identify that which by definition escapes our normal field of visibility? Wrestling with the question of the specter's visibility, Derrida has suggested, "the specter, as its name indicates, is the frequency of a certain visibility" (100). If we are able to see the specter and render it visible, it is only insofar as what we see as the marked absence left by the ghost's appearance: "at the time and place where [the specter] appears, there something disappeared, departed in the apparition itself as reapportion of the departed" (Derrida 6). In other words, the kind of seeing enabled by the psychic experience of being haunted is different from the seeing we normally experience. Haunting renders visible the invisibility that marks the limits of our common practices of seeing and makes us see, as in recognize, that there is a presence before us, which we nevertheless fail to see with our naked eyes.

Closely engaging with several Israeli texts (literature and painting) in the next section, I seek to unearth the haunting presence of the visible invisibility of the Palestinian Nakba, which I show to be a central feature of Israeli cultural and political imagination. My readings follow a two- stage process. First, I look at three principal Israeli literary texts (published in 1949, 1963, and 1974) and trace in them a progressive narrative of haunting associated with a culture of denial, blindness, and failed vision. In the second part, I turn to a painting exhibit by the acclaimed Israeli artist Larry Abramson. The exhibit, Tsoob'ä (1994), situates the question of failed vision and the symptomatic blindness of Zionism at the heart of the artist's investigation of the relationship between national ideology and landscape paintings and, more specifically, between the displacement and concealment of Palestinian ruins and the greater tradition of modernist Israeli landscape paintings. What is therefore symptomatically present in the literary texts that I analyze—the haunting of the visible invisibility associated with the repressed history of these ruins—reemerges in Abramson's work as a meta-artistic commentary that is as much about the image of these ruins as it is about the ruin of the image. I will return to this point following my discussion of the literary texts.

From Yizhar's Khirbeh to Yehoshua's Ruins and Koren's Crypts: A Growing Visible Invisibility

The figure of the "deserted Arab village" (ha-kfar ha-aravi ha-natush) appears, reappears, and disappears in Yizhar's, Yehoshua's, and Koren's texts, making visible the unresolved history of violence and repression located (and hidden) at the heart of the Israeli Jewish Zionist narrative advanced and undermined by these authors. In Yizhar's groundbreaking text, written less than a year after the 1948 war, we are confronted with the hirbeh, Arabic for "ruined structure" (the Arabic word literally translates to something which is destroyed, broken, or spoiled). Within the story, the term is used by the Israeli soldiers in reference to a Palestinian village they are about to destroy and turn into ruins. Close to twenty years later, Yehoshua's text momentarily reveals to the reader, only to quickly reconceal, the hidden ruins of an Arab village located in the midst of a recently planted Israeli national forest. A little less than a decade later we find the same figure of speech ("the ruins of the deserted Arab village") in Koren's novel, only this time the ruins seem to have already become "a crypt" in the sense advanced by Abraham and Torok: "a burial site" where a past trauma and the failure to face it are sealed and "kept out of sight." The emptied ("deserted") Arab villages to which Yizhar's early novella introduces us, and which reappear in Yehoshua's text as hidden ruins and in Koren's novel as crypts, unfold a semantics of ambiguity located between presence and absence, the present and the past, the visible and the invisible, and the living and thedead. Located in the liminal spaces (hidden in the forest or marking the exterior of a thriving settlement), these ruins come to us not only as images of a violent past, but also, I suggest, as a reminder of "a space that is still in becoming" (Eshel 147). They are, in other words, figures (and figures of speech) animated in their haunting.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822359014
• ISBN 13: 9780822359012
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224