Ariella Azoulay teaches visual culture and contemporary philosophy at the Program for Culture and Interpretation at Israel’s Bar Ilan University. She is the author of The Civil Contract of Photography (Zone Books, 2008); Atto di Stato—Palestina-Israele, 1967–2007, Storia fotografica dell’occupazione (Mondadori, 2008); Once Upon a Time: Photography Following Walter Benjamin (Bar Ilan University Press, 2006); and Death’s Showcase: The Power of Image in Contemporary Democracy (MIT Press, 2001), a winner of the 2002 Infinity Award for Writing, presented by the International Center for Photography for excellence in the field of photography.
Asleep in a Sterile Zone
by Ariella Azoulay
The familiar sight of a Palestinian room—colorful blankets wrap those sleeping on the floor, crowded against one another. A khaki sleeve catches the eye. A ray of light crossing the frame from the right leads to it. Then it becomes easier to notice a pair of army boots peeking out from under another blanket, a flexed knee in uniform and an upside-down helmet. These are Israeli soldiers. They are sleeping in a Palestinian home in Gaza. There is no trace of the inhabitants. They must have “fled” once more as refugees.
This photograph landed in my email-box a few days after the beginning of the Israeli attack on Gaza, along with about twenty others. The accompanying letter iterated: “We should all be proud of the IDF [Israeli Defense Force] . . . these brave kids defend our country”; following this was a recommendation and authorization to distribute these images. This email was signed by the CEO of the Israeli branch of a large European firm. His full personal data were prominently noted at the bottom of the letter. This is the most abstract photograph of a very harsh series, the last two of which come with a warning: “These are not to be viewed by children.” The rest, according to the sender, may apparently be shared with kids, as a part of this war’s booty.
Images similar to the one of soldiers asleep in a Palestinian home were disseminated to date only by soldiers who are members of Shovrim Shtika (Breaking the Silence, an association of soldiers who have decided to “break the silence” and share with the Israeli public abuses perpetrated to Palestinians during their military service) as a part of their debriefing, the sobering-up process after the missions the army had required them to carry out for the sake of “state security.” Their photographs are not made public via the press but are exhibited in alternative venues. In Israel, at least, the occupation of a Palestinian home to provide soldiers with a place to sleep is not a news item. Were a press-photographer to shoot such a frame, the editor would not print it, for “lack of public interest.”
But now the press has been kept away from Gaza, and it has a very meager supply of images of the ongoing horror there. Israel allows press-photographers to set themselves up on a hill adjacent to the Gaza Strip and shoot—from long distance—the smoke billowing over the horizon, thus screening the inferno within. The hill from which Gaza can be observed is open to visitors. For their convenience, benches, trashcans, and information about the surrounding landscape have been placed here. Over the past few weeks, people have come here with binoculars and cameras, and—while holding conversations in-situ—acquired or enhanced their military savvy of missiles, range, precision-hits, and impact. (Many of these people, or those close to them, have been in the army and privy to its codes, and this is their chance to show off their know-how.) From their observation point, what they see is exactly the picture that Israel wishes to show: a war fought on equal footing by two sides. Missiles launched in Gaza hit Israel, and Israel retaliates.
The people who bring their children to this hill to show them Gaza under bombardment do so in fascinated wonder at Israel’s might. From this hill they can show their children both the symmetry that justifies Israel’s devastation of Gaza, and Israel’s spectacular show of force. Their gazes follow the trajectories of missiles and fighter-helicopters; they try to guess the nature of their hits, and applaud at the sight of smoke billowing. “Yes!” We’ve done it! We’ve hit them! “Yes!” We’ve destroyed them! “Yes!” We’ve shown them. In elated patriotic camaraderie individuals, couples, and families can now go back home, fully certain of their righteousness—their government’s, their army’s, their own.
The combined preparatory work done by the Israeli government/army/media concerning the terror of missiles launched at Sderot and making Gaza inaccessible to the world was systematic and effective, so as not to leave a shadow of a doubt: there is nothing more just and more right than to destroy Gaza. The political and military leadership that counted on its soldiers to carry out this mission—and on such citizens who would show up right there to applaud—could also count on the previous mobilization of its citizens to devastate Gaza. Nothing new under the sun—except the magnitude of destruction, which steadily increases. The ritual pattern stands at the ready, both in political lingo (“Gaza first”) and in military jargon (“terrorist infrastructure”). They do not need pictures from Gaza. What they see from here suffices. Thirteen hundred dead? From this vantage point, it seems justified.
When the man with his back to us in the second image here returns home and downloads his photographs into his computer, he will be able to view—and forward to his friends—this picture of himself, with Gaza burning in the background, as he waves a victory-sign for the camera.
From time to time, the screen that insulates us from Gaza is ruptured by photographs transmitted via email by Gazan photographers—unbearable images of severe harm to civilians and their immediate environment. Very few of these are printed in Israeli daily press. Those that are published are provided by Reuters or by the Associated Press. Some probably reach these news agencies by the Gazan agency Ramatan, which currently employs 150 journalists and photographers in Gaza and has become a major supplier of news photographs from Gaza worldwide (though not to Israel).
The person who proudly forwarded the photograph of the sleeping troops did not see in it that which the soldiers of Breaking the Silence see in such images. Those soldiers, and others like them, have refused to go to war this time around, and for this many have been tried and incarcerated. The Israeli press has not reported this at all. The media’s silencing of their refusal to take up arms is akin to the silencing of demonstrations by Jewish Israelis against the war, which took place every day during the attacks on Gaza, or the arrest and incarceration of dozens of demonstrators. The media does, however, report the arrest of Arab demonstrators, thus again casting the Arab as “troublemaker” or “law-breaker” and emphasizing once more the insoluble, national nature of the conflict. The media impose a total veto on joint demonstrations of Jews and Arabs, for fear of cracking the fortified separation between Jews and Arabs, which they promote for fear of suggesting that the conflict between the populations is not “destined.” No one will prosecute the soldiers in this picture or the one who photographed them, although all of them invaded a home and removed its inhabitants in order to have a place to sleep. This is understood as an “act of state.”
The photograph is a not particularly harsh image to look at. It shows soldiers asleep in Gaza. Even in the midst of battle, soldiers need their sleep. The difficulty arises when one recalls that the colorful blankets under which the soldiers are curled up are not their own, that the dwellers of this home where they now sleep have been made homeless. One of the soldiers, wakened by a first ray of morning light before his pals, is taking pictures—for them, for their families—a souvenir, an image of a night’s sleep in Gaza.
But, after all, this is Gaza. How can Israeli soldiers who participated in the destruction here—the devastation of entire neighborhoods and public buildings, the total ruin of vital infrastructure, the wounding of thousands, the bombing of hospitals, civilian shelters, and schools, the killing of more than a thousand human beings—how can these soldiers, who are, to say the least, not exactly welcome guests here, how can they possibly afford to sleep so peacefully in the midst of the inferno they have produced without fearing for their own lives? The answer lies in one of the Occupation’s practices, most common since its inception—the creation of a “sterile zone.” A sterile zone is an area emptied completely of Arabs so that the Israeli military can carry out its missions. In this image we are most likely witnessing the heart of the sterile zone. We have no knowledge of its size, its perimeters. But for these soldiers to sleep so serenely, so safely, not only would the dwellers of this house have had to be removed from the sterile zone, but the residents of the entire area would have to be gone as well.
For the Israeli soldier, a Palestinian home is a violable space. This point was not born in the most recent Gaza campaign. The history of this violability goes back more than sixty years. At that time, the voices opposing the expulsion of Palestinians were hushed by another that overtook the military and political leadership of the Jewish public, making expulsion a given. This leading voice stammered in its official declarations but was nonetheless determined, and managed to expel 750,000 Arabs from the areas of British Mandate Palestine. Beginning in 1948, over the course of a year, Jewish soldiers went from village to village and, when called upon, from home to home, tearing Arabs away from their dwellings and lands. At times the soldiers used indirect means—rumors about what would happen to them if they choose not to leave their homes, and truck convoys to help them take the way—and at others, direct physical threat and violence. Since that time, the Palestinian home has not ceased to be threatened by the very thinking and operating patterns that present that home to the Israeli public (as well as to world public opinion) as an existential menace.
The residents of the Arab towns of Al-Ramle, Bir Al-Saba, Al-Majdal, and Isdud, occupied by Israeli forces in the 1948 war, either escaped or were forcibly expelled. Most of them were removed to Gaza, which tripled in population with the influx. At the end of the war the Egyptians controlled Gaza and instated their own military administration. Israel did not manage that last “military victory”—the conquest of Gaza—before signing ceasefire agreements with Egypt in 1949, thus giving birth to the narrow, troublesome “strip” at the edge of the State of Israel.
A “strip” is a military-political term that designates a region that must be dealt with as undetermined, a situation to be solved. The “Gaza Strip” was born as a problem. Since this birth, Israel has never ceased proposing “solutions to the problem.” In 1949 Israel proposed a political solution, which was to annex the strip, along with some of the refugees it harbored. But this “solution,” with its military scent, was rejected by the parties involved. In the 1956 Sinai campaign, the strip was occupied along with the entire peninsula and Israel imposed a military administration. This did not last long, as under American-Russian pressure Israel was forced to retreat from the territory it conquered. In 1967 Israel managed to re-conquer the strip and take control of the 1948 refugees yet again. Since then, for more than forty years Israel has controlled the Palestinian population in Gaza. At least ever since the general closure Israel imposed upon the Gaza Strip in 1991 during the first Gulf War, such control entails cutting off the strip from the West Bank as well as strict control over any entry and exit from it. By means of administering the crossings, Israel regulates life in Gaza. Since the Second Intifada, and ever more tightly since its “disengagement,” Israel has been managing a measured, chronic disaster, ever watchful not to cross the fine line of a “humanitarian catastrophe,” enabling or preventing the flow of goods, people, and means.
Since 1948, the Palestinian home has never been a private domicile that shelters its dwellers from invaders and strangers. Indeed, Israelis do not conceive of themselves as invaders or strangers, and they do not regard the Palestinians as home-owners in the usual sense. Their homes are vulnerable to nightly incursions, bulldozer activity, bombs dropping from the skies, missile barrages, and shootings that make them uninhabitable. They are appropriated to create army outposts, positions, and headquarters, depending upon changing circumstances and increased “security necessities.” The explanation given for these actions is that they are necessary in order to “flush out the terrorists from their nests,” “suppress resistance,” or “destroy insurgent infrastructure.” Thus the Palestinian home is presented as a military outpost of the enemy, calling for military intervention. The Palestinian home constitutes a problem; military intervention is its solution—or at least a means to “solving the problem.” More precisely, the home becomes penetrable and violable because it has been perceived by some local Israeli commander as a “security problem” or as providing a means toward a solution.
Israel usually manages to carry out its destruction with a public silencer, thus avoiding repercussions in Israeli or international public discourse, and maintaining the status quo. Whenever its operations were intensified and expanded, and the Palestinians persistently resisted Israeli military might with the meager means at their disposal, Israel has turned to other countries for help, to halt the very campaign it initiated and bring about a ceasefire agreement. Usually, while conducting these negotiations, it manages to wreak more devastation and invade more homes.
Such military campaigns renew the state of emergency, re-justifying its permanent validity since 1948, mobilizing one and all and helping them to forget the preceding emergency. Most importantly—it prevents Israeli citizens and others around the world from identifying the source of this state of emergency: the regime itself. The Israeli regime needs the state of emergency. It cannot survive without it. To this end it has been mobilizing its citizens for more than forty years to continue fighting its non-citizen subjects. The source of the real state of emergency is the existence of a regime that denies all its subjects—both citizens and non-citizens—the viable possibility to build for themselves joint frames of living in their area. It does not let them exorcise themselves of the language of occupation in which any Arab is a potential member of a “killer gang” (as they were termed in the 1940s), an “infiltrator” (in the 1950s), a “militant” (in the 1960s and ’70s), or part of a “terrorist organization” (ever since the 1980s).
“A ceasefire is enough for us,” Ben Gurion wrote in 1949. “If we chase peace—the Arabs will expect us to pay a price—either borders or refugees, or both. Let us wait a few years.” Ben Gurion wrote this in the very year when the State of Israel was accepted as a member nation in the UN. In spite of its mass expulsion of Palestinians and the devastation of their habitat, Israel was recognized as a “peace-seeking” state.
The current campaign in Gaza should be interpreted within this pattern: while the ultimate solution is suspended—be it peace, war, or mass expulsion—Israel is using violence to partially destroy Gaza and suppress resistant people who were made refugees sixty years ago by the same state. The alliance of sovereign nation-states, supporting one another in the wars they conduct against governed populations who are refugees in their countries or outside them, continues to condone Israel’s countless military campaigns in the territories it has occupied.
Translated from Hebrew by Tal Haran
Kratsman: courtesy the artist/Chelouche Gallery, Tel Aviv
Maroody: courtesy the artist