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Social Semiotics
ISSN: 1035-0330 (Print) 1470-1219 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/csos20
The Genealogy of Colonial Plunder and Erasure –
Israel's Control over Palestinian Archives
Rona Sela
To cite this article: Rona Sela (2018) The Genealogy of Colonial Plunder and Erasure
– Israel's Control over Palestinian Archives, Social Semiotics, 28:2, 201-229, DOI:
10.1080/10350330.2017.1291140
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2017.1291140
Published online: 03 Mar 2017.
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The Genealogy of Colonial Plunder and Erasure –Israel’s
Control over Palestinian Archives
Rona Sela
Department of Art History, The David and Yolanda Katz Faculty of the Arts, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
ABSTRACT
The essay discusses one characteristic of colonial archives –how the
ruling state plunders/loots the colonized’archives and treasures and
controls them in its colonial archives - erasing them from the public
sphere by repressive means, censors and restricts their exposure
and use, alters their original identity, regulates their contents and
subjugates them to colonizer’s laws, rules and terminology. It
focuses on two archives plundered by Israel in Beirut in 1980s: the
Palestine Research Center and archive of Palestinian films. The
essay continues my earlier research on Palestinian visual (and
other) archives taken as booty or looted by pre-state Jewish
military organizations and soldiers or civilians in the first half of
the twentieth century, especially during the Nakba (the Palestinian
catastrophe, 1948), and later by Israel’s military bodies. It analyzes
the plunder itself while focusing on the power relations reflected
toward the hybrid gazes of the colonizer and the colonized and
discusses colonial features of military archives holding and
controlling seized materials. While colonial museums have been
largely discussed, and also archives holding colonial history, this is
one of the first essays to discuss features of colonial archives
holding plundered archives/material.
KEYWORDS
Israeli looting/plunder/
seizure of Palestinian archives
in Beirut (1980s); mirror
image; Zionist/Israeli colonial
military archives and
mechanism of control;
censorship; study restrictions;
access prohibition/limitation;
Western interpretation;
postcolonial archives;
Palestine Research Center
archive; Palestinian films
seized in Beirut; Cultural Arts
Section
Introduction
The essay discusses colonial plunder/looting of cultural and historical treasures and
archives and their administration and dominance in military colonial archives. It analyzes
the genealogy of plunder and deals with the two mechanisms of seizure. The first is the
plunder and hybrid gazes toward the act of seizure. The second is repression in the colo-
nizer’s military archives and subjugation to the colonizer’s regime of truth. It focuses as a
case study on two Palestinian archives seized by Israel in Beirut in the Lebanon war (started
in 1982): the Palestine Research Center (hereinafter: the Research Center)
1
and archive of
Palestinian films in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Ministry of Defense Archive (here-
inafter: the IDF Archive). It continues my research over the years on Palestinian archives
that were plundered or looted by pre-state Jewish military organizations, soldiers and civi-
lians in the first half of the twentieth century –especially during the Nakba (the Palestinian
catastrophe, 1948), and later by Israel’s military bodies inside and outside Palestine, and
which are ruled by Israeli military archives (Sela 2009,2013,[2012]2015,2017).
© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
CONTACT Rona Sela ronasela@netvision.net.il
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
SOCIAL SEMIOTICS, 2018
VOL. 28, NO. 2, 201–229
https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2017.1291140
Colonial archives have been researched extensively, especially since they document
how colonizers control the colonized through physical means –oppression, ethnic segre-
gation, ethnic cleansing, torture, rape –and/or on a conscious level from the way they
form and construct the image of the colonized to fit a Western colonial world view to
the way they govern the writing of colonial history for the benefit of the colonizer by
various methods (Meiselas 1997; Sela 2000,2007; Stoler 2002,2011; McEwan 2003;
Elkins 2005,2015; Dritsas and Haig 2014; Rawlings 2015; Shepard 2015). Ann Laura
Stoler, a leading researcher of colonial archives, deals with archival production of knowl-
edge, with the way these archives function as the state’s“cultural artifact of fact pro-
duction,”and suggests tracking “the production and consumption of ‘these’facts”
(Stoler 2002,90–91). According to her, colonial archives are not only products of “state
machines”but support the production of these states (see also Feldman 2008). “Colonial
archives were both sites of the imaginary and institutions that fashioned histories as they
concealed, revealed and reproduce the power of the state.”Reading them from “bottom
up,”or “against their grain,”as exposed in research from the last few decades, enables
them to be re-read from a different new perspective (Stoler 2002, 99).
The essay focuses on particular types of colonial archives –treasures plundered or
looted by force from the colonized, and governed by colonial administrations, discussed
by few scholars in the last few years (Caswell 2011; Shepard 2015; Sleiman 2016). As men-
tioned, I conducted the first study to systematically map visual Palestinian archives and
treasurers seized by military forces and Jewish/Israeli civilians, many of them during the
Nakba and also later already in 2009 and since then continue research on the topic
(Sela 2013,[2012]2015,2017).
My studies demonstrate how Israel conceals Palestinian treasures not only by physical
means (seizing of booty or looting), but also by a strict system of management, control and
“knowledge production”–laws, rules, norms, methods and archive procedures such as
censorship, restricted study, access prohibition/limitation, control over what is declassified
(to whom and to what extent), cataloging and labeling according to Zionist codes and ter-
minology that differ from the original Palestinian terminology, signifying Israeli ownership
over the material and more (Sela 2009).
2
These two types of power, “power to know”and
“power over”as Edward Said demonstrates and Caswell (2011) addresses in her research
about Iraqi Baath Party Records seized by the US, are inextricably connected.
The archives I discussed in the past, are, among others, the archive of Chalil Rissas
3
–
father of Palestinian photojournalism (Figure 8 below) –that was looted from his store
in Jerusalem; an archive taken as booty from the office of Rashid Al-Haj Ibrahim, Chairman
of the National Committee in Haifa (Figure 1); an album plundered from the home of the
Nashashibi family in Jerusalem; photographs taken from a dead Arab soldier and leader
(Figures 4 and 11 below), and many other archives and images plundered in Palestine,
and outside of Palestine, before, during and after the Nakba (for instance, Orient House
Archive [2001], Sela 2009,Figure 2). The two archives the essay discusses operated from
the mid-1960s/early 1970s until 1982 and were located in Beirut. They preserve extensive
research/materials on Palestinian life during the twentieth century, making it possible to
expose important chapters in Palestinian history. They depict extensively Palestinian resist-
ance that began in Jordan in the mid-1960s and continued in Lebanon from 1970, as well
as displacement, rupture and refugee life in exile. These occupied archives not only reflect
blind spots –“colonial violence in the making”and the blocking of knowledge (Stoler 2011,
202 R. SELA
124–125) by the colonial regime, but literally reflect the colonial situation through the eyes
of the colonized –the state of “rebellion,”as defined by Memmi ([1974]2003), in which
“the colonized liberation must be carried out through a recovery of self and of auton-
omous dignity”(172). Moreover, reading these “captured”archives (Budeiri 2016) today
through a postcolonial approach not only gives voices to the colonized, to the subaltern,
but also “contextualizes their response to engagement with and resistance of colonialism
with the specificities of recent history”(Caswell 2011, 238; see also McEwan 2003; Sela,
2009 [2012]2015).
Palestinian institutions in Beirut
In the 1960s, parallel to the establishment of the Palestine Liberation Association (PLO in
1964) and the growing power of armed Palestinian revolutionary forces, various Palesti-
nian institutions were established in Lebanon for documentation, planning and research
–for example, the Institute for Palestinian Studies (1963) and the Research Center
(1965). At the same time, there was a revolution in the visual arts field. In 1968, the Pales-
tinian Film Unit, initiated by individual pioneering creators and devoted to documenting
the Palestinian struggle, was established in Amman. In the beginning, it dealt with pho-
tography, and then with cinema as well. After Black September –clashes between the
PLO and the Jordanian Armed Forces (1970) –the Palestine Film Unit was forced to relo-
cate to Lebanon together with other Palestinian forces. There it focused on cinema,
Figure 1. Unknown photographer, Members of Al-Najda from Salha Village, end of 1947 to early 1948.
From “Files of Land of Israel Arabs up until April 1948”IDF Archives. The photograph was taken as “mili-
tary booty,”as defined by the archive, from the office of Rashid Al-Haj Ibrahim, Head of the National
Committee, Haifa. According to the archive, “since November 2002 an opinion by the attorney general
to allow the use of seized material in archive files”is in effect.
SOCIAL SEMIOTICS 203
collaborated with the PLO, joining its widespread operations, and changed its name to the
Palestinian Cinema Institution (hereinafter: Cinema Institution). Following its significant
achievements in Beirut, other groups that dealt with visual aspects (photography, painting
and graphics) and especially cinema were established in Palestinian organizations. They
were based on an understanding of the power of visual image –non-moving and
moving –in mass media, and the benefits to be accrued through their enlistment in
the national struggle (Sela 2017). As a result, there was a flowering of enlisted Palestinian
cinema that distributed national ideas and became part of a larger worldwide movement,
Third Cinema Movement. These creators were looking for a new anti-colonial language
and direction and their work served as an alternative to colonial cinema (Buali 2012;
Denes 2014; Sela 2017).
In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon. After the departure of the PLO, the Israeli military appar-
atus began taking as booty materials and archives from the PLO and other Palestinian insti-
tutions. The essay focuses on two of these archives that were evidently taken by the Israeli
military in Beirut: The first, the Research Center archive, was returned to the PLO a year later,
after being duplicated by Israel (Sela 2009). The second, visual –photographs and films as
mentioned above –is still in the IDF Archive. Israel apparently holds additional archives
taken from Beirut, as well as earlier archives, and until they are declassified and access is
available, it is impossible to know the amount of material Israel has in its possession.
Looted archive 1 –Palestine Research Center
On 28 February 1965, a few months after the establishment of the PLO, the executive com-
mittee decided to establish the Palestine Research Center in Beirut. The Research Center,
academic in nature, was founded to document and conduct research on Palestinian past
and current history, and to publish books and articles devoted to the subject.
4
Fayiz
Sayigh
5
established the center (1963–1965), and Dr Anis Sayigh, his brother, intensified
its operations (1966–1977).
6
Mahmoud Darwish administered the center for a year
(1977–1978) and in its final years, it was managed by Sabri Jiryis (1978–1982).
7
The
center operated until September 1982, at which time IDF soldiers entered West Beirut
and seized the archive as booty.
The archive held books, articles, documents, microfilms, as well as manuscripts of impor-
tant Palestinian personalities, maps –most of them rare, and photographs. A newspaper
and journal department documented Palestinian events on a daily basis.
8
Jiryis established
a department that collected materials about Israel and its position toward the Palestinian
people. Another department dealt with the international aspects of the Palestinian question
as well. Hebrew was also taught. The Center published research, organized events and con-
ferences, employed over 80 researchers, and was as stated at the United Nation website, of
16 July 1982: “one of the centers of research and publishing that made Beirut a beacon of
free thought and expression in the Arab world.”Hana Sleiman, who recently published an
article about the Research Center, argues that liberation movement archives, like state
archives, although essentially “different in their conditions of production, play an equally
ubiquitous role in shaping historical narratives”(Sleiman 2016, 44). The Center published
the yearly Al-Watha’iq Al-Filastiniyya (The Palestinian Documents) and the magazine
Shu’un Filastiniyya (Palestinian Matters from 1971). The Research Center and the Institute
for Palestinian Studies were at that time the main institutions dedicated to the
204 R. SELA
documentation and preservation of the Palestinian past and present, exposure of the Pales-
tinian narrative before and after 1948, and discussion on contemporary Palestinian issues
including Palestinian refugees and the Palestinian struggle. According to the testimony
of Sayigh and Jiryis, Israel tried several times to shell the center and eliminate its employees
even though they enjoyed diplomatic immunity.
The Research Center archive and library taken as booty by the IDF (1982) were returned
to the PLO after a year as part of a prisoner exchange brokered by the French. Israel made
copies of the archive materials before sending the crates to the Algeria, where Jiryis
viewed them a short while after their return. Jiryis returned to Israel together with
Arafat in the 1990s. He re-established a Research Center in East Jerusalem but the
Israeli police seized the materials in 2001 when they closed down the Orient House and
confiscated its archives.
9
Thus, Jiryis experienced the confiscation twice –first in Beirut
and then in East Jerusalem.
Looted archive 2 –“films seized from the PLO Archive in Beirut”
“Films Seized from the PLO Archive in Beirut”as defined by the IDF Archive, were taken as
booty in Beirut in 1982 by Israeli military forces. Discussed in a separate article (Sela 2017),
they contain mainly cinematic and photographic documentation of the daily life of Palesti-
nians in refugee camps, military training, battles, civil war, political, cultural, and social events,
resistance, parades, interviews with political and military figures, intellectuals and others.
There are also a considerable number of films from foreign sources –The United Nations
Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), foreign television
and news agencies, and historical material. The documentation contained in these films is
occasionally historically and culturally rare and unique, and therefore significant.
The number of existing films is difficult to estimate, but recently, the archive opened in
my presence a list of approximately 1200 films or film footage, some appearing several
times in various versions. Only a few dozen films have been released to the public and
the criteria for opening this material and making it accessible are not clear. Although
some of the archive materials are from non-Palestinian entities, many of the existing
materials in IDF Archive were filmed by Palestinians and shed light on the documentation
of Palestinian visual history and resistance. They make it possible to expose their self-rep-
resentation, one that is non-Western and not contaminated by colonial aspects (Denes
2014, 222).
10
I was unable to find information in the IDF Archive regarding the identity
of the institute/entity from which the films were seized. They are catalogued at the IDF
Archive as “PLO Archive,”where in fact no such institution exists.
11
I encountered many
obstacles in my attempts to discover the archive from which they were plundered - the
Cultural Arts Section (Sela 2017).
Colonial features of official military archives governing plundered
materials
The politics of looting and control –censorship, erasure and suppression
Omnia El-Shakry who discusses Middle East archives claims that archives reflect the
destructive forces exerted on them, “whether shadow or real, intellectual or material”
SOCIAL SEMIOTICS 205
(El-Shakry 2015, 935). As stated, colonial archives have a significant role in creating and
constructing the colonial situation in consciousness –“sites”of “knowledge production”
rather than sites for information retrieval (Stoler 2002,89–107). Israel’s military archives
have two types of colonial materials –the first, contains colonial history and depicts its
development; the second, holds by force seized/looted Palestinian material and is the
core of this essay. In both cases, they are engaged mainly in erasing and omitting the
history of the colonized. They manifest the colonial situation and become a mirror of colo-
nial power relations.
Looting of cultural treasures does not end with the physical act of plunder, but con-
tinues with colonial administration –the colonial archive controls the accessibility/
exposure or withholding of the looted materials, their reading/interpretation (censorship
laws and viewing rules and procedures of restrictions), and the exposure of knowledge.
Thus, the structure of the archives reflects the desire to dominate consciousness. There-
fore, as Stoler suggests, research and supervision of the archive’s knowledge management
process is required. The challenge for researchers of colonial archives –those holding the
history of colonialism and those holding the treasures of the colonized, is therefore to deci-
pher the distorted history manufactured by the colonizer, and the destructive procedures
of storage (Sela [2012]2015).
My research over the years discusses the regime of knowledge of Israeli colonial
archives –civil and military (Sela 2000,2007,2009,[2012]2015,2017). It shows,
among other topics, that since the 1930s, Palestinian archives and images were sys-
tematically and deliberately plundered/looted by Jewish/Israeli military entities or
by civilians who had internalized the codes of power, and deposited in official
Israeli archives. Subsequently, Israel becomes a central source of information about
the Palestinians. I address the way archives function under restrictive and oppressive
colonial military management, how materials are classified on entry and become
restricted, and the archive does not act to return materials to their owners (see also
Caswell 2011). As of 22 February 2009, the IDF Archive stated on its website:
“Records held by IDF and Defense Establishment Archives were created by security
forces and therefore, pursuant to the Archives Law, have restricted access for fifty
years from the date of creation.”
12
According to the Archives’Regulation Law (2010),
the period of limitation is between 30 and 70 years.
13
Although not created by Jewish/Israel’s security forces, “captured”archives are subject
to the rigid laws created originally for Jewish/Israeli military materials, ignoring their Pales-
tinian ownership and moral and legal rights. Should the archive regard certain materials as
having the potential to harm Israeli national security or foreign relations, the material is
restricted indefinitely (The Freedom of Information Law, 1998). In one of the many legal cor-
respondence I had with the IDF Archive regarding seized Palestinian archives (Sela 2009),
and especially with regard to the material plundered in Beirut as described here, I received
a letter from the Assistant Attorney General to the Ministry of Defense:
After further review of the subject, it has been found that the photograph requested by your
client, Dr Rona Sela, is in the possession of the IDF as archival material, and as such is con-
sidered ‘restricted material’as defined in paragraph 7 (a) to the Archive Regulations (Study
of archival material deposited in the archive), 1966. We are therefore unable to make the
material in question public.
14
206 R. SELA
With regard to another archive plundered by Israeli Police in 2001, the Orient House
archive, the response from the Public Complaints Unit of the Israel Police to my request
to open the archive was: “…as a general rule the public has no rights to these documents,
since the material is held under the administrative authority of the Ministry of Public Secur-
ity, that issued an order to close the place”(Advocate Hamutal Sabag, 2 December 2008).
It is not known how many of the plundered archives the IDF Archive holds, how many
have restricted access or under what circumstances they were seized, the information in
most cases remaining classified. Legal counsel is not always helpful in disclosing this infor-
mation as described here. The IDF Archive, responsible for all military archives in Israel
(such as the Palmach Archive and Haganah History Archive), applies additional laws and
regulations that further restrict the study of materials. As demonstrated, based on
reports of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and the State Comptroller, the archive
is in no hurry to publish material that is no longer restricted,
15
creating obstacles and dif-
ficulties for researchers wishing to review them.
16
In addition, the IDF Archive website
refers to the laws of the State of Israel as “influencing the work of the archive,”thereby
giving themselves a wide range of freedom outside of the constitutional framework.
17
In addition, the process of censorship continues to exercise control over who has access
to materials or parts thereof. For example, the adoption of discriminatory policies
between researchers such as the selective opening of materials, or flexible rules for
researchers with an establishment agenda, one of the IDF Archive’s main characteristics,
especially in relation to Palestinian materials chronicling a different history. Thus, for
example, on one of my visits to the archive I came with a Palestinian researcher. The
archive created many obstacles in giving him access, especially to Palestinian materials
(see also Budeiri 2016). Moreover, various films from the looted film archives in question
were opened and closed at different stages. The same applied to aerial photographs of the
Palestinian villages pre-1948 (Sela [2012]2015, 91). This pattern is reinforced by rules,
norms and modes of conduct, strategies, built-in policies and laws that regulate archive
activities and archiving and cataloging methods. In a meeting of the Israeli Parliament’s
Constitution, Law and Justice Committee relating to the study of confidential material (17
January 2005), one of the security officials said: [The criterion is] “to be one of own. I
was editor of Maarachot [an official Israeli military magazine]. Within this framework, I
got it. If I hadn’t been editor of Maarachot, I wouldn’t have got it.”
18
Moreover, the
archive decides which researchers it permits to conduct research and places restrictions
on various reference materials, or controls the topics/areas that can be investigated.
19
The State Controller wrote: “The need for authorization and conditions for authorization
raise concerns of discrimination towards those interested in access to materials, contrary
to prevailing standards in scientific research.”
20
The plundered archives are not only subjugated to knowledge production, sometimes
they are also under a risk of physical destruction. With regard to the Orient House archive
that was plundered by the Israeli police (Figure 2) and moved from its original building in
East Jerusalem (JQ 2001; Sela 2009; Oshrov 2010), and according to the letter I received
from the Israel Police Complaints Unit mentioned above (2 December 2008), the archive
was moved to containers in Beit-Shemesh. Since the area suffers from extreme climate
changes, the material is therefore under the risk of physical devastation (Sela 2009, 8,125).
In the few cases when archives/materials are returned to their owners, the archive’s
approach is: “copy before returning”to retain as much information as possible about
SOCIAL SEMIOTICS 207
the colonized. Moreover, the archive’s strategy of duplicating materials that are not its own
without the owner’s approval is another patronizing strategy indicating that the archive
continues to control materials it does not own, expropriates their copyright, and requires
Figure 2. Amos Ben Gershom, An Israeli Soldier is Guarding the Orient House after it was Closed by Israeli
Police and its Archive was Plundered, 12 August 2001, Israeli Government Press Office Archie.
208 R. SELA
payment from readers for publication of materials. For instance, the IDF duplicated
materials it seized from the Research Center and gave them to an unknown Israeli research
institution, information that is blacked out.
21
The State Archivist, Mr Y. Freundlich, in
response to one of my query wrote, August 30, 2009: “I have seen the collection …I
have assigned the archive manager the task of returning the material to its owners
after it has been scanned.”
It is important to note that these colonial rules and regulations embodied in the work of
Israeli colonial military archives are not only imposed on plundered archives but also on
material of Palestinian importance produced by Jews/Israelis charting colonialism. This
is because they too have the potential to crack the colonizer’s narrative. Thus, for
example, the archival materials describing the massacre of Jewish forces against the Pales-
tinian population in the village Dir-Yassin in the region of Jerusalem in 1948 were docu-
mented by Jewish sources, and Meir Pail, a commander at that time, donated them to
the IDF Archive. Since then, they are censored, although they were supposed to be declas-
sified after 50 years (1998). Israel continues to renew the security classification. In a petition
to the Israeli Supreme court in 2010 to open the material, and thus recognizing the mas-
sacre that Israel denies –“three reports, certain documentation and a group of photo-
graphs”–the court adopted the state’s opinion and argued that they were “especially
afraid of the severe visual effect of the material that might in its opinion hurt the
State’s international relations. This effect is found in various photographs.”
22
Recently, I asked to view the classified material of Dir-Yassin; however, the IDF Archive’s
manager forwarded my request to the Israeli State Archivist. He informed me that:
A special committee [headed by the Minister of Justice Ayelet Shaked] to deal with permission
to view classified archival material met on 11 September 2016, to discuss among others, your
request. The committee asked for clarifications from additional sources and concluded that
until they receive these answers and have further discussions on the subject, the material
will remain classified.
23
A parallel can be found in colonial archive research documenting colonial systems of
management and ways of erasing history also when colonial rule ends. For example,
most of the colonial archives in Algeria were transferred to France despite demands
to keep them in Algeria for study by local researchers (Shepard 2015, 873). Todd
Shepard reviews the long history of suppression and concealment of archives –
looting or deliberate hiding, burning or stealing –starting with the Spanish archives
in the Philippines destroyed by the Americans in 1898, to the European archives
stolen by the Nazis and then by the Russians at the end of the war, or archives
seized in Iraq in 2004 by the US (869). Archives describing British colonial rule and its
long history of brutality against the indigenous peoples (Elkins 2005) were transferred
to Britain after the colonies received independence, remaining under British control –
“From India to Kenya, a dark cloud literally hung over Britain’s imperial retreat”(Elkins
2015, 852) –and thus defined by Rawlings as “migrated archives”(2015). To this day,
they are subject to British sovereignty, which decides what to open and what parts
of history to tell. The Government of Kenya, for example, filed a request several times
for the return of archives and documents, requests that were denied on the grounds
that they were British archives. Furthermore, there were instructions to burn/destroy
some of these archives. With regard to materials transferred to Britain, the policy,
SOCIAL SEMIOTICS 209
until recently, was to forget, to conceal or to censor. These actions were taken in order
“not to embarrass the British”since they describe the violation of human rights, torture,
rape, illegal detentions and the like (Shepard 2015; see also Rawlings 2015). Some of
them disappeared in the 1990s and there is little expectation that they will come to
light (Elkins 2015, 856–858). “Gaping holes became an imperial legacy in postcolonial
archives,”enabling those responsible to escape the scene of the crime (Elkins 2015,
852–854). Elkins describes the British colonial violence imposed not only on personhood
but also on objects:
Evidence was first removed from Kenya, subsequently hidden, and then later disclosed
through legal discovery that is of great relevance to how we as historians think about
British decolonization and the relationship between the state and the construction of its
archives. (Elkins 2015, 859)
A Western interpretation
Knowledge about colonized peoples, categorized as “third world”by the West, is found in
many cases in the “metropolitan countries,”in archives of Western knowledge as Aijaz
Ahmad shows. They are not examined by indigenous criteria but measured, evaluated
and categorized according to criteria of the Western World. Western archives treat them
with tactics of silencing, fabrication and false image of the non-Western. Archives of colo-
nized peoples, always established to serve a Western audience and never a native audi-
ence, refrain from addressing non-Western practices and contain destructive features
(Aijaz 2000, 286–296).
Palestinian archives follow the same Western pattern of structuring, interpretation and
destruction imposed on them by Israel’s military and civil archives (Sela 2009,[2012]2015).
Directing them to mainly Zionist audience allows erasure of their Palestinian character-
istics, largely expresses the Zionist system of representation and repression. For
example, the IDF Archive catalogs the films taken from Beirut as “Films seized from the
‘PLO Archive’in Beirut,”although in fact there was no such institute. Information regarding
their origin –the Cultural Arts Section of the PLO –is not available in the archive, nor it has
been researched by Israeli archivists, although it has been more than 30 years since they
were seized (Sela 2017).
24
Archivists are employed as “gatekeepers”of official Israeli history
and the archive’s treatment of materials reflects patronization, destruction and erasure.
The many interviews and correspondence with IDF Archive staff did not help in finding
the owners of the film archive. Furthermore, the copyright holder is listed as “IDF Spokes-
man Unit”and not the institute the material was taken from (see, e.g. Figure 3). Hence, not
only is the origin of the films erased but they also have new owners and a “new”copyright
holder (see also Figure 4, taken from a dead Arab at the Haganah History Archive).
I was also prevented from studying the military archive’s archive –correspondence and
information that could shed light on the films’origins and how they reached the archive –
and denied valuable information regarding the material’s Palestinian characteristics. The
legal assistance I took in an attempt to facilitate opening the materials, clarifying their
origin and identifying their owners, did not help in most instances.
25
In addition, although
the procedure to receive the status of “accredited researcher”
26
is not democratic –a pro-
cedure that allows researchers to view confidential material –I filed a request in hopes of
tracing the origin of the films. The request was denied a number of times and the whole
210 R. SELA
process, like the archive’s conduct regarding the topic of research, was ambiguous. Finally,
I received a response from the archive manager, Ilana Alon, 16 August 2011:
It is not known from where in Lebanon [they were seized –R.S.] nor the exact date. The archive
does not know from which PLO body they were taken …the films were seized during the
Shalom HaGalil war in 1982 –brought to Israel by the battalion for the technical collection
of seized documents …the reels were transferred to the IDF Archive by the IDF spokesman
in 1985.
27
The IDF Archive avoids researching and cataloging the films according to the criteria
originally employed by the Palestinians to assemble them, subjecting them to an alien cat-
aloging, deciphering and interpretation system, and treating them as materials of minor
cultural importance. For example, they are catalogued according to Zionist terminology
and the IDF Archive’s customary system of coding, categorization and classification,
with no relation to their Palestinian characteristics/cataloging. The films are classified in
the IDF Archive on two separate lists –“Seized by IDF Spokesman Unit”and “Seized
and Edited by IDF Spokesman Unit”(Figure 3)–that evidently do not match or consider
the material’s original classification. According to a longstanding Zionist tradition, a Pales-
tinian is classified as an enemy and a terrorist. For example, in photographs looted before
the 1950s, most of the Palestinian fighters are defined as “Arab gangs”(Figures 5 and 6)–
producing a negative connotation. Palestinian settlements are referred to by Hebrew
names to erase their Palestinian identity, people expelled from their homes during the
Figure 3. “IDF and Defense Establishment Archive, Films Seized from the ‘PLO Archive’in Beirut. No
Way Out –Palestine War of Independence and Six Day War. Photographs of pictures of terrorists,
and scenes from tent camps, Qalandia 1957, (92) B75–92,1,2”.
SOCIAL SEMIOTICS 211
Nakba and want to return are defined as “infiltrators”(Sela 2009,13–14, 44, 62, 77–79; Bar-
Tal 1999; Podeh 2002) and looted photographs are defined at Bamahane [Military Maga-
zine] 41, 9 June 1949 as: “imprisoned photographs”(Figure 7, Sela 2009, 89). Sometimes
when the text in the photograph does not meet the worldview of the colonizer, it is phys-
ically deleted (for instance, by correcting fluid, see Figure 8). Hana Sleiman demonstrates
that Israel uses the documents of the Research Center to construct a narrative that depicts
the PLO as a terrorist organization and the Israeli army as the liberator of Southern
Lebanon (Sleiman 2016,48–51). Films too reflect the construction of a demonic identity.
Every film copy received by a researcher begins with a yellow text written by IDF
Archive workers, characterized by Zionist terminology. For example, Telecine 00075–92,
1, 2 is cataloged as “Photographs of pictures of terrorists, and scenes from tent camps”;
and Telecine 00084–0as“Terrorist camp in Kuwait.”Clearly, “terrorist”is not a Palestinian
definition. Telecine 00102–0 gets the softened description, “Description of IDF attitude and
harsh treatment of Palestinians in the territories.”Scenes of mistreatment earn the milder
term, “harsh.”The looting itself is described in the military archives in soft terms that
conceal the act of plunder. The images are catalogued as “images received from …”
instead of “images looted/plundered by …” (see, e.g. Figure 4 above). Seized Palestinian
Figure 4. “The photograph was found with an Arab prisoner. Received from Rashkes Moshe. Copy
Rights: Haganah History Archive. Negative is existed.”According to Rashkes, the photograph was
taken from a dead Arab, and not as mentioned in the archive files.
212 R. SELA
Figure 5. Untitled, 1936–1938, The National Library, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Archival
envelope with photographs, entitled: “Arab Gangs and their Leaders During the Riots of 1936–1938”.
Figure 6. Untitled, 1936–1938, The National Library, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The photo-
graph was taken from the above envelope entitled: “Arab Gangs and their Leaders During the Riots of
1936–1938”.
SOCIAL SEMIOTICS 213
materials are shown permanently at the Museum of Israeli Intelligence Heritage and Com-
munication Center, presented by Israel in a biased and inciting manner as material confis-
cated from terrorists (see, e.g. Figure 9). However, the same type of material and content,
for instance, Israeli key holders displaying national symbols, produced after the 1967 war
by Israeli bodies, are perceived in the Israeli consciousness as strengthening national pride
(Sela 2007,Figure 10).
Figure 7. “Imprisoned photographs,”from the article “Pictures and Treasures in Arabs’Lenses,”Bama-
hane 41, 9 June 1949.
214 R. SELA
The archive as a site of resistance
Colonial archives, as demonstrated above, are imagined sites of institutions that create his-
tories using mechanisms of erasure and concealment. Over the years, there have been
attempts to challenge the reading of archives and colonial practices, and to build
Figure 8. Chalil Rissas, Demonstration of Palestinian Women’s Organization in the Old City of Jerusalem,
undated. Written on the placard: “No to relations and no to negotiations, the mandate will be nullified”
and another section was deleted with white-out. Looted photograph from the studio of the photogra-
pher. IDF Archives. “Accepted since the mopping up operation of 1967, November 2002 - an opinion by
the attorney general to allow the use of seized materials.”Courtesy of the Rissas Family.
SOCIAL SEMIOTICS 215
postcolonial/decolonial models (Stoler 2002; McEwan 2003; Sela 2009,[2012]2015; Steele
2010; Caswell 2011; Weld 2014; Elkins 2015; El-Shakry 2015). The anti-colonialist discourse
requires, as Bhabha suggests (1990)“an alternative set of questions, techniques and strat-
egies in order to construct it”(75). This process requires reading through the colonial
archive’s many overt and covert layers, neutralizing its colonial biases, and exposing infor-
mation that often contradicts and challenges its official goals, illuminating the blind spots.
It alters our knowledge about the past, providing new tools to confront the present, an
“archival turn.”
The Palestinian film archive in the IDF Archive was cleansed of its original resistance
and Palestinian uprightness, undergoing colonial emasculation. Its objectives and the
reason it was established were erased. The IDF Archive closed it for an extended
period and when partially opened, presented it as an archive stripped of context and
history, its identity and essence altered. It was cataloged according to Western conven-
tions, using the terminology of the colonizer and not the original terminology, and
deleting the identities of the films’main creators. It was presented as an eclectic and
unidentified assortment of documentary films comprised of documentary footage
with no sequence or connection between them.
This suggests that the role of the postcolonial researcher is to dig into the different
layers, to extract information –in many cases disguised, biased and inaccessible, to con-
struct the historical and cultural context, to view it in its original form, to reveal the key
figures it served and the creators it sponsored. The researcher must return the colonially
Figure 9. Seized artifacts at the permanent exhibition, The Museum of the Israeli Intelligence Heritage
and Communication Center, Gelilot, Israel. Photographed during a visit, July 2009.
216 R. SELA
sterilized archive to its initial historical and cultural context (McEwan 2003; Sela 2009,
[2012]2015). “If Western archive has done nothing but silence, misrepresent and fabri-
cate false images of non-Western culture, the task, necessarily, is to restore the authen-
ticity of those culture through their own practices, rituals, and representations”(Aijaz
2000, 296).
El-Shakry also discusses the phenomenon of the absence of materials and documents
in Middle East archives. She calls it “History without Documents”that challenges the
writing and turns the archive into an “instituting imaginary,”following the traces of the
dead, “always incomplete, always unknowable, and always, at least partially, the projection
of our own desires.”Therefore, in her opinion, one must reveal what is inaccessible, while
having an understanding of the system of “archival imaginaries”(El-Shakry 2015, 921). For
El-Shakry, the archive is a metaphor of selective forgetting and what remains is writing the
history of what is lost and missing in archival evidence. Researchers in the Middle East are
forced to find alternative sources of information –oral histories, correspondence, mem-
oires and private collections, newspaper clippings, foreign archives and the like (934;
see also Stoler 2002; Elkins 2015, 864–865; Weld 2014).
Colonial looting –mirror images and hybrid gazes
As part of my ongoing research on Israel’s looting of Palestinian archives, I initiated a range
of peripheral interviews
28
–with looters, with victims of looting such as archive managers/
Figure 10. Artifacts produced by Israeli agencies after 1967 war. Shown at the exhibition Six Days Plus
Forty Years, Petach Tikva Museum of Art, 2007, curator: Rona Sela.
SOCIAL SEMIOTICS 217
workers (Sela 2009,82–103; 2013), with witnesses –which shed light on the complexity of
power relations reflected through various hybrid gazes. In addition, tracking archival
materials –traces, signs, indications of erasure, clues and snippets of looted information
and digging into the various layers of the archive,
29
illuminates the genealogy of plunder
and mechanism of erasure,
30
as the archive acts brutally to delete any evidence of
looting. For example, to complete the information on Photographs taken from a dead
Arab (Figure 4 above), donated by the soldier to the Haganah History Archive, I located
and interviewed the soldier who looted the photograph, and also collected information
from a book he had written describing the plunder (Rashkes 1962; Sela 2009, 96, 2013).
Another example is a photograph “found in the pocket”of Abd AL-Qadir Al-Husayni and
donated to the Palmach archive by Uzi Narkis, as shown in the archive records, enabled
the discovery of a chain of plunder (Figure 11). It is important to note that the complemen-
tary information in original files accessible in the beginning and later closed to researchers –
such as when classified material was opened/closed, under what circumstances and by
whom, and under what circumstances it was seized –also helped to complete details
about the plunder and the stringent methods of managing materials in official military
Israeli archives. In addition, the fact that soldiers and citizens who plundered/looted
archives donated them to the military archives, helped to chart the process of looting.
Although they chose to forward the occupied archives to a military institution with strict
Figure 11. “Palmach Information Center (Palmach Archive). Nahshon Operation. Photograph Descrip-
tion: Gangs commander in the battle over Qastel. In the photograph: Abd AL-Qadir Al-Husayni (the
photograph was found in his pocket). Date: 1948. Received from Uzi Narkis, Jerusalem”.
218 R. SELA
laws and limitations on access and exposure, their privacy as looter was exposed when the
archive opened the material and cataloged them as “donators.”
I deal here with the seizure of the Research Center and Cultural Arts Section in order to
broaden the discussion on the multifaceted layers in colonial relations addressed by many
researchers. Comparing various testimonies of the colonized, the colonizer
31
and a photo-
grapher with regard to these specific cases of plunder, enables crosschecking and ques-
tioning of hybrid gazes as reflected here. Sabri Jirvis’s–the last director of the Palestine
Research Center –who anticipated the seizure, testified:
We prepared for the IDF’s entry into the city, and our departure. It was September 1982. The
PLO organization was enormous and we weren’t able to take anything. A day before the
IDF’s entry into the city, when it was known that the first Israeli soldiers had entered the
adjacent street, I arrived at the Center at night and took important materials –mainly
manuscripts –memories of Palestinian figures I didn’t want lost, political reports and assess-
ments. They remained with me, out of the reach of Israel’s soldiers …that’s the real archive.
Not what the IDF took. I put the material into two suitcases and kept them in a secure
place.
When we were told that Israeli soldiers were in the next street, I sent the workers home, closed
the Center, and disappeared. We worked until the last minute and then fled. I didn’t see the
actual seizure. Somebody told me about it. The IDF soldiers thought the building was booby-
trapped, so on the first day they came and searched the area. On the second day, they brought
trucks and began to load them up. They took everything –apart from Knesset protocols and
laws of the State of Israel. There was a board in the meeting room, and they saw Hebrew
writing on it –we taught our employees Hebrew –so one of the Israeli soldiers had
written, “You’re screwed!”(emphasis added by the author, Figure 12).
Jiryis emphasizes Palestinian pride and uprightness (Memmi [1974]2003)–the fact that
he rescued the most important material, not giving Israel the opportunity to control sig-
nificant knowledge, and that they worked until the last moment. At the same time, he
describes the soldiers’attitude: “You’re screwed!”The blackboard, a tool of transforming
knowledge becomes a vehicle for a public shaming.
Shlomo Arad, an Israeli photo-journalist, then in his thirties, entered Lebanon with the
IDF paratroopers. He worked for Newsweek, but also as an IDF military photographer,
having an independent arrangement with the military magazine Bamahane. According
to his testimony, apparently related to the Cultural Arts Section:
32
Leading up to the IDF entry into the city –everyone knew the IDF was going to enter western
Beirut –a‘buzz’started around the ‘PLO Archive.’Many were interested in the archive and
wanted to know where it was, to find and photograph it –foreign and Israeli reporters and
photographers, the Newsweek editorial staff, and also me, personally …I imagined I could
just enter the building, open files and photograph. It was my dream.
As someone involved in visually documenting the Israeli–Palestinian conflict from a sub-
versive point of view, Arad hoped to see a reflection of Israeli society in the Palestinian archive.
I thought perhaps I would find files on Israel…when the IDF began to bite into West Beirut, the
museum and other parts, we started looking for the archive. In September I went in with the unit
that fought and conquered West Beirut. It took a few days until I found it. (Figure 13)
SOCIAL SEMIOTICS 219
Ultimately, Arad was not given access to the archive and its contents.
When I got there, IDF soldiers had already loaded it. The archive was surrounded by tanks and
walls of sand, like a fortress, to prevent access to it. I arrived in the late morning; the weather
was good, September –still summer. A chain of soldiers, a slight distance from one another,
were passing crates taken from the archive from hand to hand, until they were loaded onto
the trucks. There were two trucks standing outside. The army forbade me to take photographs,
but after much arguing it was agreed I could photograph the soldiers from the rear. I photo-
graphed the human chain but again the army intervened and that particular photograph was
censored. They never returned it to me. They only allowed me to publish the image that I gave
you, where you can’t identify the soldiers or the actual plundering.
Unlike Arad, who was consciously looking for ”the archive“, an Israeli soldier from para-
trooper Regiment 50 who assisted in seizing the Cultural Arts Section described to me his
encounter with the colonized archive and the way Israeli soldiers were documented:
We moved around in APC’s (armored personnel carriers) and a person from the ISA (Israel
Security Agency) directed us to places where materials had to be collected from the PLO’s
various institutions. We entered the buildings. Some teams worked in parallel. Everything
was taken. Often in buildings where the archives were situated, they hid weapons as well. I
remember massive Russian crates filled with bombs, Russian Kalashnikovs, rockets, rifles,
RPG’s, knives. We were scared the buildings were booby-trapped. So we loaded the
weapons first. The crates were heavy and it took hours. Then we collected the documents.
Figure 12. A video interview with Sabri Jiryis, 28 August 2009.
220 R. SELA
The soldier, unlike the photographer, did not even know from which institution the
material was taken, the importance of the documents or what he was going to see.
While Arad searched for the archive actively, the soldier spoke about the confiscated
materials and archives in general and in a passive manner:
It was only from you I learned that one of the plundered archives was from the and the other
from Cultural Arts Section. I identified the building immediately from a photograph I saw lying
on your desk. As a soldier, I didn’t know what it was used for.
Figure 13. Shlomo Arad, Israeli soldiers taking as booty archives in Beirut (including Cultural Arts
Section), 1982, courtesy of the photographer.
SOCIAL SEMIOTICS 221
The soldier, as part of his duty, was forcibly exposed to the Cultural Arts Section items.
When clearing the archive of its contents, we saw pictures of Israeli soldiers taken at Israeli
checkpoints, which froze our blood. We were afraid we would see ourselves there. If I’m
not mistaken, someone identified himself or someone he knew. We understood we’d been
singled out. They’d been watching us. War, a foreign country, everything vulnerable. You
don’t fully understand the codes of the place or what you’re doing there. Out of the blue in
Beirut you see old pictures of you or your friends photographed at checkpoints in the occu-
pied territories. It was frightening. Suddenly we understood we had been targeted …that
we’d been marked …No, we never discussed it among ourselves.
Much younger then Arad, the soldier, totally absorbed by the army by choice, “Poi-
soned”in Israeli slang, mainly remembers: “Russian Kalashnikovs, rockets, rifles, RPG’s.”
The civil and ethical aspects that such a meeting generates did not enter his conscious-
ness. Hence, perhaps, the encounter with his reflection or people like him in the
“enemy”archive was surprising and agitating. But the visual surveillance of the “Israeli
soldier”by the “enemy”contains two elements that reinforced the experience –first, it
was taken surreptitiously without the soldiers’knowledge, apparently for intelligence pur-
poses, and gave rise to a sense of impending disaster, that until then the soldiers were
unaware of: “We understood we had been targeted.”Second, people identified themselves
in the pictures. They were looking at a personal portrait of themselves, and they sensed the
crossing of a threshold that shocked and unnerved them. This feeling was accompanied by
emotional turmoil and fear in real time, and then later repressed: “It froze our blood. We
were afraid we’d see ourselves there …we realized they had followed us …it was frigh-
tening …no we never discussed it among ourselves.”
A study of a group of photographs from the Haganah archive looted by Moshe Rashkes,
an Israeli commander, from a slain Arab in the battle in Bab Al-Wad (Jerusalem region,
1948, Figure 4 above) reflects the same complexity. An interview with the looter and a
book that he published –Days of Lead (1962) depicts how they carried the body to the
base and the looting of photographs:
He bent over the dead man’s head and lifted the upper part of the body to a sitting position.
…it [the body] was slipping from my hands and slowly sliding down; I struggled with all my
strength to raise it up again …The dead body nauseated me, I felt sick to my stomach. I felt I
was going to throw up. The body was placed [in the storeroom at the base] …his head,
slightly to the side, was tipped back as if pulled by a hidden weight …we bent over the
body and started rummaging through the pockets of the blood-soaked overalls …the sight
of the blood sticking to my fingers revolted me. I stretched out my hand over the dead
man’s trousers and began to wipe my fingers on them. (Rashkes 1962, 105–107; Sela 2013)
The images he looted document riots and injured or dead bodies of Jewish soldiers:
Yechiel handed me a photograph. “These are our soldiers”…“the enemy is distributing it”…I
glanced at it …my blood froze. I felt as if the breath had been squeezed out of me. Paralyzed.
Our soldiers –a pile of naked bodies, amputated limbs, I was shaking.”(Rashkes 1962,28–29)
“We thought they were distributed by the Arabs to frighten us, he told me.
33
The indigenous demands ownership over the gaze. Like a mirror image, the soldier saw,
maybe for the first time, “us”photographed by “them”–a reflection or testimony to the
violent and harsh power he imposed over the colonized, apartheid that Israeli society
222 R. SELA
denies. These type of photographs, exist also in sections documenting colonialism in the
colonizer’s archive, but they are masked with Zionist interpretation and terminology or
censored/subordinated to colonial rules. Peled-Elhanan shows an equivalent phenom-
enon in Israeli schoolbooks in relation to the Palestinians. She states that “they
command forgetting by being based on a very strict selection of facts”and as such,
“they harness the past to the benefit of the present and the future of Israeli policy of
expansion”(Peled-Elhanan 2013, 124).
The image of the self that the soldier saw in the colonized archive cracked his viewpoint
of denial. As a result, he felt threatened. While the camera serves as an instrument for
instance of the state or official bodies to transform knowledge and power, as various
researchers demonstrate (for instance, Sekula 1986, Tagg 1988), rebellious organizations,
especially since the period of the Third Movement (and mainly in cinema) started to use it
to undermine colonial power, reflecting the reversal of power relations (Sela 2017).
Both soldiers, from the 1948 battle and from Beirut 1982, faced the fact that they were
exposed. The soldiers describe the fear and anxiety they felt when looking at their imago.
The mechanism of power that they themselves had created was now turned on them.
They wished to observe without being seen, however, the colonized unveiled their
gaze, enabling the shadow of the other to fall upon the self (Bhabha 1994, 85). Moreover,
the soldiers’reaction reflects an ambivalence, which is “one of the most significant
Figure 14. “The Military Governor in South Jerusalem –The Main Office. A permanent authorization to
bring and take out products and objects from the occupied area, 31.5.1948”. Courtesy of Shraga Peled.
SOCIAL SEMIOTICS 223
discursive and psychical strategies of discriminatory power”(Bhabha 1994,86–95). Fanon
described ([1967]2001) the hybrid gazes –the fantasy/longing/curiosity/excitement (of
the photographer), and the colonizers’worry and fear at seeing an image of themselves
through the eyes of the colonized, reflecting the power/knowledge relationship. Like
the mirror period of Lacan. “Every time the subject sees his image and recognizes it, it is
always in some way ‘the mental oneness which is inherent in him’that he acclaims”
(Fanon [1967]2001, 161).
Epilogue
Colonial archives usually hold colonial history while colonial museums treasures plundered
from the indigenous. Both institutions, the archive and the museum, have influence over the
writing of history, but also over the present and the future (Derrida 1998; Stoler 2002; Ander-
son [1983]2006; Small 2011). The Israeli case is unique on two levels. First, colonialism has
not yet ended, and is still active and an open wound. Second, in Israel, the treasures of the
native are not held by the museums nor are they shown or exposed to the public. They are
concealed and restricted in military archives as enemy resources and are subjugated to mili-
tary rules. They resemble in many aspects, archives devoted to colonial history, but also have
some unique characteristics as shown here. However, it is important to note that colonial
museums that reflect the imperialistic collecting mania recall, in many ways, colonial
archives. For instance, they both have a central role in deleting the past (with regard to
museums see for instance, Small 2011; Edwards and Mead 2013). In addition, since the
1970s, there is a tendency to reinterpret imperial history in colonial museums, similar to
the colonial archives as discussed here, allowing “other layers of histories –local, regional,
community, indigenous, minority –to be expressed”(Sauvage 2010).
Israeli society lives by a dichotomous code of ethics. On the one hand, there is consen-
sus on returning treasures seized by the Nazis to their Jewish owners, and the subject is
rarely off the public agenda. On the other hand, this ethical code is not applied to Pales-
tinian treasures taken as booty by Israel.
34
Officials are also using the colonial argument
that taking and preserving plundered treasures in wartime save them from oblivion as
National Library staff, for example, claimed to Amit Gish in reference to Palestinian libraries
seized in the 1948 war (Amit 2014, 79). Palestinian libraries not only were not returned to
their owners, but the attitude of the Israeli librarians was arrogant as well, and descendants
of the owners who came to view them were treated condescendingly. The daughters of
Khalil Sakakini tell of their encounter with their father’s books, plundered from their
home by librarians of the National Library in 1948. After the 1967 War, when permitted
to visit the library, one of the senior librarians said to them,
You have no right to claim anything …in fact, each book individually and also all the books
together are abandoned property …maybe we looked surprised or even annoyed …because
he repeated and explained that since 1948 all Palestinian property –such as books, houses,
fields, villages, towns –had become the property of the State of Israel. (Hanegbi 2002, 121)
Recently, the subject was raised again after Daash, realizing the commercial potential of
historic treasures, began selling them to finance part of their activities. Other historical and
archeological remains, mainly Christian, were destroyed and their destruction recorded, as
224 R. SELA
part of a deliberate cultural war. Consequently, the British Museum began storing in its
warehouses archeological treasures smuggled illegally out of Syria “from a desire to pre-
serve the items during the civil war.”But unlike the not-so-distant colonial past of Britain –
still holding many treasures it does not legally own, while preventing access to colonial
archives describing the horrors that occurred in the colonies (Rawlings 2015, 199) –Neil
Macgregor, the director of the museum, relating to the recently smuggled treasure, said
(quoted in Haaretz, June 6 2015): “We are an important factor in preserving the items
that were smuggled from Syria, We did the same thing in Afghanistan, and are now return-
ing to them the findings we had in our possession”(Stern 2015). Official Israel, however,
not learning from the colonial past, is entrenched in the colonial situation. Changing
the archive into a decolonial/postcolonial site of resistance is therefore one of the chal-
lenges facing researchers of Israeli colonial archives today, along with the battle to
return pillaged archives to their owners.
Notes
1. The Palestine Research Center archive plundered in 1982; was discussed in Sela 2009 and
Sleiman 2016.
2. On the cultural importance of looted material see Montgomery (2011, 325 (Iraqi material)) and
Sela (2009, 106–113 (Palestinian material)).
3. This is how the photographer wrote his name in English. The academic transliteration of his
name from Arabic to English is Rasas.
4. Information about the Research Center and its directors is taken from Sabri Jiryis (interviews
on video, 28 August 2009; 24 July 2010; 7 October 2007); interview with Anis Sayigh, February
Figure 15. Avraham Vered, Paratroopers Taking Documents as Booty in Qalquilya, 1956 IDF Archive,
Bamahane Collection.
SOCIAL SEMIOTICS 225
16, 2010: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmigjelLo1Eª; http://photography.jadaliyya.
com/pages/index/18769/anis-sayigh_a-profile-from-the-archives; (JP 2014; Amour 2011;
Salah 1985; Sela 2009; Sleiman 2016), http://www.alraqamia.com/user/profile/publisher/10
and http://www.shuun.ps/page-438-en.html.
5. Fayiz Sayigh (1922 Syria-1980 New York). As a child, he moved with his family to Tiberius and
studied in Safed. Completed a first and second degree at the American University of Beirut and
a Doctorate in Philosophy at Georgetown University in the US. His doctoral thesis dealt with
Zionist Colonialism in Palestine.
6. Anis Sayigh (1931 Tiberius-2009 Amman). Educated at Zion College in Jerusalem. He was
exiled to Sidon in 1948, completed his Bachelor’s degree at the American University in
Beirut. He obtained a doctorate degree in Middle Eastern Studies at Cambridge University
(1964), and founded the Palestinian Encyclopedia.
7. Sabri Jiryis, born in Fassuta, in the Galilee (1938). He studied Law in the late 1950s at the Hebrew
University in Jerusalem and was expelled by Israel in 1970 for activities defined by the state as
hostile. Exiled in Lebanon, he worked for a short period at the Institute for Palestinian Studies
and became a member of the Palestinian National Council. He currently lives in Fassuta.
8. The library held more than 20,000 titles, although various sources quote different amounts
http://www.alraqamia.com/user/profile/publisher/10; (Ihsan 1982; Rubin 1983;JP2014;
Sleiman 2016).
9. Unearthing secret police archives in Guatemala, see Weld (2014).
10. Although Denes refers to films of the Palestinian Cinema Institution and not the PLO Cultural
Arts Section –from where the films were seized and as will be described, both archives expose
Palestinian self-representation.
11. Therefore, it will be named in the essay “PLO Archive”with quotation marks.
12. “Rules, Orders and Instructions”:http://www.archives.mod.gov.il/pages/MISC/z-chukim.asp?AR=1.
13. http://www.archives.gov.il/wp-ontent/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. See
also Sela 2009,30–33. http://www.police.gov.il/meida_laezrach/meida_clali/hofesh_ameda/
Pages/chok_hofesh_ameda.aspx.
14. Benny Cohen to (my) Advocate Shlomi Zcharya, 26 November 2008.
15. http://www.acri.org.il/he/2007. Information and quotations regarding Israeli laws, regulations
and procedures were discussed in Sela (2009,30–33).
16. http://www.acri.org.il/he/1940. These are complaints mentioned by researchers and the
Association for Civil rights in Israel regarding IDF Archive operations, see, for example,
http://www.acri.org.il/he/1763.
17. http://www.archives.mod.gov.il/pages/MISC/z-chukim.asp?AR=1. In addition, Section 14a of
The Freedom of Information Law 5758–1998 lists the military agencies exempt from the
law’’s stipulations.
18. http://www.acri.org.il/he/1940.
19. Many appeals were made to the court on the matter (Sela 2009,30–33).
20. State Controller’’s Report 50b: http://www.acri.org.il/he/1940.
21. Itamar Rabinowitz, who managed the Dayan Center, formerly the Shelach Institute, told me
that the archive of the Research Center was offered to him, but he refused to accept it. Per-
sonal conversation, 17 June 2015.
22. 07/10343, Supreme Court file, 3 May 2010.
23. Personal correspondence with Yaakov Lazowick, State Archivist, 15 February 2016, 26 Septem-
ber 2016.
24. I tried to obtain information in a conversation with Reuven Erlich, from the Intelligence Heri-
tage Center, 22 January 2012 and other military personnel (e.g. endnote 27).
25. During the years, I had a long legal battle with Israeli security archives with regard to plun-
dered/looted Palestinian Archives, including a fight to open and expose the material and
return them to their owners. This is described in length, alongside an appendix of legal cor-
respondence I had with the Israeli military archives, and a list of archives that I found that
were taken as booty in Sela (2009).
226 R. SELA
26. http://www.archives.mod.gov.il/pages/MISC/z-sherut-hoker.asp?AR=1.
27. I also approached the IDF spokesperson in an attempt to get answers, but to no avail (Letter to
me from Major Z. Halevi, 28 March 2012).
28. About testimonies, especially visual testimonies of concealed evidence, see (Huberman 2008).
Another example is the Israeli Ministry of Education’’s attempt to prevent testimonies of Israeli
soldiers describing their brutal behavior towards the Palestinian population in the occupied
territories. Breaking the Silence (Shovrim Shtika) organized these lectures in Israeli schools in
recent years without much success. See also The Belfast Project, an oral history collection
stored at Boston College that contains interviews with paramilitaries involved in the troubles
in Northern Ireland. Participants were promised their interviews would remain sealed until
either they gave permission or after their death (George 2013).
29. Elkins demonstrates the same frustrating process of collecting any evidence describing the
detention camps in Kenya that the British official colonial government destroyed or classified
as confidential. She wrote: “Even the most assiduous purges, however, often fail to clean up all
the incriminating evidence (Elkins 2005, xiii). She describes a method of searching evidence in
official archives ‘fragmented remains’, sometimes with no success. This led her to find other
sources –written and visual-such as private collections, newspapers oral history, while some-
times information didn’t come from files or document but from “cumulative effects of sus-
tained research”(Elkins 2005).
30. Azoulay (2016) addresses equivalent issues raised by Sela (2009).
31. The evidence, some of which is documented on video by the author, was gathered over the
last 15 years.
32. An interview with Arad, 10 November 2012.
33. A conversation with Rashkes, 3 March 2009.
34. The double standards of these ethical codes are also discussed with regard to documents of
the Baath party taken from Iraq during the US invasion in 2003 and are located in the US.
(Montgomery 2011).
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Rona Sela is a curator and researcher of visual history and art and a lecturer at Tel Aviv University. Her
research focuses on the visual historiography of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict, Palestinian photogra-
phy, colonial Zionist/Israeli photography, colonial Zionist/Israeli archives, human rights violation,
plunder and looting of Palestinian archives and their subjugation to repressive colonial mechanisms,
and on constructing alternative postcolonial mechanisms and archives. She also researches the
development of alternative visual practices connected to civil society systems, asking to replace
the old Israeli gatekeepers. They reflect the Palestinian civil struggle over housing, planning, edu-
cation, budgets and on exposing Palestinian history, narrative and the Arabic language, which
were erased intentionally from the public sphere. She has published many books, catalogues and
articles on these topics and curated numerous exhibitions. For further information look at http://
www.ronasela.com.
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