A different version of this essay was published as “Photographic Conditions: Looting, Archives, and the Figure of the ‘Infiltrator,’” Jerusalem Quarterly, 61, 2015, pp. 6–22.
ARIELLA AZOULAY (born Tel Aviv, 1962) is an author, art curator, filmmaker, and theorist of photography and visual culture. She is a professor of Modern Culture and Media in the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown University. Azoulay has degrees from Université Paris VIII, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and Tel Aviv University. In 1999 she began teaching at Bar-Ilan University. In 2010 Azoulay was denied tenure at Bar-Ilan, a move regarded by some colleagues and commentators as politically motivated. In 2010 she was the Gladstein Visiting Professor at the Human Rights Center of the University of Connecticut. In 2011 she was Leverhulme Research Professor at Durham University, and she is currently Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Modern Culture and Media at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies.
Let me start with a screenshot of a photograph, one of twenty-five images that I selected from the archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and was not authorized to include in an exhibition I curated several years ago.
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In the archive, this photograph of an elegant elderly man is captioned: “Kfar Yona, Jewish front line. A former prisoner of war is interrogated in the presence of a delegate from the ICRC.” When I first saw the photograph, I recognized some of the figures from other images kept in Zionist archives.
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I knew, even before examining the photograph more closely, that this old man was not, and could not be, a prisoner of war. The young men between 15 and 40 were the first to be removed from their communities. This guy has stayed behind with the women, children, and other men of his age group. Relating to him as an embodiment of a neutral category—POW—reflected the way that agents of the ICRC either on the ground or in the archive interacted with the subject’s actions, or more accurately, with his avoidance of action, with the embarrassing situation that he created by not moving on. The expulsion was supposed to keep going. Contrary to many other operations of expulsion conducted in Palestine during the years 1948-49, this one in particular was open to photographers and international organizations such as the ICRC, since it was conducted under the aegis of the normative category of the post-WWII-era “repatriation”—when millions were forcibly displaced in Europe. Palestinians who were transferred from their homes during these years could not be repatriated to other places, as Palestine was their homeland. It is only with the creation of a sovereign nation-state— Israel—with the UN endorsement that terms such as partition and repatriation could be used as neutral markers of policy. These terms are used factually in the captions of several photos taken in the same situation. At this particular expulsion, approximately 2,000 Palestinians of Arab origin—mostly women, children, and elderly people—were left with little choice but to sign papers proving that they agreed to be evacuated to Jordan as part of “family reunification” (their relatives having been expelled already a few months earlier or incarcerated in labor camps).1
Out of the 2,000 women fated for “transfer” through this kind of expulsion, conducted “willingly,” about 800 refused to evacuate in spite of being threatened by the Jewish forces.2
What lies were these women told in order to make the term repatriation sound plausible? What kind of pressure was put on them? To which types of violence were they exposed, so that they would give their consent not only to leave their homes—they were already forced to leave them when they were evacuated from Tantura—but now, to also leave their country? In the absence of photographs from this phase, we cannot say much about the means employed to obtain the women’s consent, nor about the fate of those who refused. We can only say that this preparatory phase had to be concluded before the scene was opened to photographers, who were invited to affirm with their cameras the success of the repatriation operation. Convening a sort of press conference in the field was not about those who refused, nor was it an opportunity for the expellees to showcase their demands. At the Israel State Archives, photographs of the same event are classified under the handwritten caption of another photographer, Beno Rothenberg, “Arab women from Tantura going to Jordan.” Rothenberg, like the Israeli journalists who attended the expulsion, knew that the expellees are not the inhabitants of Fureidis from where they are being expelled, but rather those who have already been expelled from Tantura.3 Rothenberg’s caption played a pivotal role in understanding that this expulsion was actually a second expulsion. Included in this category of “women” were elderly men and children; at this point, military-age men from Tantura had already been either incarcerated or massacred.
In front of the cameras and representatives of the international community, unexpectedly, and outside of any protocol that was prepared for this occasion, this elderly man dares to stop, to withdraw his consent to eave his home and ceases to move. Halting precisely where many cameras were present, he threatens to spoil the orchestrated spectacle of Arabs “leaving of their own will.” Not much work is required in order to argue that were he a prisoner of war, representatives of various NGOs and military forces would not be seen gesticulating around him, trying to find the right words and gestures to force him, without direct violence, to accept his fate, respect the consent form he signed, and leave his homeland of his own free will, forever. Yet the ICRC, rather than offering a provisory caption, requires its workers to protect the caption from revisions and preserve it as if it were fused with the photograph, since the latter can only be shared with others on the condition that it is accompanied SOLELY by the ICRC’s caption. As I already mentioned, my request for permission to include the photograph in an exhibition was denied. Hence, rather than showing this photograph, I can share with you its substitute, what I call an unshowable photograph.
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This had nothing to do with what is in the photograph, which is still accessible in the ICRC archives. Nor did it have to do with me, since they could not have known in advance what I planned to write. Rather, it was about my stated intention to append my own caption to the ICRC’s. It was about questioning the way that the photograph endured in the archive through language that made of this man a prisoner of war and of the entire operation one of repatriation, or return to a patrie, while it was actually a transfer from one’s homeland.
The ICRC’s implied anxiety, however, was not ungrounded. I did indeed intend to study those photographs together with my companion—the photographed person—even if, according to the archive, our worlds as well as our political roles—were meant to be kept apart. Looking at the photograph of him taken at the moment he was forced out of his homeland, especially when one knows how much of Palestinians’ archives are incorporated into Israeli archives, I invite you to see also the moment he was dispossessed of his material culture and of the protection that archives provide. This protection occurs not through the document archives as legal proof of ownership or identity, but rather for their contributions to what Hannah Arendt called “worldliness.” Since he was not deported alone but together with hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians, the moment of his deportation was also the moment in which Palestinian archives lost the protection of the people—that is, Palestinians themselves—who recognize their existence as meaningful, and hence in need of protection. Their transfer is the moment in which archives became vulnerable to looting. His expulsion, and the foreclosure of his refusal to be expelled, is sanctioned by the looting of Palestinian archives and the entitlement of Israeli Jews to study Palestinian culture in and through archives, in the absence—or in the differential presence—of Palestinians and their archives. With the mass expulsion of Palestinians, their archives were partially destroyed and partially converted into a pile of appropriable segments by the newly established sovereign state and the international organizations that collaborated with it. Nothing of this drama, the heart of the story, is meant to be archived through the imperial categories used by nation-states. Sovereign nation states are predicated on archives that they shape in correspondence with the violent policies they pursue toward segments of populations that even though they govern, they do not relate to as part of the body politic of the governed. In their demographic fantasies, the body politic consists of governed citizens and expulsion is a means to shape it, rather than a device of ruling. Being such a citizen, that is, a privileged citizen by definition, I refrain from going to archives where such images are preserved without my companion, the one who was denuded of his life within a community and made a vagabond, then a dweller of a refugee camp, and soon after an “infiltrator,” until another brutal category was made his, that of a stateless person, carrying only flimsy travel documents or no documents at all, holding none of the papers without which one can hardly move between nation-states’ gates. It is only when one forgets, as one is taught from birth, to think about one’s citizenship as unrelated to one’s state, that one can continue to enter the archive, as a matter of fact and of civil status, without him (or her in other cases), without recognizing the violence of which one’s citizenship is made. Since asking about him and his like in the archive is always already suspicious, there is no other way to go to the archive than with him, making sure that his understanding of the meaning of expulsion, body politic, citizenship, accountability, rights, worldliness, and so on—encapsulated in his firm presence there, kneeling and holding his stick as an anchor in the ground to which he belongs, and rejecting these men’s threats and pleas calling him to move on—is not dismissed for something else, but rather magnified into one of the rare accessible photographs (so far at least) in which, against the military operation of controlling the image of the destruction of an entire culture, a small gesture of opposition was captured as a reminder not of how Palestinians comply with the destruction of their world, but of how much the apparatus of a totalitarian regime made even the possibility of the existence of such gestures unimaginable for several decades.
Exploring the archive with a Palestinian companion became part of my archival routine, a constant attempt to make our actions coincide in space and time, even though he is still forced to live outside of the body politic of which I’m a part, not only because he is no longer alive, but also because his gesture of refusing to leave Palestine dates from 68 years ago, hence obsolete. The temporality and spatiality imposed and epitomized by imperial archives doom his claims to appear as either over or always coming from a post-ness and an outside that mark his grievances as violations of the law, and mine to be at best expressions of solidarity with his ancient plight. Only as co-citizens of a non-imperial imagination can we enter the archive together, share in common those claims to stop the ruination of Palestine that became “his” claims, and together reject differential citizenship and its implication in the perpetuation of violence against those whose belonging to the body politic was denied by displacing them beyond the state’s borders. It is only in his presence that I could rewrite several versions of this and other sentences until I was able to force the language to produce the affirmative one about his belonging to the body politic.
Entering an imperial archive with a Palestinian companion is part of unlearning imperialism and having access not to what is in the archive but to this invaluable option of seeing in a non-imperial way and partaking in the actualization of non-imperial archival modalities. After all, my companion did not have to go through processes of unlearning the past and struggling with political lies in order to disclose, from underneath the ICRC language, that he was not a prisoner of war and that even if he gave his consent to be uprooted from his home, this formal consent was achieved against his will and against any common sense, and it was from start to end an act of sheer violence and not an agreement based on an acceptable exchange.
Let Me Pause Now and Ask, What Is an Archive?
In his influential book Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida analyzes the archive and reveals its secret: violence, “the violence of the archive itself, as archive, as archival violence” (Derrida 1995, 7). He starts with the figure of the archon, the guardian of documents, the sentry: “The archons are first of all the documents’ guardians. They do not only ensure the physical security of what is deposited and of the substrate. They are also accorded the hermeneutic right and competence. They have the power to interpret the archives. Entrusted to such archons, these documents in effect speak the law: they recall the law and call on or impose the law” (Derrida 1995, 2). The archon is the first of the three pylons supporting the archive. The law, as Derrida argues in this passage, is the second, and the Greek arkheion, the house, the place, is the third. In locating Arkhē, as both commencement and commandment, at the conceptual core of the archive, Derrida alternately places emphasis on documents and on the law. “To be guarded thus,” Derrida continues, “in the jurisdiction of this speaking the law, they [the documents] needed at once a guardian and a localization” (Derrida 1995, 2). This conflation between law and documents is troubling and is made possible only when the internal machination of the archive is centered around the “core” of the archive, its essence that the philosopher can grasp only when the noisy presence of people is removed, what Derrida calls its “topo-nomology,” “without which no archive would ever come into play or appear as such” (Derrida 1995, 3). Derrida’s account of the archive is schematic and abstract. The documents that “needed” their guardian and localization are depicted as the focal points of the archive. Derrida’s own intervention in the archive does not leave its impression in this schematic depiction; he remains external to the mechanism of the archive, a guest who comes after its constitution. Such external observation of how the archive works could not be obtained were Derrida not being lured, seduced by the sentries to look at their work from the outside, to track down the borders they set and the fences they erect, and by doing so to acknowledge the law they legislate. After all, part of the sentries’ work is to fool the one who stands at the archive’s entrance and make him or her believe that they, notwithstanding the law they guard, were there before. Yet, in turn, Derrida tries to fool the sentries, writing that “[i]n an enigmatic sense…the question of the archive is not, we repeat, a question of the past.It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow” (Derrida 1995, 36).
Certainly, something is wrong with the temporality of the archive and with its announced mission to serve as a guardian of the past. Achille Mbembe locates the problem in the archive’s desire to forget and liquidate the past, whereas Derrida performs this desire even as he detaches the past from the future, without providing any argument to sustain such a separation: “[T]he question of the archive is not, we repeat, a question of the past…It is a question of the future” (Derrida 1995, 36). This claim is similar to what has become commonly identified as the revolutionary gesture par excellence: positing a new beginning that disrupts the oppressive past—rather than recognize in it the imperial gesture whose license to destroy cultures is grounded in this fantasy of a new beginning. The notion of a radically new beginning, inherited from the major 18th-century revolutions, is inseparable from the formation of a body politic whose members are differentially ruled. This means that those who were dispossessed in the process were made unqualified for reparations, restitution, and compensations. This disruptive temporality stands at odds with people’s modes of negotiating the time of the archive, which are never a matter of aspiring for a new beginning but rather always rejection of and negotiation with the archive’s mission of isolating historic actions and foreclosing interactions with them—in effect, the archive’s mission of stealing common time by making people’s claims disappear for varied durations before they are permitted to reemerge publicly. Co-citizens’ concrete actions in and interactions with the archive, their insistence on their right to continue to engage that which was removed from the course of events that shape the common, can be substituted for an abstracted past and an engineered future only in an approach to the archive, exemplified by Derrida’s text, that relegates these co-citizens to a place outside the archive, labeling them external users, if it asserts their presence at all. No less than through the documents it preserves, the archive’s operation is conducted through the way it rules over governed populations. Consequently, it is not only interest in documents that brings people to interact with archives, but also the way they are ruled by archives, sometimes through documents, sometimes in their absence.
By assuming the guardians’ original presence in the archive, before others he conceives as contingent users whose presence is incidental and secondary to its operation, the philosopher makes himself smuggling others out of the vicinity of the archive, copying them illicitly and sharing them randomly with others, even selling them for a profit. Yet if one chooses not to ignore these others and instead becomes their companion, rather than relating to the archive as an accomplished place of the law with incontestable archons, the first thing that becomes clear is that the archive is not a place but a threshold. When the archive is seen as a threshold, it is no longer possible to prioritize the archons’ pretension to be guardians of a consummate sovereignty over the living reality of masses of deprived and dispossessed groups of co-citizens who constantly challenge the law that was made to preserve their dispossession and deprivation. At the archive’s entrance, the question what is an archive—a place or a threshold, a depository of documents or an apparatus of rule, an accomplished law or a contested violence—is essential if one wants to avoid siding with the guardians and looking inward, thus viewing those dispossessed by the archive solely through their presence in the documents preserved inside it, that is, looking for them under categories provided by the differential sovereignty the archive was made to serve, categories such as “infiltrators” or “refugees.” Those who continue to be dispossessed by the archive and forced to embody political categories such as “infiltrators” do not expect to find in it a remedy in the form of an apocalyptic leap into a future, such as the one Derrida depicts when he writes, “If we want to know what [the archive] will have meant, we will only know in times to come…a spectral messianicity is at work in the concept of the archive” (Derrida 1997, 36). My Palestinian companion’s refusal to inhabit the figure of the infiltrator is not an expression of a spectral messianicity but rather a rejection of the violence enforced on their bodies and a persistent call that denies their classification in a past detached from what came after and a future made into an a priori law whose meaning is still to be revealed.
When this person or his peers sought to return, the category of “infiltrator”—a constitutive element of the differential sovereign regime that was created in their country, which denied their present grievances and relegated them either to a completed past that cannot be reversed or to a future beyond reach—was attached to their bodies. This category was made legible to security agents at borders and frontlines who read in it a set of instructions—interrogate, arrest, harass, expel, or execute—that also became legible to citizens. The violence these agents exercised against those who were until recently their co-citizens eventually produced masses of archival documents that scholars were interpellated to explore. The archive lures scholars to comply with the imperative to look for infiltrators in photographs and documents, where their images, manners, habits, and modes of infiltration can be viewed and studied carefully. In the archive, the legibility of the category of the “infiltrator” is acknowledged and confirmed as an object of knowledge belonging to citizens. Entering the archive with my Palestinian companion, the point of departure for my study of the “infiltrator” is that the infiltrator who is allegedly captured in the photos does not exist. As I work in his company, he ceases to be an object of knowledge, and together we inhabit a continuous present in which state agents try to force a Palestinian who resists the authority of the state to expel him from his homeland to be an infiltrator. In his company, the interpellation directed at Israeli Jewish citizens to recognize Palestinians in these documents dealing with infiltrators cannot be brought to completion, since it is not about granting him a right to return as an expression of progress, generosity, or humanitarianism, but about recognizing his refusal to be expelled to begin with, as a refusal that has never ceased.
My assumption—that the infiltrator does not exist—is an onto-political assertion that the archive cannot confirm or refute, since the archive is one of the sites where infiltrators are fabricated against their will. Similarly, the existence of “infiltrators” cannot be confirmed or refuted by the presence of photographs in the archive that are classified under this title. Rather than reading such photographs as representations or evidence of infiltrators, I use them as an opportunity to ask: what are the photographic and archival conditions for the fabrication of the infiltrator? Being a product of violence, the infiltrator should not be studied as such—that is, as an object of knowledge that can be tracked down in documents—but rather in relation to the citizen who, in being differentiated from the infiltrator, participates in the latter category’s fabrication. Hence, claiming that the infiltrator doesn’t exist is equivalent to the claim that citizenship is a light weapon that coerces people to embody outrageous political categories. The persistence of the figure of the infiltrator, I argue, is evidence of the ongoing violence and dispossession embedded in the institutions of citizenship, archives, and scholarship in places where such a category has been naturalized into the discourse.
Relating to the archive as a document-centered institution driven by concern for a discrete past, as we do when we consult the documents an archive holds, elides the violent military, as well as ideological and political, campaign that must take place inside and outside the archive, often even outside the country, to maintain the perception of the archive as a professional institution in charge of preserving the past. Statements that express shock at the poor maintenance of negatives and documents that have “historical value,” important as these artifacts might be, uphold the idea of the archive as a site of historical preservation rather than as one of the major ruling apparatuses of a regime-made disaster, which operates by secluding forms of life, often through looting and confiscation, and showcasing them as history.
Slightly different from groundbreaking work by scholars such as Gish Amit’s on the robbing of Palestinian libraries, Aron Shai’s work on the involvement of the Israeli Antiquities Authority in the destruction of Palestinian villages, or Rona Sela’s work on looted collections of photographs in the IDF archive, which are based on exposing classified documents stored for decades in archives, I am more interested in the looting that takes place in full sight, in floodlit arenas, even. These public spectacles, involving the private or semi-private seizure of trophies, are essential elements in training Israeli citizens not to see the violence of which they consist.4 Rather than acting as one who “unearths” the looting of Palestinian archives and scientifically reconstructs these events from archival documents that were declassified after an abominable delay and in which one can find plans for looting explicitly written, and thus giving more weight to archival documents than to people’s grievances, testimonies, and photographs that are not classified and hence do not have to be discovered, I prefer to explore the regime-made disaster as it manifests itself openly, on the surface, in the aftermath of brutal interventions. Learning from and with Palestinian companions, I cannot fail to perceive the different instantiations of looting as limited to the expropriation of documents, but rather see how these acts of plunder become central to the form of rule that governs us together and imposes limits on our capacity to imagine and inhabit time and space differently than along the dividing lines of differential sovereignty. This companionship becomes a way to engage one another outside the form of our respective roles in the theater of differential sovereignty.
Photographs of looting and looted photographs that no one considered classifying can—and should—teach us about archives, archival procedures and law, and archivists and their field of expertise. Looking at certain photographs from the peak of the war the state of Israel has waged against those it made into “infiltrators,” namely, photographs taken by soldiers and shared publicly on digital platforms, we can learn about the ways photographs are handled, the body language of expropriation and appropriation, the ceremonies of taking trophy pictures, and the judgments soldiers make on the meanings and uses of photographs, as incriminating evidence of enemy aspirations, as confidential or dangerous material, or as signs of cultural hierarchies and distinctions. The looted materials are sorted according to the military needs, general and particular interests, and short-and long-term PR concerns that guided the soldiers in deciding which documents they would take with them and which they would leave behind, manifested in their lack of interest in them and their poor value. Some recurrent gestures, visible in many of the images taken at sites of looting, but seldom discussed as constitutive of the archive, deserve attention and inclusion in our understanding of what an archive is. Here is a clear gesture of ostentatious disregard for Palestinian archives, the role they play in the social fabric, the labor invested in them, the impact of time on them, their modes of caring for Palestinians’ past, for their documents, records, or modes of organization. This sight is the outcome of a series of gestures that directly contradict the image of meticulous archival labor that the Zionist archive foregrounded as the expression of its mission and mode of operation.
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