The Black Box of the Occupation Revisited: Photography, Responsibility, and the Israeli Occupation

This article considers two exhibitions organized by Israeli writer Ariella Azoulay (1), "Everything Could Be Seen," held at the Umm el-Fahem Art Gallery in 2004 and "Act of State: 1967-2007 [An historical exhibition]," held at the Minshar Art Gallery in Tel Aviv in June 2007. Both exhibitions raised questions about the relationship between photography, spectatorship, and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The latter exhibition also explored the value of photography as a means of understanding the historical processes and structures of the occupation. Azoulay's curatorial projects provide new understandings of how photography can contribute to the development of a broader opposition to the occupation within Israeli society. Central to such concerns is the visibility of the occupation for Israelis. Nicholas Mirzoeff recently called for the establishment of general "visual rights" for people in the context of globalization, primary among which are "the right to look at the obfuscated and concealed operations of globalization" and "the right to be seen by the common as a counter to the possibility of being disappeared by governments." (2) These visual rights can be usefully adapted to the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians in the occupied territories. In this context, most Israelis cannot or do not want to see the plight of the Palestinians in the occupied territories, while the Palestinians have consistently struggled to bring their condition into the Israeli (and international) field of vision. The following will explore the ways that Azoulay has used photography in attempts to make the occupation visible. RESPONSIBILITY AND VISIBILITY In 1994, Azoulay wrote an article entitled "The Black Box of the Occupation (Who will acclaim the heroisms of Israel?)" in which she described the press photographs upon which the Israeli artist David Reeb based certain paintings produced during the 1980s, as "'eye-prints' of Israel as an occupying society." She continued: "David Reeb's paintings interpreted these eye-prints as though they were remnants of inscriptions from the 'black box' of the Occupation." (3) Here Azoulay uses the informal name for an aircraft flight recorder to suggest that photographs of the occupation can be collectively treated as a means of understanding its structures and as evidence on the basis of which political actions can be taken. As Azoulay observes in a later text, locating the images in the "black box" is the first step in enabling the occupation to "appear in full view on the occupier's side." (4) But for these images to contribute to the process of making the occupation visible, they must be viewed in ways distinct from their standard presentation in the print media. As part of this reframing process, these images need to be relocated within what the Israeli media critic Daniel Dor calls the "discourse of responsibility": a discourse that "understands that Israel, and Israelis, have to assume responsibility for the solution of the conflict, because at present, in reality, the Palestinians are under Israeli occupation and not the other way around." (5) Within this discourse the mechanisms of the occupation, already familiar to Israelis through media imagery, would no longer be viewed as acceptable actions on the part of the Israeli state. To this end, Azoulay organized the exhibition "Everything Could Be Seen" in 2004 as a means of providing Israelis with the opportunity for a "fresh gaze at what apparently has already been seen" in the media, with the objective of persuading viewers that the situation of the Palestinians is a manufactured "state of emergency" toward which they should take responsibility. (6) Azoulay thus brought together a range of visual representations, some of which were similar to those in the mainstream press while other pieces made reference to conventional media images of the occupation. For example, Reeb's 2002 series of paintings, "Garbage Dump" were worked from a Miki Kratsman photograph of Palestinian boys lifting their shirts in response to being surprised by Israeli Border Police at Um el-Fahem in 2000. …