In Figure 37 Shaw’s book cover sends out a more confident message. Ben Gurion is mixed with fellow Israelis, a man of the people among them, and altogether the depiction is more cheerful. A man with a plank suggests the building of the nation continues apace whilst another with a gun promises vigilance, but he will never disappear from the pages of Zionist history because the existential threat of enemies is embedded in the mythology of Zionism. The use of portraits of ordinary, working men surrounding the prime minister on both covers was presumably to engage the viewer and set the tone for the inside pages and reinforce the image of Labour Zionism.
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Figure 36 This Is Israel 1948
http://cgi.ebay.com/ROBERT-CAPA-PHOTOGRAPHS-ISRAEL-1948-1ST-HARD-CO-/230573957232
retrieved 15 March 2011
Figure 37 Report on Israel 1950 http://www.soulman.org/meta.html retrieved 14 March 2011
However, this ideological experiment in nation building was taking place in a country that already had a name with diverse peoples living there. Israeli photographs often disregarded
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this inherent contradiction, the building of a socialist democracy in a divided community. For example, the Zionist agencies albums sometimes showed Arab dead, but never Israeli dead, or showed Arab prisoners of war, civilians in disarray, of situations in which Arabs were observed, and others from which they were excluded. Unlikely then that Figure 38 was ever published in a commemorative photographic album that had the blessings of the state. It is a reminder of the unseen threat reinforced by the use of the words ‘terrorist attack’ in the caption. Given that this image was retrieved via the Internet, who can say when the caption was written, but nowadays terrorism refers to an illegitimate activity often inflicted upon the innocent. The term is frequently used to delegitimize an enemy and Figure 38 can be read today exactly as it could have been in 1948, even though it was during war.
Figure 38 Werner Braun After a terrorist attack in Ben Yehuda Street 1948
http://www.snunit.k12.il/jerusalem-photo/en/MAINBraun.html retrieved 20 May 2011
Figure 38 is an interesting example of how Arabs were frequently photographed in the presence of Israelis. Though the photographer in this case is standing at street level on the
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same plane as the Arabs in the street, there are troops standing up in a jeep and two more on the balcony of the building behind and all are looking down upon a defeated enemy. Photographers also photographed Palestinians from above to emphasize dominance but in Goldman’s case he nearly always photographed at eye level. Images like Figure 39 that pose questions can be found elsewhere in Goldman’s work because had one wanted to show the Palestinian perspective in this photograph one might well have stood next to Goldman.
Figure 39 Majdal after surrender 1948, Paul Goldman
Paul Goldman press photographer 1943-61 Israel Museum 2004
Figure 40 is a scene frequently echoed over the years, and Chim Seymour’s 1957 photograph is clearly linked to the pioneer spirit, the simplicity of a Spartan landscape and of the outdoor marriage ceremony. Time stands still and the period clothing does not lessen the relevance and symbolism of the scene even now. It has a frontier spirit, a middle of nowhere feel, yet the message of the wedding canopy, the huppah, with its embroidered Star of David, reaffirms the continuity of Jewish tradition. It also signals via the pitchfork and the gun propping up the canopy, the dignity of labour and the readiness to respond to a call of arms. These joyous scenes are seen repeatedly in Zionist albums, the edited highlights of thousands
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of crafted moments that woven together show the dream of Zionism and its achievements. They generally ignore the irrelevant, the controversial, or anything that contradicts its progress. The view always implied is that the rewards are worth toiling for.
Figure 40 Chim Seymour wedding in the Border Regions, Israel 1952 http://j.w.blogspot- com/2010/02chalutz-wedding.html retrieved 7 June 2011
In 1952 for example, eight commemorative albums were produced depicting the life, times and government of the country. The editors included photographers Lazar Dunner and Beno Rothenberg. (Sela 2005:144) Albums appeared annually until the 1973 October War, but their popularity was never higher than following the 1967 June War. Albums combined text with photographs in equal measure, and in their endorsement of progress echo Soviet albums. (Sela 2005:145) Usually accompanied by a foreword written by a public figure, the effect they sought was comparable to family albums, to instil pride and foster unity. Notably absent from albums were pressing social issues whilst captions were florid and bombastic failing to describe what was occurring or where and when photographs were recorded. The caption could be direct ‘First Aid by the Light of Oil Lamps’ or full of bravado ‘Explosives
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Forward!’ or contain an occasional biblical reference. (Rivlin 1958)36 They referred to heroism and the sacrifice expected of ordinary men and women.
Figure 41 Paul Goldman, Athlit camp 1945. Paul Goldman, press photographer 1943-1961. Israel Museum 2004
Figure 41 shows Jews alighting from freight cars in a wartime scene that has a filmic quality. If this photograph is shorn of its context it might, as easily be a still from a film set as a moment in a recorded event. Given the usual association between Jews and freight cars in this period, Goldman’s photograph catches the viewer off guard. Nonetheless it depicts the arrival of Jewish refugees into a British detention camp in the Middle East. There is no tension between the soldiers and the refugees that are ignored by their guards who have their backs
36
Boris Carmi and Beno Rothenberg were the photo editors in this publication on behalf of Israel Defence Forces
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turned to them, as the rather excited bunch of youngsters spill out of the cars. It is a composition that shows the British as an irrelevance, the gaze of the soldier, like that of empire is fixed on other horizons. The soldiers are ignored by the chattering youth, who in their minds are setting foot in Zion and not about to face the depredations of a detention camp. If these youngsters can endure the freight cars of German Nazism, they can survive those of British colonialism. The joy in the faces of the youngsters can be read as an act of defiance, Zionism is unstoppable. It is also a personal photograph insofar as Goldman, a Hungarian, arrived in Palestine via the same detention centre as in the photograph. He then joined the British Army and saw active service in Libya where he was wounded and consequently discharged.
Figure 42 Chim Seymour 1954 Children’s Reception Centre David Seymour (Chim) Phaidon 2005
Goldman was a close friend of Capa’s and they worked together from time to time when Capa was on assignment in Israel. Though by this time he was in mid 40s and with poor Hebrew, and it was quite a challenge for him to report news. He fared better with foreign
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press agencies than with Israeli news outlets. Between 1945-63 some 34 commemorative albums were published but Goldman’s work only appears in four of them. (Nir 2004: 12) In part this is because his journalism was less concerned with the themes expressed in the romanticised albums and was more suited to newspapers. Of his generation, he was probably the most factual in his photography, owing much more to journalistic standards than to artistic ones. As historical documents his photographs are more credible than, say, those of Kluger. Goldman’s portraits of political and military figures are very effective and insightful.
Figure 42, another by Chim Seymour, shows a reception centre for new immigrants in which children are made welcome with the aid of candle lighting ceremony. The boy’s sailor suit catches the eye and the innocence of the scene was exactly the sort that was used in the recruitment of new immigrants. Seymour’s work in Israel, along with that of Robert Capa, his close friend, is intensely personal and both photographers have had their work repeatedly published in Israel. The contribution by Jewish photographers to the recording of the growth of Israel is immensely important. Their return tickets, foreign passports, fresh eyes, and Jewish solidarity, provided ideal ingredients with which to record a dream in the making, Israel a phoenix rising from the ashes of Jewish destruction. There is more than a touch of romanticism in the photographs of visiting Jewish photographers who would not be around long enough for the disenchantment to set in.
The agencies were preoccupied by mass immigration, fuelled by the Law of Return (1950) allowing Jews anywhere the right to live in Israel and hold citizenship. ‘The need to bind together the vastly disparate social elements of the new nation became a primary goal, inspiring a new photography of heroism.’ (Perez 2000:11) Photographers could empathise with immigrants having shared a similar journey and transition. The displaced milled around
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a new cultural space, dutifully and willingly photographed. Israelis were creating a sense of belonging and photographers were part of that process.
Figure 43 Polling station in the field
Israel today and yesterday Am Oved Publishers 1966
Figure 43, a scene from a commemorative album, juxtaposes the gun and the ballot box in a composition that spells out the importance of a democratic vote no matter what the circumstances. Zionists placed great store on Israel’s democratic credentials with regard to her neighbours and to the support of Western powers, and this sort of image would play well with foreign and domestic audiences alike. It serves equally as an important signpost amongst others from which Zionist collective memory is forged. There is rarely any contradiction between the militarism and democracy of Israel, the latter often flagged as a justification for belligerence against neighbouring states seen in the main as autocracies. However, as Ricoeur suggests, a photograph (like the ideologies it serves) may carry a
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surplus of meaning, conveying more than is desirable or more than is intended. Figure 43 is not without a sense of this and perhaps an inappropriate message to promote democracy.37 In the context of the period however, the Zionists would have read this image differently believing the combination of the gun and the ballot box would have signalled the message of how Israel was both building as well as defending democracy.
Figure 44 The Sinai Operation, 1956. Aryeh Yaakobi
http://www.netnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3623486,00.html Retrieved 21 March 2010
Figure 44 is a reminder of other forces at work in the state building project, not least the need for coercion at one level or another, of manpower, of military machines and implicitly the backing of a powerful ally. Figure 44 looks more like a scene from the pages of American military history than of Israeli but it is emblematic of an enduring alliance between both countries. It has a relaxed atmosphere and was recorded by American born Aryeh Yaakobi who had long been involved in Zionism, joining the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement in New York and doing his agricultural training in New York State ahead of a stay on Kibbutz
37
The ballot box was not available to Arab-Israelis for many years and in the first ‘republic’ 1948-67 there was a dominant party that only ceded to a competitive system after 1967.
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Hatzor. During WWII he served as an aerial photographer with the USAF before settling
permanently in Palestine in 1946 where he photographed for the Israeli Air Force and ran their photo labs. His work was diverse including bygone scenes of English village life where he was stationed between bombing runs across Europe. Figure 44 is probably a personal moment recorded with his colleagues given that aside from his official work the remainder of his photographs were unpublished. An accomplished photographer who, like many of his generation, went unrecognised and were it not for diligent researchers and inquisitive journalists, a number of photographs shown here would never have seen the light of day. What Yaakobi achieves in this composition is the idea that so soon after the state had been inaugurated Jewish society had coalesced into one with ‘a specific cultural character and a high level of self-awareness, as well as established social, economic and political institutions.’ (Even-Zohar 1990:175) It was different culturally to the Yishuv as well as to Diaspora and in Yaakobi’s composition the uniformed officers appear to reaffirm the idea that Israel had come of age.
In the various state archives, according to Chava Brownfield-Stein, there are scores of photographs showing women (often with men) serving in several capacities (from pilots to artillery officers) yet political leaders, and notably Ben-Gurion, were no longer keen to have women involved with or portrayed in combat after statehood was achieved. The army had created the illusion of equality in its formative years partly to satisfy early socialist Zionist aspirations as well as to promote an idea of equality that would percolate into the wider community. But this masked a real inferiority of women within the military hierarchy whilst cementing the identification of women within the military system. Quoted in an Israeli newspaper article, Brownfield-Stein claims that women soldiers have no ‘visual presence at the climatic military moments of victory.’ (Glick 2003) Moreover the more typical representation of women was to show them with a rifle, suggestive of a defensive role at the
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rear whilst also of a civilian in uniform (see Figure 45). Brownfield-Stein argues that ‘most of the photographs do not depict a situation of action, rather at the points of contact between the civilian and the military or at ceremonial parades.’ (Glick 2003)
Figure 45 The first mass recruitment to the Haganah Tel Aviv 1947 Boris Carmi. Photographs of Women 1940-80 Israel Museum 2006
Sela argues that the Zionist agencies marginalised the role of women photographers, suggesting that they ‘had neither penetrated public consciousness nor earned the right to be recorded in the local history of photography.’ (Sela 2005:211) This was despite the fact that many had already proven track records in the field. Women fared better as painters, but across the arts and in journalism, women were neither given parity with men in the same fields nor had they equal opportunities of advancement. Where photography was concerned many women were only ‘discovered’ forty years later. (Sela 2005:213) Because of this absence of professional opportunities, women had fewer constraints in the choice of what to photograph, alongside the men who either rejected working with the Zionist institutions or
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had been turned away by them.38 Sela observes that women emulated the way men worked reinforcing the dominant reality in which women were assigned an inferior position. Only a few women, she suggests, were quietly subversive in their work and provided an alternative to Zionist photography. A number of women managed intermittent assignments with various Zionist institutions, either through membership of organisations, or through connections, but their work failed to enter the canon of Israeli photography and was ‘erased from the collective memory.’ (Sela 2005:214) For both the men and women who worked outside of the mainstream institutions the survival of personal archives has been uncertain. Only by chance once in a while does a lost archive turn up and has extracts published. For women, it wasn’t until the 1970s that their professional aspirations began to be addressed. ‘The New Hebrew nationalism that developed…at the time of the Yishuv was inherently masculine whether in its symbolic and mythological aspects, or in reality’ and remained this way until the 1960s. (Sela 2005:211) Zionist support for the equality of women was always qualified but the photographs suggested parity with men when it came to building and defending the Land of Israel until after the 1948 war. However, the struggle of women for parity does not diminish their obvious contribution to photographs of this period.
Women were not the only subjects where Zionist agencies wanted to emphasise their own agendas according to evolving needs. Jameson suggests whilst an image can show reality, it could at the same time, portray a misrepresentation of it and in order to satisfy aesthetics, reality becomes corrupted in its representation. Figures 45 and 46 show agricultural scenes common in Israeli photographic albums and among the emblematic themes of settler colonialism reinforcing the link to the land and importance of physical labour. The scythes and pitchforks underline this and the probable assumption was that those who worked the
38 Sela cites Dinah Gotz, Liselotte Grschebina, Trudi Swarz, Alice Holz, Sonia Gidal, Marli Shamir, Hanna Degani, Charlotte Meyer, Gerda Meyer, Ricarda Schwerin and Chava Salomon. In addition there were photographers who left Germany during the rise of Nazism such as Ellen Auerbach (Sela 2005:216).
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land would fight harder to defend it. In both photographs there is a suggestion of circles that at this time in Zionist mythology were used to indicate purity. The repetition of images and themes popular in Israeli albums has the effect Jameson describes, that reality becomes distorted. Farming scenes often showed harvesting, or ripening fields glowing in sunshine, as if there was only ever one season. Whereas one finds the seasons present in transit camps, one rarely finds them in agricultural scenes.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3351502,00.html. Retrieved 21 March 2010
Figure 46 Kibbutz Ein Gev, harvest festival, circa 1940 Naftali Oppenheim
Just as the cinema that fictionalised the American pioneers holding onto their farms against foes both uncivilised and unwilling to compromise, so Zionist photographs told a similar story. There were the photographs of Givati cavalry, or the Hashomer watchmen cantering on horses in open landscapes. Or the harvesting scenes as shown here, famer turned gunslinger as the need arose and always the pastoral, the frontier ahead of them. There were of course comparable scenes of Arab peasants arming themselves with rifles to defend their villages or toiling with pitchfork and scythe, narrating the same stories as the Zionists. What is missing from many (but by no means all) such photographs is the point at which the two communities
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intersect. The flight of Arabs and the arrival of immigrant Jews primarily appear as separate narratives as if unconnected to one another.
Figure 47 David Perlmuter harvesting at Kfar Menachem date unknown
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3507259,00.html retrieved 20 December 2009
In Figure 48, a staged event specifically intended for the photograph, the combination of ‘farming’ and dancing presses all the right buttons to reinforce a sense of joy or fun that was a conscious ploy of Zionism to attract people to the cause and specifically to generate togetherness that one also finds in Figure 46. Also with Figure 49 there is a suggestion of the innocence, even goodness in the Zionist project. The two boys helping each other to bang in a post in the middle of all that emptiness, the virgin land, not only signals that the very young could play a role in redeeming the wilderness but also signals the vulnerability of pioneers. Hard to imagine how these boys could be a threat to anyone and the idea that their ancestors had marched out of ancient Israel due to the political violence of the period or that their