Visible Invisibility

On Ruins, Erasure, and Haunting

The [Palestinian] villages that no longer exist were pushed out of the [Israeli] public sphere. They carry new names of Hebrew settlements (yeshuvim ivriyim). But these villages left some traces in these new settlements ... a stone fence, bricks of ruined houses.

—Azmi Bishara, "Between Place and Space"

To be sure, the Nakba exists in the landscape. There are hundreds of ruined Palestinian villages throughout Israel, many of which are still surrounded by the sabra cactus ... but for some reason the ruins of villages across the countryside [fail to] register among the Jewish Israeli population.

—Neve Gordon, "Erasing the Nakba"

There is an ambivalence [that] lays deep at the heart of Israeli thinking and culture ... a denial of the persistent, ghostly presence of the Palestinian absentees amid the ruins of their homes and their neglected fields.

—Yehudit Kirstein Keshet, Checkpoint Watch: Testimonies from Occupied Palestine

This book deals with questions of vision and visibility, particularly the ability to see and be seen. But the parameters by which we determine what is or isn't included within the realm of the visual is itself a matter open to dispute. Following the image of the ruins of depopulated Palestinian villages within the Israeli public sphere and culture, this chapter investigates how a certain failure to see or to appear generates an alternative mode of visuality associated with the sociopolitical power of ghostly haunting.

Informed by the work of Avery Gordon, Jacque Derrida, and Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, I suggest that haunting expands the realm of the visible to include the visibility of the invisible. The chapter engages several key Israeli literary and artworks to examine how the unresolved and ongoing historical violence associated with the Palestinian forced exile of 1948, referred to in Arabic as the Nakba (the catastrophe), is seemingly erased or hidden from Israeli eyes, and yet nevertheless finds its way into the Israeli visual field as a haunting presence of a visible invisibility.

To be sure, the dominant Israeli visual field—not unlike that of other settler colonial societies—is created, guarded, and sustained through various state-governed blinding mechanisms that conceal and erase the history of past inhabitants' relationship to the land. In the case of Israel, these erasures include rhetorical acts such as the replacement of the Arabic names of villages with new Hebrew names, the use of the term "present absentees" to denote Palestinians who fled their homes in 1948, and the replacement of the term "Palestinians" with the term "Israeli Arabs" in reference to Palestinian citizens of Israel. The erasure also takes the form of particular spatial arrangements, such as the planting of numerous national forests over the remains of Palestinian villages; and the separation of Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Israelis so that the visibility of the other remains as minimal as possible, including the construction of the Separation Wall, which keeps the Palestinians of the West Bank out of the Israeli visual field, and the construction of distinct road systems for Israeli Jews and Palestinians, which again minimizes the visibility of the other through the imposition of two radically separate geopolitical realities on the same territorial landscape (see Weizman, "Politics of Verticality").

And yet, unlike what we might consider other, more successful settler colonial projects, the Zionist Israeli Jewish enterprise failed both in removing the original inhabitants of the land and in concealing their traces. This means, among other things, that compared to Australia, New Zealand, or the United States, Israel has not succeeded in generating a myth of a unified democratic collective origin, or in hiding the ongoing violence involved in the state's establishment. It also means that despite Israel's ongoing and persistent attempts to cover up, remove, hide, and eliminate anything Palestinian, the "stubbornly persistent Palestinian presence" nevertheless manages to invade almost every aspect of everyday Israeli life (Makdisi, "The Architecture of Erasure" 527). Indeed, the common Hebrew phrase is kfarim netushim, which literally translates to "deserted villages." Focusing on the image of the ruins of depopulated Palestinian villages within Israeli culture, this chapter traces the growing visible invisibility of the Palestinian Nakba as a ghostly haunting that continues to taunt the Israeli visual field despite the state's elaborate attempts to do away with it once and for all.

The Landscape of Ruins

For anyone familiar with the Israeli landscape, the sight of ruins of destroyed Palestinian villages is not unusual. Usually one finds but a few remaining structures: an arch, a gate, a half-standing house, a broken water tank. It is true that a great number of the more than the four hundred Palestinian villages depopulated following the 1948 war were completely demolished by Israel, leaving no trace behind. But there have also been instances in which ruins have been left visible, and in some cases they have even been carefully preserved and exposed as parts of touristic sites open to the general public. If the majority of the ruins were thus destroyed in a process of historical erasure, others were erased in a more complex manner: while the ruins were left visible, they were incorporated into the hegemonic Zionist narrative through a process of resignification. At times this process of resignification involved the transformation of the Palestinian ruins into symbols of biblical times, whereby the ruins are imagined as ancient remains that offer an insight into the life of the Israelites. At other times, the ruins were preserved and presented as an organic part of the landscape: "a-historical natural entities, like rivers or water pools" (Kadman 70–71).

The image of Palestinian ruins has found its way into numerous Israeli landscape paintings, films, and literary texts, becoming an integral part of the projected new Israeli landscape and a significant element of so-called authentic Israeli culture (Ofrat 19). Examining the status of Palestinian ruins in these cultural texts, one finds a similar tendency to resignify, dehistoricize, and naturalize. Thus, in many of the Israeli abstract landscape paintings from the 1950s and 1960s, Palestinian ruins are included in the frame but only...