The Afterlife of Palestinian Images: Visual Remains and Time

Israel’s erasure of Palestine is tackled through the looting of Palestinian archives and what remains of the colonial plunder in Azza El Hassan’s book The Afterlife of Palestinian Images: Visual Remains and Time (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). The author introduces the subject with her encounter of a film reel that survived the 1982 Israeli invasion of Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and subsequent looting. “My encounter with the visual remains of plunder, and what emerged from it, have never left me: the possibility of creating something anew out of ruins.” The author, also a film maker, grapples with the space that offers little connection to the past due to erasure, and the space that allows the potential of imagination. 

In that space, the “visual remains of plunder”, as El Hassan describes the objects relating to Palestine and Palestinian society, are changed by colonial violence, and how the objects in turn affects Palestinians’ relationship with relics of their past. 

There is a cyclical pattern when it comes to erasure and plunder. El Hassan explains how an attack on one archive fuels the emergence of a new institution to preserve what remains of the archive, even as Israeli colonialism continues to attack Palestinian attempts at preserving memory. Israel, the author notes, crossed borders to plunder Palestinian archives. Raising one important point which sets the scene for her book, El Hassan notes, “While the plunder of Palestinian institutions is usually recorded and documented, the looting and destruction of the private archives of individuals during invasions and bombings are not.” Throughout the book, the author gives examples of private archives and how the remains of such archives carry the memory of Israeli colonial violence. 

There is no post colonialism in the remains of Palestinian archives and in the Palestinian experience, because Palestinians and the remains of their archives are constantly facing ongoing cycles of plunder. “The ongoing looting of Palestinian archives is a performance of national sovereignty staged by the Israeli army and intended for the Israeli audience, whoa re turned into an accomplice in the crime by being made to acknowledge it as nonviolence.” Palestinians, meanwhile, are both audience and subjects of violence, in which looting constructs the image of Palestinians as powerless. “Their inability to defend their own archive implies that they can be forced into oblivion,” El Hassan writes.

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