At Home with Palestine: Performing Historical Domestic Photographs of the West Bank in Israeli Households

Only a week after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war ended, Israeli citizens began traveling to the territories conquered by the Israeli Defense Forces in the recent battles with Egypt, Jordan and Syria. Commonly carrying cameras, they photographed in spaces that just returned to accommodate more prosaic activities than armed conflict. Drawing on my recent ethnographic fieldwork in Israel, this talk looked into the ways in which members of Israeli society perform their postwar photographs in the household nearly 50 years after their making. A large part of the talk considered photographs taken in the West Bank, which meanwhile the Palestinian people have fought over in their struggle for an independent Palestine state. Focusing on the types of situated knowledge that these photographs help shape in specific domestic settings, I argued that they give rise to complex life-worlds in which Israeli citizens turn back to the photographs to resist the prevalent, politically loaded reality in the country.