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.

The book describes the dynamics of looting and inaccessibility. Palestinians have no access to their own archives, while Israelis do albeit under strict regulations. However, the presence of archives is related to power, which Palestinians are deprived of. The loss of the Palestinian archives triggered searches for remains of Palestinian archives internationally, yet what was salvaged of the past does not necessarily relate to the Palestinian present, particularly when it comes to the remnants of the pre-Nakba era. Erasure, which is a dominant feature in the remains of Palestinian archive, is tied to “an archive of disappearance’, which narrates to Palestinians what has been violently lost or plundered. 

“I have not struggled over what to do with an archival collection, since I have never been confronted by one before,” El Hassan notes. As a film maker, she notes that most of her protagonists are missing visual recollections of their past due to colonialism. The book discusses personal engagement with the remains of plunder, and how such engagement takes place with “remains of a violent crime.” For Palestinians, erasing the past is tantamount to erasing their own claims, which ties directly into the colonial looting initiatives to silence Palestinian narratives. 

Much attention is devoted to the remains of Palestinian photographer and cinematographer Hani Jawherieh’s visual work, salvaged by his widow, Hind. Through Jawherieh’s visual remains of plunder, as El Hassan calls the remains of Palestinian archives, the author explores several themes in relation to colonial plunder and the Palestinians’ links to what remains and how they can relate to those remains. Exhibited at P21 Gallery in London, Jawherieh’s remaining work was not at risk of being plundered by Israel. However, the remains are imbued with colonial violence. “There is nothing normal about interacting with remains that emerge after violence; so, as these visual remains were handled, the handler would be constantly confronted with this reality.”

El Hassan notes that what Jawherieh had intended while photographing the Palestinian reality during the years of anti-colonial resistance in the 1960s and 1970s – that is, the eventual liberation of Palestine through the Fedayeen, is no longer a reality when viewing the remains of his work. Thus, the distortion between the photographer’s intention and expectation, and the viewer’s experience, is a constant reminder of the same colonial violence that severed the link between the work and its ultimate viewing after being salvaged. Only seven prints remain out of Jawherieh’s body of work. 

The book’s discussion about the visual remains of plunder is rooted in Palestinian history. El Hassan notes, for example, that Palestinian films “from the revolutionary era had no trailers and were released mostly in makeshift cinemas located in refugee camps.” Various other snippets of history, as well as imagined memory, are linked to specific discussions. For example, Jawherieh’s daughter can smell gunpowder upon unpacking her father’s camera and she invites the author to participate in this moment. However, it is the imagined memory linked to her father’s killing that makes this memory accessible to the daughter. Trauma is ever present in the plundered remains of Palestinian archives. 

The absence of Palestinian archives also transforms the remains of plundered archives into personal property, which in turn creates spaces in which the rest of society are unable to reconnect with particular instances of the past. Through the narratives of the Palestinian Cinema Institute, the work of Hani Jawherieh and the author’s own research and film, the book seeks liberation “from the absence of visual images and of a past that has been plundered.” 

El Hasasn exhibits incredible consciousness in her written work, which is both descriptive and intimate in terms of the emotion associated with the archival plunder and persistent loss. Trauma is a recurring theme and one which forms part of the book’s conclusion, as the author describes blurred boundaries, the incomplete images as a result of colonial violence, and how even incomplete images that carry trauma within can enable Palestinians to speak and process their own trauma. However, El Hassan maintains, as she discusses earlier in the book, plunder renders the historical sequences incomplete and prevents Palestinians from reaching closure, because colonialism in Palestine is ongoing. It is through digital technology that Palestinians can counter the cycle of colonial violence by preserving what remains, and what continues to unfold, in terms of Palestinian visual images and film.