Clean Hands

Ariella Azoulay

Some artists in Israel have been trying to deal with the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. Their art may be examined in relation to some specific conditions: territorial relations, the ambivalent status of political borders, and the dialectical effacement of places and images. In a wider context, their art may be examined in terms of sight and site in relation to the transformation of the modern forms of war and its photographic conditions. I have tried to present these various conditions in their actual context through a discussion of four artistic projects: family photos taken by "unknown photographers," collected and classified by Michal Heiman; a rethinking of the Holy Places in the works of Sigalit Landau and of Boaz and Dana Zonshein; and the interpretation of media images of the occupation, and of figures of speech representing it, in the paintings of David Reeb.

The first section of this article includes some general remarks about war and borders. The second section presents two major fantasies of western culture which are related to national and museological discourses-the fantasy of purification and evacuation and the fantasy of conservation and recycling. In the third and fourth sections, these fantasies are used in order to clarify the political and cultural administration of Jerusalemís conflictual space and history.

I.

War is not a matter of routine. It is precisely a violation of the routine. It breaks out, its commencement is declared, its end is agreed upon. To be called it a war, it must be a relatively isolated event that takes place within a limited period of time on the presumption, by at least one of the sides, that a resolution can be reached. When it continues more than a reasonable length of time and appears to be unresolved, when the two sides wear out each other's strength it is then termed a war of attrition.

War is only one form of the economy of violence; it is conducted between states, between armed forces. An armed conflict between two sides is a precondition for war. Occupation is another form of the economy of violence. The precondition for occupation is in effect the prevention of the use of force (fighting or deterrence) by the occupied side. In a traditional modern war, territory is divided by a border. The front becomes the stage where the battle takes place. In a state of occupation, the whole occupied territory becomes a stage; nevertheless, the border isnít completly eliminated. Israel is in a state somewhere between war and occupation, and these two forms of economy of violence and territorial division are at the base of its political, cultural, and language economy.

The 1967 war amplified the ambivalent status of the border in Israeli political and cultural discourses. The border between Israel and the Palestinian ocuupied territories was named "The Green Line," and, like a chameleon, it has been seen and unseen, maintained and denied, traced and effaced. The line reproduced the logic of previous Israeli occupation of Palestinian places and images, for examle the Hebraization of place-names (Arabic Ein Hud to Hebreu Ein Hod, meaning "spring of sublime beauty"), the appropriation of major symbols (the cactus) and their endowment with new meaning, or the practices of conservation and reconstruction which appropriate and invent an authentic local style.

The border, under different forms, meanings, functions and uses, is repeated frequently in David Reebís paintings. By using different scales to represent the border, it becomes an ambivalent figure (see photo 1 & 2). In one way it limits the territory, but in another way it opens a new visual field that contradicts this demarcation of territory. The very form of the "Green Line" becomes a dialectical statement. This line, designed to separate the territories, is not shown in the paintings as an independent form or line; instead, the whole contour of the Israeli state is indented in the place of the Palestinian territories. Thus, the border performs not only the functions of demarcation and separation, but also that of identifying the countryís new shape. The paintings of David Reeb are one of the rare places where one can find the "Green Line" or an icon of the map of Israel without the territories behind the "Green Line." Official maps do not represent this line. In this specific context, the repetition of the "Green Line" as an icon in the painting of Reeb might be interpreted as a practice of training the eye-of both the artist and the spectator-to the future shape of Israel.

One way or another, the border changes the visual field. In some paintings, a change in scale transforms the border from an icon to be seen into a kind of a vision instrument, a peephole or even a new eye which frames the sight: an eye in the shape of the "Green Line." This shape covers the front of the painting in a way that obliges the spectator to view the whole scene depicted by the artist via this particular "Green Line" shape.

At the end of September 1996, just after the openning of the tunnel in the Temple Mount by the Israeli governement, the Palestinians fought in order to demarcate a clear border between them and the Israeli forces. These violent events took place in order to achieve what the peace process had failed to achieves-the demarcation of a border between Israel and the occupied territories. A border means the cessation of the occupation (and its possible transformation into a war), the cessation of a state of affairs in which one side limits the actions of the other and obliges it to suspend its power. A border is a necessary precondition for a modern war (otherwise we are dealing with another kind of event), as much as the war is a means for establishing the border.

The Michal Heiman Archives contain many images taken from family albums since the beginning of the Zionist movement. These photos are classified in several sections. Under one of them, called "Border," Heiman classified photos showing people in front of borders and monuments. These photos, taken by private citizens with their own camera, were taken regularly by Israelis in front of new borders following each war, in order to provide photographic proof of their phantasmagoric ownership of the territory. The "unknown photographer," the main figure behind these archives and the producer of these images, almost always provides the same colonial gesture in various places (see photo 3). The photographic practice takes part in the transformation of the real conquest into a touristic conquest. The main figure in the photos is the border. By the simultaneous presence of the photographed individual in front of the camera and beyond the border, a clear-cut territorial demarcation is produced. These photos, with others classified in different sections form the Michal Heiman Tests (MHT), a critical project of common psychological tests: Thematic Aperception Tests (TAT). The MHT emphasizes the ambivalent status of the chosen images and the particular contexts of their conditions of production, viewing, and decipherment. These photos are almost always after-war photos. They maintain the linear course of time and the difference between wartime and touristic spectator time.

Today, the economy of photography has a new role within the economy of violence. The camera designates the place of war and has become one of its distinct agents. The camera dislocates the border and may be understood as a distinct indicator of the transformation of war from a specific territorial configuration into multiple singular acts of violence, which are not necessarily any less systematic. Wherever the camera is situated, it is preparing the arena for the war that will take place or is taking place. This new arena is less and less dependent on the border. The camera may arrive in order to illuminate, restrain, restrict, criticize, and supervise the violence and use of force, but it may become the marker of a local border where the coming bloodshed will be declared. This new economy of violence linked to the economy of photography raises in a very acute way the illusionistic aspect of the faith that instruments of control and destruction can be turned, by dint of their users' intentions, into instruments of rescue or critique.

"I" (the full name of a combat soldier may not be disclosed) is a Cobra helicopter pilot in the Israeli Air Force, who flew spectacular missions into Lebanon daily during the recent "Grapes of Wrath" operation. Equipped with a sophisticated optical array, "I" set out to "cleanse" the area. He performed dozens of missions, the object of which was to destroy targets, and returned unharmed to his base. A few days before the shelling of Kfar Kana, I met with "I." My purpose was to listen at close hand to pilotsí language, the organizing paradigm of which is a panoptic viewpoint that facilitates control and "cleansing." "I" operates sophisticated cameras that make it possible for him to believe that he does indeed have a panoptic viewpoint, control, and "cleansing" capability. His panoptic conception is driven and guided by the panoptic conception of those who send him and who, by means of "I" and his like, hold sway over a broader panoptic field that includes history, politics, resources, and logistics. Like a Russian doll, or alternatively like a telescopic lens, "I's" eye is situated in the visual field of another "I" who is himself situated in the visual field of yet another "I" above him, and so on and so forth; legions of eyes trained to identify and shoot down targets.

The paradigm of a sopisticated, trained and professional eye-which can distinguish between what is important and what is not, identify targets and overtake them-is familiar from other disciplines in which pressing a button destroys inanimate objects at the most, never talking heads. "I" relies on himself and on his subordinates to accurately hit only the targets and prevent unnecessary accidents. Several days after I spoke with "I" more than a hundred people were murdered in the "accidental" artillery shelling of refugees at the U.N. base at Kfar Kana in south Lebanon. I held no further conversation with "I" but one suspects that he would have said that such accidents don't happen with him and his Cobras. In their case, it's a matter of surgical elimination. Accidents do occur, yes, but only rarely, and not on such a scale. With them the purpose is to "cleanse," to destroy targets, not to massacre. With them the hits are accurate. A learned discussion of thermal optics would have served as the scientific basis for his claim.

The massacre at Kfar Kana-just like another, "minor" incident in which an ambulance and all its occupants were destroyed-was no accident. These are events that make sense within the logic of occupation, of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip on the one hand, and of southern Lebanon on the other. But these events can also be understood within the logic of the arms that generated them. For what would occupation and implements of destruction be without these accidents? Are not these accidents exactly the sort of events which make up the essential nature of occupation and of implements of destruction?

"The development of technology is pure warfare." Technology creates a space in which the border for which the agents of war are responsible becomes negligible, within the framework of the overall bloodshed that is taking place in a large number of focal points, which are not necessarily connected to borders or territorial demarcations.

II.

Sigalit Landau's exhibition took place at the Israel Museum in 1995, the 28th year of the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem-28 years during which the organization of space and the distribution of representations in the public space of Jerusalem have been in the hands of one authority, one body determining the rules of the place-the rules according to which Jerusalem as an archive of past and present is governed and preserved.

The exhibition included a video film by Sigalit Landau which takes place along two axes: an interview with the person responsible for Museum hygiene (which is supervised at its entrance gates), and documentation of Landauís (staged) ejection from the Museum into a garbage container, traveling inside the truck to the Palestinian village of El-Azariya, where she is tipped out together with the garbage. The video film and the exhibition initiate a discussion about sites (museum, garbage dump), the borders that mark them (walls, military closure), exit openings (garbage truck), manifest and latent networks that connect sites (garbage removal), and purification and sterilization procedures (the scientific discourse).

But the main protagonist of Sigalit Landauís exhibition is Jerusalem, the symbol of the Israelo-Palestinian conflict and the unspoken centerpiece of their peace agreements (see photo 4).

The way Landau confronts the national discourse of garbage removal with the museological discourse of purification encourages a larger discussion about the linkage between these discourses of purification, evacuation, conservation and recycling. Two main fantasies can be formulated in relation to these discourses.

Fantasy A. The area is sterile, the vision is clear, and rays of light flood the field, which is clean-shaven. Any bristle will be trapped in the lens, designated as a target, and destroyed. Each bristle will be examined and a machine adapted to it, a machine brought to life specifically in order to practice the discovery and focused extermination of a single type. Registers and lists of types and species will facilitate classification. Central border lines, which by their nature determine who is on which side, will be drawn up on several fronts. Each border line will have two sides, a bright one and a dark one, an interior and exterior, up and down, appropriate and inappropriate, desirable and undesirable. Like garbage, the inappropriate or undesirable will find its way outside; it will be compressed, as in the action of an involuntary muscle acting not upon any command, trained to fulfill its function like an automaton.

The border line is a replacement for the routine action of the muscles of the digestive system, which grind the food and hasten it on its way to the anus, from whence they help to expel it, in its undesirable form, outside. The border line doesn't operate on its own. Several muscles take part in the operational activity and transform it into dull routine, its motions unfelt, like a monotonous procession of recurrent diploid contractions/relaxations that preserve the appearance of "no motion." The dark side situated on one side of the border-in effect, behind the border-is expelled beyond the illuminated visual field most of the time, and it becomes a black and glutinous crater which swallows those things that require explanation, the causal relations that enable one side to be illuminated and the other side to remain dark, turbid, vulgar, lacking in nuance, subordinate, and, often enough, willing to serve. Instead of causal relations, spectacular plans for increasing the intensity of the light and its proliferation abroad may suffice: a sort of annular expansion of the diploid procession, a centrifugal movement of illumination. This movement is accompanied by involuntarily induced friction activities, commercial relations, violent motions, exploitation and compulsion, murderous "cleansing," acts of rape and acts of spite that will reconstitute the border each time it may seem to the occupant of the dark side that he is drawing nearer to the light.

"All my life I have lived in killing, in blood, in what you call disturbances of the peace. I grew up in a refugee camp near Ramallah and there was nothing else to do there. I was born in the Nusseirat camp in Gaza, and I was five years old when Sharon decided to widen the roads, so that terrorists wouldn't roam through the alleys. I don't know what occupation is or what Jews are. I just remember that people came in the night and destroyed our house, put us on a truck and dumped us like garbage in the middle of Ramallah" (Naji Nasser).

The cleansing muscular action has been assimilated into dull routine; it seems outside time, circular, devoid of purpose or reason. It is nevertheless subordinate to a vision extending into the future, which criticizes the murky past and is willing to pay the price at present for the benefit of a future that seems to be formulated like a series of clauses in a contract, the realization of which is destined for the morrow. One dunam after another, we shall cleanse the entire world, build roads, capture wanted men, and increase our store of sterile areas.

Fantasy B. This too is concerned with the digestive system. Instead of eliminating the

refuse and burying it in dumps of various kinds, it seeks to transform it into part of the barter economy. Not only the language by means of its coinages, but the crater as well; to stand on the verge of the abyss and discover that the water is shallow. The crater is not something exterior. The crater is not the unseemly, the undesirable, the inferior; it is possible to maintain relations with its inhabitants that are not merely linguistic. Instead of burying the dead, it is possible to recycle them, to inject them into the circle of life, like ghosts, to turn them into seemly corpses. The cemetery that has placed death out of bounds will be abolished. Every border will be examined and found arbitrary, to be replaced by a local, singular border, a border that doesn't presume to represent or speak on behalf of anybody, a border that isn't determined only by authorized agents, a border that seeks to undermine the authority of the authorized, a border behind which there is nothing but the border itself, which is enmeshed in a network of borders that are pushing inside, in an involuntary motion, everything that has presumed to be outside the border. Cubic meters of garbage, thousands of years old, is being injected into the exchange relations of blood, capital, representations, money, and metaphors.

It seems natural to think that Fantasy B would like to do away with Fantasy A. That is to say, it follows the other chronologically and seeks to take its place, to replace its method of organizing space, which is based on a number of borderlines that separate different areas in hierarchic fashion, with another method of organizing space, within the framework of which each point is also, in principle, a borderline, which has lost its limiting essential nature because it has also become limited by the lines and points that surround it.

Fantasy B is like the corrective experience of Fantasy A. The movement outside from the interior, which characterized Fantasy A, hasn't ceased to exist; on the contrary, Fantasy B infinitely multiplies the sites from which it is performed. Concurrently, the movement inside from the exterior, which characterizes Fantasy B-the corrective action, the purpose of which is to undermine the border that presumes to separate the exterior from the interior, and to include the exterior inside-is also performed from countless points.

Small lamps hang from the necks of people, whose job it is each time to cross for a short while the border between the bright side and the dark, to illumine some of the frictions, to report them, to burn them into paper or record them on magnetic tape. Unknowingly they are the agents of the language which the crater has sprouted, they are driven by the faith that their lamp may help those who live in the dark to drape themselves in some light. They may be emissaries of Fantasy A as well as Fantasy B. They are realizing a vision of a better world-which always shatters in the face of good intentions-hostages of the instruments for seeing and showing meant to facilitate its realization, like cameras and museums.

An hour before the massacre at Kfar Kana, a French television camera interviewed some of the refugees who were staying at the U.N. shelter. The camera documented the heads which were led to the slaughter a short while later. The camera demarcated a territory on which the artillery shells could home in. The camera and the missile were manufactured in the same factory; the factory of sophisticated, precise optics.

III.

Fantasy A. When the Arabs conquered Jerusalem in the 7th century, they had to remove vast quantities of accumulated garbage that covered the Temple Mount compound. They then built the El-Aksa Mosque there. The Crusaders conquered the city in 1099, slaughtered Jews and Moslems, removed all signs of Islam from the Temple Mount site, and transformed the Mosque into a Christian basilica. One hundred years later, Jerusalem was again purified when the Moslems returned and removed all crosses and symbols of Christian ritual. Descriptions of Jerusalem from the 18th century tell of a neglected city, in ruin, overflowing with garbage. Extended Ottoman rule neglected the acts of purification. Afterwards there was an Egyptian occupation, then Ottoman rule again, followed by British, Israeli, and Jordanian rule, each occupation accompanied by removal activities. The Israeli army conquered East Jerusalem, including the Old City, in the 1967 war. The first commander to enter the compound is said to have exclaimed: "Temple Mount is in our hands. Repeat. Temple Mount is in our hands." Immediately after the conquest of the Temple Mount, the Israeli army set about "cleansing" the buildings and the minarets of Arab Legion soldiers, then vacated and razed an adjacent Moslem neighborhood. The David Tower Museum, founded in 1988, was the climax of a conservation practice which aimed effectively at cleansing and purifying. The story of the city of Jerusalem, as written inside this museum, is a result of the cleansing of the story from any disturbing details which might trouble the casual order which enables the occupation to continue.

But the story of Jerusalem may also be told according to the other fantasy, Fantasy B. Jerusalem's first museum-the museum of the Greek Orthodox patriarchy-was established in 1858. In 1902, the Franciscan Museum was established in the Church of the Flagellation. In 1905, Bezalel's museum was established with the goal of collecting Jewish cultural treasures from all over the world. Indeed, this collection was the basis of the Israel Museum which opened in 1965. In 1923, the Supreme Moslem Council established the Islamic Museum. In 1938, the Rockefeller Museum was established in East Jerusalem, its main goal being to house archaeological treasures.

Each of these museums represented its own point of view, a point of view that determined the rules of the place and its exhibits. The establishment of a museum marks a threshold consisting of treasure hoarding and control over the entrance gates as to what should be let in. These museums existed side by side in the space of simultaneity and heterogeneity. This is not a common description of cultural or political space in Jerusalem. Common descriptions aim at banishing simultaneity and heterogeneity and imposing an image of one hegemony. They inevitably form part of a discourse of purification dealing with exit gates, the removal of garbage-elements that interfere with new images taking over and proliferating.

"My handling of the trouble you've brought into the museum," said Mr. Bigeleisen, supervisor at the Israel Museum, to Sigalit Landau, in regard to her request to bring a mushroom into the museum, "consisted of isolating your trouble inside a transparent bubble. You didn't want to kill it, you wanted to maintain it inside the museum space, in order to keep it alive. By bringing such a thing into the museum space you are endangering the museum space" (David Bigeleisen).

"The people had already been there half a year. It was fiercely hot, an inferno. The situation was terrible. It looked like ruins. I saw families sitting, dirty, filthy. A little food would be brought to them. It was a camp of lean-tos, rundown houses left from the time of the Egyptians. A family lived in each house. Little kids running around barefoot, naked, dirty. There wasn't enough water. They were supplied with a little drinking water. There were no showers. They would take a little water from the container that the army provided and bathe. There were women there, children and the aged-there were no young men at the camp, they had been sent to the large detention camp at Abu Rodes. I was horrified upon my return from the visit. I saw it as something that shouldn't have been done. It was a terrible lapse on the part of the State of Israel. When I sat with Ziyad El-Husseini's mother, she said to me: `You are keeping us here like animals.' I said to her: `You have a son who is a murderer, what would you have us do?' What was I supposed to say to her, `It's a mistake, you're right'? You can't demand too much of me, after all, I was representing the State of Israel" (Colonel [Res.] Yitzhak Pundak).

At different levels in Landau's exhibition, the cultural discourse dealing with the Museum, with purification and control of the entrance gates, is confronted by the parallel or complementary discourse about purification, a national discourse. This complementary discourse is an allegory of the purification that accompanied each conquest of the City since its establishment and now accompanies the Israeli occupation and the power relations between Israelis and Palestinians imposed by it.

"We wanted to create an atmosphere of a strong military government. Those deported, some of whom, as I said, had simply been arrested in the street and didn't belong to any terrorist organization at all, were transported to Tel Azafi at the tip of the Dead Sea and sent packing towards the Jordan. The deportation operation was called `Patient.' There were some who hadn't confessed during interrogation who were also deported" ("Nate," a General Security Service official).

The space of Landau's exhibition looks like a violent encounter between a modernist discourse about purification and art, significantly expressed by the museum space, and a colonial discourse about "cleansing" and exploitation. Various objects help to mark out territorial divisions of the space and are positioned as dialectical images; dialectics without the following stage, without sublation (Aufhebung). Thus, for instance, on the left side of the metal door that has been transformed into a tent shelter, there are two hollows produced by the application of heat, looking like the imprint of an atomic explosion-two mushrooms of destruction which, at the same time, transmit a message of warmth and shelter, as might be expected from a protective structure; or the "Rock" (the foundation of the Temple Mount) whose reconstructed impression is positioned in the center of the show space. This is the crater under the "Rock," a world which can be reorganized at the push of a button and is composed of green computer mouse pads, physical data taken from the virtual world. The pads having been exposed to food, drink, and time, have turned into a fungal culture designing its own living world of color, shape, and organic health. The fungus is banned at the Museum gates-it is exhibited in a hermetic case-where it is identified with filth, rejection and infection. But only a few kilometers away, in El-Azariya, the site of the municipal garbage dump, the fungus is perceived as harmless. It lives there, breathes, decomposes the garbage that others dig into and earn a living from.

This is the face of the occupation, like a zero sum game: here plenty, there need. What is prohibited here is allowed there, and vice versa. The Museum removes its garbage to El-Azariya. El-Azariya is situated in a Palestinian area where, from time to time, prolonged closure is imposed by the Israeli army. The garbage dump has become the source of income for many who have lost their source of income in Israel as a result of the closure.

"There are Palestinians who work in the garbage in order to survive. Since the closure, there are several hundred who stand there each day waiting for the garbage to arrive from Jerusalem, from the Jews. They are looking for aluminum or something good to sell, sometimes clothes. I went and took pictures and they didn't believe it, they thought I was exaggerating. So I went and conducted a full investigation, why they come, what they do. These are simply hungry people who've been going there for several years already, although we didn't know about it" (Haled Zigari).

The computerized image produced by Dana and Boaz Zonshein this year presents an unprecedented view of one of the main holy places in Jerusalem, the Wailing Wall (see photo 5). The Wall in their image is immersed in the sea at a moment of catastrophe, a quite ridiculous one, for Jerusalem, unlike Tel-Aviv or Haifa, is known for being a city that has no coastline and popular wisdom has it that its native residents hardly know how to swim. A crowded line of people stands in front of the Wall. They look as if they are entrapped between the Wall on one side and the sea on the other. Their territory has been condensed into a mere line that can hardly contain them. The image seems to portray an anxiety similar to "being thrown to the sea," a catastrophe frequently formulated in Hebrew to describe the impossibility of making peace with the Arabs, as that is their only goal. The computerized image contains the Wall, the sea and the crowded line. All other relics have been eliminated. The Wall in this image is emptied of its religious and national meaning; it is just a grey board, a tabula rasa ready for a new game, either within the evacuation logic of Fantasy A, or within the recyling logic of Fantasy B.

IV.

The Temple is placed on the mountain. It is a Temple without owners, because the Temple is the owner of those who pretend to be its owners. He who offers provocation to the temple with the colonial gesture of trying to grasp it in his hand-"Temple mount is in my hand"-must eventually realize that he is brandishing a mighty fist and causing unjustified evil.

In Landauís exhibition, the form of the holy stone is reconstructed with computer pads (see photo 6). Nearby there is a bar of soap in the form of a computer mouse (see photo 7). This is a reminder that holiness is a virtual affair: there is no ownership, and by consequence, no changing of ownership. Instead of changing hands (that is, ownership), one may rest content with "hands-on" commands like computer commands: "open" Temple Mount, "cancel" Temple Mount, "replace" Temple Mount. With a computer-mouse-shaped soap in hand, Temple Mount can be held in the hand. With a push of a button, one might "multiply" Jerusalem or "divide" it. "Divide Jerusalem!": "I went with a lump of clay to try to capture the shape of the ëRockí because taking pictures is banned there. This is really an amazing place. It is difficult to get up there because prayers take place there all the time. The whole idea of the exhibition was to provide an alternative, to explain to people that they are going to return the eastern part of the city to the Palestinians, to build a replacement, and recognize that the Israel Museum could be the replacement: this is a mount and this is a mount."

Only after the division of the city of Jerusalem into two different cities will it be possible to clean hands and get rid of the dirt of the occupation. And finally have "clean hands."