Archival Imperialism: Examining Israel�s Six Day War Files in the Era of �Decolonization�

Abstract

This research investigates how the interventions of records’ creators and archivists have shaped the Six Day War Files Collection to sustain Israel’s own narrative of the War. Using a theoretical framework of settler colonialism, epistemic delinking, and symbolic annihilation, this narrative is deconstructed to showcase how it has served to further Israeli colonialism at the expense of Palestinians being marginalized as a people and Palestine being erased as an autonomous state. In constructing this narrative, Palestinians were excluded from the telling of the Six Day War, and in instances where they could not be erased, they were misrepresented or maligned. By delinking the records from their colonial context and unsettling this narrative, Palestinians’ experience of coloniality can be reinstated where it was excluded. This paper offers a novel perspective to the current archival scholarship regarding Palestine, revealing how symbolic annihilation in the archive extends and is an extension of systemic annihilation. Moreover, it challenges traditional archival practices which have historically paved the way for acts of imperialism to occur unquestioned. A common tactic that imperial nations use to assert their sovereignty within another nation is to construct and perpetuate representations that depict that nation and its people as inferior. Colonization is a devious system. As a territory is appropriated and exploited for another nation’s gain, the colonizer is exonerated from any wrongdoings because they employ “a racialism that systematically devalues the self-worth, culture and history of the colonized” (Ghaddar and Caswell, 2019, p. 72). While the colonizer interjects their own invasive settler society, this denial of the worth of the colonized “justifie[s] various policies of either extermination or domestication” (Tuhiwai Smith, 2012, p. 27). The continued existence of indigenous1 populations over time comes to be seen as a threat while the existence of the settler is safeguarded using apartheid walls, security fences, and reserves. Controlling the idea of the colonized, however, goes beyond misrepresentation, extending into the archive and becoming truth in a nation’s official documentation. The monopolization of archival material is the colonization of information, an intentional tactic used to regulate, control, and subjugate the colonized alongside the theft and remapping of their territory (Stoler, 2002, p. 97). How do we as archivists engage with problematic archival materials knowing that they are still valuable sites of inquiry despite being moored to imperialism? It begins with a shift—an “epistemic ‘delinking’ from the colonial matrix of power” (Cushman et al., 2019, p. 2), used to interrogate the records against their context of settler colonialism. The epistemology of the archive has been recontextualized through the vantage points of many different colonized groups, but the Archival Imperialism 109 ATD, VOL18(ISSUE1/2) predominant focus has been upon case studies of Indigenous peoples within Commonwealth nations (Buchanan, 2007; Luker, 2017; Genovese, 2016; Delva and Adams, 2016; Duarte and Belarde-Lewis, 2015, McCracken, 2015; Thorpe, 2014). This has left few investigations into the state archives of non-Western settler colonial nations (Khumalo, 2018; Frings-Hessami, 2019). Of these investigations, Palestine as a colonized nation has been given little attention. Moreover, within this body of scholarship the scope is largely limited to an analysis of Palestinian documentary heritage without delving critically into the gritty context of settler colonialism in which it exists. For instance, scholars have been reading against the grain of Israeli records to re-insert the historical Palestinian presence where they were willfully excluded (Sela, 2000, 2007, 2009, 2017, 2017, 2018; Davis, 2016; Doumani, 2009; Bshara, 2013; Denes, 2015). The limitation of many of these studies, however, is that they do not negate the imperial power that continues to erase Palestinians in the documentation of the present. Scholars have also sought to reconceptualize current archival practices to consider the needs of Palestinians living under occupation and in diaspora, but these practices are ineffective if unadopted by the Israeli archives continuing to perform archival imperialism (Stoler, 2018; Butler, 2009; Aboubakr, 2017). If Palestinian history is to be reinstated where it has been erased, I argue that we must not limit our focus to the boundaries of the archive. We must extend this analysis to the larger apparatuses of Israeli imperialism within which the archive operates. Since pre-Statehood, Israeli settlers have upheld a narrative that the land was “a desert supposedly empty of indigenous inhabitants,” before they arrived, which supported Zionism’s “biblical ideology designed to establish the Jewish people’s ‘historical right’ to the land” (Sela, 2016, p. 52). Since then, the Israeli military has been suppressing contradictory narratives found within Palestinian archives, non-profit institutions, and even personal records (Sela, 2017, p. 201). While Palestinian documentary heritage is colonized by Israeli imperialism, Israeli archives create and preserve their own narratives unimpeded by dissenting voices. One such archival collection is the Six Day War Files, a digital collection within the custody of the Israel State Archives (ISA). This significant body of records, held under restricted status for 50 years since their creation, document the decision-making processes of Israel’s most powerful political authorities as they reacted to the events and the aftermath of the 1967 Six Day War in real time.2 Overall, the Six Day War, referred to as Al-Naksa (The Setback) by Palestinians, set into motion territorial changes that have defined the area as we know it in the present: Israel’s victory captured the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria (Oren, 2002, p. 308). In this paper, based on research conducted during the writing of my master’s thesis, I argue that the Six Day War Files have served to further Israeli colonialism at the expense of Palestinians being marginalized as a people and Palestine being erased as an autonomous state. In order to systemically annihilate Palestinians on the ground, the records’ creators symbolically annihilated the idea of Palestinians, a process Michelle Caswell (2016) defines as “what happens to members of marginalized groups when they are absent, grossly under-represented, maligned, or trivialized” in the archive (p. 27). I engage this theory of symbolic annihilation to delink the records from their colonial context and bring “to the foreground” what has been erased: “other epistemologies, other principles of knowledge and understanding” (Mignolo, 2007, p. 453) belonging to Palestinians. The term “epistemic delinking” in relation to decoloniality originates in the discussions of Aníbal Quijano (1999, later translated to English in 2007) and Walter Mignolo (2007). These works posit that coloniality is deeply entwined with the myth of European modernity, which has justified colonial violence and exploitation in the name of power and development (Quijano, 2007, p. 169). Much