| The Article | | | The essay deals with the way uprooted Palestinian villages emptied in the 1948 war (their Palestinian inhabitants were banished or fled from the horrors of war) were visually preserved in Israeli consciousness. The essay analyzes a group of photographs taken by Israeli photographers between the years 1948 to 1951 that exist in official Israeli archives. These images, taken for Israeli national propaganda needs and whose main goal was to describe the new Jewish immigrants that were settled by the new Israeli state in these villages, show how they implement the Zionist world-view. However, and in contrast to governmental purposes, reading these institutional photography archives makes it possible to learn about Palestinian identity pre -1948, and about the Palestinians villages and people that are missing from these photographs. The essay reflects how reading the archives enables extraction of different, sometimes contrasting, layers of meanings. Therefore, photography archives function as an important source for social-political insights.
Keywords: Palestinian villages; present-absent; reading photography archives; Zionist photography; enlisted photography; Israeli institutional archives; Allan Sekula; war of 1948 in Israel/Palestine; pictorial history of Palestine; Absentee Property Law; Jewish settlement; Zionist information campaign; Zoltan Kluger (1895–1970), Trudi Schwartz. | | |
| | | | | |  | | Zoltan Kluger, An immigrants’ family sitting on their luggage in the main square in Yehud, 01/10/1948. The Government Press Office, Israel. | | |
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