Palestine and Israe
For this group of patterns, I have selected imagery that I hope will capture a sense of the complex and entangled histories of Palestine and Israel. I have provided primary sources for the images, tracing them to archives or databases, and the descriptive titles I have used are from those sources.
During this process, I have become increasingly conscious of how captions accompanying historical photographs shape our understanding of the narratives that are portrayed.
AP Photo, July 16, 1948. (Photographer unnamed.)
Although an archive may aspire to be an objective repository for information, its language is not neutral. For example, the original caption of the photograph to the right reads,
An Israeli soldier, armed with a rifle, stops some arabs (sic) in a street in Nazareth, Palestine, July 17, 1948, as they are travelling after the allotted curfew time. Israeli forces had occupied the town earlier that day.
Tamara N. Rayan, explains in, Archival Imperialism: Examining Israel’s Six Day War Files in the Era of Decolonization, the using the term “Arabs”, rather than “Palestinians”, (as we see in the caption of the Associated Press photograph dated July 16, 1948), refers to ethnicity and disregards nationality. Rayan quotes Michelle Caswell’s, Seeing Yourself in History, reminding us that,
“…the symbolic annihilation marginalized communities face in the archives has far-reaching consequences for both how communities see themselves and how history is written for decades to come”.
Reading autobiographical accounts of historical events is an important part of my process of making Redwork: The Emperor of Atlantis. These microcosms of individual experience have shaped my understanding of world events, and I often listen to them as audiobooks while designing patterns and embroidering them.
The picture to the right depicts the The Theodor Herzl, the ship that Alicia Appleman–Jurman, a Polish Holocaust survivor, travelled to Haifa aboard as a refugee from Europe in 1947. Her autobiography, Alicia: My Story, (1989), bridges the histories of WWII, the Palestine Mandate, the founding of Israel, and the Yom Kippur War.
Ghada Karmi’s, In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story, (2002), is a memoir of the Nakba – the expulsion of the Palestinian people from their land – that overlaps the latter part of Alicia Appleman–Jurman’s autobiography in time and space.
In Tracing Homelands: Israel, Palestine and the Claims of Belonging, (2022), Linda Dittmar, an Israeli-American, born in 1939 in Mandate Palestine, seeks to understand the Nakba as she travels to sites of childhood memories in Israel. Many of her memories intersect with images in the patterns in this section, including visiting Tantura in 1950, and as her family drives away from the beach, seeing women and children standing behind barbed wire. In retrospect, she realizes that they were survivors of the massacre that took place the night of May 22, 1948, during the First Arab-Israeli war.
Photo: Digital Commons, University of South Florida, Alicia Appleman–Jurman Photographs: J12-00035 Caption on bottom of photograph reads: "14-IV 1947 [untranslated Hebrew] 48".
Community parade to commemorate the Balfour Declaration, 1917 (St. Catharines, Ontario).
Photo: Franklin Caplan, Ontario Jewish Archives
A black and white photograph of the Theodor Herzl, the ship aboard which Alicia Appleman-Jurman traveled from Europe to Eratz, Israel after World War II, as seen before docking in the port of Haifa, Israel. The banner on the side of the ship reads "The Germans destroyed our families & homes - Don't you destroy our hopes".
Photo: Digital Commons, University of South Florida, Alicia Appleman–Jurman Photographs: J12-00035 Caption on bottom of photograph reads: "14-IV 1947 [untranslated Hebrew] 48".
Arab Women from the Palestinian Village of Tantura move to Jordan under the supervision of the United Nations and the Red Cross. June,1948.
Photo: Benno Rothenberg, Israel State Archives, Meitar Collection, The Pritzker Family National Photography Collection, The National Library of Israel. Call Number: ARC. 4* 2068 / 13935
An Israeli soldier, armed with a rifle, stops some arabs in a street in Nazareth, Palestine, July 17, 1948, as they are travelling after the allotted curfew time. Israeli forces had occupied the town earlier that day.
AP Photo, July 16, 1948. (Photographer unnamed.)
Memorial for the fallen soldiers in the Yom Kippur War. (The Yom Kippur War is also known as The Ramadan War, The October War, The Fourth Arab–Israeli War, and the 1973 Arab–Israeli War.)
IPPA Photographer, 14 October 1974. Dan Hadani Collection, National Library of Israel, Pritzker Family National Photography Collection. Call Number: ARC. 4* 1995 11 09497 26
A Palestinian stone thrower faces an Israeli tank, during clashes at the Karni crossing point between Israel and the Gaza Strip, on the outskirts of Gaza City, in this Oct. 29, 2000 file photo. According to Enaam Udah, 41, her son Fares Udah, 13, is the boy in the picture and was shot dead by Israeli gunfire on November 8, 2000. "We don't send our sons to an easy death, " said Udah "But if this is fated by God, then I cannot change that"
Photo: Laurent Rebours/AP Photo.
The Izz ad-Din Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the Palestinian Islamic resistance movement of Hamas, hold a military march at the Gaza port in Gaza City. The march falls on the anniversary of the capture of Israeli soldier Aron Shaul by Al Qassam Brigades during the 2014 Israeli war on Gaza.
Photo: Ahmad Hasaballah, IMAGESLIVE via ZUMA Press Wire
On October 7, 2023, Hamas soldiers attacked Israel, triggering the current Israel-Palestine War.