Abstract
Following World War I, photography and photojournalism were growing in British Mandate Palestine as were tensions between the immigrating and resident Jewish populations and the resident Arab populations. As increasingly violent riots began to break out, the nature of photographed representation in Palestine morphed to reflect the surrounding violence. This paper discusses the changes in the public presentation of Palestinian photographs to enhance the depiction of these violent encounters and their historical and political significance from the end of World War I through the Arab Riots of 1936.
This historical time span provides sufficient examples of violent confrontations between the two groups vying for legitimacy while still entrenched in a colonial setting. After the end of World War I in 1918, the Palestinian population, the Jewish population, and the British military became increasingly engaged in altercations leading up to the Arab Riots of 1936. Cameras captured the portrayed reality before and after the rioting in Jerusalem and Jaffa, among other locales. With the escalation of these rifts, the photographs depicted more violence than ever before.
These new interpretations of the violent events, however, reflect the contextual surroundings. This paper addresses the identities of the photographers behind the camera from the Palestinian and Arab communities and the distribution channels through which the photographs were reproduced. Furthermore, I analyze the depicted events and the relevance of the vantage point in contributing to the efficacy of reporting the event. The photographs transform from ones presenting merely scenes of mass public gathering to those showing individual acts and results of violence, such as those running from danger and corpses.
In order to ascertain the progression of violent depiction, I use Arabic newspapers, such as Falastin, in addition to photograph collections and chronicled histories. Articles from the Arabic press provide the historical and sociocultural context for which the photographs were taken.
The eighteen years I discuss are situated within an intermediate period of increasing confrontations between two defining moments of the conflict: the Balfour Declaration, which encourages a Jewish homeland, and the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, which establishes Israel as a state. In analyzing the snapshots, this paper shows the normalizing ability of pictorial violence within the milieu of British Mandate Palestine. This paper highlights the role of popularized imagery of violence in anti-colonial movements as a new tool for political expression.
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