From Palestine to Israel A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947-1950

In this carefully curated and beautifully presented photobook, Ariella Azoulay offers a new perspective on four crucial years in the history of Palestine/Israel.

The book reconstructs the processes by which the Palestinian majority in Mandatory Palestine became a minority in Israel, while the Jewish minority established a new political entity in which it became a majority ruling a minority Palestinian population. By reading over 200 photographs from that period, most of which were previously confined to Israeli state archives, Azoulay recounts the events and the stories that for years have been ignored or only partially acknowledged in Israel and the West.

Including substantial analytical text, this book will give activists, scholars and journalists a new perspective on the origins of the Palestine-Israel conflict.

Introduction: Constituent Violence 1947–50
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
1. Military Governmentality
2. Socialisation to the State, and the Mechanisms of Subordination
3. Architecture of Destruction, Dispossession and Gaining Ownership
4. Creating a Jewish Political Body and Deporting the Country’s Arab Residents
5. Borders, Strategies of Uprooting, and Preventing Return
6. Looting, Monopolising and Expropriation
7. Observing 'Their Catastrophe'
Index

Ariella Azoulay is Professor of Modern Culture and Media and the Department of Comparative Literature, Brown University. She is the author of From Palestine to Israel (Pluto, 2011), Civil Imagination (Verso, 2011), The Civil Contract of Photography (MIT Press, 2008), and Death's Showcase (MIT Press, 2003). She won the 2002 Infinity Award for Writing, presented by the International Center for Photography for excellence in the field of photography.