As a discursive supplement to the exhibition »The Promise, the Land,« a two-day symposium was held at Linz's O.K., with international – including Israeli and Palestinian – participants. This seemed a necessary measure in order to place the precarious situation in which the exhibition found itself into the context of a broader political discourse. The first part of the symposium, »Unfamiliar Territories – Identity and Representation in the Visual Culture,« dealt with Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian identity constructions. The second section, »Under (De-)Construction – Positions and Perspectives in Political Criticism,« concentrated on the sociopolitical analysis of societies. Not explicitly taken up during the symposium were the historical and political dimensions of exhibiting critically-minded Israeli art in formerly Fascist Austria, today under the influence of a right-wing government, and, at that, on the eve of war in Iraq. But these issues did find their way into some of the presentations, while a tangible tension pervaded the entire symposium.

The lectures – particularly those given by Israeli participants – came from the left-wing spectrum, critical of the current administration. This criticism came to light in various ways: some endeavored to deconstruct the myths upon which Israeli was founded along with their pictorial representations, while others analyzed the overall sociopolitical situation. The most fundamental lecture on the history and present-day problems of Israeli society was held by Moshe Zuckermann, the current director of the Institute for German History in Tel Aviv. He launched his talk by making a categorical distinction between Judaism, Israel and Zionism. »Not every Jew is a Zionist, not every Zionist is an Israeli, und not every Israeli is a Jew.« In terms of the history of ideas, he placed the emergence of Zionism in the context of the national liberation movements in nineteenth-century Europe. He sketched several phenomena as numbering among the present-day conflict axes in Israeli society: the contradiction between secular civil society and a theocratic social order; the ethnic issue, comprising broad social and cultural differences between the various Jewish immigrant groups; the growing income gap caused by increasing privatization; the group of Arab, Palestinian inhabitants with an Israeli passport, as well as the huge ongoing wave of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, mostly secularized settlers who practically form a state within a state. All of these major structural problems take a back seat these days to the urgent threat from outside. Yet these inner-Israeli potentials for conflict might serve to make the Middle East peace process even more difficult. What Israel should strive for, in Zuckermann's view, is a bi-national state structure, formed out of Palestinian and Israeli sub-states.

On the first day of the exhibition, art projects by Aim Deüelle Lüski, photo artist, theoretician and art critic, and network artist Horit Herman Peled were presented. These projects dealt with how images are produced by the media (and the accessibility of such images), while basically focusing on borderline situations. Raz Yosef discussed Zionism as an ideological project from the perspective of film scholarship, describing it as an undertaking that was allegedly fixated on the Jewish sexual identity, especially that of the Jewish male. He contrasted the Anti-Semitic scientific/medical discourse in turn-of-the-century Europe, in which the body of the Jewish male connoted illness, insanity, degeneration, sexual perversion, femininity and homosexuality, with the Zionist movement's desire to transform this image toward that of the hyper-masculine Israeli colonist and explorer. For today's viewer, the film clips shown, with their old-fashioned pictorial rhetoric and emphatic form of expression, had their comic elements, but they also offered some uncanny moments. One example was a film about a child who grew up in a concentration camp, and who, once released, was still unable to read his new environment and the body language of the people there as anything other than threatening. (»Adama«, 1947; by Helmer Lerski). At the same time, Yosef sees elements of the uncanny as being interwoven with the national Israeli discourse, and believes that they incessantly subvert the strived-for, but nonetheless imaginary, coherence of the Zionist story.

The presentation given by psychoanalyst Avi Rybnicki, who grew up in Germany and today lives in Tel Aviv, was entitled »Trauma, the Return of the Repressed and War Upon War – Is There a Way Out?«. Rybnicki described the traumata undergone by Israelis and Palestinians and the manipulative use of such traumata in politics. He views the definitive trauma of the Israeli population as being the Shoah, which is reactivated with every single terrorist attack. The attack »always catches one unawares and does not allow for subsequent retranscription (Nachträglichkeit), nor for time coordinates, borders or a symbolic dimension.« An imaginary line connects the arbitrariness of terror with the arbitrariness of the concentration camps, catapulting those affected into a neurotic state that can then be exploited by right-wing politicians. The Palestinians live under similar conditions of identification with the status of victim; their central trauma would be the expulsion (1948), reinforced by decades of living in refugee camps in Arab states. Both sides see themselves as victims, and feel weak, under attack, threatened and morally superior (whereby Rybnicki does not intend to negate the differences in status, military power, etc.). According to Rybnicki, the persistence of these traumata and the resulting compulsion to repeat what has happened in the past make the intervention of a third party necessary if a political solution to these conflicts is to be achieved. But this is difficult due to the fact that, for non-Jews (in the Christian civilization), Jews represent the necessary Other, those who split off from the mainstream and are therefore somehow uncanny. Within Europe, this relationship is colored in addition by (partially repressed) feelings of guilt, which give events in the Middle East a strong emotional charge in the perception of the European audience.

The two Palestinian contributions to the symposium, by Fareed Armaly, artist and curator, and Issam Nassar, historian, concerned themselves in particular with images of Palestine and the Palestinians in the media and the political use made of such representations – discussed using the example of a project last shown at documenta11, Armaly's »From/To,« and also, more generally, European photography in Palestine since 1900.

Finally, the contributions of Ariella Azoulay, author and director, and Ilan Pappe, political scientist, gave the impression of an Israeli intelligentsia that is extremely critical of the regime. Azoulay spoke about citizenship, violence and war; Ilan Pappe's talk centered on the idea of denial and its central role in the constitution of the State of Israel. In the sole German contribution, »Konkret,« publisher Hermann Gremliza discussed the relationship of the German Left to Israel. Gremliza made use of the saying, »the Germans, who are unable forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.« This is in and of itself quite an interesting theme, but it was presented quite polemically by Gremliza. In the end, it remained unclear as to which sources fed both the extreme rejection of Israeli politics as well as the non-conditional support of Israel, and also which role is played here by projections and repression in the political realm and which interest groups might ultimately instrumentalize such repression.

Remapping the Region, Symposium, 7 to 8 March 2003, O.K. – Centrum für Gegenwartskunst, Linz

 

Translated by Jenny Taylor-Gaida

 

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