Archival Imperialism: Examining Israel's Six Day War Files in the Era of "Decolonization".

Rayan, Tamara N.

This research investigates how the interventions of records’ creators and archivists have shaped the Six Day War Files Collection to sustain Israel’s own narrative of the War. Using a theoretical framework of settler colonialism, epistemic delinking, and symbolic annihilation, this narrative is deconstructed to showcase how it has served to further Israeli colonialism at the expense of Palestinians being marginalized as a people and Palestine being erased as an autonomous state. In constructing this narrative, Palestinians were excluded from the telling of the Six Day War, and in instances where they could not be erased, they were misrepresented or maligned. By delinking the records from their colonial context and unsettling this narrative, Palestinians’ experience of coloniality can be reinstated where it was excluded. This paper offers a novel perspective to the current archival scholarship regarding Palestine, revealing how symbolic annihilation in the archive extends and is an extension of systemic annihilation. Moreover, it challenges traditional archival practices which have historically paved the way for acts of imperialism to occur unquestioned.

PALESTINE; ISRAEL; IMPERIALISM; COLONIES; DECOLONIZATION; HISTORY of archives; PALESTINIANS; ARAB-Israeli conflict

Across the Disciplines, 2021, Vol 18, Issue 1/2, p108

1554-8244

Academic Journal

10.37514/ATD-J.2021.18.1-2.09