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 Socialization 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, Monopolizing and Expropriation
7 Observing “Their Catastrophe”
Index