Tamara Rayan, "Archival Imperialism"

Rayan, Tamara N. (2021, November 8). Archival imperialism: Examining Israel’s Six Day War files in the era of “decolonization”.[Special issue on Unsettling the Archives.] Across the Disciplines, 18(1/2), 108-121. https://doi.org/10.37514/ATD-J.2021.18.1-2.09

Rayan examines the Six Day War Files Collection and uses frameworks of settler colonialism, epistemic delinking, and symbolic annihilation to deconstruct the Israeli narrative it presents. One central question is whether it is valid to study an archive that is problematic, in this case asserting a colonial narrative that erases the nationhood and in many cases the presence of Palestinian people. Rayan sees value in countering such archives:

If Palestinian history is to be reinstated where it has been erased, I argue that we must not limit our focus to the boundaries of the archive. We must extend this analysis to the larger apparatuses of Israeli imperialism within which the archive operates.

Rayan's main argument is that the Six Day War Files are further marginalizing Palestinians--for example in sharing the narrative of Israeli officials who only refer to them as "arabs" thereby denying nationhood--by symbolically annihilating "the idea of Palestinians." The Israeli records creators have flipped the identity of indigenous and settler between Israeli and Palestinian peoples--a compelling point supporting Rayan's thesis. Rayan points out rhetorical moves as well as telling absences in the narrative to point to a colonialist narrative constructed through the choices of archivists--it's critical archival analysis presents a strong point about this narrative of erasure.