Situated imagination of Zionist borders: the feminist gender nonconforming photography of Yael Meiry

Abstract

How does the history of a nation’s relation to transgender subjects affect their situated imaginings of national territorial borders, collectivity boundaries and gender barriers? This article offers an answer to this question through a close reading of photographs by the artist Yael Meiry. Based on a visual culture analysis of Meiry’s intervention in dominant Zionist historical narrative I argue that by using their photography as an arena of a feminist, gender nonconforming situated imagining, Meiry upturns Zionist normative border-making of territory, collective and gender, demonstrating that they are always interrelated and interconnected. The article focuses on the ways in which Meiry’s situated imagination challenge the imposed normativity of the Zionist mechanisms of bordering as it is embodied in three historical dominant Zionist icons of borders, boundaries, and barriers, which were constructed as a part of the invention of a national tradition: the map, as an icon of Zionist territorial borders; the palm tree, as an icon of Zionist collective boundaries; and the fist, as an icon of the Zionist gender barriers.

KEYWORDS:

• Situated-imagination
• gender
• feminism
• transnationalism
• borders
• photography
• art
• Zionist body

Introduction: visual poetics of gender mobility

In 2010, the first permanent exhibition of Israeli art opened at the Israel Museum – the national museum of Israel, Jerusalem. A major work in this exhibition is the Zionist painter Reuven Rubin’s triptych First Fruits (1923). Rubin visualized the Zionist ideal of transforming the feminine Eastern European “old Jew” into the masculine “new Jew” (Shapira 1997; Almog 2000) through reversals of nineteenth-century European iconographies and compositions of figure and ground. The image of the Diaspora Jew as disabled and crippled (Sufian and LeVine 2007; Weiss 2002) and the feminine and homosexual Jew (Gilman 1993; Shapira 1997; Boyarin 1997; Presner 2007) are reversed and replaced by the Atlas-like, muscular new Jewish pioneer. The composition rule of thirds is reversed so that the land, and not the sky, now covers most of the background of the painting. The combination between the painting’s main figure, the muscular new Jew, and the ground, the Palestinian land, embodies the notion that “Zionism is Judaism with Muscles” (Presner 2007). This painting embodies the vision of Zionist Eugenics, of corporal and spiritual regeneration of the image of the pathological body of Eastern-Europe Jews in the image of heroic neoclassical, heterosexual men, occupying the Palestinian land.¹ Around this main figure stand his racialized others: Ashkenazi (European Jewish) women, which embody the symbolic reproduction of the collectivity’s future as a modern, secular nation; Mizrahi (literally: Eastern Jewish) men, which embody the symbolic reproduction of the collectivity’s biblical past; Mizrahi women, who embody the biological reproduction of the collective; and Bedouin men, presented outside the central panel of the painting, embody the Middle Eastern indigenous space, serving as the limit to the Zionist collective.

In Israeli art history, First Fruits is a canonical painting. It represents the optimistic vision of early Zionist artists of Palestine as a place of harmony between Arabs, Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews (Zalmona 2013). When I discussed this painting with my students, however, other readings arose based on our various standpoints: mine, as a Mizrahi-feminist queer woman, and my students’ standpoints as (mostly) Mizrahi, Bedouin, Palestinians, Ethiopian and Former Soviet Union immigrants and LGBTQI subjects.² When we look at the painting, we see something else: a major cultural symbolic image of Zionism’s racialized and gendered territorial borders, its collective boundaries and gender barriers. From its genesis as a settler-colonial movement with national aspirations (Shafir and Peled 2002, 16-17), Zionism’s visual imagining of its boundaries, borders, and barriers was based on binary and hierarchical divisions of gender and race roles (Rajuan Shtang 2023). The formative period between 1882 and 1948 that constructed the boundaries of the Zionist collective and shaped the Zionist nation shared two major dimensions of nationalist projects: genealogical, establishing a myth of the common origin of Jews, and cultural, establishing a common heritage provided by the Hebrew language and Jewish religion (Yuval-Davis 1997, 21). Another major dimension in the construction of the boundaries of the Zionist collective was the establishment of a binary and hierarchical division of both gender roles (Bernstein 1987, 7-20) and race roles (Rajuan Shtang 2023). The pre-1948 Zionist establishment constructed a racial scopic regime in which the visualization of the Zionist entity evoked connotations of masculine-like rationality, modernity, and culture. The visualization of Zionist Others, inside and outside the collective, included the Arab as ultimate enemy-Other, the Jewish Mizrahi Other (Shohat 1989), the Jewish woman-Other, who evoked connotations of femininity through emotionality, nature, tradition, and passivity, and the gender nonconforming Jewish Others, who were feminized as they were viewed as perverting the Zionist project and the Jewish nationality (Ilani 2018). This convention, however, had one exception: while the racialization of Mizrahi women was based on feminization (using signs of primitive human and national evolution), the racialization of Ashkenazi Women was based on masculinization (using signs of political action, rationality, and national progress) (Rajuan Shtang 2023).

In this article, I focus on the photography of Yael Meiry to confront the ways in which the imaginings of Zionist borders have always been intertwined with the understanding and limits of gender. In what follows, I use “borders” to refer to the lines that delimit a nation-state’s legal geographical territory, “boundaries” to refer to the limit lines of a nation-state collective (Stoetzler and Yuval-Davis 2002, 330), and “barriers” for the limit lines of the gender of the subjects of nation-states. Underlying my discussion is the question: how does the Zionist historical positioning of gender and sexually nonconforming subjects, who pervert the Zionist project (Ilani 2018), affect their situated imagining of Zionist borders, boundaries, and barriers? I borrow the notion of “situated imagining” of a nations’ borders and boundaries from Stoetzler and Yuval-Davis (2002, 335) as an extension of the feminist epistemological discussion on “standpoint” and “situated knowledge” (Haraway 1988), which outlines that the feminist standpoint does not merely comprise “knowledge” but also images and imaginings. Accordingly, Stoetzler and Yuval-Davis (2002, 331) argue that nation-states’ borders and boundaries are constructed by the imagination in ways that are affected and determined by the situated positioning of those who do the imagining. Yet, while I follow this line of thinking, I shift the gender focus from “women” to gender nonconforming subjects and their imagining of the nation.

My discussion of Meiry’s photographs is based on transnational (Vertovec 2009, 1–13) and queer-feminist theories which allow me to conceive of rigid Zionist borders, boundaries, and barriers through a pluralistic ethics of gender and sexual diversity (Hall and Jagose 2013, xvi-xvii), and through lenses of critical paradigms “that require sensitivity to both gender and feminist criticism as well as to the variety of ways of differentiating from the oppression and dominance of normativeness in general” (Sedgwick 1993, 8-9) and heteronormativity in particular.³

Meiry’s photography functions as an arena of a feminist gender nonconforming situated imagination, through which they upturn the gendered dominant iconography of Zionist borders, boundaries, and barriers. Meiry’s photography embodies visual moments in processes which I call “visual poetics of gender mobility:” transitions in the shape of the Zionist symbolic iconography of borders, boundaries, and barriers, which are driven by a feminist gender nonconforming desire. During these transitions, the Zionist, muscular body’s power to keep control of its gendered organs diminishes. Thus, the limit lines of its visual imagery of the binary, hierarchical division of labor and meaning in the sphere of gender, take on a new shape, that emerges from an othered standpoint: transgender, gender nonbinary, or genderless. Meiry’s imagery can be perceived considering Clair Colebrook's (1997, 172–3) theocratization of the body as an event. Colebrook suggests that if we theories sexual difference not from a metaphysics, but from the physics, then we might see as many sexual differences as there are many bodies and questions about sexual differences these bodies evoke.

In the three sections that follow I provide a close reading of Meiry’s photography. I show how Meiry’s photographs functions as a visual arena of situated imagination, through which they upturn normative and common Zionist iconography and symbolism by using it to challenge borders, boundaries, and barriers of nation and of gender – demonstrating that they are always interrelated and interconnected. In a way, this is what makes Meiry’s work feminist gender nonconforming and challenges the historical narrative. Each section focuses on situated imagination of a dominant Zionist historical icon, and of the narrative it embodies, as they were designed as a part of what Eric Hobsbawm (1990) called “the invention of a national tradition”. The first section presents Meiry’s situated imagination of a Zionist border’s icon – the map. The second section deals with the Meiry’s situated imagination of the icon of Zionist boundaries – the palm tree. The third section presents the situated imagination of an icon of Zionist barriers – the fist.

The map: borders (or the return of the Jewish people to the land of Israel)

Meiry’s imagining of Zionist borders, boundaries, and barriers emerges from their experiences as a member of local trans-feminist and queer-feminist communities. Over the past decade, Yael Meiry has worked consistently and intensively on the margins of the Israeli art field, creating a body of work that is in conversation with local and international queer-feminist and trans-feminist artists. The hegemonic discourse of the Israeli art field is based on an Oedipal narrative of a founding father, a phenomenon typical of national narratives that seek to plant a nation’s roots firmly in the past and establish a national biography on the basis of a primal point in history, taking the form of a prehistoric man, a legendary king, or a dramatic foundational event (Manor 2008, 418). Subsequently, research on trans-feminist and queer-feminist art in Israel is almost non-existent.⁴ Using low-tech technology and digital media, Meiry photographs themself, people who are close to them, and the spaces, objects, and landscapes around them. Their work does not merely give visibility to their community, but seeks to transform the Zionist iconography of borders, boundaries, and barriers and its underlying oppressive divisions of labor and meaning in the sphere of gender. This first section fucuses on Meiry’s imagining of the map as an icon of Zionist borders.

A mane of brown hair covering a face fills the center of an intimate portrait photograph (Self Portrait against the Occupation (2014)) (Figure 1). The sitter is the artist, Yael Meiry. They present their hair at the center, using it as a curtain or a screen. Visible behind Meiry in the background is part of a map of the Occupied Territories issued by the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem (The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories). Another photograph (David (2014)) (Figure 1) is taken in the arrival hall of Israel’s Ben-Gurion Airport, named after the “founding father” of the Zionist state, and features a bronze bust of Ben-Gurion himself – one example of the use of national symbolism in the interior design of the airport (Arad 2012). In the photograph, the bust appears against the background of a limestone wall – the same stone used to cover buildings’ facades in Jerusalem.

Figure 1. Left: Self Portrait Against the Occupation (2014). Right: David (2014).

The two photographs appeared side by side in Meiry’s booklet of photographs, So I’ll Have a Place (2015). While both photographs feature portraits with Zionist connotations in the background, their context is different. The B'Tselem’s map refers to historical conquests of the Zionist movement, from a perspective that opposes them. The limestone wall on the background of Ben-Gurion’s bust is a Zionist architectural symbol of Jewish identity (Sachs and Van Voolen 2004). In addition, the portrait of the Zionist leader conveys a heavy, rough, and rigid-looking impression, whereas the self-portrait of the artist evokes a sense of lightness, airiness, and smoothness. Ben-Gurion’s short, masculine hairstyle and visible, stiff features – characteristics generally identified with power, control, and masculinity – stand out against the soft flowing hair, concealed facial features and delicate bare shoulders – physical traits often identified with vulnerability and femininity – in the portrait of the artist. However, upon careful study, cracks appear in this system of opposites and the modern binary roles that go along with it.

The modern gaze is trained to identify, classify, and catalog (Foster 1988, ix–xiv). In the case of these photographs, it encounters a difficulty. The concealed face of the artist confounds the ability of the gaze to perform one of the most basic acts of modern classification – determining sex (Mirzoeff 1998, 392). The gaze moves across the surface of the veiled face until it stumbles across a tiny detail: the shoulders of the figure are covered with soft, downy hair. After the initial glance, Meiry’s portrait disappoints the expectation to link two salient features – a full luxurious head of hair and smooth, flawless skin – with femininity. Instead, it presents a gender nonconforming or nonbinary figure.

Meiry’s diptych shows two modern scientific and aesthetic technologies of visualization that were used to illustrate and to promote political ideologies: the cartographic map and the realistic portrait. In the Zionist context, it was David Ben-Gurion who commissioned the drawing of the first official Hebrew map, “aiming to strongly establish on the ‘Land of the Fathers’” as the historical origin of Zionism (Benvenisti 2000, 11). In the field of Zionist art, it was Boris Schatz who founded a tradition of realistic portraits that commemorate the legacy of the Hebrew “heroes of the People,” both ancient and contemporary, and produced a continuum between them (Mishory 2003, 55–62). When Meiry places their portrait next to a photograph that not only shows an icon of the “founding father” of Zionism, but also marks two dominant practices that were used to invent the Zionist tradition, Meiry performs a deviation from these traditions, and from the visual logic underlying them.

Opposed to Zionist borders and boundaries, Meiry’s map and portrait depict a controversial geography and body. The map disengages the quasi-natural border lines of the cartographic map showing the borders of the State of Israel. It is a map of the occupied West Bank marking the internal divisions established on Palestinian land over the course of more than fifty years of Israeli occupation, which have intensified and become more entrenched since the Oslo Process period in the 1990s and after. The map shows the illegal Israeli settlement blocs and the separation barrier whose construction began in the early 2000s and is ongoing. It was produced to prove the violent governmental principle where border markings are deliberately temporary. Meiry’s self-portrait disengages from the quasi-natural borderlines of the gender binary Zionist portrait that characterizes the bust of Ben Gurion.

Classifying bodies, collectivities, and spaces according to binary categories of binary sex (male/female) and nation (us/them) is a modern phenomenon that reached its peak during the nineteenth century. In the modern world, writes Benedict Anderson, “everyone can, should, will ‘have’ a nationality, as he or she ‘has’ a gender,” emphasizing gender’s centrality in the construction of modern subjectivity (Anderson 2006, 5). The idea that collectivities should be identified with one nation, which is defined in terms of ethnicity and language, developed between 1880 and 1914 and was completely new in the nineteenth century, breaking with monarchies’ traditions of defining collectives in heterogeneous ways (Hobsbawm 1990, 102; Anderson 2006, 19). The idea that nations should be identified with one territory, which is defined in terms of borders as continuous separating lines – demarcating state sovereignty as “fully, flatly, and evenly operative over each square centimeter of legally demarcated territory” – developed in parallel with ideas about ethnicity and language, breaking with the tradition of defining monarchies by centers, while marking borders only in strategic places (Stoetzler and Yuval-Davis 2002, 332). The idea that bodies should be identified with one of two sexes, which are defined in terms of sex organs, was established during the eighteenth century, breaking with the classic tradition of defining human bodies as one type with two variations, a simple inversion of the genitalia (Lacquer 1990).

The political model of nation-states and the medical model of the two sexes became categories that were conceived as autonomous, eternal, universal, and natural (Stoetzler and Yuval-Davis 2002, 334). However, these categories were historically “man-made” (human-made as well as male-made) and were established over a hierarchy of gender differences. Sex organs went from being paradigms of gender hierarchy – women were men manquées or “lesser men” – to foundations of incomparable difference: women are the sum of their sex organs, shaping their naturalized essence in a way not found in men and thus inferior (Lacquer 1990; Callen 2018). Ethnicity and language went from being signs of collective differences to foundations of incomparable difference. According to this model, Western nations are the sum of their collectives’ developed ethnicities and languages, shaping their (naturalized) evolutionary maturity in a way not found in the “passive existence” of primitive peoples who did not develop into nations and are thus inferior (Hobsbawm 1990, 101; Bennett 1988, 90). Borders went from being ambiguous, porous, and indistinct zones, allowing sovereignties to fade imperceptibly into one another, to foundations of incomparable difference. Nation-states, then, are the sum of a complete correspondence between naturalized collectivity boundaries and naturalized territorial borders (Anderson 2006, 19; Stoetzler and Yuval-Davis 2002, 332).

The use of cultural and symbolic images of the two-sex model plays a crucial role in the continuous (re)construction of a nations’ territorial borders, boundaries of collectivity and identities, as well as their naturalization and stabilization in time and space. Nations constitute a natural extension of family and kinship units, based on naturalized sexual divisions of labor, while developing specific codes and regulations, defining who and what is a “proper man” or a “proper woman” (Yuval-Davis 1997, 44–46). Within these binary, hierarchical, divisions of labor and meaning in the sphere of gender, women are required to carry what Amrita Chhachhi (1991) has called “forced identities,” or what Kobena Mercer (1990) has called “the burden of representation”: women, in their “proper” behavior and their “proper” clothing, are represented as nations’ biological, cultural, and symbolic reproducers, and as symbolic carriers of the borderline which signifies nations’ territorial borders, collectivity boundaries, identity, and honor (Yuval-Davis 1997, 11). Thus, women have an ambivalent position within nations: as both symbols and “others” of the collectivity.

In two other photographs, Pendant #2 (2016) and Pendant #3 (2016) (Figure 2), Meiry challenges the imposed normativity of the Zionist mechanisms of bordering as it is embodied in the Zionist iconography of borders. Both photographs show a gold pendant shaped as a free-hand drawing of “Greater Israel” – Zionism’s desirable state borders described in biblical and historical sources (Morris 2011, 138).⁵ While the thick border lines create a clear division between “inside” and “outside” – a body of a nation versus its surroundings – this body has no material embodiment. Thus, the tiny, golden borders map the imaginary Greater Israel, designed to signify one major purpose of the nation: its valuable essence, which, as a pendant, is designed to be located close to the heart, physically and symbolically. In the words of Thongchai Winichakul, the pendant is a majoritarian “geo-body” – an imaginary perimeter of a nation, which is constructed discursively and technologically through innumerable concepts, practices, and institutions (Winichakul 1994, x, 16-17). Meiry focuses their lens on popular design and fashion trends as a technology in the service of the continuity in time of the Greater Israel geo-body; a tool for the (re)construction of the bounding of the Zionist collectivity through the imagination of its desired territorial borders.

Figure 2. Left: Pendant #2 (2016). Right: Pendant #3 (2016).

Benedict Anderson (2006, 19) claimed that the pictorial delineation of national borders as a logo, as a visual icon, was a seminal step toward the consolidation of an emerging nation-state, since national communities imagine their sovereignty by assuming ownership over a well-defined territory. This was a desire for a symbolic shape of the state, a logo-manifesting territoriality (ibid; Ben-Ze'ev 2015, 245). Scientific cartography and maps, as fundamental artifices for imagining the geo-body of a nation, prospered in the last two centuries alongside the rise of nation-states (Anderson 2006, 175). Moreover, mapping often preceded the establishment of states, outlining their future (Edney 1997). In this sense, cartography served as “nation state science” or “scientific nationalism” – scientific work that helped imagine a national population fitted to its borders. This was a part of a larger phenomenon during the nineteenth century in which the human sciences co-produced the concepts and tools by which populations were conceived, and the state was built (Mattson 2014, 324). As Meron Benvenisti has shown, Israel Exploration Society (IES) members created the first Hebrew map knowing that, since the public could not reach the desert areas, the map would provide its materialization and visualization. The map enabled them to provide a concrete artifact to a public previously presented with an abstract idea of a new Jewish reality in the desolate Negev. By doing so, they encouraged members of the nation to think in terms of a collective self through the process of territorialization (Benvenisti 2000, 11; Bar-Gal 2003; Chacham 2017; Guilat 2011).

The composition of Pendant #3 (Figure 2) is reminiscent of a scientific photograph, like a picture taken by an archaeologist who has just found a piece of ancient jewelry. Meiry imitates a disposition of a scientist, but what they mark as an “artifact” was not excavated from a hidden space and put on display. At first sight, Meiry’s “finding” symbolizes the territorial desires of Zionism’s ongoing political present, but when viewed more closely, it seems to symbolize something else. The display of objects classified as “archaeological findings” was developed, as Tony Bennet shows, during the eighteenth century, when museums became fundamental institutions of modern nation-states. Archeological displays were part of the emergence of a “historical frame” for museum displays, offering a life-like reproduction of an authenticated past and its representation through stages leading to the present. The extended time horizons of museums, in close association with archaeological excavations that increased the vertical depth of historical time, allowed for the emergence of archaeological collections in nineteenth-century museums as invented traditions depicting nations as advanced entities in a universal history of civilization (Bennett 1988, 88–89).

The composition of Pendant #3 (Figure 2) echoes archeological display practices, but in reverse. The archeological research of the land of Israel – and the display of the archeological findings in Zionist national museums (Hazan 2017) – as a part of the invention of the Zionist tradition was one of IES’s official goals: to establish a connection between the people and the land of Israel, based on “the continuation of the historical thread, which was never severed, from the time of Joshua Ben-Nun to the days of the conquerors of the Negev in our generation” (cited in Benvenisti 2000, 11). The trendy, up-to-date jewelry is displayed as if it was an extinct phenomenon of an ancient, primitive, and undeveloped notion of Jewish collectivity. It is photographed at very close range, in the palm of a hand, presenting it to the camera for close, careful documentation and observation – as in the composition of the opening image of the promotional video for Bar-Ilan University’s Biblical Archeology Course, for example. The national timeline reversal brings the objective and authentic appeal of the archeological scientific display to the point of absurdity, and thus, the authoritative image of the Zionist geo-body is undermined.

Pendant #2 and Pendant #3 (Figure 2) are also reminiscent of artistic, scenic-symbolic maps (Bar-Gal 2003), and of landscape maps (hybrids of cartographic and scenic maps) (Guilat 2011) of a gendered Greater Israel geo-body, familiar from the history of Zionist iconography, which expressed the colonial aspirations of Zionism while visualizing the idea of a Greater Israel prevalent in the early twentieth century. The genesis of this tradition is embodied in Ephraim Moshe Lilien’s famous drawing From the Ghetto to Zion (1902) and Otte Wallish’s posters From Our Products (1930) and Tnuva – Cooperative Association for the Production of Hebrew Labor Farms in the Land of Israel (1930), which visualized imaginary biblical images of the Land of Israel’s (Chacham 2017, 564–567) geo-body. Like the scenic maps of the Zionist geo-body in postage stamps and “Blue Boxes” produced by the Jewish National Fund (JNF) (Bar Bar-Gal 2003), Wallish’s image lacks signs of (man-made) borders. It does, however, carry signs of gender. The Zionist masculine settler embodies his historical role as the leading force in the Judaizing of the Palestinian space through “Hebrew labor and consumption” (Margalit Stern 2006), leaving no sign of its Others inside (Jewish women) and outside (Palestinians and gender\sexual nonconforming subjects) the Zionist collectivity.

Since the prior condition enabling the Zionist project is the imagining of the boundaries of the Zionist collectivity through gender barriers, the erasure of signs of gender in Pendant #2 and Pendant #3 (Figure 2) signifies the undermining of the Zionist vision and the of the iconography of the Grater Israel map. Throughout the early history of Zionist iconography, then, the imagining of the Zionist collectivity’s boundaries through (binary and hierarchical categories of) gender barriers precedes their imagining through territorial borders. This is because “natural borders” of nations only become such following social, political, and historical events that are “man-made” (made by humans and by men) (Stoetzler and Yuval-Davis 2002, 334). In this sense, Otte Wallish’s Zionist geo-body, embodied Zionist (Ashkenazi) “men’s monopoly on all that was important, powerful and valued” (Bernstein 1992, 2; Margalit Stern 2006), including the determination of collective boundaries and territorial borders, but also the determination of gender barriers as the basic, prior condition enabling this monopoly.

In Meiry’s situated imagination, then, the significance of the nation-state’s borders is challenged and undermined. Meiry’s images challenge the viewer’s gaze as a function of the modern epistemology of nationalism and gender by re-imagining symbolic compositions and signifiers of archeology, cartography, and art which were used for the invention and justification of Zionist national tradition of borders. While David Ben Gurion’s argument, “since ancient times, the borders of the Jewish people’s autonomy have retreated and advanced in accordance with the permutations of history,” expressed the Zionist concept of borders as frontier (Jackson Turner 1921; Shafir 1984; Kemp 1998; Ne’eman and Arbel 2011), which is dominant to this day, Meiry’s images embody a “fuzzy” geographical perception of borders and territory. In Pendant #3 (Figure 3), Meiry lights up our political imagination as the flash from their camera hits the metal surface, the upper contours of the symbolic map are burned by the light of the extra exposure, and the outlines of the pendant look as if they have caught fire. In the images of pendants, Meiry’s emphasis is on the symbolism of the geo-body, rather than its accurate territorial shape. Thus, these images can be conceived of as a visualization of a political imagination in which the notion of nation-states borders is de-naturalized and undermined.

Figure 3. Left to Right: Old North (2016); Yad Eliyahu (2016); Agave (2016).

Meiry doesn’t seem to provide the viewer with a clear vision regarding the future imagination of the territorial space that was Mandatory Palestine before 1948 and is now Palestine/Israel. Like Meiry, several Jewish artists have incorporated images of Israel’s border into their work, for example the work of Joseph Sassoon Semah, Dganit Brest or David Reeb. But Meiry alludes to a different political imagination. They create the visual conditions for potential different imaginings of a “de-mapping” (Rogoff 2000, 148) and de-territorializing of the Greater Israel geo-body, inviting the viewer to open a space for the political imagining of a new set of potential resolutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which aren’t based on the modern us/them conflictual model of the territorial nation-state.

The palm tree: boundaries (or the return of the fauna and flora to the land of Israel)

During its formative period, the Zionist project faced the major challenge of the invention of a national tradition. As a colonizing settler movement with national aspirations, it was essential that Zionism create a tradition that would grant it the validation and the justification for its territorial ambitions in Palestine (Berlovich 1996; Dahan and Wasserman 2006). At the same time, the principle of visualization – creating a visual image for an abstract idea – was becoming an effective political tool (Mirzoeff 1999, 5–9). The use of visualization as a tool to invent Zionist tradition began in the second half the nineteenth century (Shilo-Cohen 1983, 204; Sela 2001, 149–160; Rajuan Shtang 2023). Zionism adopted modern nationalism’s “Janus-face”, with one face oriented toward a future of progress and modernity and the other looking back at an ancient, indigenous past around which its members could unite (Nairn 1977, 117).

The palm tree was one of the most familiar visual images used for the imagining of the Zionist boundaries, borders, and barriers. In the iconography of European Orientalist painting, the palm tree became an archetypal symbol of the exotic East, although as a visual image it was frequently removed from its natural habitat and inserted into imaginary compositions (Benjamin 2003). Early Zionist iconography continued this tradition rooted in the political conditions of colonialism but charged it with a nationalist context. The palm tree and the date, as well as the orange, were presented in Zionist visual propaganda as exotic plants “whose habitat is the land of the Bible” (as quoted in Jaffa – The Orange's Clockwork 2009), in parallel with their appropriation as economic resources. The palm tree became one of the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts’ most popular early images. Bezalel’s workshop produced Judaica items as well as carpets, posters, and prints inspired by the motif of the palm tree or incorporating it in the design (Shilo-Cohen 1983, 204; Mishory 2003), and these functioned as modern folk-art artifacts embodying the spirit of the nation and proof of the presence of the “People” with its roots in the local soil (Chinski 1997, 193). The invention of the Zionist visual culture tradition by Bezalel, combining Jewish symbols, Romantic-Orientalist aesthetics, and modernist compositions, had an important effect in embodying the fabricated connection between the Jewish past and the Hebrew present.

As one of the seven species listed in the Hebrew Bible as the agricultural products of the biblical Land of Israel, the palm tree symbolized the Jewish biblical past and its Zionist future at the same time. Its oriental character signified the notion of a Jewish past in the Middle East; its phallic character signified the notion of the new, muscular Jew, returning to his homeland. As George Mosse (1985, 17) has shown, with the rise of modern nationalism, the male body became representative of the nation. The modern nationalist movements adopted the philosophical ideal formulated in the social contract of the eighteenth century (Pateman 1988). They developed a discourse that identified masculinity with fairness, sexual restraint, sovereignty, and power – qualities that a nation sought to attribute to itself and considered necessary for its establishment (Mosse 1996, 56). When Zionist discourse needed a metaphor for the nation as a masculine body, its gender image was reversed accordingly. The discourse of the Enlightenment era, which portrayed the Jewish people in the image of a woman, was supplanted by the nationalist discourse of the generation of the Jewish renewal, “which began to imagine the Zionist nation as a masculine body” (Gluzman 2007, 15). In coining the term “Muscular Judaism,” Max Nordau gave form to the vision of this new paradigm. Inspired by this renewed connection with Jewish tradition, he said, “we will once again be deep-chested, strong-muscled, and sharp-sighted men.” His call was an important rallying cry for the pioneers of the second and third Aliyah who would create the pioneer Zionist body (Neumann 2011). The image of the ideal Zionist body reshaped the image of the Jewish Diaspora feminine body in the form of a Zionist man who takes the soil of the Land of Israel, merges with it, to make it one of his organs (ibid; Gluzman 2007, 39).

Ironically, while the palm tree became increasingly present as a Zionist economic and symbolic resource, exploited for propaganda and to burnish the Zionist image, as well as (through planting) the means of territorial conquest, the actual physical presence of palm trees during the pre-1948 period was meager at best. It was Ben-Zion Yisraeli, a member of the Kinneret Farm (one of the most well-known early Zionist settlements) who took upon himself to import palm trees from neighboring Arab countries, an undertaking which eventually turned into a Zionist mission. The discourse of return features in the title of the book The Return of the Palm Tree to Eretz Israel: The Travels of Ben-Zion in Iraq, Iran, and Egypt, which describes Yisraeli’s travels in Arab lands and his illegal actions and smuggling operations to import hundreds of thousands of saplings (Stoller 1977). Yisraeli’s contribution to this invented tradition therefore involved acts of theft. The countries from which he had smuggled the saplings prohibited their export because dates were a crucial commodity in these countries’ economies.

It is against this background that one can read the appearance of the palm tree in several of Meiry’s photographs as an isolated, bleak, and flawed phallic sign. Unlike other of Meiry’s series of photographs in which the staged elements stand out, the palm trees series have a documentary-like quality. The palm trees are photographed in their spatial context, in areas where they used to proliferate, mostly neighborhoods in south Tel Aviv, such as Yad Eliyahu and Florentine. Meiry does not insert themself in the frame. The spaces seem public and normative, and despite the residential-looking imagery, it appears static, empty of people, orphaned, and sterile. The palm trees that appear repeatedly in these photographs shoot upward like a kind of phallic element, but one that is castrated and dejected.

In the photograph Old North (2016) (Figure 3) there are whitewashed apartment blocks with a truncated palm tree in the middle that looks like an abandoned totem pole, a flagless flagpole, or a giant burned out torch. In another photo, Yad Eliyahu (2016) (Figure 3), the top of an orange tree at the bottom of the frame appears next to an old shack. Behind is another palm tree, also truncated, but encircled by a thick collar of dry, drooping fronds. In the photograph Agave (2016) (Figure 3), a comely, fresh-looking palm tree appears as a detail in a pastel-colored naïve wall painting. Peeking out from behind the painted wall are the flowing fronds of a real, rather tall palm tree as well as two old wooden poles once used for stringing electrical wiring, which divide the frame along a harsh, vertical axis. At the foot of the tree is a wild desert bush with giant octopus-like tentacles that spread uncontrolled in every direction. These images diverge from the modern Orientalist-Romantic palm tree of Zionist iconography and neither embellish nor magnify its appearance through imaginary compositions. The palm tree, which signified masculinity, erectness, and intensity, is stripped of its power. Meiry repeatedly presents the Zionist symbol whose artificial presence in the Israeli landscape and visual culture has become natural, but with each repetition, the symbol acquires a new scope, as the arms of a violent erupting and spreading desire, or masts of impotence and defeat.

In the photographs Pruned (2016) and Washingtonia (2016) (Figure 4), long, circular, dry, or yellowing palm leaves become a sort of fence that encloses the entire frame in an open and dynamic composition. If, in the photographs that I discussed earlier, the palms grow in spaces devoid of people, here neither the spatial nor the social context is apparent. The palm leaves overpower the frames obscuring the space they divide or enclose, limiting the ability to see past them. Rather than embodying the iconic national image, these photographs embody the practices that make it possible to provide the world of national images with a natural image. In other words, they expose the visibility of the political conditions that enabled their appearance. Meiry upturns the imposed normativity of the Zionist concept of boundaries, as it is embodied in the Zionist icon of the palm tree. The symbol is defamiliarized and thus undermined: the palm tree’s Orientalist-romantic symbolism (Jewish biblical past) and phallic symbolism (Zionist mascular new Jew) transforms into a truncated, dry, isolated, deterrent and esoteric flora.

Figure 4. Left: Pruned (2016). Right: Washingtonia (2016).

The fist: barriers (or the return of masculinity to the Jewish body)

One of the most prominent images in Meiry’s work repeats in a series of staged photographs that correspond with the iconography of the Zionist Labor movement: their fist. In them, Meiry’s own hand appears at the center of the frame holding a fruit, vegetable, or other hands. A raised masculine fist or a masculine hand holding powerfully agricultural implements, fruits or weapons were iconic signs used in images produced by the Zionist Labor movement. A leading force of the Zionist project, the Labor movement played a decisive part in fashioning the Zionist ethos. Moreover, it determined the hegemonic narrative of the Zionist movement (Shapira 1999). In the period of the establishment of the state of Israel and in the two decades that followed, the world of images created in service of the Labor movement embodied those majoritarian ideals.

The Labor movement iconography, which tied redemption of the Jewish body (from the feminine space of the Diaspora) to redemption of the Land of Israel (from Arabs), centered on the inventing and shaping of a new Jewish body. Some of the prominent Zionist designers in the 1920s were graduates of the Bezalel school, and their commitment to the Zionist project is apparent. Unlike the images created in the Bezalel workshops, which mainly personified the existence of an indigenous Jewish past and at the same time its renewal, the images produced in the field of advertising mainly embodied the reality and character of the new Jewish present. Photographers like Liselotte Grzebin and designers like Otte Wallish and the Shamir brothers, shared this undertaking in their work for national concerns. Their images feature the masculine Zionist body eager to take control of the Palestinian space by working the land. While these photographs and posters were part of Zionist national indoctrination enterprises offering hygienic proselytization to the public (Chacham 2017, 528), they also served the Zionist project of the gendered indoctrination of the male body. Indeed, images of the strong, muscular arms of the Zionist pioneer tilling the fields, lifting a shovel, building a brick wall, holding a hammer or a rifle, recurred persistently in Zionist propaganda, mainly from the 1920s onward.

Research on early Zionism is preoccupied with the masculine body, whereas primary studies dealing with women as a distinct group in the history of Zionism are often biased. The contributions of women are practically invisible in the hegemonic historiography and visual systems of the Zionist Labor project. Billie Melman argues that this situation is in keeping with the centrality of the connection between nationality and masculinity in local historical narratives (Melman 2009). Ashkenazi and Mizrahi women alike were excluded from the heroic working of the land, and their representation in the visual culture of the period was shaped accordingly.

In some of Meiry’s photographs, the appearance of the masculine Zionist body redeeming the land is undermined as it collapses into itself through its eroticization. By charging it with erotic desire, the very quality it is supposed to negate as those expected to embody Zionism’s rational reason. Meiry turns the frame into a gendered, sexualized space, infused with power relations. Meiry creates a phallic image, featuring in several photographs their hand penetrating the frame from the bottom holding up a variety of fruits. The erotic connotations arise from the tension between the composition’s various components: the power exerted by the hand holding the fruit as opposed to the softness and sensuousness of the juicy, moist, frozen, or wet texture of the fruit itself. The observer is made to wonder about the physical act – sucking, gnawing, gulping or fisting, the lesbian counter-practice to the phallus – that preceded the taking of the picture.

The frame as space into which Meiry thrusts objects appears also in another photograph (Stained, 2012) (Figure 5), but this time, instead of a fruit, the phallic hand grips another, feminine hand, which is, itself, transformed into a sort of fruit that has just been plucked from the earth. The erotic tension in the photograph is created by the combination of seemingly contradictory signs of intimacy and power relations. The hands are in close-up signaling intimacy, but the composition – one hand holding the other, which has polished nails and the top of which is partially stained in a reddish-brown hue – suggests a power hierarchy. However, the grasped hand does not seem to object. It “lends a hand” to its being presented as a soiled, fragmentary feminine object, by Meiry’s phallic hand. The connotations of gender power relations in sexuality, of control and submission, that arise from this image, relate to the “feminist sex war” debates, specifically the criticism over the feminist refusal to recognize the sexual languages that are created in a marginal context, and serve as a means of resistance to the influences of patriarchal and racist sexuality and gender roles (Hollibaugh and Moraga 1983, 394–405). In this sense, Stained suggests an adherence to the Zionist laboring of masculinity, but it provides it with an undesired twist.⁶ It is influenced by the new context in which they are placed, as in the erotic relationship between Butch and Femme, which may allow for another encounter between gender differences, within which the difference is not denied but forms a basis for an empowering connection. Polar gender roles or sexual power relations might reproduce heterosexist models. Yet, their appropriation by sexual or gender minorities may be used to create different feminist frameworks that allow marginal subjectivities to give new meaning to their experience without a cultural tradition established by their Ashkenazi community of origin by placing the Zionist iconography of soil and fists in a new context, of their community of choice. The soiled hand is displayed as an object subject to a force exerted upon it. Yet, that same hand appears to have exerted force upon another object. Did it penetrate a body? Did it dig into the soil? This private, intimate image also raises collective, historical, and violent connotations. The literary-visual image of “blood and soil” emerged in the intellectual climate of fin-de-siècle Europe as part of the crystallization of Fascism. It was a fitting image for the nationalist ideas shaped out of the merging of rational scientific and Romantic principles, ideas that gave birth to the idolization of national interest. In Stained, the hand, the fist and the soil/blood transform – from signifiers of violent negation of ‘Others’ to signifiers of a marginal positive practice of pleasure.

Figure 5. Left to Right: Stained (2012); A Fist with Blood (2014); Guli's Testosterone (2013).

The Zionist national and colonial project is premised on binary gender boundaries, so contesting the latter can challenge the former. In Fist with Blood (2014) (Figure 5) Meiry challenges the Zionist imagination of borders and boundaries by contesting its gender barriers. Meiry’s hand appears once more in its regular place at the center against a white background. Yet, this time, it does not hold anything. It folds up in a tight fist. A small bloodstain spreads horizontally from the tip of the thumb tucked inside the fist; in other words, the blood flows unnaturally, against gravity. The blood emphasizes the lines of the skin, which for a moment looks like a topographical map of a barren, hilly desert. Symbolically, this image clearly illustrates the Zionist desire to construct clear gender masculine barriers. The Zionist masculine body, symbolized by the fist, redeems, using force, the Jewish body from its feminine Diaspora form, and the Jewish land from its alleged ‘barrenness’ and Arab-ness. And yet, as a realistic image, the tighter the fist, the clearer becomes the emptiness of its grip. It holds nothing in it, and it attacks nothing except itself, to the point of drawing blood. The ironic relationship to the Zionist ethos is revealed: symbolically, the fist works in accord with (Zionist) nature, but in real terms it works against nature, in other words, against the organic conditions of its own existence. Thus, Fist with Blood embodies a de territorialization of Zionist geo-politics, its forced borders on spaces, as a result of undermining its bio-politics – its forced barriers on bodies.

The political intersection between gender and nation in Meiry’s hands holding objects photographs becomes specific and concrete in the photograph Guli’s Testosterone (2013) (Figure 5). In it, Meiry’s hand is visible holding a small glass flask with a white label with the word “Testoviron” printed on it. The close-up of the flask creates a bold contradiction – despite its small size, it takes over the visible field. Meiry forces the viewer to look at the flask, as object for close observation, as if looking carefully at the little bottle will provide them with a revelation of hidden knowledge. Yet gazing at this object does not satisfy the heteronormative, cisgender “will to know” – knowing which of our fixed, binary notions of sex\gender is at stake. The visualization of the biology of gender, of body organs as carriers of truth, of natural gender essence, is replaced by a visualization of what Teresa De Lauretis (1987) called “technology of gender:” discursive and material techniques – such as the procedures of hormonal and surgical modification of sexual attributes – employed in the production of gender differences. In Guli’s Testosterone, while moving from the sight of biology to that of technology, and the transforming signifiers of the genitalia with artificial gender hormones, Meiry undermines the centrality of the gaze in the determination of sexual differences and the viewer is required to rethink their concepts of sexual differences. The sharp transition from images that signal the potential of vulnerability to ones with the potential to injure stretches the range of properties of Meiry’s hand, which is photographed repeatedly, from a pose of retreat identified with femininity to one of attack related to masculinity.

Yet, in the context of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, which emerges from Meiry’s entire work, Guli’s Testosterone signals Israel’s pinkwashing practices, and the turning of trans folks’ bodies into a battlefield of the Israeli occupation. As an image plucked from the clinical field, Guli’s Testosterone undermines the essentialization and naturalization of the modern principle of binary gender, and the history of the hormone’s use for the purpose of gender transition. But as one of Meiry’s hands series, it refers also to the role of this hormone in the context of Israeli occupation. As trans activists Daryn Copland and Ita Segev wrote, Israeli laws and regulations have enabled the Israeli corporation Teva Pharmaceuticals Industries, “to exponentially grow monopolizing the generic manufacturing sector while suppressing the Palestinian pharmaceutical industry and Palestinians access to health care and medication”.⁷ This phenomena signals a relatively new challenge which arise on the Zionist intersection of gender and nation: the crossing of gender barriers does not necessarily mean a betrayal of national borders and boundaries.

Conclusion

In this article, I focused on Yael Meiry’s photography as an arena of a feminist gender nonconforming situated imagination, through which the dominant narrative and iconography of Zionist borders, boundaries, and barriers is challenged and transformed. Meiry’s photography is situated in the inherited tradition of the western, white hegemony of the Ashkenazi Zionist pre-1948 gender and race scopic regime (Rajuan Shtang 2023), “Zionist photography” (Sela 2001) in particular, which established a colonial visual language, aiming at constructing and justifying the Zionist project, first and foremost its desired borders, boundaries and barriers. Yet, like other nation-states (Young 1994; Schendel 2005; Horsman and Marshall 1994; Donnan and Wilson 1999), Zionism’s desire to maintain and control its different limit-lines is almost always contested by challenging forces (Ben-Ze'ev 2015, 245). This article suggested contemplation on Meiry’s photography as a space that allows the emergence of such challenges.

Meiry’s visual poetics of gender mobility comprises and enables the colliding of intimacy, vulnerability, sophistication, and suggestiveness on one hand, and forcefulness, directness, imbalance, and penetration on the other. It requires prolonged visual, even meditative, attention, which is foreign to the modern gaze that is absorbed in rapid gender classification. These are visual moments necessary for the visual poetics of gender mobility: transitions, driven by a feminist gender nonconforming desire, which undermine and reconstruct gendered iconographies of Zionist borders, boundaries, and barriers.

Meiry’s photography activates a space of feminist gender nonconforming political imagination. Using this space and medium, Meiry undermines visual symbolic Zionist borders, boundaries, and barriers, and the power of Zionist visual imposition, allowing an emergence of a field of imagining unfixed limit lines of collectivities and of subjectivities of gender and sexuality. The visual poetics of unfixed limit lines of gendered bodies in Meiry’s photography require attention and sensitivity to their singular processes of mobility. It is a sensitivity that invites a confrontation of the singular body as an event of thought.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 On Zionist Eugenics see: Falk 1998.“Zionism and the Biology of the Jews.” Science in Context 11: 587-607.

2 I teach at Sapir Academic College, in southern Israel, and at the Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art, in the center of Israel.

3 On queer feminism and heteronormativity, see: Stryker and Whittle 2006, 7–8; Butler 1994, 1–26; Martin 1998, 11–36.

4 This situation parallels the European and North American art academic arena, where research on (and production of) implicitly cisgender and heterosexual feminist art flourishes, while there is no equivalent research on trans-feminist and queer-feminist art (Jones and Silver 2016, 2–3). In this sense, Meiry, who is personally and artistically publicly associated with local queer-feminist and trans-feminist act communities, situates themself politically, socially, and artistically on the perimeter.

5 The ‘Greater Israel’ pendants are offered for sale on Jewish commercial websites. What distinguishes them from the kinds of ‘Palestine pendants’ that one can buy on the Internet is the inclusion of the occupied Golan in the former. This difference marks the different perceptions of the two nations regarding the coveted territory. Today, in terms of the Israeli mainstream, the Golan is perceived as an integral part of the territories of the State of Israel, while for the Palestinians it is not part of the Palestinian homeland, but a Syrian territory.

6 As scholars like Gloria Andalzua (1987), Jack Halberstam (1998), Amber Hollibaugh and Cherríe Moraga (1983, 394–405) have argued, the relationship between class, nationality, gender, and sexuality is not limited to traditional reproduction.

7 See: Ita Segev, “Israel Makes the Hormones I Need, But I Support Palestinian Liberation,” Them, May 18, 2018.