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In this review of Adam Raz's Looting of Arab Property during the War of Independence (2020, in Hebrew) Rona Sela critiques the book as dealing with the subject from a Zionist perspective and accepting Ben-Gurion's attitude of reducing official/state responsibility for the massive theft against Palestine and Palestinians, and being unconcerned that looting/seizures violated international law. Sela points out that Raz shows that the government made manipulative political use of the "looting" in its drive to ethnically cleanse what would become the State of Israel while arguing, at the same time, that the responsibility lies with the individual (Jewish) citizens of that state, who became "passive accomplices" of its policies. According to Sela, by Raz not distinguishing between individual looting and organized official seizure, he is led to minimize the direct responsibility of the sovereign and adopt biased conclusions that contradict, conceal, reframe, and whitewash the testimonies and cases described in his own book. While the pillaging and seizure of Jewish private property during the Holocaust is always on the Israeli public agenda, the looting and pillaging of Palestinian property and culture has been largely silenced. Just as Israel demands and receives compensation for Jewish stolen property and for crimes committed against them, Sela argues that compensation for the crimes perpetrated against Palestinians must be on the agenda - morally, legally, and practically - and that Israel must reveal the Palestinian textual and cultural treasures held and hidden in Israeli archives and return them to their rightful owners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay discusses one characteristic of colonial archives – how the ruling state plunders/loots the colonized’ archives and treasures and controls them in its colonial archives - erasing them from the public sphere by repressive means, censors and restricts their exposure and use, alters their original identity, regulates their contents and subjugates them to colonizer’s laws, rules and terminology. It focuses on two archives plundered by Israel in Beirut in 1980s: the Palestine Research Center and archive of Palestinian films. The essay continues my earlier research on Palestinian visual (and other) archives taken as booty or looted by pre-state Jewish military organizations and soldiers or civilians in the first half of the twentieth century, especially during the Nakba (the Palestinian catastrophe, 1948), and later by Israel’s military bodies. It analyzes the plunder itself while focusing on the power relations reflected toward the hybrid gazes of the colonizer and the colonized and discusses colonial features of military archives holding and controlling seized materials. While colonial museums have been largely discussed, and also archives holding colonial history, this is one of the first essays to discuss features of colonial archives holding plundered archives/material. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An essay is presented on scouting of Palestinian villages by the squads of the Haganah, forerunner of the Israel Defense Forces, between 1940 and 1948 to gather information in order to make files and aerial photographs, and to conduct surveys. It mentions that the scouts gathered geographical, planning and topographical information of Palestinian villages which later helped Israel to attack Palestine.