The elasticity of the Color Line

Abstract

In light of the ongoing massive social protest that began in Israel in summer 2011, and considering the new interest in the Israeli Black Panthers protest movement marking its 40th anniversary, I wish to reexamine the press photographs of the Black Panther demonstrations taken in 1971. Studying these photographs, I argue that the visual coverage of the protest in the Israeli popular press strictly excluded the demonstrators from the Israeli public using racial signifiers. This occurred precisely during a period in which the use of racial signifiers was diminishing due to the Six Day War. I draw parallels between photographs from the 1967 War and from the Black Panther demonstrations and maintain that viewing the photographs exposes the state dialectic in handling its citizens. This dialectic moves along the axis between acceptance and rejection, identity and difference, and containment and alienation-relying on the racial visual signifier both to presence and to justify identity and difference.