Souvenirs of Conquest: The Israeli Occupation as Tourist Event

Missing from most historical accounts of the 1967 war are the ways it functioned as a tourist event. The gradual easing or dissolution of borders between Israel and its newly occupied territories generated new possibilities for travel between territories divided by militarized borders since 1948. Suddenly the newly occupied territories were available as tourist sites, landscapes, and/or markets for Israeli Jews and Palestinians. To take 1967 seriously as a tourist event is not merely to interrogate the relationship between Israeliness and tourism, but to complicate the ways we understand this crucial moment in Israeli history--that is, the immediate aftermath of the war that established Israel as an occupying power in the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai and Golan Heights. To do so, I turn away from issues that have traditionally animated historians of the war (notably, postwar diplomacy and debate over the future of the occupied territories) to examine the popular, quotidian practice of Israelis (particularly Israeli Jews) as they encountered and explored the occupied territories and peoples in the days immediately following the cessation of violence. This encounter took shape in and through tourism in crucial ways; more pointedly, tourism was a (if not the) primary register by which Israeli civilians experienced and found value in the occupation—its territories, peoples, vistas, and markets. Such a line of questioning helps reanimate traditional historical questions about occupation, territorialism, and settler expansion. I argue that the mass tourist phenomenon of 1967 was crucial in laying the groundwork for the subsequent state investment in the occupation. Using the tools of postcolonial discourse analysis, I examine the Hebrew press in the weeks after the cessation of violence in June 1967. As such, it is also a meditation on the utility, and the limits, of postcolonial theory for making sense of Israeli colonial-nationalism.