1. Museums have served as a history-shapinginstrumentfor centuries. The
accumulation of objects,natural and artificial alike,namingand
systematically classifyingthem, is one of the ways to know the world.
However, it is clearly evidentthat museums have also been shaped by the
varied contexts and basic premises thatwere dominantin different
periods and different places.
A museum, therefore, is not a final object.Itis not a fixed entity that is
created in the same way atall times and in all places,nor is itgrounded in
ancientmodels and ideas that underpin its existence. A museum is a
mechanism. It is a culture- and history-makingmachine.Its identity, aims,
and the functions itfulfillschangein accordancewith the hegemonies
and order of privileges customary in a given society.A museum – a
society’s storyteller – is therefore a political and social productthat
reflects the power relations thatcreated it, and the contexts within which
it operates and which it is supposed to represent.
However, a museum does not only tell a story, classify,and document; it
also erases.In his photographic project Museutopia, Ilya Rabinovich
studies national museums,observes how they represent ideology and
myth, and examines the kind of society reflected through the perspective
they create – and the kind of society reflected in the perspective itself.
Rabinovich photographed the firstpartof the project (also presented in
the exhibition) in his hometown, Kishinev,the capital of Moldova.He
chose to photograph the second partof the project in eleven military
museums in Israel,to which he immigrated when he was eight, and from
which he moved to Holland where he currently resides.In their articlefor
the book that accompanied the project in Moldova,Huub van Baar and
Ingrid Commandeur quote Slovakian dissidentMilan Šimečka who
claimed a few years before the fall of Communism that communist
regimes were surprisingly successful in organizingcollectiveforgetting. It
may well be that Communist era museums were not the only ones that
created this phenomenon. In fact, erasureand forgetting arepart of the

2. directactivities of museums by their very function as instruments for
shaping,writing,editing, and classifyingnational histories.Thewriting
processes,as well as the erasure and forgetting processes,function
similarly under any regime. This is in factone of the cornerstones of
museal practice.Rabinovich’s projectin Moldova and Israel creates a kind
of index of these museal practices in the context of societies thatare
undergoing change or buildingprocesses.Itprovides a visual examination
of the tools employed by museums, and of how a museum itself serves as
a means of writing – and erasing – history.Rabinovich’svisual research
process also provides insights concerningthechangingroleof museums
and the social and political implicationsof this change.
Most of Israel’s military museums that are presented in the exhibition
belong to the Ministry of Defense Museums Division.In other words,the
Ministry is responsiblefor their ongoing operation and maintenance, and
for determining the content of their exhibits and the instruction provided
in them. Twelve museums operate under the Division’s aegis,and focus
on various military heritagechapters,especially theestablishmentof the
State of Israel and the various wars.Mostof the museums were originally
established by non-profitorganizations thatsought to relate and preserve
the stories of various organizations,their leaders and their fallen,and in
the main remained involved in the museum’s operation.
It is interestingto note that many of the museums documented in this
exhibition were established in the late1980s in post-FirstLebanon War
Israel –a war that constituted a milestone in the declineof the Israeli
public’s blind faith in its political leadership,theIDF, and the official
narrativeof a “war of no choice”. Perhaps an answer to the question of
why the State of Israel turned its attention some forty years after its
establishmentto establishingmilitary heritageinstitutionsfor the
purpose of educatingthe young who are not partof “the founding
generation”, can be found here: Perhaps then, more than ever before,
there was an evident need to validatea heritagethat had not previously
been considered “history”, but rather “reality”.[1]
Observation of Rabinovich’s photographs creates on the one hand a
sense of intimate familiarity,an almostinstantunderstanding of the story
being told, which stems from the fact that ithas been told so many times
and by so many means – in kindergarten, school,television,ceremonies,
and so forth. On the other, this sense of familiarity is also attended by a
feeling of discomfort that possibly stems fromthe disparity between the
well-crafted narrativepresented in the museums and the means they
employ – and perhaps more so by the disparity between the museal
content and the reality of contemporary lifein Israel.In this mix visitors
may also find a strain of nostalgia,of shared longingfor a period that was
and is no more, a period from which contemporary lifeis distantand
detached. However, when we observe the distantreality in the
photographed documentation, a senseof embarrassmentemerges as
well; after all,itis notonly the remembered narrativethatwe recognize,
but also ourselves aswe were when we encountered it naïvely and
accepted it at face value,without inquiring,withoutaskingquestions
concerningwhat it said and did not say.(Compare this with the tolerant
softness and even compassion in thephotographs of the museums in
Moldova.This is perhaps reserved for a country that has admitted the
failureof the idealistic and absolutestory,and is contending with the
difficultiesof creatinga crediblecontemporary narrative).

3. The sourceof the senseof discomfortemerging from the photographs,
therefore, is not only the narratives presented by the museums or our
own identity as these museums’ addressees,pastand present. It is
primarily associated with the feeling that they are endeavoring to tell a
uniform story,to participatein a unifyingprocess and in creatinga new,
singlecollective.This “melting pot” process underlyingthe Zionist
enterprise, in which the army is one of its principal means,is accurately
reflected in the military museums.They completely ignoreIsraeli society
as multicultural,and attempt to present it as homogenous. Thus, in
virtually every case,those who were forced to pay the priceof the
melting pot areabsent: the Mizrahi,the Arab, the Ethiopian,the
Russian… anyonewho is not considered “Israeli”accordingto the
hegemonic perception. In this respect, the museums are monuments to
Israeli society as the “old elites” sought to shape and see it. The Israeli
society reflected from them has no connection whatsoever with actual
Israeli reality.
The experience offered by the photographed museums has not stood the
test of time in a basic material respecteither. The content and the
arrangement of the displaysin them belong to an era in which cultural
stories were related by an omniscientnarrator to a mostly convinced
audience, with a linear perception of reality wherein good and bad are
absolutes.But the world has changed considerably sincethen: the
accessibility and availability of information from a vast variety of sources
has chipped away at the exclusivity of the official narratives,and the
presence of technology has accustomed us to total flash experiences.
The content of the photographs themselves articulately attests to this.
The sites documented in them arenot impressive,and certainly do not
present uniformity of museal languageand practice.Most of them
present patchwork spaces comprisingadded construction,improvised
cabinets,portablewalls,and outdated display cases:noneof which look
strong or impressiveeven as the remnants of a unifyingideology,as an
archeology of narrative.Itis doubtful that even in the pastthese spaces
possessed the power to create a meaningful visitingexperience.Is it
possiblethatwhen the story is sufficiently strong,the means of its
dissemination areless important? Is itonly when the narrativebegins to
weaken that the need to reinforcethe visual and interactivemeans arises
in order to turn a museum visitinto an experience and a pastime? Is this
the nature of the often spoken of correlation between decliningideology
and the riseof the culture of experience and entertainment, wherein the
exhibition spaces of museums are shunted asidein favor of commercial
and food spaces? In this respecttoo, the museums that Rabinovich
photographs are archeological sites.Monuments to an ideology.
This is not to say that the irrelevanceof the museums attests to the fact
that Israeli society itself has abandoned the narrativethey present. Israeli
society still considersthe story of the establishmentof the State of Israel
– the story of the Jewish people’s return to its land,the story of “a land
without a people for a people without a land” – as its seminal narrative,
with all thatthis implies in terms of writingand erasurealike.
Consequently, we may need to look elsewhere for the root of the change
that has resulted in the irrelevanceof these museums in recent decades.
It possibly originates in the animated debate being conducted in Israeli
society concerningthe monopoly over power. This debate renders the

4. centers of power and the hegemony less transparentand self-evident. A
good example of this is provided by Anat Rimon-Or in her article“From
the dying Arab to ‘Death to the Arabs’:The modern Jew and the Arab
residingwithin him”, in which she states that at times the impression is
that cries of “death to the Arabs” are far more disturbingto the Israeli
public than the actual death of Arabs at Israeli handsin and outsidethe
State of Israel.The verbal abusedirected at leftists and Arabs is generally
identified with a lowsocioeconomic status,a Mizrahi-rightistpublic.By
contrast,the killingitself,when perpetrated institutionally,accords
prestige to the operation,and for many years this actwas reserved for
the social elites generally identified with the Left.[2]
What is revealed here is not shock at the violence,but the loss of
monopoly over it. This monopoly, which was so self-evident in Israeli
society,is represented by the museums photographed by Rabinovich.Its
declinegains no expression in them, despite the factthat as military
museums they tell,among other things, the story of the State of Israel’s
utilization of power. The transformation and change Israeli society is
undergoing in these contexts are not expressed in them. Consequently, it
may be said thatmore than tellingthe story of the establishmentof the
State of Israel and the story of the ZionistMovement, these museums tell
the story of a specific sector in Israeli society and represent its perception
of itself as charged with writingthe history of this society – with its truth.
The profound processes of change Israeli society had been undergoing in
recent decades have turned this voice, which in the past was this society’s
transparentand self-evident voice, a voice that had no need for an
identity other than “being Israeli”,into one of many voices in a
polyphonic and multicultural society.In this respect, the irrelevanceof
the museums stems from the fact that they have become sectoral
museums that represent a specific group.They have losttheir monopoly
over “being Israeli”.Consequently, this is nota declineof the narrative,
but only of the monopoly over its writing.
It is surprisingand saddeningto discover – albeitstill too soon to assert
unequivocally –that the multiplicity of voices does not necessarily create
diversity in the narrativeor challengeits basic premises,or even
rediscover truths that have been erased and forgotten. This can be
likened to the promiseembodied in the opening of the Israeli media
market to multi-channel television:what at firstseemed a breakingof the
monopoly of the public channel,and was supposed to lead to a diverse
variety of opinions,turned out to be multiplecommercial channels that
tell the same story.
Hadas Zemer Ben-Ari
Eyal Danon
The exhibition was made possible with the generous support of the
Mondriaan Fund.
[1] In this context it is interesting to observe the transformationundergone bythe museum institution, according
to art researcher Didier Maleuvre, whichhe illustrates bymeans of the process undergone bythe Louvre
Museum. It was founded during the French Revolutionas aninnovative andeven revolutionaryinstitution, but
has since become anestablishment for validation and preservation:“…the museum intoday’s worldis associated
with cultural preservation, it first appearedas a means ofsocialrenewal: as a wayof breaking, rather than

5. bonding, withthe ways ofthe past. The museum was meant to further the momentum ofa historicalputsch, in
reactionagainst historyconceivedas the politics of the status quo”. For further reading, see Didier Maleuvre,
Museum Memories:History, Technology, Art, Stanford UniversityPress, 1999.
[2] Anat Rimon-Or, From the Dying Arab to “Deathto the Arabs”:The Modern Jew andthe ArabResiding Within
Him, Theoryand Criticism 20, Spring 2002 (Hebrew).