Last week the Israeli photographer David Rubinger—most famous for his picture of Israeli paratroopers standing at the Western Wall in 1967—died at the age of ninety-two. Amnon Lord reflects on his work and his place in the history of Israeli photography, and laments the absence of photographers who can fill his shoes:

David Rubinger was in effect Israel’s family photographer. . . . [His] photos reveal first and foremost that Israel is a huge story. Images talk. . . .

Rubinger took the photographs that chronicle the country’s story. One picture, taken in Beirut, shows that he wasn’t afraid to get close to the thick of the fighting, but he didn’t produce amazing war photographs. Even his most famous picture, of the paratroopers at the Wall, has something staged to it. It’s not staged in the sense that the photographer brought soldiers (or models dressed as soldiers) and placed them next to the Western Wall after the fact and had them stand at the desired angle. Rubinger’s picture is in the right place, in the field, and at the moment of truth of Israeli history. But he still placed the soldiers. . . .

But since the 1980s, it’s harder and harder to find a winning image—a visual image from a seminal event. . . . The visual digital explosion of the past few decades blurs everything, including the names of the photographers—and the events themselves. Among the flat sea of photographers, only one stands out in recent years: Miri Tzaḥi. . . . Tzaḥi knew how to connect with the disengagement from Gaza and other events full of national pathos, which other photographers missed.

 

David Rubinger Documented Israel’s Great Story

This piece was first published on the Hebrew-language website Mida on March 4, 2017 rendered into English by Avi Woolf, and republished here with permission. The original article, complete with photographs, can be found by clicking on the link at the bottom of this page.

Photographer David Rubinger, who passed away at the age of ninety-two, was one of a series of photographers whose pictures were seared into national and global memory. Against the background of the visual explosion of the digital age, they particularly stand out.

David Rubinger was in effect Israel’s family photographer. His death allows us to stop for a moment and ponder the great photographers whose work captured the state of Israel over the years. Rubinger’s photos reveal first and foremost that Israel is a huge story. Images talk. Great photographers were here, saw, and took pictures, and the images they brought from the Israeli area were burned in the collective memory — not just Israeli, but international as well. I don’t want to compare the pictures of our lives to those of other peoples, some of whom are our neighbors, but ours is bigger. The story, I mean.

Rubinger took the photographs that chronicle the country’s story. One picture, taken in Beirut, shows that he wasn’t afraid to get close to the thick of the fighting, but he didn’t produce amazing war photographs. Even his most famous picture, of the paratroopers at the Wall, has something staged to it. It’s not staged in the sense that the photographer brought soldiers (or models dressed as soldiers) and placed them next to the Western Wall after the fact and had them stand at the desired angle. Rubinger’s picture is in the right place, in the field, and at the moment of truth of Israeli history. But he still placed the soldiers. I mention this because many years later I saw an authentic picture taken by one of the soldiers from the first battalion who arrived at the Wall, in which you can see the battalion commander, Uzi Eilam blowing the shofar, with his deputy Dan Ziv alongside him, with the IDF’s then-chief rabbi Shlomo Goren off to the side. The photo is straight and reflects the real situation at the Wall when the paratroopers arrived, absent the heavy pathos of a Rubinger photo.

One of those who put Israel on the photographic map was Robert Capa, who has no equal or superior. The famous photo of the ship Altalena burning before Tel Aviv’s beaches is his. The same is true of some of the burning images of the neglect in the shanty towns in the early days of mass immigration at the beginning of the 1950s. Afterwards, Capa moved on to the First Indochina War, where he met his death in 1954.

The man who first brought the people of Israel authentic images from the battlefields of the reprisal raids [against guerrilla attacks from Israel’s neighbors in the 1950s and 1960s] and the 1956 Sinai Campaign was Avraham Vered, a photographer for the magazine Bamaḥaneh (the IDF equivalent of Stars and Stripes). We see Ariel Sharon, the celebrated commando Meir Har-Zion (whom Moshe Dayan called “the best soldier ever to emerge in the IDF”), and their comrades in the 1950s actions in the way that Vered made us see them. It’s as if already he expected that they and their friends would be etched in national memory as heroes. The camera was attracted to them even before the creators of the late-1960s mythologies revealed their dictated exploits. In the end, Avraham Vered’s powerful image is that Meir Har Tzion lying badly wounded in the hospital with tubes coming out of his body, after the Khirbet al-Rahwa raid of 1956.

Micha Bar-am, if not quite the antithesis of Rubinger, is certainly no family photographer. He may not have photographed Menachem Begin help his wife Aliza put on her shoe like Cinderella—as Rubinger did in another iconic shot—but who could present something which would be the equal of the photo in which IDF soldiers can be seen taking cover along with their Egyptian prisoners, in what was known as the “courtyard” in the Yom Kippur War.

After 1973, most of the iconic photographs are political. They are also artistically weaker, and are not necessarily known today. Many Israelis would recognize the picture of the religious Zionist leader Ḥanan Porat carried on his comrades’ shoulders in Sebastia. Who could name the photographer? Eight years later, a picture was taken that gained mythic status for the Peace Now left of its time, a solid front of 1980s manly men holding hands, with Emil Grunzweig at its center. (Vardi Kahana, who took the picture, was perhaps Israel’s first female photographer of significance). Was it the famous Peace Now demonstration after the publishing of the report on the Sabra and Shatila massacre, at the end of which Greenzweig was killed by the grenade hurled by the far-right activist Yonah Avrushmi? In any event, the difference between the militant popular movement that was Peace Now in 1983, and the movement we know today that spends its time filing appeals and counting settlers’ houses is enormous.

The era of the photographers of the newspapers Ḥadashot and Monitin came next. Adam Baruch set the new standard in photography, with some help Micha Kirshner: Brigadier General Yiftaḥ Spector bare-chested, an Arab kid who was hit with a rubber bullet, that sort of thing. Still, those who seek out moments of national significance still take the photographs that people remember: Begin and Sharon on the Beaufort crusader castle in Lebanon, with a second lieutenant in the Golani special forces reporting to then-Defense Minister Sharon. The photo is etched in our memories in part because this is where Begin asked Sharon if the PLO fighters had machine guns, and because of Sharon’s original, incorrect statement that no Israeli soldiers were killed in the preceding battle.

This is the period of the paradoxical career of the Israel-Prize winning photographer Alex Levac. One picture he took, of two Shin-Bet officers leading a live terrorist away after the hijacking of the 300 bus, became infamous because it led to the discovery that the Palestinian in the photograph, along with another hijacker, were summarily executed by the Shin Bet. Thus this photo has remained in Israeli consciousness far more than the hundreds, or even thousands, of other good pictures he took.

But since the 1980s, it’s harder and harder to find a winning image—a visual image from a seminal event. This is despite the fact that there is even footage of Yigal Amir shooting Prime Minister Rabin in the back. The visual digital explosion of the past few decades blurs everything, including the names of the photographers—and the events themselves. Among the flat sea of photographers, only one stands out in recent years: Miri Tzaḥi. The Israeli family has changed, but Tzaḥi knew how to connect with the disengagement from Gaza and other events full of national pathos, which other photographers missed.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.