Photographing 1948: Robert Capa’s Absent Palestinians

Abstract Visually speaking, Robert Capa made Israel. Through that act he erased Palestine. The vision Capa developed of Israel is captured in the 303 published photographs that he took over the course of three trips in 1948–50. This article explores the ideological frameworks that shaped Capa’s understanding of Israel/Palestine and probes the concealed context of his images. The analysis shows that Capa covered his topic through an ideologized lens that depicted Israel as a heroic nation of Holocaust survivors and victors of war, while the Palestinians and the Nakba were hidden from view. Capa’s vision was important because he was an internationally renowned photographer who was not an official Israeli propagandist, yet his images served that function.

hostile Arab elements" 3 -that is, to secure Palestinian villages and empty them of their Palestinian inhabitants. Plan D marked the onset of widescale Palestinian expulsion, a process that included several massacres by Zionist forces in Palestinian villages and towns. 4 By the time Capa landed in Tel Aviv in May 1948, an estimated 250,000-300,000 Palestinians had already been forced out of their localities of origin. 5 As corroborated by a June 1948 Israeli intelligence report, the mass exodus was primarily caused by the actions of Zionist paramilitary groups and the Israeli army. 6 By the spring of 1949, Israel had emerged the victor and some 750,000 Palestinians had become refugees as a result of what amounted to ethnic cleansing. 7 Capa's narrative of what transpired, however, is completely aligned with the official Zionist narrative, which maintains that Palestinians left of their own free will and the Israeli army was merely defending itself. The idealized Jewish settler and the absence of Palestinians in Capa's images elided the reality of ethnic cleansing and gave credence to a narrative that denied that reality.
I explore Robert Capa's vision of the first Israelis by contextualizing his pictures within both his personal life story and events on the ground. Unlike the existing literature on this segment of Capa's work, which focuses on the vivid iconographic contents of his images and primarily on his portrayal of Israel and the Israelis, this article examines the images in light of historical events. 8 I question how Capa narrated to the world what Israelis call the War of Independence and Palestinians know as the Nakba (catastrophe). Essentially, I ask: How does the construction of this narrative relate to the absence/presence of tension in a settler-colonial setting where an immigrant population is expelling and robbing an Indigenous population of their land? Such population replacements are core to settler colonialism. 9 And Capa's photographs illustrate how his documenting of that settler-colonial state's creation served the origin myth that Israel was established in a defensive war and that the first Israelis made the desert bloom, completely overlooking the destruction of the territory's native Palestinian society.
Unlike the existing literature on Capa's images, and informed by Rona Sela's method of critically reading images, my focus is not on what Capa framed in but rather what he framed out of his photographs. 10 This method of critically reading photographs is explored in depth by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, who argues that "photographs should always be studied in connection to what the shutter sought to keep disconnected from what we are invited to see. […] when we speak about conditions of systemic violence, we should not look necessarily for photographs of or about systemic violence, but rather explore photographs taken in those zones and decode them outside of imperial epistemologies. " 11 In probing Capa's images, I am more interested in the Palestinians who are absent than in the Israelis who are present in them and I hone in on the narratives that surrounds that absence-in other words, what we are not "invited to see. " I acknowledge that things look very different from our present vantage point than they did for Capa. He took many of his pictures in the fog of war, or at least in circumstances proximate to war, and in a context where he was physically embedded with Israeli forces and both emotionally and ideologically invested in the Zionist project of Israel as a haven of safety for European Jews coming out of the slaughter of World War II-a time when the Western world, and Capa himself, was coming to terms with the vicious anti-Semitism that culminated in the Holocaust. In this worldview, Israel was an embattled and heroic weaker party. In line with the Zionist discourse, the very existence of Palestinians was denied and the fact that they were dispossessed was simply shrugged off. Since then, robust scholarly historical research has established that the State of Israel, as well as the Zionist movement that preceded its formation, destroyed Palestinian society, driving out the majority of Palestine's native people and barring their return. 12 That notwithstanding, Capa's images have not ceased to carry weight and they remain powerful, even spellbinding. Critically examining these images is therefore not just about understanding how Israel/Palestine was understood by or represented to a Western audience in 1948-50, but it is also about uncovering the narrative underlying these images.
This article is grounded in scholarly research into Capa's life, photography, and ideological worldview and in numerous historical works that document what was happening on the ground at the time of Capa's visits. It draws on Capa's eight photographic collections from Israel/Palestine, a total of 303 photographs, which are published online by Magnum Photos, the photo agency Capa established. 13 In addition to these published collections, there are more than seven hundred rolls of film that Capa shot in Israel/Palestine. I have not assessed these myself, relying instead on their examination by Andrew L. Mendelson and C. Zoe Smith who confirm that the published pictures are representative. 14 The online section also matches what we know was available to his contemporary public.
Capa was not the only photographer working in Israel/Palestine at the time. The Yishuvand later, the Israeli authorities-employed numerous photographers to document the making of their state. 15 Unlike them, whose images are stored in Israel's National Photograph Collection, Capa was not commissioned to take photographs serving Israel's "national ideology" or its "fundamental norms, values and goals […] constructing its symbols and language. " 16 He was a freelance photojournalist and his images reflected his personal understanding of what was taking place. And as an internationally acclaimed photographer, Capa arguably had a greater impact on the Western visualization of Israel/Palestine than if he had been directly employed by Israel, 17 independence being typically considered a marker of objectivity.
While it is difficult to measure the exact impact of Capa's images on the contemporary perception of that history, it is worth pointing out a few things that signal their significance. For one, Capa was perhaps the most famous photographer of his age. Second, his images from Israel/Palestine were published in a joint book with the renowned US author, Irwin Shaw, and in magazines such as Illustrated. Third, many of those images remain in common use today, including the one described in the opening paragraph of this article and, especially, the images of David Ben-Gurion declaring Israel's independence.
This article is organized into three parts. First, I outline my theoretical approach to analyzing the images. I then draw a brief biographical sketch of Robert Capa before proceeding with an overview of his work in Israel/Palestine. These sections provide a frame for understanding what motivated Capa when he took the photographs he did, and what prompted Capa to exclude certain events and topics. Finally, I conduct critical readings of his images, focusing on his narration of the establishment of Israel and on the erasure of Palestinians.
In sum, the article shows how Capa naturalized the absence of Palestinians by portraying a landscape developed by Israelis as if it was pristine land.

Absence and the Photographic Frame
It is often difficult to separate what is absent from what is present because, naturally, they are intertwined insofar as one necessitates the other. 18 Absence is present in the sense that we can detect what has been intentionally ignored and removed or unintentionally overlooked. A close reading of Capa's images narrating Israeli history can therefore also be read as images narrating Palestinian absence precisely because Palestinians are overwhelmingly absent from those images, although remnants of their presence are visible. 19 Consequently, although there has traditionally been an assumption among both researchers and news consumers that photojournalism is an "impartial and objective" form of journalism, 20 the photojournalist's viewpoint is situated, meaning that they too engage in the "politics of the human gaze. " 21 The act of photographing is the act of framing events through subjective composition, both literally and figuratively. It is an act that implies inclusion/exclusion or absence/presence. Azoulay uses the apt term "verdict" to describe this function of photography. 22 "Frame" takes on a double meaning when analyzing photography in the settler-colonial context in which Israel was established and Palestinians were forced out of their homeland or placed under military rule and rendered second-class citizens. In one sense, it denotes the literal frame of the photograph as Capa took it. On the other, it represents Capa's political situatedness and the frame of reference through which he perceived Israel/Palestine. In Capa's imagery some lives are grievable, while others are not. His images hence become for us, the viewers, epistemological, ethical, and political lenses through which to see the world, understand conflict, and sympathize with its victims or victors. 23 Attempting to understand the function of these images in narrating Capa and his generation's understanding of the conflict, we must both consider Capa's worldview and, simultaneously, break free of it.
My analysis of Capa and his images is inspired by Sela's analytical approach to the photographs taken by Israeli state photographers. Sela's analysis shows how both the photography itself and the accompanying text or captions "blur the Palestinian context. " 24 Sela says that her work was an attempt "to strip photographs connected to Palestinian existence from their imposed Zionist national context […] to decipher the contradictory meanings […] to crack their façade" 25 -in other words, to undertake a critical reading of images that enables the "extraction of different layers of meaning. " 26 It is in this critical vein that I approach Capa's pictures, contextualizing them through the historical events that transpired in Israel/Palestine but are not captured in the actual pictures. I also contend that omissions in the accompanying captions were deliberate since Capa was close enough to capture actual events, both in terms of time and space, but chose not to do so. Interestingly, the visual contents of Capa's images are very similar to the state-sponsored photographs analyzed by Sela and Azoulay. 27 Capa was so deeply entrenched in the Zionist worldview that he saw things in much the same way as the official state photographers. While his nominal independence as a freelance photographer of great renown conferred credibility on the images, his ideological sympathy with Israel ensured that those images served the official Israeli state narrative.

Photographer with a Cause
Susan Sontag highlights that "photographs are evidence not only of what's there but of what an individual sees, not just a record but an evaluation of the world. " 28 By excavating the historical context in which these images were made, as well as the photographer's life story, this article seeks to understand why Capa erased the Palestinian reality and what that erased reality was. Capa's visualization of Israel/Palestine was affected by many factors: where he went; the events he covered; what he included in the pictures; the pictures he chose to publish; and how he captioned the pictures. In other words, we must understand Capa the photographer to understand Capa's images. A brief biographical sketch of Robert Capa helps contextualize the personal-ideological frames that shaped his image making and his understanding of Israel/ Palestine.
Born in 1913 as André Friedmann, Robert Capa was a Jewish refugee from Hungary. He left his home country in 1931 after having been active in an anti-fascist student group, for which he was violently interrogated by the Hungarian police. Anti-Semitism was rampant in Hungary and was part of Capa's life from childhood. Capa did not escape anti-Semitism as his first place of exile was Berlin, where he witnessed Hitler's rise to power. He moved to Vienna in 1933 and then on to Paris. His precarious status as a refugee was exemplified by the fact that for years, his only formal ID was his Nansen passport, the interwar documentation given to stateless refugees. 29 The Spanish Civil War (1936-39) became his formative work experience. War, which came to be his hallmark, was not his only subject, however. Capa's professional outlook-his sense of the photojournalist's role-was explicitly political. He perceived truth as an argument for a cause and not as a virtue in itself, as evidenced by his statement: "The truth is the best picture, the best propaganda. " 30 On another occasion he commented, "In a war you must hate somebody or love somebody, you must have a position or you cannot stand what goes on. " 31 Capturing Capa's self-identification as a political photojournalist, his biographer Alex Kershaw notes, "The Spanish Civil War was Capa's first chance to fight totalitarianism in the trenches with a potent weapon-the Leica [his camera]. " 32 Thus, in a very literal sense, Capa was transmitting his vision of the world. As Lawrence Rudner comments, Capa belonged to a category of "photojournalists who, by virtue of their political, social or aesthetic feelings, choose to convey their particular passions via their work, overtly position themselves as 'involved' with the world and its problems […] his photographs reveal his own analysis. " 33 Capa was a photographer with a cause, one shaped by his life experiences and political leanings. In Spain, he witnessed fascism's victory up close. 34 On the frontlines of the civil war, his girlfriend and photojournalistic equal, Gerda Taro, was killed. 35 Capa also witnessed the global brutality of fascism when he covered the Japanese bombing of China, then went onto capture the turning tide of World War II as he embedded with Allied troops in Africa and Europe. On September 7, 1945, he photographed the highly symbolic Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) service in Berlin's synagogue, the first since 1938. 36 Capa barely survived the war. He had been close to action on many occasions, including being on one of the first barges to land on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day, and could easily have been hit by a bullet or a shell. He was coming to grips with the destruction surrounding him. And though Nazism and fascism were defeated, the Jewish society into which Capa was born was decimated. The Hungarian Holocaust experience was extreme: an estimated 565,000 Hungarian Jews were murdered, 37 including several relatives on his mother's side. 38 Capa's life story, political ideology, and sense of the photojournalist's role all coalesced in the images he subsequently took-and those he did not take-in Israel/Palestine. Capa's life story as a socialist Jewish refugee who, in a series of hazardous missions, had covered the destructive fascist war machine made him inclined to side with the newborn Jewish state founded on socialist principles. This was an inclination shared by a whole milieu of Jewish photographers. 39 As an internationally famed photojournalist, Capa was a prime representative of a worldview manifested in images. His prominent status as a photojournalist was such that in many respects, he had no equal. His images defined the Spanish Civil War and the landing in Normandy. Yet, when Capa decided to cover the establishment of the State of Israel, he failed to obtain adequate contracts for the job. His decision to proceed regardless is a measure of the assignment's personal importance to him. His emotional attachment to the Israeli cause was manifested both in the fundraising film he directed for the New York United Jewish Appeal in 1950 and his toying with the idea of settling in Israel. 40 Kershaw describes the 1948 war as "Capa's most personal war. " 41 Marc Aronson and Marina Budhos note, "The creation of the state of Israel gave him a sense of hope after the traumas he had lived through and witnessed since the 1930s. " 42 As a result of his stature, Capa's pictures went on to shape and/or validate Western audiences' perceptions of Israel/Palestine.
His iconic imagery of the Jewish refugees and of "heroic" Israeli soldiers and settlers building the Jewish state reflects his understanding of the photojournalist as a creator of propaganda for a cause. While his life story and his socialist and anti-fascist political leanings help us understand his sympathy for Israel and the newly arrived Jewish refugees, the situation in Israel/Palestine was one in which there were two refugee populations-a newly arrived Jewish immigrant population expelling and replacing a fleeing Palestinian population. The fact that Capa does not portray the Palestinian refugees, nor discuss the Israeli responsibility for their expulsion, reveals his dichotomous understanding of war-where there is one right and one wrong. Since he sympathized with the Israeli narrative, the Palestinian refugees fell outside the frame of victims deserving equal (grievable) sympathy. His images portray how the survivors of the Holocaust became state builders in a hostile environment, and he was unable-or unwilling-to portray how the state that they created was also a perpetrator of brutality and dispossession.
Whelan notes of Capa that "by the time he documented the Israeli War for Independence, he knew that many of his relatives had been killed at Auschwitz. He could empathize all too easily with the subjects of his photographs. " Adding that, "The paradox is that, although Capa made his photographs in order to help the side in whose cause he passionately believed-the Spanish anti-Fascists, the Chinese, the Allies in World War II, the Jews in the Israeli War for Independence-his sympathy extended to individuals on both sides of the conflict. " 43 This might have been true for the other wars Capa covered, but there is no evidence that it applied in the case of Israel/Palestine. Capa argued that it was impossible to cross the battle lines to portray what was happening on the other side, but this was primarily a personal/ideological issue rather than a logistical one. While it is difficult to ascertain what it was possible for Capa to physically see, Western photographers working for Life Magazine covered the war from the Arab side and documented the forced exodus of the Palestinians. 44 Israeli photographers documented the same thing 45 but unlike them, Capa only saw-or only portrayed-the Israeli side.
Capa was far from alone on this stance. Another prominent Hungarian Jewish socialist, Arthur Koestler, was also reporting from Israel/Palestine at the time. 46 Like Capa, Koestler compared the Israeli "War of Independence" to the Spanish Civil War, and in his work too, the Palestinians were largely absent. During events they both witnessed, the Palestinians were described as passive bystanders. One of Koestler's descriptions is particularly revealing: "They were an easygoing, peace-loving and individualistic people, with narrow interests and no national consciousness. " 47 As we will see in one of the few images Capa took of a Palestinian, neither Capa nor Koestler attributed agency to the Palestinians. Capa and Koestler came from a similar milieu and their perception of the conflict was colored by their background. Through their stature they enhanced how Western audiences perceived the conflict. They were not alone in shaping this Western understanding. Rather, they were exemplary of a broader tendency. Amy Kaplan shows how sympathy for Israel was common among US progressives at the time, 48 informed as it was by anti-fascism, internationalism, and self-identification with Jewish settlers. As Rashid Khalidi notes, "settler" even has positive connotations in US history due to the context in which the country was shaped. 49 And according to a US journalist quoted by Kaplan, Americans saw "new immigrant cities […] in the background, ghostlike, was the crumbled Arab village, … a visual reminder that the Arab, too, had a diaspora. " 50 These words could have described Capa's images.

Presence and Absence in Capa's Israel/Palestine
Capa arrived in Tel Aviv on May 8, 1948. He was present when David Ben-Gurion declared Israel's independence and he documented the first Israeli cabinet session. 51 When troops from surrounding Arab states (Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, as well as Iraq) went to war against Israel, Capa headed straight to the frontlines where he embedded with Israeli soldiers. His most important military coverage was of the battle for the Jerusalem highway. 52 Between his first and second visit to Israel/Palestine, Capa returned to Europe where he visited Auschwitz. He then returned in May 1949 as the State of Israel celebrated its first anniversary and after most of the armistice agreements had been signed between Israel and contiguous Arab states. His last visit was in 1950. 53 During his 1949 mission, he worked on a book project, Report on Israel, with US author Irwin Shaw. 54 As much as his photographs, his comments from the trip reveal his blinders. In a report in Illustrated magazine from August 27, 1949, he commented: "Israel is the crudest and hardest place one can inhabit today […]. But it is a place where one hears the young people sing at night, and even the old ones talk about the bright future now awaiting them. " 55 The "people" in this context were Jewish Israelis. While Capa took almost no photographs of Palestinians-only a handful of exceptions have been identified, as will be discussed-he had plans to disguise himself as a Bedouin to go and take pictures on the other side of the battle lines. In the end, the pictures of the Dome of the Rock that Shaw obtained for their book came from an Arab photographer-an indication that it was not the people on the other side that were of prime interest, and that capturing their perspective was of no importance. 56 Some of Capa's most moving images taken during his second trip to Israel are of a camp for Jewish displaced persons close to Haifa that housed newly arrived Jews. This camp reminded him of what he had seen in Germany shortly after World War II. He was so disheartened by the experience that he was unable to edit the pictures himself because he felt he could not bear to look at them. 57 The case of Haifa highlights Capa's one-sided vision. Haifa was a site of mass Palestinian flight and the city's Palestinian population was reduced from 71,200 to 5,000, according to the aforementioned Israeli intelligence report. This meant both that there was an unfolding Palestinian tragedy that Capa did not cover and a remaining Palestinian population that he also did not document. 58 There is an equal lack of recognition of this in the captions, underscoring Sela's point that captions and images work together to "blur the Palestinian context. " 59 The omission of any photographs of Palestinians in the copublished book stands in contrast to the text written by Shaw. While it is clear that both Capa and Shaw are sympathetic to Israel, Shaw tackles head-on the reality Capa overlooks. Shaw again and again notes that Palestinian fields and other properties were seized, he mentions the Deir Yassin massacre, he discusses the negotiations regarding the right of return for the Palestinian refugees, and he highlights that UN representatives on the ground argued that Palestinians wanted to return to Palestine. 60 This book was not a typical coproduction based on collaboration but rather a combination of two separately produced bodies of work. Capa and Shaw had gone to cover Israel on individual missions but found that their coverage overlapped nicely. Shaw's text cannot therefore be read as an explanation of what Capa saw. Instead, it should be considered a description of what was possible to see. Furthermore, the contrast between Shaw's attention to the Palestinian perspective and Capa's neglect of it highlights how Capa's captions, in the instances when Capa provides text to accompany his pictures, underscores what he wants the viewer to understand when viewing his pictures.
Mendelson and Smith argue that Capa creates and/or confirms three myths in his images of Israel: first, the "civilized" Jew defending himself against uncivilized Arab attackers; second, the heroic Sabras (Jews born in Mandatory or Ottoman Palestine); and third, the land as a religious/historic Jewish patrimony. 61 This point is also made by Katarzyna Hauzer: "Capa's intimate photo essays mythologizing his ancestors, the Israeli, whose civilized soldierpioneer-defender look is measured against the Arab desert-dwelling nomad-aggressor image. " 62 While I concur with Hauzer's description of Capa's portrayal of the Israelis, what stands out in Capa's images is not so much the contrast in representation that Hauzer notes, but rather the absence of such representation altogether. Mendelson and Smith also make the point that "Arabs" are almost totally absent from Capa's imagery, making them merely "an implied enemy. " 63 In the total set of images, that is, all seven hundred rolls, they identify only a small handful of "Arabs, " including two men from an August 1948 story and another from a July 1948 article, as well as a few others in long-distance shots. 64 Although Capa captures a Druze man at close range in a November 1949 story, the caption reads "A Druse Arab, who sided with the Israelis. " 65 One can understand this last descriptor as the expression of a redeeming feature.

Out of Frame, out of Mind
While Mendelson and Smith are correct that Capa's images fail to show "any Arab civilians injured or killed by the Jewish forces, " they understate how Capa depicts the emptied Arab villages. 66 One can only fully understand this by comparing Capa's visual storytelling with a historical analysis of the events that transpired in the places where those images were taken. The factual history and the narrated history are not the same, and while Capa did an excellent job of visually narrating a history, he did not tell the full story. Existing analyses of Capa's photographs focus on what he portrayed and far less on what he erased. While Capa does show how Israeli settlers took over emptied Palestinian villages, the story he tells-both in his images and in the accompanying texts-portrays this as a seemingly innocent act, obscuring the violence that made it possible. If Israeli violence is present, it is depicted as heroic. As I will demonstrate in the following paragraphs, Capa shines a positive light on highly dramatic events, concealing forced expulsions and highlighting Israeli civilian projects in the absence of Palestinians.
The caption on an image showing an Israeli family walking toward the camera carrying agricultural tools and a food basket is a flagrant example: "Settlers in the Arab village of Tarshiha, seen here collecting their rations and returning from the fields. " 67 Such Israeli settlers reminded Capa of the Spanish idealists fighting Franco's fascist army. 68 Neither the caption nor Capa's image tells us anything about the dramatic events that led to Tarshiha being emptied of its Palestinian inhabitants and made possible the scene Capa depicts. In fact, if one knew nothing about the history of Tarshiha, one could read the caption to imply that these Jewish settlers peacefully cohabited with the Palestinians who lived in the village. Tarshiha, in the northern Galilee, was a town captured by the Israeli army in late October 1948. 69 As described by Benny Morris: "The bombing of Tarshiha that night [October 29/30] killed 24 and buried 60 more under rubble, and triggered mass flight. " 70 While some of the town's Christian population remained in place, the total number of refugees from Tarshiha was significant, numbering 4,000-5,000. 71 In January 1949, the Israeli army returned to the town and deported another "33 heads of families and 101 family members. " 72 There were further depopulation plans for Tarshiha but they were not implemented. 73 According to a New York Times article referenced by Walid Khalidi in his seminal work, All That Remains, UN observers on the ground "reported the extensive looting of villages and the carrying away of goats, sheep and mules by the Israeli forces.
[…] The looting appeared to the observers to have been systematic, army trucks being used. The situation has created a new influx of refugees into Lebanon. " 74 Azoulay notes that the Palestinians who remained in Tarshiha were "gathered in a closed area and placed under military rule. " 75 Capa did not take pictures of them and their absence from his photographs undermines his claim that it was not possible for him to take such pictures.
In another image, a happy-looking Israeli couple sit on a stone structure with their feet dangling in an irrigation canal. In the background, a minaret is visible, as are a few other buildings. The otherwise serene ambience of the photo is disrupted by two things-the minaret and the location of the image. According to the caption, the irrigation canal is "near the village of Safed [Safad]. " 76 The minaret is a picturesque detail in a scenic landscape and need not mean anything by itself. A person not acquainted with the details of what happened in Safad could be excused for seeing the image as proof of two societies coexisting. The historical account reveals a grimmer reality. Prior to the civil war, Safad was indeed a mixed Arab and Jewish town, with a population of around 10,000-12,000 Palestinians and 1,500 Jews. 77 Already by December 1, 1947, right after the announcement of the partition plan, it was reported that Palestinians were fleeing from Safad, and two weeks later violence broke out between the two communities in the presence of British troops. 78 On April 16, 1948, the British troops left Safad to its fate. Fighting immediately resumed. Then Palmach Commander-in-Chief Yigal Allon ordered "the harassment of Arab Safad in order to speed up its evacuation. " 79 Starting on May 1, Palmach forces took over the surrounding Palestinian villages and on May 2 they reached Safad and started firing mortars on the Arab neighborhoods. After a week of fighting and mortar bombardment, the town was captured on May 9-10 and an estimated 10,000-15,000 Palestinians fled the Safad area. 80 Only a hundred elderly Muslim and thirty-four to thirty-six Christian Palestinians remained in the town. Of these, the Muslims were expelled to Lebanon while the Christians were "transferred" to Haifa, 81 transfer being a common euphemism in the context of ethnic cleansing. 82 Koestler, like Capa, reported on Safad after these events. Both accepted the official Israeli version. For Koestler, the fall of Safad was a "miracle. " 83 Unlike the public version of events, reproduced by Koestler and Capa, the Israeli intelligence "migration report" of June 1948 underscores that the population of Safad fled because the town was overrun by Zionist troops, and that what transpired there had a "critical impact on the vicinity. " 84 The report repeatedly invokes the "fall of Safed" as the main factor in driving Palestinians of the area to leave their villages. 85 In the text accompanying two other images from a "hilltop near Safed, " Capa tries to tell the story of what took place. Examined against the historical account, Capa's story is only partially truthful as he falsely portrays the Palestinians as the aggressors and omits altogether the fact that over ten thousand Palestinian civilians fled as a result of the Palmach takeover. His caption reads: "During the fighting in the town, the surrounded and outnumbered Jews constructed two mortars, more notable for the amount of noise they produced than for their practical effect. But along with the noise of the mortars, there came a rainstorm, the first in memory in that region during the month of May. The attacking Arabs, convinced, according to the story, that the Jews had developed an atomic weapon, then fled the town. " 86 Capa accepted the Israeli version of events, which, as all good propaganda, contained some element of truth. The Zionist forces had systematically fought their way to Safad, blowing up neighboring Palestinian villages to break the morale of the town's Palestinian inhabitants. When the Palmach launched the mortar barrage on Safad's Arab neighborhoods on May 2, and then staged their ground incursion on May 6, Palestinians fled in droves. But the last Haganah attack was yet to take place. This too started with a massive mortar barrage, and it is this barrage that some of the remaining inhabitants evidently thought was an atomic bomb. 87 Capa misrepresents several crucial points-the mortars were not fired by an outnumbered and besieged Jewish population, but rather by the Zionist forces besieging the town, and the putative "atomic bomb" did not trigger the fleeing; rather, it was a later event in a twoweek attack.
Similarly, in a series of pictures along the "central front, " Capa describes how Haganah troops "rest in a captured Arab village" with no reference to what had happened to that village or its inhabitants. 88 While these are images of war, and thus not as innocent looking as the images from Tarshiha and Safad, they are equally one-sided. The embedded photographer sympathizes with the army with which he is embedded. That around 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes and turned into refugees between December 1947 and the summer of 1949-not to mention the thousands that were killed or massacred-is elided in both Capa's photography and commentary.

Present Absentees
In 1950, Israel enacted a legal regime that designated displaced Palestinians who left their homes but remained inside Israel's demarcated boundaries according to the 1949 armistice agreements as "present absentees. " This Israeli legal framework encompassed some 20,000-30,000 Palestinians shortly after the 1948 war. 89 Internally displaced persons, as they are known in international law, commonly return to their homes after the end of hostilities; in the Israeli context, internally displaced Palestinians were not allowed to return to their homes and Israel confiscated their property. 90 The phrase "present-absentee" is relevant on several levels when analyzing Capa's photographs. First, neglecting to portray "the other side" because it was too dangerous to cross the battle lines is not a convincing argument. There were plenty of Palestinian refugees within Israel's boundaries, both in Haifa and Tarshiha where Capa took many photographs. Second, on a more metaphorical level, the Palestinians-both those driven out of the country during Capa's first two visits and those who remained in Israel after the armistice agreements were signed-are present-absentees in Capa's imagery in that their presence on the land is felt but they remain absent from the photographs. Except for a few counterexamples, discussed below, this presence is not that of individual persons but of physical remnants represented by the houses and objects left behind, or what Israeli legal parlance classifies as "absentee property. " 91 While we might understand Capa's decision not to cross into neighboring Arab states, he could easily have seen internally displaced Palestinians or visited some of the Palestinian enclaves remaining within Israel. He could also have captured on camera the mass exodus of Palestinians while he was present, as the Life Magazine photographers did. While his idea of dressing up as a Bedouin to cross the battle lines fits well with his adventurist and self-aggrandizing image, there were plenty of less risky ways to find Palestinians. Highlighting the alleged dangers involved in taking pictures of Palestinians served to build up the mythology of Israel as a peaceful modern state that had risen in the midst of archaic and dangerous Arab surroundings.
As noted, there are exceptions to the absence of Palestinians in Capa's photographs from Israel/Palestine. I have identified four such images out of the 303 in the online Magnum database. These pictures fall into two distinct categories, and in at least one case, it is only guesswork whether the individuals depicted are in fact Palestinian.
The first category is one in which Palestinians can be seen across a barbed wire divider. In two pictures from Capa's 1948 visit, such a roll of barbed wire divides both the road and the image in two. The first image is a close-up of two men, one of whom appears to be handing over to the other what looks to be a packet of cigarettes across the barbed wire divider. Based on the premise that Capa was standing on the Israeli side of the divider, we can assume that the man facing the camera is a Palestinian, as is the child resting against a stone wall in the background. This picture is unique among the 303 images in that we see the faces of Palestinians. The title of the picture, "A divided sector of an Arab/Israeli village, " is a pertinent comment on the ways that Israel's establishment ruptured Palestinian society. 92 Together with the next photo in the same category of exceptions, this image further suggests that it would have been possible for Capa to portray the "other side. " In the second image, we see the back of a woman walking with a child on the other side of the barbed wire. Since the keywords to the picture only mention "settler, " which we can assume refers to the people in the image which are on his side of the barbed wire, we cannot know for certain whether the woman in question is a Palestinian, but we can assume so given that Capa takes her photo across a fence seeming to mark a boundary. 93 The second category is an odd one in that both pictures involved are close-ups of what are clearly Palestinians, but the individuals photographed remain inaccessible to us. In the first, an "Arab worker helps with the irrigation of a field" in the Galilee. He is in the foreground of the picture, but his face is turned away from the camera in the direction of what the keywords identify as a Jewish settler. 94 The notion of the "Arab" worker merely assisting the Jewish farmer fits well with the Zionist discourse that Jewish colonists were bringing modernity to the land, summed up in the Zionist slogan of making the desert bloom.
The second picture in this category is also a close-up-this time with the subject of the photograph facing the camera. The person in question is a Bedouin woman voting in the 1950 Israeli elections. Apart from her hands, she is completely covered in black clothing, including her face. She is thus both the central focus of the picture and hidden from view. 95 Taken together, these four exceptions reveal several things. First, most obviously, they demonstrate that it was possible to encounter Palestinians-whether across barbed wire fences or similar invisible boundary markers that divided villages; or by visiting the Palestinian communities that remained in Israel, such as the "present absentees"; or by covering the Palestinian communities that remained in place, such as those of Haifa. Second, like the images  Capa, 1948. from Tarshiha and Safad, these four images convey nothing of Israel's responsibility for the Palestinian predicament. Third, with one singular exception, the Palestinians are faceless and mostly passive subjects in an Israeli world. Even when physically present in the images, they serve as a curiosity or as a backdrop. They are not makers of history, and they are not grievable subjects.
It was the likes of George Nehmeh, and other early photographers for the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) that captured the Palestinian predicament for posterity in those early years. While UNRWA's photographers also produced iconic photographs, none of these gained the kind of exposure that Capa achieved with his images. 96 As is evident from the work of George Rodger, a Magnum photojournalist of the time, it was possible for Western journalists to cover the plight of Palestinian refugees. 97 Rodger, who had been assigned to Africa and the Middle East since the founding of Magnum, covered the Palestinians experiencing the Nakba. 98 He had this to say: "Sometimes the ideology of Magnum went a little too far. The whole world knew that the Israelis had annexed Palestine in 1947 and driven out the Arabs. Nevertheless, Capa, Chim [Magnum cofounder] and other photographers insisted on photographing the Promised Land and distributing the pictures all around the world.
[…] I was on the other side, insofar as I was an Arabist working with the Palestinian refugees. I knew that their houses had been destroyed. My version of these facts was never published. " 99 Rodger's criticism of Capa was mirrored by Capa's own: in covering the Palestinian refugees, "Rodger had taken sides, " he said. 100 On the one hand, this spat within Magnum could indicate that Capa was not merely oblivious to the Palestinian predicament, but that he was actively opposed to it being included in the narration of events. His criticism of Rodger also reveals that Capa seemed blind to the fact that he too had taken sides. In a text he wrote in 1948, he acknowledges how the Israeli state was an immigrant nation born of and built on the remains of another people's tragedy, but he avoids assigning blame to Israel for that tragedy: "Without Nazism," Capa opines, "it [Israel] could never have gotten mass immigration and without [British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Ernest] Bevin to encourage the Arabs to fight and flee, it would never have gotten its present territory." 101 In the same text, Capa moves on to describe the subject of one of his images as "an old man, sitting on the dirt floor of a little abandoned Arab dwelling. He is an old rabbi from the Yemen." 102 While Capa acknowledges that the territory had been abandoned, he fails to make any connection between that fact and Israeli actions; nor is there any trace of sympathy for those who had to abandon their homes. Instead, Capa empathizes only with the Jewish refugees arriving in Israel. * * * * * Capa's motto was: "If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough. " 103 The problem with Capa's pictures from Israel/Palestine was not that they were not good enough-on the contrary, they have an iconic quality-nor that he was not close enough, but rather that his lens was only aimed in one direction.
The photographer does not simply capture an objective truth but engages in that act from his specific positionality. Reality for Capa was deeply embedded in his worldview, and the images he produced enhanced that reality. For Capa, like for Koestler, and other Western observers at the time, Israel and the Israelis were victims but also heroic victors. The Palestinians, on the other hand, were passive, absent, and ungrievable.
Even when the Palestinian tragedy is evident as a subtext in his photographs, Capa fails to engage with that tragedy. Two of the pictures discussed in this article allow us to "crack their façade": 104 The one from Safad, with the minaret in the background that testifies to a recent Palestinian history, to a society that has been destroyed and whose physical remnants are visible; and the one from Tarshiha, with the physical remains of a Palestinian village there for all to see. Yet for Capa, in both instances, the focus is on the new Israeli society being built on the wreckage of the Palestinian society that he fails to acknowledge.
In taking and making these photographs, Capa was not simply an observer; he was a narrator and his narration only served to strengthen the story Israel told the world. He was thus not a mere documenter, but also a builder of nationalist monuments in the form of pictures, highlighting what he viewed as heroic nation-builders. Paradoxically, the photographer who in so many wars had not only seen the victims but focused on the refugees fleeing those wars failed in this crucial instance to acknowledge the Palestinians as grievable in the same way.