Ten years ago, Karnit Mandel paid a visit to the Israel Defense Forces and Defense Establishment Archive in Tel Aviv. At the time, Mandel, an experienced archive sleuth, was working as a researcher on documentary films. One day, when she was hunting for old footage, she glanced over at the next table. Amid a hodgepodge of old drawings and documents that had clearly seen better days – her gaze happened to fall on a file folder on the messy table. Inside was a long list of items on a printout from a particularly ancient computer printer, bearing a Hebrew title that was hard to ignore: “War Booty Films.”
In response to Mandel’s question, a member of the archive staff explained that the file contained materials that had arrived from Beirut in 1982. She asked whether she could view the footage described in the list she saw; for that, she would need an official permit, she was told: You have to write a letter requesting to view the materials, the staffer said, and explain your reasons. Mandel, who at the time was an M.A. student in film school and was working on a seminar paper dealing with the visual memory of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in addition to her other research work, was undeterred by the bureaucracy. She fired off a letter, explaining that she wanted to view the films for her academic research, and waited. And waited.
Failing to get a reply, she started to call the archive, relentlessly asking about the status of her request. “Every time I called, different people in the archive gave me
— source jfjfp.com | Nirit Anderman reports in Haaretz | Dec 9, 2021