Introduction: “Nuclear archives are by nature violent.”1

Nuclear archives are violent in more than one sense: the subject material is violent of course, but so are the regimes of secrecy governing nuclear weapons.2 This is arguably most evident in the case of Israel, which is the only nuclear weapons-possessing state that does not officially acknowledge the existence of its nuclear weapons. Israel has at least 90 nuclear warheads produced in a reactor near the city of Dimona in the Negev desert. The city, constructed in the mid-1950s on top of land expropriated from Palestinian Bedouins, was a self-proclaimed “developmental town” where Mizrahim (Jews from Middle Eastern countries) were housed. With the construction of the nuclear reactor, carried out with assistance from France, racialized Mizrahim would be placed on the frontlines of nuclear risk, exposed to various dangers, without being informed or consulted.

Like other “radioactive empires” explored in this issue, Israeli nuclearization has been deeply intertwined with racial hierarchy encompassing both Mizrahim and Palestinians. Although both of these groups face racialization and exclusion, they are not equally stratified: Palestinians are a colonized people present in the territories colonized by Israel in 1967, in 1948, and in the diaspora after their displacement from Palestine. Mizrahim, on the other hand, were “invented” through Zionism’s creation of Arabness and Jewishness as mutually exclusive groups, a discourse embraced by Arab nationalist states in the region.3 While Palestinians and Mizrahim were depicted as “underdeveloped” and “non-modern,” Israel sought to “rehabilitate” Mizrahim.4 Thus, these two groups’ relationships to land and sovereignty vary significantly, as the photo-essay will discuss below.

The term “radioactive empires” is derived from Winona LaDuke and Ward Churchill’s (1986) article on the overlap between nuclear materialities and colonialism.5 This overlap is evident in how colonial legacies are embedded in everyday spaces, becoming pervasive all around us, much like radioactivity, exposing people to vulnerabilities in the present as well as the future. But the link between nuclear materialities and colonial structures is also an invitation to consider how imperial actors have derived power from nuclearization, and from the very threat of radioactivity.6

Israeli nuclear weapons are governed by a policy known in Hebrew as amimut (ambiguity or opacity).7 This means that Israel does not officially confirm or deny having nuclear weapons. While it is well-known that Israel has nuclear weapons, and is not a member of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), its policy of amimut is supported by Israel’s allies and has thus served as a diplomatic shield. In Israel, amimut means that the subject of nuclear weapons is therefore even more heavily censored and securitized than in other nuclear weapons-possessing states.8 When Israeli whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu fled the country and shared photographs of the reactor with the international press in 1986, he was kidnapped by Israeli agents, sent back to Israel, and subsequently charged with treason.9 Vanunu spent 18 years in jail, 11 of which were in solitary confinement.

The secrecy underpinning nuclear archives continues to deny justice to those who have been affected by the presence and use of nuclear weapons. It upholds and normalizes the nuclear security state and represents it as here to stay.10 As Timothy Pachirat has argued, modern society has sought to conceal practices of industrialized killing, including the labor and bureaucracy associated with such violence.11 Nuclear reactors can be placed alongside other violent institutions of modernity, whether the industrialized slaughterhouse or other zones of confinement that are invisible and inaccessible to the public, such as spaces of detention, interrogation, execution, or extermination. Nuclear facilities epitomize sanitized violence, in contrast to the bloody and grotesque violence visible in a slaughterhouse. In this context, how can we meaningfully research nuclear weapons and nuclear politics? How can we transcend these violent archives and the structures of censorship? How can we understand a secretive site such as Israel’s nuclear facility and its links to other sites of irradiation? Can visual depictions play a role in the disruption of nuclear secrecy?12

Because of the context of state secrecy and how it affects nuclear weapons in particular, researchers have thought of the nuclear archive as a privileged place to uncover truth. Official nuclear archives are places scholars and activists go to amass information, to challenge secrecy. We now know a lot more about nuclear weapons, including Israel’s nuclear history thanks to this approach. The declassified information on the Vela Test (a clandestine nuclear test conducted by Israel and South Africa and still shrouded in significant mystery) is one case in point where scholars have revealed the US’s deliberate concealment of the test.13

Yet archives center the state, presenting written material as authoritative. This has long been a problem in the study of Palestine/Israel, where Palestinian oral histories were dismissed as a form of documentation of the Nakba, the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in 1948.14 In contrast, written archives produced by the state have been seen as objective, though of course, state and other archives represent a distinct point of view and because of this can reproduce existing power structures.15 Someone wrote, assembled, and curated these archives, at a specific historical moment and place. As many historians have emphasized, instead of using an archive as the sole object of investigation, we need to consider the process of its compilation, production, and preservation—and maybe even its destruction or termination.16 Saidiya Hartman’s work on the “emptiness” of the archives of slavery is instructive here. Archival absences represent more than silences, they are scandals of grotesque and unimaginable violence.17 As the artworks discussed below demonstrate, there is a fundamental archival power imbalance in discussions of nuclear weapons and more generally discussions of Palestine, in which Palestinian voices have long-been spoken over, erased, conveniently overlooked.18

Feminist nuclear scholars have effectively demonstrated that there is a hierarchy in knowledge production, in terms of the substance considered to comprise an “archive” and its authors.19 As Rebecca H. Hogue and Anaïs Maurer have shown, Pacific women’s anti-nuclear poetry reflects embodied knowledge and emotional experiences, and has therefore typically been situated outside of “valid” political discourse.20 Can scholars create alternative archives that question what nuclear weapons are doing? In nuclear security studies, deterrence has been a mantra.21 Can we try and put deterrence aside? What else do nuclear weapons do? At what cost is this alleged security achieved? What other stories can we tell about nuclear weapons, about their visceral presence in our lives?

After all, despite their supposed isolation, expressed through militarized infrastructures, nuclear reactors are not disconnected from their surroundings but are part of broader ecosystems and lives. They are also deeply intertwined with feeling, with fears and anxieties. Even the enthusiastic embrace of militarism, the sense of technological and military prowess, is based on fear – based on a response to feeling threatened or unsettled.22 Narrative and art are one way to fill this gap, as feminist scholarship on nuclear weapons has effectively demonstrated. This work has convincingly shown that bringing in the personal, the emotional, and the affective is a critical component of understanding the nuclear-armed world. Not only do these perspectives destabilize the dominance of nuclearism, including its associated vocabulary of “nuke-speak,” they allow for a more comprehensive understanding of who or what is “nuclear,” as Gabrielle Hecht argues.23 They broaden the perspective of a nuclear actor, practitioner, or thinker.24 At the same time, they extend the scope of analysis to the various stages of the nuclear fuel cycle.

In this essay, I explore artistic expressions dealing with nuclear weapons in Israel/Palestine: a painting of the nuclear plant in Dimona by Belgian artist Luc Tymans and commentary on it by Suzanne Landau, a renowned Israeli museum curator; a multi-media exhibition which garnered significant attention by Israeli game publisher Asi Burak, which considers a future apocalyptic scenario of an extremist group seizing and bombing Israel’s nuclear reactor while establishing an independent state in the West Bank; a reflexive ethnographic film by Meital AbuKasis, a Mizrahi filmmaker from Dimona who grapples with her community’s complicated relationship with the reactor; a visual art project by Palestinian Inas Halabi which seeks to creatively depict stories of radioactive waste buried in the West Bank; and finally, a short film directed by Ronen Barany, an Israeli video editor in Channel 2, a main television network in Israel, which imagines an Iranian nuclear attack in Israel.25

These pieces all represent interventions in the debate on Israeli nuclear weapons, their absent presence in the country and in wider political debates. They demonstrate how the reactor is made sacred, simultaneously feared and revered, while exploring processes that accompany nuclearization, such as widespread secrecy and securitization as well as racialized environmental damage.26 The pieces I examine all capture a sense of looming anxiety, which is a fundamental feature of the nuclear condition. Like all materials, these sources have significant limitations as well as internal tensions. While these artistic pieces deal with Israeli nuclear infrastructure (if only implicitly, in the case of The Day After), their relevance lies less in their ability to “expose” nuclear weapons, but rather in how they imagine the implications and the presence of nuclearism across Palestine/Israel.

1. Nuclear Plant

Luc Tuymans

Born Belgium 1958

Nuclear Plant 2006

Oil on canvas

97 × 175 × 3 cm

The Israel Museum, Jerusalem

Purchased through the gift of Agnès and Edward Lee, London; Monica and David Zwirner, New York; Freddie and Muriel Salem, London; Lisa and Steve Tananbaum, New York; Linda and Harry Macklowe, New York; Adrienne and Peter Biberstein, Zurich; Mimi and Peter Haas Fund, San Francisco; and the Barbara and Eugene Schwartz Contemporary Art Acquisition Endowment Fund

Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem by Elie Posner

This oil painting is currently housed at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. It was painted by a Belgian artist in 2006 and is simply titled “Nuclear Plant.”27 Luc Tuymans’s art has tackled subjects such as historical amnesia, which he seeks to disrupt through a focus on disturbing historical events, such as the Holocaust and colonial violence in the Belgian Congo, while reflecting on dynamics of morality and responsibility.28 Tuymans has other paintings that consider nuclear dangers and nuclear landscapes, such as “Frozen,” a 2003 oil painting dealing with the apocalyptic implications of the Chernobyl nuclear accident.29

“Nuclear Plant” is almost dreamlike in its tones. Through the idyllic landscape, the painting eschews the depiction of the reactor as inherently menacing. Instead, the reactor appears banal; its immediate association with danger, as a structure of securitization, is concealed. The color of the physical plant matches the sky, which obscures the nuclear reactor and renders it part of the nature. The reactor blends with its physical surroundings, and it is surrounded by a greenery that softens any allusion to the techno-landscape, creating a sense of harmony. The image looks peaceful, serene, white-washing the deadly implications of a nuclear reactor. There is no indication of what lies inside the facility, aside from the title. And even in the title, there is no indication that this is in Israel, particularly since domed or cylindrical structures tend to be a mark of nuclear reactors elsewhere as well.30

The description on the museum’s website was written by prominent Israeli art curator Suzanne Landau in 2010. It also notes the element of concealed danger produced by the artist’s decision to opt for a tranquil scene that washes out and blends the nuclear reactor with the environment. Landau also alludes to the secrecy that has structured the nuclear realm:

Nuclear Plant, in tones like camouflage colors, is based on a blurred press photograph of the Israeli nuclear reactor near Dimona. The anxiety the painting instills arises from the disparity between the image and its meaning, between the serene landscape and the exposure of hidden structures in a top-secret compound. In the middle of the austere composition of geometrical forms set against a void, the plant’s shining dome, where the dangerous explosive substances are kept, stands out. This structure, with the narrow tower at its side, evokes a mosque and its minaret. Tuymans deliberately links it [the painting] to other potentially explosive domes in the Middle East, such as Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque, and in this way alludes to the political and religious dilemmas in the region and to the apocalyptic scenarios they present.31

Though the comparison of nuclear weapons with religious structures is not new, the final sentence of the description is striking. The comparison has been invoked to emphasize the making of the nuclear bomb as a mythical object, the ultimate protector of the state and a symbol of security.32 In the case of Israel, the term “security” itself has become a virtual deity. Security through mass destruction and death can be seen as having parallels to religious debates. Scholars have highlighted the Israeli principle of a “sanctity of security” to explain its posture surrounding the nuclear issue, though it extends far beyond the nuclear realm.33 As feminist scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian has theorized, a “security theology” in Israel permeates and structures Palestinians’ everyday life, including the intimate realms of body, love, and memory.34 The depiction of the nuclear reactor through themes of religion can accordingly be seen as affirming the reactor’s status as lying beyond debate and contestation.

However, the only recognizable religious symbols in the paragraph quoted above are Muslim, that is, the mosque and the minaret, which are deemed potentially “explosive” subsequent to a racialized post-War on Terror depiction of Muslims as representing an imminent threat. Landau’s description alludes to this potential violence, seeming to equate the presence of Muslim infrastructure of worship with the creation of nuclear weapons. This description transforms Israel’s nuclear weapons into the corollary of mosques, both elevating the sanctity of the reactor while simultaneously implying that these religious spaces are forms of danger and lethality, akin to a nuclear weapon.

Landau’s description seems to be imposed on the image, which can be understood as part of the process of curation, and which has been associated with an attempt to tame artwork, whether by aiming to make it align with political objectives or by making it easily digestible to audiences. The description, meanwhile, reduces conflict and war in Israel/Palestine to religion, rather than to political questions over land, equality, and the ongoing process of settler colonialism.

While the description suggests that the nuclear reactor is menacing, it still seems to be natural or inevitable. The threat it poses continues to be sanitized, hidden from the public gaze. There is thus an element of “artwashing,” where the violence of the nuclear reactor itself is minimized, and any disruptive potential within the image is averted. The description instead shifts one’s attention to religious symbols as objects of fear. The curation exposes the limits of critique in the museum and the inescapable dominance of settler colonial securitization, even in civilian spaces.35

2. Israel 2023

“Israel 2023”

Asi Burak

Bezalel Academy 1998

A multi-media display by Israeli game developer Asi Burak in 1998, “Israel 2023” was a speculative project envisioning a worst-case scenario taking place 25 years into the future. For his graduation project at Bezalel Art Academy, Burak created an audio-visual display that expresses anxieties over rising right-wing politics in Israel and their hold on society, and especially, their potential to cause an implosion of the Israeli state.

In the speculative story told by Burak, by 2023, a new right-wing faction in Israel has amassed enough power to secede and create its own state called Yehuda (Judea). The fictional State of Judea is led by Yigal Amir, the man who assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995. Yehuda’s armed militia, called the Judean Front, bombs the Dimona reactor, seizes control of it, and threatens to use nuclear weapons unless the State of Israel agrees to its demands. One of the demands of the Judean Front is to remove al-Aqsa mosque from the Temple Mount.36 In the display, Burak relies on the racist language of the Kahanist movement (emerging from the political thought of Meir Kahane and his Jewish supremacist and fascist ideology), such as “for the cleansing of the homeland,” featured alongside the model of the bombed reactor.37

The reference to the State of “Judea” in the West Bank is not unusual: the West Bank is widely described as “Judea and Samaria” in Israeli society since its colonization in 1967. This language has been routinely used by the Israeli state and not only by the settler movement.38 The schisms present in Burak’s display – between religious and secular Israel – are no longer as stark today. In his analysis of Israel’s increasing embrace of religious Zionism, Ilan Pappe argues that the settler movement has transformed the country into the ‘State of Judea’.39 While Burak’s film situates this language – and Israeli extremism more generally – as external to the Israeli state, it powerfully demonstrates how it has arisen from the state itself. As such, one could argue that this extremism cannot be extricated from Israel’s own history and politics and from its broader colonial logics.

Meanwhile, Dimona and al-Aqsa are linked once again; Dimona, a highly symbolic site of Israeli power, is linked to the possible demolition of a religious Palestinian place of worship. The display is mainly a critique of the emergence of right-wing politics in Israel, but it also implicitly highlights the fetishization of the nuclear bomb. As discussed above, this is a broader trend regarding security infrastructure, discernible beyond the nuclear sphere, but nuclear weapons can be understood as the ultimate representation of this dynamic. Sources have suggested, for example, that the first nuclear warhead Israel produced had the phrase “Never again” welded onto its exterior, in both Hebrew and English.40

In the physical display, the rupture in the dome is intended to trigger shock and fear. The reactor appears as the ultimate symbol of the Israeli state (as opposed to, for example, Israeli political institutions). Contrasted with Tuyman’s image, where the reactor blends with its surroundings, destruction stands out in this image, with a gaping hole within the dome. The image also serves as a powerful reminder, even if inadvertently, that nuclear weapons are a constant, looming source of danger and anxiety. They are an Israeli-manufactured existential threat to Israelis, and also to Palestinians. Palestinians are invisible in the scenario envisioned in this art installation, even as their land faces expropriation, their homes and religious buildings are subject to demolition, and their political futures held hostage by both the States of Israel and Judea. Palestine and Palestinians are neither depicted nor mentioned explicitly within Burak’s display. In discussions within Israeli media about this display, they are also largely overlooked. While the Oslo agreements and Israeli-Palestinian peace process of the 1990s ostensibly sought to create a Palestinian state next to the Israeli state, the art installation indulges fantasies of a Jewish state (or rather, two competing ones) on all of Palestinian land, while erasing Palestinians.

Burak’s display received media attention in Israel when it was produced, with several news channels reporting on it, engaging with the scenario or criticizing its doomsday vision.41 The work has resurfaced in recent years, particularly during the year 2023, with commentators reflecting on its prescience.42 Indeed, various right-wing Israeli organizations have continued to call for the release of Yigal Amir, whom they perceive as a national hero who was able to predict the failure of the Oslo process and thwart the potential Palestinian state to be established.43

Many have suggested that the dystopian narrative that Burak envisioned in “Israel 2023” came to life in December 2022, when the most right-wing government in Israeli history was sworn in. The government draws its support from the settlement movement in the West Bank and includes representatives of Jewish supremacist movements, which have become part of the mainstream. The Israeli far-right is becoming deeply entrenched in the West Bank and increasingly militarized—yet it is not separate from the Israeli state but is armed and protected by it.44 Armed settlers have generally operated with impunity, but this has escalated since October 2023 concurrent with Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Similarly, while the language of “cleansing” is associated with the Israeli right-wing, which has emphasized notions of racial, ethnic, and religious purity, successive Israeli governments have continued to uphold and expand the crimes of ethnic cleansing and apartheid against Palestinians, as numerous international human rights groups and UN experts have warned.

Burak’s display, perhaps inadvertently, engages the themes of the bifurcation between the 1948 and 1967 territories. Like in Tuymans’ painting, there is an important ambivalence that the audience is left to grapple with. On the one hand, the story being told can be seen as reinforcing the notion that the settler movement is happening “over there,” as a radical or fringe group that has refused to follow the Israeli mainstream and opts for secession. But on the other, the work points us in the direction of Israeli violence, such as the very construction of the nuclear reactor as well as the accelerating occupation and annexation of Palestinian land. The work alludes to the ways in which the Israeli settler movement is used by the state to achieve its political objectives of settler colonialism while still aiming to wash its hands of any responsibility over its outcomes.

3. Father.Land

Father.Land

By Meital Abukasis

Filmmaker Meital AbuKasis’s synopsis for Father.Land (Shem.Av) describes the work as “a reflexive ethnographic journey to her hometown of Dimona.”45 AbuKasis is a Mizrahi-Jewish woman whose family came from Morocco to Israel and were settled in Dimona, along with many other Middle Eastern Jews, particularly North Africans. In Dimona, they found themselves living in “development towns” in harsh conditions.46 The placement of Middle Eastern Jews on the frontlines of nuclear risk resembles other contexts of “wastelanding” – a term used by Traci Brynne Voyles to highlight the racial and spatial process by which certain spaces are rendered dumping grounds.47 The city of Dimona, with a population of nearly 37,000 people, is famous for the nuclear reactor outside of town but also for its other industrial and chemical plants.

Produced in 2015, the 50-minute film deals with AbuKasis’s attempts to make a documentary about Dimona, both the city and the reactor. The film spotlights the numerous difficulties AbuKasis encounters, which emerge as a result of widespread and entrenched anxieties and concerns regarding the reactor.

AbuKasis’s documentary deals directly with the issue of nuclear secrecy in and around the city of Dimona. Questions of visibility and archiving are therefore at the heart of the film. For example, the film opens with shots of the zeppelin that accompanies the reactor in Dimona – a floating but permanent symbol, for the purpose of observation, of the nearby presence of nuclear weapons. The tiny zeppelin is visible in the sky in the image above, to the right of the film’s title. It is subtle, against the landscape of the city, where residents continue to maintain normal lives despite the danger of nuclear weapons. The reactor itself is not directly shown in the film, though it is seen in passing from the car amid conversations about whether or not AbuKasis is allowed to film.

Through the film, Dimona appears as a space of exception and as a mundane place. On the one hand, it is framed by a “spectacle” of techno-scientific mastery over the desert, a long-standing Zionist trope and dream that continues into the present and operates as a rationale for colonialism.48 On the other hand, this dream of scientific mastery is muted by images from the city, where residents’ bodies and lives have been exposed to nuclear risks.49

The nuclear reactor is deeply interwoven with AbuKasis’s life—not only because its presence looms over the city of Dimona, but also because, as the documentary discusses, her father worked there until retirement and holds no grudge against his former place of employment. Their conflicting views on the reactor thus result in tense conversations over secrecy, censorship, and securitization. The film accordingly dedicates significant time to exploring the filmmaker’s relationship with her community and family, and specifically her father, who worked at the reactor for around 40 years and who insists on continuing to preserving state secrets. The nuclear reactor frames their fraught relationship. It is dominant, but implicit; it is always there, but hidden.

The film is full of micro-level negotiations over what questions one can ask and even over the right to ask questions. The film’s different actors internalize, laugh at, and fear the pervasive securitization, which is depicted as pervasive and all-encompassing. The documentary powerfully illustrates how secrecy and control by the Israeli authorities play out in Dimona on a personal level. Throughout the film, the reactor almost appears to be living with them in their home, present even when unacknowledged and eerily represented by letters and visits from officials to AbuKasis’s father. Those official communications are designed to warn retirees about potential participation in cultural projects and other forms of documentation. Such warnings were triggered by AbuKasis’s decision to make a film about the Dimona and her attempts to reach out to people involved, which were – unsurprisingly – seen as unwelcome. Her very inquiry into the reactor translates in the Israeli context as an indication of disloyalty, a disavowal of Zionism and the militarization enabling its settler colonial enterprise.

The documentary effectively demonstrates how residents are recruited to play a role in the security infrastructure, both through action and inaction. Potential security risks are everywhere in the documentary, where the filmmaker struggles to convince people to talk to her, but also to convince her family members to simply drive her past the reactor to film it while in motion. The documentary is a testament to how secrecy is operationalized, but also negotiated. It is also a testament to how securitization and its associated logic of sacrifice creates a mythology that asks subjects to feel proud of their association with nuclearity rather than to feel themselves its victims.

4. We have always known the wind’s direction

Film still from We Have Always Known the Wind’s Direction, HD video with sound, 11 min 57 sec, 2019–2020. Courtesy of the artist, Inas Halabi.

Inas Halabi’s 12-minute video, produced in 2019, confronts reports about the burial of nuclear waste in the south of Hebron in the Occupied West Bank in Palestine.50 Reports about Israeli nuclear waste in this region have abounded, and Palestinian scientists and activists have sought to document its effects on their bodies, lives, and communities. As of yet unconfirmed by authoritative sources, or in official archives of states, these nuclear waste sites are still regularly described as rumors or alleged reports.

In this context, Halabi, an artist, works with scientist Dr Khalil Thebayneh to reflect upon nuclear stories in Palestine. In particular, they are interested in how to render visually the presence of high levels of radioactive isotopes in Palestine, especially since radioactivity is invisible and cannot be detected by sight. This problem is familiar in the literature on nuclear visualization, having long plagued photographers, artists, and victims.51 The video accordingly attempts to document the levels of cesium and strontium found in the land by adding colors and filters to the camera to visually capture the saturation of the land. This video is one part of a broader art project by Halabi dealing with nuclear waste.52

While AbuKasis’s documentary pays attention to the normal people wrestling with structures of securitization, Halabi’s short film centers the land, with shots showing mountains and valleys, livestock and birds, fields and buildings, and skies. Interestingly, the film does not mention Israel explicitly or the Dimona reactor at any point, and the viewer is not exposed directly to any infrastructure of occupation, such as checkpoints. Attention to the land is a constant feature of Palestinian narratives, particularly in art and poetry, which emphasize attachment to the land above all else.53 It is in this context that one can understand Halabi’s focus on the pollution of the land with human-made radiation.

The title of the film suggests an intimate knowledge of the land and the movements of the wind, a reflection of this attachment to the land and a desire to remain present on it. But while the film chronicles Israeli violations on the land, it also alludes to the limitations of destructive power. In other words, despite its ability to occupy Palestinian land and build infrastructures of militarism, Israel cannot control everything. Seeking to make light of Israeli nuclear bombs, Palestinians have sometimes joked that they are unusable, because they would harm Israelis themselves. Despite the mythology of Israeli technological prowess, Israel cannot control nature or the direction of the wind.

During the film, Halabi asks Thebayneh to read a poem she wrote. The poem describes rain in an idyllic village, followed by an incomplete rainbow – a rainbow of only two colors, red and orange for radioactive isotopes produced by nuclear fission. It concludes with:

These colors only confirm that we’re going to die

My organs feel heavy

The sound of the trucks reaches my ears

The echo of the brakes multiplies

My body becomes an unresponsive disintegrating mass.

In her description of the film, the artist links the invisibility of the isotopes to larger dynamics of invisibility, to “the systemic networks of power and control in the region.”54 Unlike the artworks I previously discussed, which deal with the nuclear reactor within Israeli spaces and debates, Halabi’s project directly situates Palestinians within nuclear discussions, challenging the practice of silencing. Halabi implicitly pushes back against the marginalization of Palestinian voices from discussions about nuclear weapons, whether Israeli or otherwise. Instead, the film asserts Palestinians as producers of intellectual, scientific, and political thought about the nuclear age.

Israel has reportedly prevented Palestinian scientists from importing the necessary equipment to investigate reports about nuclear waste and has itself long dismissed and marginalized them; as a result, these reports have not gained much traction globally. For example, the Palestinian Return Centre sought to draw attention to Israel’s lethal disposal of nuclear waste in August 2023, but the international community continues to turn a blind eye—a deadly apathy that became all too apparent throughout the genocide in Gaza.55

Yet, as scholars of other cases of nuclear colonialism have shown, it is important to take these “whispers” seriously. For example, the US suppressed Japanese reporting on the effects of the atomic bomb. Similarly, indigenous people’s accounts of the effects of nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands and elsewhere in the Pacific were dismissed for many years.56 What might a Palestinian archive of Israeli nuclear weapons look like? Halabi’s artwork thus considers not only the immediate and long-term destruction posed by nuclear weapons but also the histories of dispossession intertwined with its construction, maintenance, and rationalization.

5. The Last Day

The Last Day (Ha-Yom Ha-Akharon) is a short film – under five minutes – produced by Ronen Barany, a video editor working for Israel’s Channel 2.57 Produced in 2012, the film envisions a potential attack by Iran against Israel in a future dated February 2013. The attack is imagined to be multi-faceted and entails using nuclear bombs. The film offers a perspective of nuclear weapons that is distinct from the other artworks. It does not deal explicitly with Israeli nuclear weapons but instead reproduces Israelis’ fears about a potential nuclear Iran. I include this film as a representation of how nuclear anxieties in Israel are currently directed towards Iran, rather than towards Israel’s own nuclear weapons. It represents another kind of invisibility affecting Israeli nuclear weapons that works with the policy of amimut.

The film opens with text that lays out this context then states, “This is one of many records that survived from that day that changed the face of the world,” creating a sense of archival destruction and reconstruction after a catastrophic incident. The archiving is part of the narrative: part of the film’s conceit is that it is property of the UN, as seen in the display of the UN’s logo and a serial number that indicates its reconstruction.

The film aims to capture a personal reaction to such an attack. It opens with a couple driving in a car while listening to the radio announcement of an attack. The film is full of confusion: the couple does not quite understand what is happening or why they cannot reach their parents or loved ones. The style of filming is similarly chaotic. Camera angles rapidly shift, disturbing the viewer and creating the sense of amateurish, but also panicked, photography.

Meanwhile, another car shows a man wearing a military uniform carrying another man who looks badly injured. Additional explosions and sirens are heard, with residents shouting, “Where is our army?” This can be an allusion to the widespread notion of militarism as a savior, but also the military as powerless in the face of nuclear weapons.58 It is at this point that a large-scale nuclear detonation takes place, dwarfing all the previous attacks. Viewers are briefly exposed to a bright light and the beginnings of a mushroom cloud before the screen turns black. The film serves as a reminder of the potential horrors of a nuclear war, though it is also part of a broader genre of Israeli existential anxiety. It reinforces a sense that already exists within Israel that Jewish-Israelis can never be safe in the Middle East although it is worth mentioning that the film does not specify that there has been an intended and authorized strike against Israel rather than an accident. The film attracted significant attention in Israel, including outraged and supportive responses. Responding to criticisms of fear-mongering, the filmmaker defended the film, arguing that he wanted people to envision and understand such a scenario, because it is one that he himself fears.59 In this way, the film embraces and reflects Israeli state propaganda.

The film can be situated alongside a broader body of literature that considers a potential nuclear showdown between Israel and Iran. Some have sought to satirize this possibility using comedy, such as the 2015 film Atomic Falafel, while others, such as the 2020 series Tehran invoke themes of the Israeli hero – a well-known global genre that has glorified and mythologized various Israeli military apparatuses in popular culture. These examples retain an element of nuclear nationalism, namely their acceptance of the very premise of Iran as a nuclear threat to Israel. Israel’s preparation for a preemptive strike on Iran in Atomic Falafel has been likened to the decision-making by a rogue general such as Jack D. Ripper in Dr Strangelove, but it is still a reaction to the external (and existential) threat of Iran, and there is no loss of control over technology.60 These cultural products also reflect the secrecy in hegemonic Israeli discourse. The settler colonial paradigm is critical here: the voices and lives of Palestinians who are present throughout the land, despite histories of dispossession, are not part of these nuclear stories.

While the film takes place in Israel, it does not deal with Israeli nuclear weapons or the possibility of an Israeli nuclear retaliation, and contrary to all the artworks I have discussed in this essay, Dimona is not discussed, mentioned, or even alluded to. The invisibility of Dimona may have been a practical adherence to amimut. But perhaps it suggests that an Israeli reaction would be moot anyway – rather than saving people, a counter-attack would be purely for the purposes of exacting revenge. The irrelevance of Israel’s own nuclear weapons in the film suggests a failure of the long-established doctrine of nuclear deterrence – ultimately, nuclear weapons were unable to protect Israel from being attacked. In that sense, Dimona is arguably present through its absence, through its failure to prevent such an attack from occurring. The question “where is our army?” can be naturally extended to the nuclear reactor: where are the nuclear weapons that were supposed to ensure deterrence?

Yet, given the lack of context, the film can also be read as reinforcing the widespread notion that Iran is an “irrational actor” which must be prevented from obtaining nuclear weapons at any cost. The narrative of preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons enables an obsession with a potential Iranian nuclear threat rather than existing Israeli nuclear weapons.61 In this context, discussions about ‘nuclear weapons’ in Israel have been reframed to focus exclusively on Iran and not on Israel.62 Such “nuclear Orientalism,” as it has been described by Hugh Gusterson, defines the global nuclear nonproliferation regime in the contemporary period.63 It has had destructive consequences, including Israel and the US launching airstrikes against nuclear infrastructure in Iran in June 2025 and again in February 2026.64

Conclusion

This essay illustrates how Israel’s radioactive empire operates by focusing on various visual representations of Israeli nuclear weapons. The wastelanding of Mizrahi and Bedouin space near Dimona and the Negev as well as Palestinian land more broadly can both be understood through Israel’s racial hierarchy and the biopolitical degradation of Palestinian and Mizrahi lives and communities. Accordingly, I connect Israeli nuclearization to broader processes of racialization, militarism, and colonialism. As such, I situate Israeli nuclear weapons across the various landscapes of Palestine and Israel, including their imagination within Muslim religious sites in Jerusalem, their link to ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and the rise of Israeli right-wing extremism, their embeddedness within the nuclear community of Dimona, their invisible presence on occupied Palestinian land, but also their irrelevance in the case of an actual potential nuclear attack.

The essay considers, following in the footsteps of Churchill and LaDuke’s work, the intersections between the nuclear and the colonial.65 Consideration of nuclear weapons needs to be meaningfully linked to processes of land and resource extraction as well as to the history of dispossession and displacement past and present. Furthermore, we need to think beyond the boundaries of state archives and secrecy; we need to find creative ways to discuss that which does not officially exist, to excavate hints and whispers of critique in the midst of silence and complacency. Reading the discourse of visual work about nuclearity and political precarity helps us piece together exactly such a counter-archive. The artistic expressions offer a way to subvert the violence of archival absence but also the fundamental imbalance that accompanies archival authority. This ever-developing counter-archive is located across genres, languages, and geographies. It destabilizes the authority and hierarchy that been associated with knowledge production on the (nuclear) security state.

Notes

  1. Dimity Hawkins made this comment during a FemNukes workshop on 8 May 2024. On the violent “origin story” of nuclear technology, see also Robert Jacobs, “Born Violent: The Origins of Nuclear Power,” Asian Journal of Peacebuilding 7, no. 1 (2019), 9–29. [^]
  2. As recent scholarship has increasingly shown, the governance of nuclear weapons is incompatible with democracy. See Sterre van Buuren, “The Arsenal and the Ballot Box: Scoping the Incompatibility of Nuclear Weapons and Democracy,” Perspectives on Politics, 2025, first view, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592724002664; Thomas Fraise, “Restricted democracies: nuclear weapons programs, secrecy, and democracy in the United Kingdom, France, and Sweden (1939–1974),” PhD Dissertation, SciencesPo, 2024. [^]
  3. Ella Shohat, “The Invention of the Mizrahim,” Journal of Palestine Studies 29, no. 1 (1999), 5–20. [^]
  4. Ella Shohat, “The narrative of the nation and the discourse of modernization: The case of the Mizrahim”, Critique: Journal for Critical Studies of the Middle East 6: 10 (1997), 3–18. [^]
  5. Ward Churchill and Winona LaDuke, “Native America: The Political Economy of Radioactive Colonialism,” Association for Critical Sociology 13, issue 3 (1986), 51–78. [^]
  6. Shampa Biswas, Nuclear Desire: Power and the Postcolonial Nuclear Order (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Anne Harrington de Santana, “Nuclear weapons as the currency of power: deconstructing the fetishism of force,” The Nonproliferation Review vol. 16, no. 3 (2009), 325–345; Michelle Keown, “Waves of destruction: Nuclear imperialism and anti-nuclear protest in the indigenous literatures of the Pacific,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 54, no. 5 (2018), 585–600; Marzhan Nurzhan, “Dealing with a radioactive past: the pursuit of nuclear justice by Kazakh youth. Case study of Steppe Organization for Peace (STOP): Qazaq Youth Initiative for Nuclear Justice,” Medicine, Conflict and Survival, 2025, published online, https://doi.org/10.1080/13623699.2025.2556092; Becky Alexis-Martin, “The nuclear imperialism-necropolitics nexus: contextualizing Chinese-Uyghur oppression in our nuclear age,” Eurasian Geography and Economics 60, no. 2 (2019), 152–176. [^]
  7. See Avner Cohen, The Worst-Kept Secret: Israel’s Bargain with the Bomb (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). [^]
  8. Ali Diskaya, “‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’: The Israeli Nuclear Taboo and the Limits of Global Governmentality,” in Neoliberal Governmentality and the Future of the State in the Middle East and North Africa, edited by Emel Akçali (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 105–121. [^]
  9. Yerach Gover and Ella Shohat, “In Defence of Mordechai Vanunu: Nuclear Threat in the Middle East,” Social Text 18 (1987–1988), 95.97. [^]
  10. Benoît Pelopidas, “The birth of nuclear eternity,” in Futures, edited by Sandra Kemp and Jenny Andersson, pp. 484–500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). [^]
  11. Timothy Pacihrat, Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). [^]
  12. On the role of visual and culture in shaping nuclear imaginaries, see Benoît Pelopidas, “Imaginer la possibilité de la guerre nucléaire pour y faire face,” Cultures & Conflits 2022/3 n° 123–124, 173–212. [^]
  13. William Burr et al., “Blast from the Past,” Foreign Policy, 22 September 2019, https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/09/22/blast-from-the-past-vela-satellite-israel-nuclear-double-flash-1979-ptbt-south-atlantic-south-africa/. [^]
  14. Nur Masalha, “Decolonizing methodology, reclaiming memory: Palestinian oral histories and memories of the Nakba,” in An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba, edited by Nahla Abdo and Nur Masalha (London: Zed, 2018), 6–39. [^]
  15. Julietta Singh, No Archive Will Restore You (Santa Barbara: Punctum Books, 2018). [^]
  16. Tamer El-Leithy, “Living documents, dying archives: towards a historical anthropology of medieval Arabic archives,” Al-Qantara XXXII (2011), 389–434. [^]
  17. Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008), 1–14. [^]
  18. Malaka Shwaikh, “Translation in the war-zone: the Gaza Strip as a case study,” in The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism, edited by Rebecca Gould and Kayvan Tahmasebian (London: Routledge, 2020). [^]
  19. Shine Choi and Catherine Eschle, “Rethinking global nuclear politics, rethinking feminism,” International Affairs 98: 4 (2022), 1129–1147; Catherine Eschle, “Gender and the Subject of (Anti)Nuclear Politics: Revisiting Women’s Campaigning against the Bomb,” International Studies Quarterly 57: 4 (2013), 713–724; Ronni Alexander, “Remembering Hiroshima: Bio-Politics, Popoki, and Sensusal Expressions of War,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 14: 2 (2012), 202–222. [^]
  20. Rebecca H Hogue and Anaïs Maurer, “Pacific women’s anti-nuclear poetry: centring Indigenous knowledges,” International Affairs 98: 4 (2022), 1267–1288. [^]
  21. On the reproduction of a nuclear canon, see Kjølv Egeland, Thomas Fraise, and Hebatalla Taha. “Casting the atomic canon: (R)evolving nuclear strategy,” European Journal of International Security 7:3 (2022), 382–399. [^]
  22. Joseph Masco, The Theater of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). [^]
  23. Gabrielle Hecht, Being nuclear: Africans and the global uranium trade (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012). [^]
  24. Catherine Eschle, “Nuclear (in)security in the everyday: Peace campers as everyday security practitioners,” Security Dialogue 49: 4 (2018): 289–305; Hebatalla Taha, “Atomic aesthetics: gender, visualization and popular culture in Egypt,” International Affairs 98: 4 (2022): 1169–1187. [^]
  25. Each of these works illustrate aspects of radioactive colonialism. They are not meant to be exhaustive in any way. While there have been several documentaries produced by Israeli television about its nuclear reactors, these tend to be concerned with the processes of developing and concealing the nuclear arsenal, rather than thinking through its significance in everyday life. Examples include a 2015 documentary by Orna Ben Dor called The Dark Secrets of the Dimona Reactor, a 2024 documentary called The Atom and I, and a 2025 documentary called Vanunu. [^]
  26. On ‘sacredness’ and the nuclear, see Jean-Pierre Dupuy, The Mark of the Sacred, translated by M. B. DeBevoise (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013). [^]
  27. The painting is displayed on the museum’s website: https://www.imj.org.il/en/collections/391294-0. [^]
  28. A description of the artist, his methods, and subjects is available on the Tate Modern’s website. See https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/luc-tuymans. [^]
  29. See https://lesoeuvres.pinaultcollection.com/en/artwork/frozen. [^]
  30. One recent example is the Barakah Plant in the UAE, which is composed of four units completed between 2018–2022 and which also contains domes. [^]
  31. Suzanne Laundau, Contemporary Art in the Israel Museum, Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 2010. [^]
  32. Jacques E. C. Hymans, “The Bomb as God: A Metaphor that Impedes Nuclear Disarmament,” Security Studies 33: 1 (2024): 1–29. [^]
  33. Avner Cohen, “Nuclear Weapons, Opacity, and Israeli Democracy,” in National Security and Democracy in Israel, edited by Avner Yaniv (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1993), 197–226. [^]
  34. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). [^]
  35. Hebatalla Taha and Nancy Hawker, “Freedom and peace at the shopping centre: the politics of consumerism in Israel/Palestine,” Journal of Political Ideologies 25, no. 3 (2020), 294–315. [^]
  36. Asi Burak, “Israel 2023,” uploaded to YouTube on 6 February 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyYgdtzwCIQ&t=26s. [^]
  37. On Kahanism, see Shaul Magid, Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021). [^]
  38. Ian Lustick, For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1988). [^]
  39. Ilan Pappe, Israel on the Brink: Eight Steps for a Better Future (London: Oneworld, 2025). [^]
  40. Seymour Hersh, The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy (New York: Random House, 1991), p. 180. [^]
  41. Gal Houbara Bergman, “Israel’s Nuclear Facility Attacked, Yigal Amir Is PM: Artist’s Eerie Forecast of Israel,” Haaretz, 20 August 2023, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-08-20/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/nuclear-facility-attacked-yigal-amir-is-pm-artists-eerie-forecast-of-2023-israel/0000018a-12c7-d5f7-a1ff-97f74b930000. [^]
  42. Ibid. [^]
  43. Haaretz, “Rightists Launch Video Campaign to Free Rabin Killer Yigal Amir,” 18 August 2008, https://www.haaretz.com/2008-08-18/ty-article/rightists-launch-video-campaign-to-free-rabin-killer-yigal-amir/0000017f-e907-d62c-a1ff-fd7feeb40000. [^]
  44. “Civilians or Soldiers? Settler violence in the West Bank,” ACLED, 10 June 2024, https://acleddata.com/2024/06/10/civilians-or-soldiers-settler-violence-in-the-west-bank/. [^]
  45. The description and film are available here: https://www.cultureunplugged.com/storyteller/Meital_Abukasis. [^]
  46. Oren David Kalman, “From development towns to ‘Mizrahi enclaves’ – was it Mapai’s intentional policy?” Middle Eastern Studies 57, issue 2 (2021), 327–341. [^]
  47. Traci Brynne Voyles, Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). [^]
  48. The notion of mastery over the desert is also evident elsewhere. For example, see Joseph Masco, “Notebook on desert modernism: from the Nevada Test Site to Liberace’s Two-Hundred-Pound Suit,” in Histories of the Future, edited by Susan Harding and Daniel Rosenberg (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 23–48. [^]
  49. Yoel Cohen, The Whistleblower of Dimona: Israel, Vanunu, and the Bomb (New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, 2003), pp. 334–347. [^]
  50. Nuclear waste is also thought to be buried near Dimona in Israel, exposing both the racialized communities of Dimona as well as the Palestinian Bedouins who continue to roam in this area. [^]
  51. See Carole Gallagher, American Ground Zero: The Secret Nuclear War (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993); Magdalena E. Stawkowski, ““I am a radioactive mutant”: Emergent biological subjectivities at Kazakhstan’s Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site,” American Ethnologist 43, issue 1 (2016), 144–157; Olga Kuchinskaya, “Twice invisible: Formal representations of radiation danger,” Social Studies of Science 43, no. 1 (2012), 78–96; Akira Mizuta Lippit, Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). [^]
  52. The research-based art series relies on mixed media methods. Halabi’s work has been analyzed and explored extensively in Elizabeth Bentley’s 2021 doctoral dissertation. Elizabeth Bentley, “Israel/Palestine: Speculative Ecologies,” PhD dissertation, University of Arizona, Tucson, USA, 2021. [^]
  53. See, for example, Nahla Abdo and Nur Masalha, eds, An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba (London: Zed, 2018); Nasser Abufarha, “Land of symbols: cactus, poppies, orange and olive trees in Palestine,” in Middle Eastern Belongings, edited by Diane E. King (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 85–110. [^]
  54. See https://halabinas.com/WE-HAVE-ALWAYS-KNOWN-THE-WIND-S-DIRECTION. [^]
  55. Palestine Return Centre, “Israel’s Disposal of Lethal Waste,” UN REF: A/HRC/54/NGO/275, 23 August 2023, https://prc.org.uk/en/post/4641/report-israel-s-lethal-disposal-of-nuclear-waste. [^]
  56. See Anaïs Maurer, The Ocean on Fire: Pacific Stories from Nuclear Survivors and Climate Activists (Durham: Duke University Press, 2024). [^]
  57. ROB FX, “THE LAST DAY-ןורחאה םויה,” uploaded to YouTube on 29 January 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5T5CF1jhTg. [^]
  58. William Chaloupka notes that in nuclear discourse, the warrior role is fulfilled by ‘deterrence’, not by an army even though there is nostalgia for the warrior. Knowing Nukes: The Politics and Culture of the Atom (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), pp. 27, 30, 40–41. [^]
  59. Ronen Barani, “Behind the scenes of the film that became a hit: The Last Day,” Mako, 03 February 2012, https://www.mako.co.il/news-money/tech/Article-32553747db34531018.htm. [^]
  60. Even in fiction, Israeli nuclear weapons are depicted as a last resort, a mechanism of survival in the face of the threat of annihilation. One example is the Israeli fictional novel The Shark by Mishka Ben-David, which begins with a multi-front attack by Hamas and Hizbullah, leading many to describe it as having predicted the attack on 7 October 2023. [^]
  61. Uriel Abulof, “The malpractice of “rationality” in international relations,” Rationality and Society 27, issue 3 (2015), 358–384; see also Clément Therme, Kjølv Egeland, and Hebatalla Taha, “Seizing Nuclear Tehran: Obstacles to Understanding Iranian Nuclear Activities,” Middle East Journal 76, no. 2 (2022), 159–78. [^]
  62. Sharon Dolev, “Creating an Anti-Nuclear Movement in Israel,” Palestine-Israel Journal of Politics, Economics, and Culture 16, issue 3/4 (2010): 103–107. [^]
  63. Hugh Gusterson, “Nuclear Weapons and the Other in the Western Imagination,” Cultural Anthropology 14, no. 1 (1999), 111–143. [^]
  64. The “counter-proliferation” attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities are not an isolated incident. They reflect an Israeli policy known as the Begin doctrine, which entails using force to prevent enemy states from acquiring nuclear weapons. It has been used by Israel against civilian facilities, such as the Osirak reactor in Iraq in 1981, and scholars suggest that it was counterproductive. See Dan Reiter, “Preventive attacks against nuclear programs and the ‘success’ at Osiraq,” Nonproliferation Review 12, issue 2 (2005), 355–371; Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer, “Revisiting Osirak: Preventive Attacks and Nuclear Proliferation Risks,” International Security 35, no. 1 (2011), 101–132. [^]
  65. Churchill and LaDuke, “Native America”. [^]

Acknowledgments

My research on nuclear imaginaries has received funding from an ICAN Academic Fellowship in 2023–4. This work is also funded by Lund University’s Centre for Advanced Middle Eastern Studies (CMES). I presented an earlier draft of this essay at a FemNukes gathering as well as at the Gender and Politics research group at the Department of Political Science at Lund University. I am indebted to the participants in both workshops for their generous engagement, thoughtful questions, and for helping me work through many of the ideas that eventually took shape in this essay. I am also grateful to the editors of the journal and special issue, the anonymous reviewers, and Benoît Pelopidas and Pelle Valentin Olsen for their insightful comments and helpful suggestions.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.