Art and the Atom in Israel/Palestine

This essay explores artistic expressions dealing with themes of nuclear weapons and radioactivity in Israel/Palestine. It brings together a variety of different sources representing critical interventions in the debate on Israeli nuclear weapons, particularly their opacity, and their absent presence in the country and in wider political debates. The artistic pieces 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. The artistic pieces also capture a sense of looming anxiety, which affects different groups of people in disparate ways. The essay suggests that art can serve as a mechanism to transcend secrecy, silence, and censorship, and simultaneously, to destabilize the authority and hierarchy that has been associated with knowledge production on the (nuclear) security state. Through these artistic expressions, we can listen more carefully to nuclear stories beneath and beyond the state, making sense of how people encounter and imagine nuclear infrastructure.