HAMID SAMONI Father of Zakaria Hamid Samoni, 8 years of age, who was killed by a rocket fired from an Israeli helicopter
The Summer 2009 issue of The Virginia Quarterly Review magazine dedicated to matters Middle East has been published just as Amnesty International releases its report on Israel’s 22 day assault that began on December 27th 2008 on the territory of Gaza.
The report (download a copy at this link) provides a broad human rights and war crimes background to the work that writer Elliott Woods and I recently completed in Gaza thanks to the generous support of the Virginia Quarterly Review and The Pulitzer Center On Crisis Reporting.
Elliott Woods essay Hope’s Coffin focuses on Gaza’s young generation and its view of the future. My essay Portraits of Survival steps away from the conventional Gaza conflict photography and concentrates on portraits of people left to deal with the scars of this recent conflict. You can also read our field reports that we compiled for The Pulitzer Center while we were on the ground in Gaza.
Peter Lagerquist has also contributed with an amazing piece called Tracing Concrete that examines the who examines the legacy of British methods of detention and barricading in Palestine, a legacy that now live on in Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
The issue emerges a few weeks after some other news. Noted Israeli writer, journalist and intellectual Amos Elon passed away on the 25th of May 2009. His voice, his views and his courage in speaking honestly about the situation in Israel/Palestine will be greatly missed. As Tony Judt says in his obituary:
Amos Elon’s commitment to Israel, the country where he lived and worked for most of his life, was never in question. But for just this reason his awkward stance, relentlessly engaging with the country’s failings, set him apart. His courageous refusal to endorse the clichés with which Israel’s defenders parry every criticism contrasts not only with the defensiveness of contemporary left-wing Israeli commentators but also and especially with the pusillanimous apologetics of Israel’s American claque.
His pieces in The New York Review of Books – Olmert & Israel, and Israelis & Palestinians are just samples that offer us insights into his clarity of thought and courage of conviction. And it his breath of vision that also offered us insights into the failings of the Palestinian leadership that is also responsible for the mess their people are in today. Again, from Tony Judt’s obituary:
His sympathy for the “stateless, dispossessed, and dispersed Palestinians” did not blind him to the ineptness of their leaders. He had met enough Arab and Palestinian politicians to know just how inadequate they were to the tragedy of their peoples and the tasks facing them.
His pieces provide us an important and complex backdrop to the crisis in the region and the forces that work against what most would call a just and civilized solution.
In addition, the Israeli journalist Amnon Kapeliouk also passed away recently. He wrote frequently in Le Monde Diplomatique and was a incisive thinker about the state of Israel and her politics. His pieces for the Le Monde Diplomatique like Limits to Tolerance , Israel’s Failed Invasion, and Israel: An Army In Power remind us once again of the powerful voices within Israeli society, politics, media and culture that are not cowed by her leader’s trenchant and shrill assault on things human, moral and just.
We do not know Israel. I am always struck by the fact that so few photojournalists have paid attention to the complexities and conflicts within Israel. As a photographer I remain dismayed at how little photo-journalistic work has been done on the country itself rather than its occupations next door. I believe that today we can learn more about the nature and reasons for the occupations and wars by looking inside Israel. To understand why life in Gaza is as it is one has to look at the Israeli communities around Gaza.
Writer Peter Lagerquist has argued this frequently and even created a powerful proposal for a magazine piece on this. As yet my attempts to take his ideas to photo editors have only been met with blank stares. It seems that we are either not ready to ’see’ Israel, or not ready to engage in the complex.
In the Arab world the country is seen as a monolithic pathology, a state consisting of homogeneously fanatic ‘yehudis’ with a thirst for Arab blood. To say nothing about the many ‘James Bond/007′-inspired conspiracies that simply exaggerate her powers and influences around the globe, to say nothing about bestowing its incompetent and mediocre leaders and secret agencies like Mossad with intelligence and a genius they hardly deserve!
Its complexities are lost to most, and with them the chance to engage and join the voices that are from within Israel speaking out against her injustices. We know well the righteousness and religiously sanctioned occupations of the West Bank and Gaza, the continued discrimination and harassment of its Arab citizens, its amnesia about the violence and inhumanity that underlined her founding, its celebration of violence as emancipation, its militarization of its culture, politics and society, its complete ignorance of the very continent and culture it actually sits in, and its aggressive and destructive influences in the politics and societies of its neighbors. We know it and we condemn it.
But we should also know that Israel needs to be engaged and entangled with. In particular, we need to connect with those within her who are confronting its structures of power and repression. As academics, intellectuals, politicians, students, writers, photographers, artists, activists and critics we have to add our voices to the minority within that is also risking its safety, welfare and security confronting what Kapeliouk called an army with a state!
Kapeliouk was one of the founders of the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, which recently won an award for their ‘citizen journalism’ campaign where they handed out video cameras to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to document human rights violations. B’Tselem then uses the footage to advance human rights and law enforcement in the region. And how many know that some fine work about the reshaping of East Jerusalem has come from a young Israeli photographer. Yoav Galai has spent many months documenting the destruction and reshaping of the Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem. Its a story and situation that deserves even more attention. He continues to write about the area in his personal blog site as well.
Elon and Kapeliouk offer us examples of courage that we would do well to emulate. Not just when it comes to Israel, but to our own societies. Their voices may now be silent. But their ideals, courage and vision must be carried forward.
