This Land Called Gaza – A Love and A Curse

“And what projects are you working on at the moment?”

“An exhibition…and…I’m working on the completion of a new book, something very close to my heart.”

“What’s it about?”

“The Palestinians.”

There was a rather long silence…my friend looked at me with a slightly sad smile, and said “Sure, why not! But don’t you think the subject’s a bit dated? Look, I’ve taken photographs of the Palestinians too, especially in the refugee camps…its really sad! But these days, who’s interested in people who eat off the ground with their hands? And then there’s all that terrorism…I’d have thought you’d be better off using your energy and capabilities on something more worthwhile!”

Swiss photographer Jean Mohr describes a conversation with a friend.(1)

Palestine is a thankless cause, one in which if you truly serve you get nothing back but opprobrium, abuse, and ostracism…Palestine is the cruelest, most difficult cause to uphold, not because it is unjust, but because it is just and yet dangerous to speak about as honestly and as concretely as [he] did.

Edward Said on intellectual/activist Eqbal Ahmed. (2)

Jabaliya, Gaza February 2009 Copyright Asim Rafiqui

Most independent photographers arriving in Palestine carry with them the awareness that much if not all of their work will go largely unpublished. This is not only because Gaza and the West Bank are amongst the world’s most thoroughly photographed human tragedies, but also because speaking of the Palestinian’s as a real people with real suffering remains near impossible. Their story has been effectively reduced to that of ‘terrorism’, ‘extremism’ and one of ‘instigators of violence’. Their rights and demands for justice drowned out by the shrill insistence on Israel’s infinite innocence and need for restitution for historical wrongs. And on presumptions of their mendacity and single-minded determination to destroy ‘the Zionist entity’. Even President Barack Obama, in a recent speech in Cairo, placed the principal responsibility of regional violence on their weak, unarmed and repeatedly defeated shoulders. Photographers and journalists who try to reveal a different reality or raise questions about the myth of Israeli innocence or question the assumption of Palestinian mendacity, find themselves ignored, marginalized and unpublished. Independent photographers who come to Palestine do so armed not with major assignments but with convictions that are personal and individual. And they usually come alone.

I arrived at Rafah, Egypt – the only crossing into Rafah, Gaza, during the last days of Israeli’s Operation Cast Lead. This time I was luckier than most for I had the support of a Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting grant and the encouragement of Ted Genoways, the creative and poetic editor of The Virginia Quarterly Review magazine. By the time I argued my way into Gaza, a way repeatedly blocked first by the Israelis and then by the Egyptians, I found myself in what had by then become only one of the most important prime time news events of the year.

The Israeli assault on Gaza began on the last day of Hanukkah on December 27th 2008 and eventually left nearly 1400 dead, thousands injured and tens of thousands displaced. It was covered by every major international TV news channel, daily newspaper and weekly magazine. Their cameramen, on-screen personalities, photographers, directors, fixers and coordinators stormed the walls of Gaza in a rush to film, edit, transmit and broadcast the events as they unfolded. On any given day, at any given hour, dozens of videographers and photojournalists could be seen in the hallways of Gaza’s famous Al-Diera Hotel speaking anxiously into their mobile phones, or sitting at tables in the restaurants, hunched over their laptops, cursing the slow internet connections and desperately transmitting their latest images. And when they were not scoffing down a quick meal, they were furtively discussing plans with their local minders, or rushing towards their waiting cars to get to a ‘hot’ location. Amidst this mob of media I, with my little film cameras and a small grant that gave me the freedom to work at my own pace, found myself apart, confused and more alone than ever before. How would what I came to say be heard over this noise?

My first time in Gaza was in the summer of 2003. I was a novice photographer who went because Edward Said wrote a small response to an email I sent him and encouraged me to go. I then returned and continued to document the situation in Gaza, particularly in southern Gaza city of Rafah where I worked for nearly 2 years. The settlers were still in Gaza then, and so were activists from the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), and the armored bulldozers and their accompanying tanks that were constructing the massive steel wall along the Rafah’s border with Egypt. The American activist Rachel Corrie, who was crushed to death by an Israeli armored bulldozer, was still there; alive, determined, passionate and beautiful. Home demolitions were frequent along the Rafah-Egypt border as bulldozers tore down Palestinian homes to make way for the steel wall. Tank patrols would terrorize residents living along the border, and there would be frequent firing into these neighborhoods resulting in deaths and maiming of residents. As a photographer I documented my fair share of funerals, Hamas marches and families salvaging their belongings from the ruins of their destroyed houses. Between 2003 and 2006 I made several trips to this surrounded territory, continuing to document the slowly shrinking social, political, economic and cultural space of its inhabitants.

And then I stopped coming. Dozens of courageous Palestinian photographers were doggedly documenting the bitter and crushing existence of the Gazans, and the incessant economic and military violence against them. The international photojournalists too kept coming to photograph the ‘militants’ and the ‘fanatics’, as if to provide the ‘facts’ that would maintain what Saree Makdisi has recently called a language that prevents us from recognizing what’s really going on in the Middle East.3 I felt that after three years of consistent work I had nothing new to add to this dialogue, nothing new to show. In retrospect I realize that it was an act of surrender by a young photographer frustrated by his inability to effectively capture in pictures the sufferings of those around him..

But now I was back again, and walking through the devastation left the aftermath of Operation Cast Lead I was struck by how familiar it all looked. The scale was larger than anything that I could remember, and its consequences very familiar; the bombed homes, the displaced families, the tank-track torn olive and citrus groves, the stunned relatives of the dead, the funeral dirges, the Hamas marches, the victory songs, the numbing buzz of the pilot-less drones overhead, the children scavenging amongst ruins, the sirens of the ambulances, the men on donkey carts carrying debris to nowhere, and that constant, distant human wail of a life torn apart or a hope torn asunder. Here I was again, but I had been here before and seen it before. The scenes I witnessed were remarkably similar to those I had seen during my time in Gaza between 2003 and 2006. As some of the world’s best photojournalists scrambled all around me to capture the devastation for the world’s audience, I found that I still had nothing new to say and by the second day I put away my cameras and stopped taking pictures.

And then I met Ismail Ibrahim Abu Eida.

He was walking alone near the rubble of his family home lost in thought. When he noticed me standing close by he merely nodded and said nothing. I stood there looking at him stumble and trip across the pile of rubble that had once been his home. A lone figure amongst thousands of lonely figures all over Gaza who were at that very moment quietly, resignedly stumbling and tripping across the rubble of their own lives. I wanted to talk to him about what was going through his mind, but he seemed reluctant, even a little embarrassed. “What will I tell you that others have not?”, he said quietly. And he was right.

Abu Eida’s pain – the loss of his life’s work, the displacement of his family, and the ruination of his livelihood, was an oft repeated occurrence in this land. Tens of thousands had already suffered it, and it was certain, given the entrenched ideas and ideals that perpetuate this conflict, that tens of thousands more are destined to do so in the future. In this land of pain, where everyone has experienced the gravest of loss, it has become difficult to express individual suffering or ask for compassion. In a life that must accept as normal the sudden and violent erasure of all that one holds dear, a life in which you console your neighbor knowing full well that someday they will be consoling you, you no longer speak about your own sorrows. You no longer share your burden because others are so crushed under their own. In a life of collective punishment your scars and sufferings are starkly your own to confront and tolerate.

Abu Eida was fortunate. No one had died. His family had been displaced to a UN refugee center, and he was sleeping on a mattress in a cargo container on the family property. With a voice that was severely controlled, he explained to me how tanks and bulldozers had forced him to flee and leveled everything he had built over the course of his life, including his family’s orange groves. Then he invited me for tea. He had only one cup. Ten minutes of digging in the rubble produced a second—broken but usable. He had no place for me to sit but a shout to a friend down the road produced a three-legged plastic chair. I protested this kindness, but he wouldn’t hear of it, reminding me that I was his guest. “It is our way, Mr. Rafiqui,” he insisted, as he made himself comfortable in the dirt, “to honor our guests— and to remind ourselves of the things within us which cannot be destroyed by tanks and missiles.”

As the day grew hotter, the mist that shrouded the citrus groves lifted, revealing what had once been the Jabaliya industrial zone. Ismail pointed toward Israel. I could see a wire fence and the silhouettes of soldiers walking along it. Israeli farmers had begun returning to their fields that morning as jeeps carrying soldiers raced back and forth along the border areas. Snipers kept an eye on the few Palestinians who dared to return to their lands. Despite the cease-fire, Gazan farmers were being shot and killed at random. “I used to work in Israel,” Ismail said. “But that was a different time, a different world.”

This world, the one whose remains surrounded us that morning, now lay in a shroud of dust raised by the hundreds of hands salvaging valuables from the remains of their homes, factories, stores, and farmlands. As I looked up from my cup of tea and out towards the scarred landscape I could see people sifting through rubble, searching for bodies, salvaging remains of machinery, consoling their children, or just sitting amongst the ruins of their homes. It struck me that indeed how fortunate were the dead who had at least, as Plato said, seen the end of war. The living however go on and suffer its horrors, carry it’s burdens, tolerate its indignities, appease its sorrows, and accept its cruelest gift – the death of loved ones.

Later that morning I finally made my first photograph – a family searching for the remains of a patriarch. The bulldozer roared and clawed mercilessly against the pile of ruins, churning up metal, concrete, electrical wiring, toys, clothing and whatever else its massive jaws caught in their broad sweeps. Around it sat many family members and friends, patiently watching the bulldozer work, prepared for the moment the body is discovered. “How do you know if someone is still trapped in there?” I asked. “You can smell it!”, came a slightly exasperated reply. There were no camera crews at the site, no photojournalists waiting to capture the moment. It was just one body, one individual, being searched for. The ‘hot’ news stories were elsewhere that morning and will be elsewhere the day after.

But these searches, these sorrows, and the days without those who were once so close, so needed, will go on. As I stood on a small hill and watch the bulldozer tear away at the collapsed walls of the house I was struck with the realization that even when the world’s attention falls on them, the Gazans are most distant, misunderstood and isolated from us. The world comes to them asking them to be either the hate-filled militant out to destroy Israel or the innocent victims of Israel’s fanaticism. And in the process it denudes them of their ordinariness, frailty and flawed humanity. In its attentions the world ghettoizes them, refusing them their history, politics, memories and agendas. Gone are their love affairs, their family feuds, their fears and hopes for their children’s futures, their infidelities, their ambitions, their material desires, their days on the beach, their care for their elderly, their gentleness towards strangers, their love of food, their eye for the perfect coffee bean, their undying and near familial love of the olive tree and their sense of connectedness with the land.

This land called Gaza – a love and a curse.

Photographer’s Note: This essay was submitted to a Swedish magazine that eventually considered it too uninteresting for publication. It was also the essay I submitted recently to a grant committee to continue my work in Gaza. I did not receive the grant. I share it here despite its seemingly sorry record, as perhaps nothing more than a way to allow the thoughts I put down here to escape from the confinement of my hopes and disappointments.

1: Said, E & Mohr, J (1999) After The Last Sky Columbia University Press, New York, New York

2: Barsamian, D, (2000) Eqbal Ahmed: Confronting Empire South End Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts

3: Makdisi, S (19/6/2009) A Language That Absolves Israel, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles, USA.

Offering Silence To The Oppressed Or How Photography Can Become A Weapon Of Repression

An exhibition called ‘Beware The Cost Of War’ recently opened in London.

Reading about it in the New York Times ‘Lens’ blog left me deeply disappointed and concerned.

Let me explain.

(Aside: Yoav Galai, the curator, is someone I have called a friend for some time now and I hope that he will forgive me for this very critical review of what is something he clearly put a lot of work in to. It is not personal, but merely a reflection on this propensity in our world to fear speaking, to raise a voice, to add details and specifics where generalizations only confuse, perpetuate injustices and acquit the guilty. I am sorry Yoav. I must say my piece.)

∞

In their book Another Way of Telling photographer Jean Mohr and writer/intellectual John Berger present an experiment where a series of Mohr’s photographs, each with their captions removed, are shown to a number of ordinary strangers and each is asked to explain what they see in the photograph. As Jean Mohr himself explains:

Was it a game, a test, an experiment? All three, and something else too; a photographer’s quest, the desire to know how the images he makes are seen, read, interpreted, perhaps rejected by others. In fact in face of any photo the spectator projects something of her or himself. The image is like a springboard. (page 42)

The result was that each individual described the photograph differently, thereby rending each photograph meaningless, and completely erasing it of history, context, intent and meaning and replacing them with what were little more than randomly created ideas based on fantasies, prejudices, and ignorances. The photos gave nothing to the viewer, the viewer merely imposed their ‘knowledge’ – factual and otherwise, onto the image. The images became springboards indeed, but they also became empty vessels into which the viewer could put anything and make them what s/he wanted. The images offered nothing, taught nothing, revealed nothing and as a result added nothing.

∞

Jean Mohr also collaborated with the writer/intellectual Edward Said to produce what I consider to be one of the finest, most important, book of photojournalism ever – After The Last Sky. This book, about which I have written elsewhere, is a masterful collaboration between a photographer and a writer. It is one of those rare photography books that has managed to lift itself from the fashionable but frivolous shelves of photography books and into the more relevant Middle East History section of a bookstore.

The book grew out of an unusual context; in 1983 Edward Said was a consultant to the United Nations International Conference on the Question of Palestine (ICQP) and he suggested that some of Jean Mohr’s photographs of Palestinians be hung in the entrance hall to the main conference site in Geneva, Switzerland. The official response to this suggestion, as Said himself describes it in the book, was unusual; they would allow the photographs to be hung, but no words could accompany them, and no explanations.

It was then that Said and Mohr came up with the idea of writing about the Palestinians – about adding the words to the photographs. As Said explains:

Let us use photographs and text, we said to each other, to say something that hasn’t been said about Palestinians. (page 4)

But they were aware that the problems they faced was not a lack of text on this matter, but perhaps too much of it. But it was also clear that:

…for all the writing about them, Palestinians remain virtually unknown. Especially in the West, particularly in the United States, Palestinians are not so much a people as a pretext for a call to arms. (page 5)

Confronting this challenge about how to convey the Palestinian experience to a reluctant audience was not going to be easy, and yet it was crucial and clear that text was going to be a fundamental act of resistance, and that its place for a people oppressed was fundamentally important because:

Stateless, dispossessed, de-centered, we [Palestinians] are frequently unable either to speak the ‘truth’ of our experience or to make it heard. We do not usually control the images that represent us; we have been confined to spaces designed to reduce or stunt us; and we have often been distorted by pressures and powers that have been too much for us. (page 6)

∞

“Beware The Cost Of War” is an exhibition of Israeli and Palestinian photographs now being shown in London. In a review written on the New York Times blog ‘Lens’, a review titled Stirring Images, No Names the writers explain that:

“Beware the Cost of War,” a show opening Friday at the Blackall Studios in London, will be conspicuous for many reasons — one of them being what it lacks: captions and credits next to the images, which were taken both by Israeli and Palestinian photographers.

The notion is that, without words, the pictures will be freer to speak for themselves.

In a slide show of some of the images we are shown scenes of grieving Palestinian and Lebanese families and of Israeli families. The curator, Yoav Galai, we are told:

…hoped viewers would discard customary ideological and political preconceptions as they looked at the images, many of which are deeply disturbing…

He is later quoted as saying:

“I realized it’s hard to show what’s really happening,” Mr. Galai said. “Once a photograph is out there, people ascribe whatever they want to it. So I thought, why not take all the pictures and tear them away from their narrative?”

∞

Yoav Galai is a young photographer. An Israeli who has documented the destruction of the Palestinian social, cultural and physical space in occupied East Jerusalem, he and I have frequently communicated via email and I respect his individual voice and determination.

But sadly I find myself in deep conflict and disagreement with this entire exhibition, and the silencing of the experience, history, and narrative of the Palestinian people already suffering from decades of silencing, marginalization, and erasure. The entire impression of ‘balance’ here is specious, and frankly misrepresents the situation which is simply one of a powerful military occupier systematically repressing and controlling an otherwise unarmed and desperate Palestinian population.

Tearing away the narrative, the history, the context of a photograph is the best way to further enable people to ascribe whatever meaning people want to images, and hence, only confirm and not question their prejudices, hates, ignorances and fears.

That Israeli historians, intellectuals, writers and journalists can clearly speak of this, admitting to the injustices their government has been executing against the Palestinians, only reminds us of the vast gap in intellectual and physical courage that imbues our societies when it comes to the question of the rights of an Arab people.

This exhibition in its current format ends up committing a number of sins against the history of the situation it claims to speak about, and even about the lives of the people involved.

• The exhibition removes context, so that we never know who is the occupier, and who the occupied. It pretends to suggest that everyone is a victim, when in fact that is not true. Israel is an occupying force, its citizens repeatedly voting into power civilians leaders, most all with deep military track records and connections, based on their ability to ‘handle the Palestinians’. The Palestinians are an unarmed people now trapped in quite possibly the most extensive, professionally administered, rationally planned, efficiently executed occupation regime in history.

• The exhibition removes chronology, so that we never know whether the act occurred this year e.g. the brutal and unnecessary massacre of nearly 2000 Palestinians of Gaza in early 2009 prompted by Israeli domestic political needs and condemned in the recent UN Goldstone Report vs. the aftermath of a suicide bomb that occurred many years ago and the likes of which have not been repeated in years.

• The exhibition removes history, so that we never know what it is that violence represents i.e. acts of legitimate violence in order to resist and overthrow and illegal occupation vs. acts of repressive violence meant to occupy, steal, and control.

• The exhibition removes the ugliest of constant and material facts; the dehumanizing and degrading check points, the summary arrests, the illegal (and yes, please, they are illegal) settlements, the military patrols that enable them, the hideous barbarism of the fundamentalist, fanatical and humanly deviant Jewish settlers, the summary executions, the entire infrastructure – administrative, military, political, under-cover of the occupation regime, the displacements, the senseless closures, and the constant threat of violence that hangs in the air and frequently manifests itself into reality.

The exhibition in fact become a tool of oppression, creating ‘balance’ where there is none, offering the easy consumption of ‘violence’ while ensuring that nothing provokes us to realize the truths that create the violence, the injustices that continue to be perpetrated, and the powers that have to held accountable for what is a clear and simple crime against humanity and massive violation of international law.

As writer Peter Lagerquist comments after hearing and reading about this exhibit:

It’s not only offensive but brutalizing, because it perpetrates another violence on those pictures, and their subjects. They are robbed of meaning, the viewer is robbed of their ability to think critically about violence, rather than merely wringing their hands over it…All that we are left with here is diffuse pathos, the knowledge that violence is bad.  And this simply is not enough; we need to understand something else.

We don’t have to love the Palestinians, but why must we insist on shutting them up? Why must we be so dismissive of values and laws that we with such fanfare created and offered at Nuremburg and enshrined in so many UN charters and Geneva Conventions? Why, when it comes to the ‘lesser’ people, do our voices suddenly find no air, our minds no thoughts, our courage no will and our photographs no captions?

∞

An oppressor wants to erase the voice of the oppressed. ‘Balance’ serves the interests of those exercising disproportionate violence and control over a weaker people and society. A people displaced, dispossessed, ignored, dehumanized, and incarcerated, in flagrant violation of our most valued principles of international law, justice and rights, do not need us to ‘remove’ their context, history and experiences of their suffering. On the contrary, it is precisely words, text, and voice that need to be used to unveil their experience. It is crucial to our responsibilities as reporters, journalists and photojournalists, to speak with courage and clarity and add our voice to those of the weak to counter, and challenge the easily heard and broader disseminated voice of the powerful.

Michael Massing took on the issue of specious ‘balance’ that today’s media organizations strive for and identified it as one of the major problems with journalism today. In a piece called The Press; The Enemy Within he quoted the writer Ken Silverstein (I am a big fan of Ken’s work!) who was then working on a piece about voting fraud in St. Louis and who found clear evidence of Republic Party manipulation of votes but was not allowed to say it as such and encouraged to ‘balance’ it with comments about similar actions, though far less systematic, by the Democrats:

I am completely exasperated by this approach to the news. The idea seems to be that we go out to report but when it comes time to write we turn our brains off and repeat the spin from both sides. God forbid we should…attempt to fairly assess what we see with our own eyes. “Balanced” is not fair, it’s just an easy way of avoiding real reporting and shirking our responsibility to inform readers.

Any easy was to shirk our responsibility to inform readers, and I would add, help them understand the perspectives and principles that are in fact consistently and necessarily defensible. And we are being cowards to not admit that there are principles of law, justice and national behavior and they are enshrined in documents that we love to quote e.g. Sudan, Kosovo, or Kuwait when it suits our needs.

I quote Edward Said from his work Representations of the Intellectual when he points out that:

Universality means taking risks in order to go beyond the easy certainties provided to us by our background, language, nationality, which so often shield us from the reality of others. It also means looking for and trying to uphold a single standard for human behavior when it comes to such matters as foreign and social policy. (page xiv)

My point would be that for the contemporary intellectual [or individual] living at a time that is already confused by the disappearance of what seem to have been objective moral norms and sensible authority, is it unacceptable simply either blindly to support the behavior of one’s own country and overlook its crimes or to say rather supinely “I believe they all do it, and that’s the way of the world?”

To speak consistently is upholding standards of international behavior and the support of human rights is not to look inwards for a guiding light supplied to one by inspiration or prophetic intuition. Most…countries in the world are signatories to a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted and proclaimed in 1948, reaffirmed by every new member state of the UN. There are equally solemn conventions on the rules of war, on treatment of prisoners, on the rights of workers, women, children, immigrants and refugees. None of these documents says anything about ‘disqualified’ or less equal races or peoples. All are entitled to the same freedoms. (page 97)

This exhibition, sadly participated in by Palestinians photographers themselves, further oppresses the Palestinian experience, because it reduces everything to merely violence and sensationalism. This is the legacy of wire photography, and of mainstream photojournalism that chases blood, celebrates murder, and titillates through the tragic.

At a time when more than ever we need to speak with courage and clarity at the systematic dispossession of what little has been left to this blighted people, we have photojournalists and curators participating in a project of silence and obfuscation.

∞

“Beware The Cost Of War’ unfortunately attempts to balance what is so terribly imbalanced. And in that process it misleads. There is nothing to be gained by wringing our hands at the hideousness of blood and flesh torn by bombs. There is nothing to be understood by images of mothers crying. There is no value in the sight of another babies still body. To produce something that can really only provoke pity – a debilitating and cowardly emotion, is to produce nothing at all. (I am reminded of Nietzsche’s argument that… the thirst for pity is a thirst for self-enjoyment, and at the expense of one’s fellow men. It reveals man in the complete inconsideration of his most intimate dear self, but not precisely in his ’stupidity’.)

As photographers we must demand that the text be returned to us who made the works. Our eye and our text is our intent, our ideas, our values and our risks. We must insist that our images not be exploited or left open to the random violence and fantasies of an indifferent and/or confused viewer. Context matters, history matters, and memory matters. We must insist that our words are not dismissed, that the intents with which we produced our images is not marginalized, and that our images do not become merely ‘illustrations’ but are clear statements of our work and our beliefs.

Our words anchor the image, and give it something that itself does not contain; meaning and intent. The caption is crucial because it is also the photographer’s insistence on controlling the use the image is put to, and to what extent it can be manipulated. In a world overrun with meaningless illustrations, the caption takes on even greater value. Context becomes a powerful weapon against propaganda and obfuscation. And a means towards clarity and understanding. We should not surrender or relinquish this right easily. In a conflict mired in millions of words of propaganda, from both sides of course but certainly largely from the mouths of the powerful who have an unbalanced access to mainstream print, internet, and tv media, the words of those who have witnessed first hand are paramount.

Epilogue: A few days ago a Swedish magazine invited me to publish my portraiture from Gaza in its pages. A highly respected publication, it offered me the choice to submit as many images as I liked, with just one condition – they would not use the words that accompanied the work. They only wanted the pictures. You can see this work, images with words, as it appeared in a recent issue of The Virginia Quarterly Review. I refused to let them publish the work, arguing that erasing the words reduced them to meaningless aesthetics, and silenced the voices of the individuals who sacrificed their time and patience in the most horrifying of conditions so that I may carry to the world their sufferings. As photographers we either forget, or prevented from being complete individuals; thinking, creative individuals with opinions, ideas and realizations. We must defend this completeness, and the sanctity of our individual experiences, understandings and conclusions.

Update: The No Captions Needed site, authored by two professors, one from Indiana University and the other from Northwestern University and described by them as ‘…a book and a blog, each dedicated to discussion of the role that photojournalism and other visual practices play in a vital democratic society.” also discussed the ‘no caption’ approach at this exhibit which you can read here: Visual Ironies

Personal Note: This post was edited to ensure that it is understood that it does not claim that the curator(s) intended to oppress the voices or remove context, but simply that the current format inadvertently ends up doing that. This is a criticism of the format, not of the individuals involved, all of whom I am more than sure have the most determined and committed intentions to raise awareness of the situation in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Where The Head Spun: Sunday, 12th July 2009

This week has been busy with some writings on The Idea of India photo project, but I did manage to come across some fascinating stuff:

Ikea Is As Bad A Wal-Mart; A piece in Salon magazine that reviews Ellen Ruppel Shell’s book Cheap.

Yes, it is our consumer habits that are driving these climate changes – the degradation of the soil, the cutting of forests, the polluting of the oceans, the exploitation of human labor in china and mexico, to name just two places, is all for the sake of our cheap consumer goods.  We may prefer to avoid this fact by trying to simply shop ‘green’, but shopping, and repeateded, frequent cycles of shopping are in fact why the problems are emerging.

Shell’s argument is simple; buy cheap and you have to buy often and hence continue to fuel the hunger of the machinery that in the end churns away at human lives (cheap labor) and the earth (trees, oil, water, cultivatable land, fresh water etc.). So avoid IKEA!

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Dr. R.K.Pachauri has a blog! I did not realize this. Dr. Pachauri is the Director General of The Energy & Resource Institute (TERI) and Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and winner of a Nobel Prize for his team’s work on the environment.  Some interesting quotes:

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) brought out a report in 2006 which estimates emissions of GHGs from agriculture as a whole, of which 80 percent are accounted for by livestock production. These constitute 18 percent of all GHG emissions from human activities. An interesting comparison between a vegetarian meal and a beef steak, for instance, was provided by The New York Times in its issue of 27 January 2008 which is revealing. A meal consisting of 1 cup of broccoli, 1 cup of eggplant, 4 ounces cauliflower and 8 ounces of rice results in 0.4 pounds of emissions of CO2 equivalent. On the other hand a 6 ounce beef steak results in 10 pounds of CO2 equivalent emissions, which amount to 25 times that of the vegetarian meal with which the comparison was made.

Apparently the retarded Mayor of London was miffed and said that he would now eat twice the beef he normally did! I guess he has friends in the beef industry!

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Arundhati Roy seems to have lost her faith in the direction of modern ‘democracy’ particularly because, as she argues in her piece Democracy’s Failing Light, it has become a brand usurped by the most venal and calculated of opportunists, and used to veil injustices and terrible violence. Interestingly Pankaj Mishra had expressed similar dismay in an earlier piece called The Banality of Democracy where he argued that ‘democracy’ has become a theater that hides extremes of violence, and where the language of ‘elections’, ‘votes’, ‘citizen rights’, ‘liberty’ etc. is used to silence genuine freedom and justice.

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Today’s While You Wait Lobotomy Special! come from  this interview with director Claude Lanzmann, speaking about his new film called Tsahal.

I was laughing so hard that in fact I could not even post a link to this frankly retarded conversation when I first read it a week ago.  What adds spice to it is the subtlety of the interview who is clearly repulsed by Lanzmann’s racist and, lets be honest, stupid answers.

When asked a question (and it is clear that Lanzmann’s intellectual myopia does not allow him to recognize that the interviewer is setting him up), about why Israeli life is worth more than that of others, he says:

The answer goes back to the Shoah, the murder of the Jews in the Second World War. There are very few families in Israel who did not lose one or several members in the Shoah. The number of Jewish victims killed in wars and attacks must at all costs – and I mean that absolutely literally– be kept as low as possible. That is the maxim.

And the inanities continue, when further into the interview, and now clearly loosing hold on his sanity, Lanzmann reveals a toy soldier’s love of weapons of slaughter:

Weapons play a central role in my film. But I don’t know whether I would say they “fascinate” me. That’s not a fair word. Because the film is never about fascination. And yet I can certainly say that tanks are the most extraordinary machines. And the most extraordinary tank of all is the Israeli Merkava, because it was built in absolutely impossible conditions. The tank commanders love their Merkavas. The tank units spend at least three years of their lives in them. The Merkava was developed by the Israeli General Tal. He features prominently in my film. He says that Israel is an ideal country in which to develop tanks further and wage wars with them.

All this would just be interesting amusement, like reading the diary of a ’slow’ friend at school, if it were not for the fact that the interview is packed solid with false histories carried over from the 1950s! Mythological references to the ‘Jews sense of defensiveness’ are trotted out to argue and defend Israel’s current aggressions and love of violence. As if there isn’t a people, nation, class or ethnicity who couldn’t construct a narrative of past sufferings and argue for their need to perpetuate new ones! The Israeli canard of the ‘uniqueness’ of the Jew’s suffering is bandied about with abandon, and I guess leaving many an Armenian, Bangladeshi, Mapuche and yes Palestinian salivating at their ‘right’ to then perpetuate their own mass slaughters in the future!

Reductive ideas of about Arabs and Palestinians are displayed to create another old canard; Israel is perpetuatlly under threat and so it must kill – they make us kill them! Viva Meir!

Its is amusing and funny, and I wish the interviewer was even more acerbic and explicit in his disdain which he clearly has but holds in check.

And finally, the great toy soldier moment does arrive, this strange boy’s love for the butcher’s tools. The interviewer subtly tricks Lanzmann into revealing an infantile worship of weapons, like a boy who buys a sports car to compensate for his cowardice and overwhelming sense of inadequecy. I qoute Lanzmann’s hilarious reply:

Of course I rode in a tank during the filming of “Tsahal”. I have also shotgrenades from a Merkava. It was really easy to hit a stationary target, but I found it extremely difficult to hit a moving one. I have also flown on reconnaissance missions. During the work on my film I also saw the first prototypes for unmanned flights, drones, which were invented and developed in Israel. They are very unusual machines, but they do not feature in my film.

Oh dear. He rode a tank – Yeeeee Haaaaa! Lets get me one of them A-rabs!!

∞

Over at Dissent the writer/intellectual Ali Iteraz in a piece called Pakistan Is Already An Islamic State reminds us, particularly those from Pakistan, that the country’s slide towards becoming a religiously drunk state is  nothing new and does not begin just because of America’s recent wars in Afghanistan. He takes us back to the years of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto – the man who is now a myth so sacrosanct that we forget that he began his career kissing up to Pakistan’s earliest dictators, precipitated 2 wars, and was directly responsible for the break-away of Bangladesh, not to say anything about the genocide that he helped encourage there. Some quotes:

Most people in the world, including some Pakistanis, live under the illusion that the country is secular and just happens to have been overrun by extremists. This is false. Pakistan became an Islamic state in 1973 when the new constitution made Islam the state religion. Under the earlier 1956 constitution Islam had been merely the “official” religion. Nineteen-seventy-three, in other words, represents Pakistan’s “Iran moment“—when the government made itself beholden to religious law. Most western observers missed the radical change because the leader of Pakistan at the time was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a whiskey-drinking, pseudo-socialist from a Westernized family. Those that did notice the transformation ignored it because the country was reeling from a massive military defeat in 1971, which led to half the nation becoming Bangladesh.

And as the government and its working increasingly articulated their objectives and plans through a language religious, the people too learned that couching their demands in religious terms was perhaps the only way to find action from the government. As Iteraz says:

Over the 1970s and 1980s, Pakistan’s marginalized people also learned how to put Islam to political use.

In 1994, the poor locals of the quasi-autonomous Swat region, languishing in a broken colonial-era legal scheme, agitated for a more efficient system called “Sharia Nizam e Adl.” This system, being local and cultural in origin and mostly the construction of a man named Sufi Mohammad, had very little in common with the sharia that exists in the classical books of Islamic Law. But the Swatis figured that appealing to Islam would work, because, after all, everyone else did the same when they wanted their material concerns addressed. They turned out to be right. Benazir Bhutto’s government quickly consented.

His conclusion is, and it relates to the situation in Swat and other regions, that people are arguing through the prism of Islam because for decades that has been the only means to reach decision makers, and to effect any sort of legislative and political action on matters of justice, rights, and needs. I quote Iteraz again:

What is happening with the widespread religious militancy in Pakistan today is that the political and feudal elite like Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, who initially were beneficiaries of manipulating the Islamic character of Pakistan, have lost control of “Islam” to a much broader class of people. These out-of-power groups, after decades of alienation, want to have control in the political system and are attempting to acquire it by defining Islam, which is an amorphous idea, in a way they deem most suitable. Every day the abstract cry of sharia becomes a means of political agitation. Every day people organize into new movements around the declaration.

I recommend the entire piece, particularly to those who insist on solving abstractions with yet another delusional one that goes something like ‘If we implement true Islam we will solve all this’ or ‘Islam does not advocate violence’ and other such inanities. These are political and social issues – of man, for man and by man. Man uses whatever references, languages and forms he needs to argue for his food, his shelter and his security. It can be ‘democracy’, it can be ‘Islam’, it can be any number of abstract slogans, but underneath they are fueled by fundamental needs.

Our Unbreakable Bond With…Er…Some Israelis

In response to an earlier post I received some comments that claimed, in an ironic mimicry of an idiotic argument often used by the Israeli government, that ‘there was no one to talk to’ in Israel, I am putting up this post to help us find ‘people to talk to’ in Israel.

So here are some suggestions for organizations we would do well to join, support, participate with, talk to and stand alongside.

• B’Tselem
• Gisha
• Yesh G’vul
• Combatants for Peace
• Breaking the Silence
• Rabbis for Human Rights
• Hadash
• Peace Now
• The Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions
• Courage to Refuse
• Parent’s Circle
• Anarchists Against the Wall
• Gush Shalom
• The International Solidarity Movement

I am little tired of the simplistic and dismissive ideas about Israel that seem to pervade conversations many young people from backgrounds Muslim. We have allowed our anger at the wrongs committed against the Palestinians to reduce us to ignorance and mindless invective.  I have said it before and I will say it again; we do not know Israel and the decades of ignorance of  its society, politics, history, culture, conflicts, strains and possibilities weakens our goals and our cause for the search for justice for the Palestinians.

Another place to begin would be to read those who know her, and write about her from within. Journalists like Jonathan Cook have been covering Israel’s politics and society for years. His books (Disappearing Palestine, Israel & The Clash of Civilizations and Blood & Religion) and articles reveal the complex political and societal workings of the country and help us understand her policies towards the Palestinians and the various agendas at work. His work helps us understand where to focus our resistance.

Ignorance, stupidity, and sheer thick headedness will not change anything, nor will it weaken the resolve of those we wish to confront and stop. There are individuals in Israel, yes, Jews, who are opposed to her policies and her terrorism against the Palestinians. These Jews, these Israelis, share with us our understanding of human life, morality and justice. So why not join them, stand alongside them, add our voices to theirs just as they will add their voices to ours?

Broken Promise: Israel Known & Unknown

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.

The Definition of Courage: The Israelis Speak

The testimonies now being given by a number of Israeli soldiers who took part in the recent war on Gaza, a war that Richard Falk, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights, called a criminal act, offer us a glimpse into acts of human and individual courage.

There is no other way to describe the actions of these young men who were involved in what was nothing short of an international war crime against the unarmed civilian population of Gaza.

The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz has been publishing a series of testimonies – the paper’s Amos Harel’s has two pieces, IDF in Gaza: Killing civilians, vandalism, and lax rules of engagement and ‘Shooting and crying’.

The Inter Press News Agency also had a piece, Israeli soldiers expose atrocities in Gaza

The matter is so large that even the otherwise obfuscating New York Times just had to give it some attention in a piece called Further Accounts Of Gaza Killings Released

And you can read Richard Falk’s views on the matter here Israel’s war crimes which was published recently in Le Monde Diplomatique.

These soldiers are finally exhibiting some bravery because it takes none to hide inside armoured vehicles and tanks and tear apart an unarmed civilian population.

But to speak honestly in the face of a nation whose conscience, morality and sense of moral right and wrong has been drowned by sectarian and ethnic prejudices requires nothing short of courage.  These soldiers were commanded to kill for god, (and yes, there were rabbis with the soldiers handing out booklets telling them that palestinians can be killed with impunity to protect the ‘holy land’!) and country, a command that in all nations sanctions murder in return for medals, political posts, and mythical immortality. They could have chosen the easy way out, and just moved on.

And we should not underestimate this act.

This is not the first time Israel’s soldiers have spoken out. They are in fact a rare example to the soldiers of all nations who have been asked to commit acts of murder against innocents.

We should also not forget this; that they are offering us an example of the individual conscience over collective passions and hypnosis. Not an easy act.

Our International institutions of justice and law have failed us, usurped as they are by the powerful and militarily footloose!

The young Israeli men (and maybe women?) know well that their silence will not be questioned, and that no international institution will be able to touch them – Israel enjoys an impunity in the court of law that most all other nations (other than the USA) probably envy!

And yet they are speaking out, reminding us the real nature of war once all the nationalist and political jingoism has been cut through -  lies that in fact some of Israel’s more ‘cultivated’ minds like Amos Oz, or David Grossman and Yehoshua (to name a few) insist on reproducing for us and by their reputations transforming into ‘truths’!

Now once again and probably for just a little while the thin veil, woven mostly by cowardly political, journalistic and corporate apparatchiks, is lifted to show us what life is like on the other side of the Israeli guns.

Richard Falk in his piece on Israeli war crimes was not optimistic that anything will or can be done to bring to book the military and political leaders who carried out their acts.

As we listen to these young men fighting to save their conscience, morality and souls, we can only wonder if anything will become of their words and acts?

Probably not.

Not yet at least.

But we can hold on to the belief that these testimonies are now part of the official records and histories. And for as long as we continue to collect those we can have hope that some day, if not tomorrow then the day after, justice will indeed be done.

To courage, then.
UPDATE: More details are continuing to emerge, as they have been for many years by the way, of the’ lax rules of engagement’ (read as: kill first and wonder later) under which the Israeli army has operated in the West Bank and Gaza for decades.

FURTHER UPDATES: The Guardian updates the situation with this piece about t-shirts being sold to the IDF, and further revelations about the killings of civilians by the Israeli army.

How The Israeli Arms Industry Learned To Dance With Bollywood.

Rafael is an Israeli arms manufacturer and here is their attempt to convince ‘feminine’ India of her need for protection thanks to the modern, macho, western Israeli man?

With lyrics such as ‘I believe In You.  You believe In Me. Together. Forever. We Will Always Be. Dinga Dinga Dee’ we have a glimpse of the sophistication of the world this video emerges from and is distributed in to.

more about “Iron Eagle Nominee: Israeli Armsdog-M…“, posted with vodpod

Gaza On My Mind

Wikipedia has an entry about Professor Ammiel Alcalay.

How cool is that?

It says that he is ‘…an American, scholar, critic, translator, and prose stylist. Born and raised in Boston, he is a first-generation American, son of Sephardic Jews from São Tomé and Príncipe. His work often examines how poetry and politics affect the way we see ourselves and the way Americans think about the Middle East.’

He is also the author of one of the most amazing books I have read in the last decade – Memories of Our Future.

The Midwest Book Review said that it was “An outstanding anthology of essays surveying the complexities of Mediterranean cultures; the diverse, changing space of the Balkans, Middle East, and North Africa-areas of diasporas, dislocations, and genocidal exterminations provoked by nationalism and religious fanaticism. Of special interest are his observations and analysis of the Israeli/Palestinian confrontation, Arab/Jewish poetics, and Jewish identity in America.”

Professor Alcalay (he is a Professor at the City University of New York), recently sent me a poem he wrote while thinking about Gaza and the horrors being unleashed there.  I was in Gaza when I first read it, and I asked that he allow me to share it with the rest of you.  So I am reprinting here.

The poem recently in the appeared in the CUNY Graduate Center Advocate magazine’s February 2009 issue (http://gcadvocate.org)

GAZA

(after Mahmoud Darwish & Yehezkel Kedmi)

Skin can be torn to shreds and melted anywhere, houses dissolve and earth ripped apart below your very feet. But can the sea itself sustain a wound?

The name of these talks cannot be Madrid or Oslo but only Gaza because politics are politics and Washington and Tel Aviv propose velocity can drown out consciousness, extinguish the memory of life and the meaning of home.

Home is where the sea goes but there is no sea in Gaza.

How long can the fishermen mend their nets?

How many nets are even left when walls descend from a sky with no
horizon and the beach is only one more part of the prison yard?

How many trees are left in the minds of the wise and caring elders,
how many intricate hems left in the battered fingers of loving mothers,
searching for water day after day, or another cup of flour or rice to keep
their meager tables grand and sate the groaning chasm in the bellies of their beloved? How many more unborn can suffocate waiting to get across an imaginary line the earth still refuses to recognize? Why do madmen keep sending boys to do the job they thought they’d done for generations, extinguishing the very breath of their souls as they keep the great illusion
alive, the great illusion that this is war and not just slaughter, plain and simple?

There is no sea in Gaza and the only waves left signal a final light, the flash
of burning flesh in white phosphorus. Once I saw some men in Gaza waiting patiently by the side of the road, waiting and hoping. Waiting to work, hoping
to feed their children. Some still wait and others don’t. But the olive trees
and orange groves and fishing nets grow upside down in an endless sea
of blood about the sky above our heads and on some truly clear nights
you can hear them flow within the veins behind your eyes.

Ammiel Alcalay
January, 2009

My most recent work from Gaza is now also online. I am very pleased and honored to present it alongside Professor Alcalay’s work.  That the poem was released to me just as my images were ready to be shown was a beautiful coincidence.

This work was funded by a generous grant from the Pulitzer Center On Crisis Reporting in Washington D.C.

You can see the main gallery of images here: Gaza Undone

And a series of portraits I made of some victims of the recent conflict here: Portraits of Loss

Gaza Diary: January 30 2009 10:33 PM

Are you from Pakistan?

I am not sure how he knew for we had not met nor spoken to each other.

I was just about the get up to leave Al-Awda mosque in Rafah, Gaza when a man sitting behind me introduced himself and asked if I was from Pakistan.

How did he know? Why did he think so? Nothing about my appearance that day – I in my conventional trekking pants and checkered shirt, suggested my background.

How did he know?

The way you said your namaaz, specifically the way I said the final salaams (face turned right, and then left) was different from the way they did it here in Gaza and he had only seen that method when he had lived in Pakistan some years earlier.

Here, the told me, you wait for the Imam to say both salaams (left and right) before the congregations follows.

In Pakistan, we do so at the same time as the Imam.

Yes, indeed, I am from Pakistan – a Kashmiri born in Pakistan in fact.  He smiled, and vigorously shook my hand and said in near perfect Urdu ‘Ap say mill karr bahoot khushi hoey!’ – ‘It is a pleasure to meet you!’

I was taken aback! It was the last thing I had expected to hear – Urdu, Pakistan’s national language – spoken here in the heart of a Gaza refugee camp.

This was back in 2004.  Since then I have met a number of people in Rafah who speak a little Urdu and love to practice it whenever they meet me.

Many Palestinians had been allowed to travel to Pakistan after the Olso accords.  Policemen, doctors, physical therapists, accountants, engineers and others spend a few years in the country and learned a little of the language there.  They had been welcomed there, appreciated the support that they saw in the country for their struggle, and obviously felt at home there.

At a local physical rehabilitation center there was even a small club of Urdu speakers to which I of course was immediately made a member.

And again, on this recent trip, I continue to receive warm welcomes from people when I tell them that I am originally a Kashmiri from Pakistan.  There is a relaxing of attitude, a clear and obvious sense of camaraderie, a dissolving of some of the distance that exists between a foreign photographer and a Palestinian from Gaza. There is a look of recognition and gestures that suggest that they believe that I recognize something of me in them too.  And their struggle and their predicaments here in Gaza.

That since I am a Kashmiri, another region struggling for its identity and liberty, and a Pakistani, a country that has argued for the rights of the Palestinians, and of a Muslim background, that I to some degree understand who they are and what they are.

I can’t say that I actually offer all this to the Palestinians.  But I know that I love to speak Urdu in Gaza for the simple reason that it is the only place in the world where I can call myself just Pakistani – not Kashmiri/Pakistani/American/Swede etc. and not have it become a fact that taints you in the eyes of the other.

Perhaps the Palestinians like to speak it because it reminds them of a time of hope when the new possibilities offered by the Oslo Accords were to be prepared for in Pakistan.  Today none of those possibilities exist as the accords have been betrayed.

But the language they heard as they dreamed their dreams in a far away land is perhaps the only reminder of that special time so long past and the excitement and joys that had accompanied it.

I love to speak Urdu in Gaza.

Gaza Diary: January 24 2009 18:00 PM

The water pipe has many names.

In the balkans it is called a ‘lula‘ or ‘lulava’.

In Egypt and the Persian Gulf it is often referred to as a ’shishe’.

In Iran it is called a ‘ganja’ pronounced as ‘ghelyoon’.

In India and Pakistan it is called a ‘huqqa’.

In the Palestinian Territories, the Levant, Iraq, Jordan, Greece, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Israel, it is called by the beautiful name of ‘narghile’- a word that has its roots in sanskrit.

But I doubt if it has ever been called a weapon of defiance.

In 2003 I decided to rent an apartment in the city of Rafah, Gaza and document the lives of the people living along the border with Egypt. These mostly refugee neighborhoods were under assault from Israeli armored bulldozers and tanks – all part of the construction machinery being used to build the steel wall along the Philadephia Corridor – the code name the IDF used to describe the stretch of land it controlled between Rafah, Gaza and the Egyptian border.

Today it is the stretch of land that is being used by the Palestinians for the construction of tunnels, and the area the Israeli Air Force concentrated on as it attempted to destroy these tunnels.

One afternoon as I walked around these neighborhoods photographing displaced families, destroyed homes and the bulldozers working the area, I ran into a group of Palestinian men preparing to sit and smoke a narghile.

They had spread out, in sight of a group of Israeli tanks protecting a bulldozer demolishing yet another Palestinian home in the area, a small blanket on the edge of the construction area, but within the 100 meter ‘no go’ zone the Israeli’s insisted on enforcing between the steel wall and any Palestinian building or person.

The men invited me to join them.

I hesitated, knowing full well that within minutes the tanks would approach this group of men and either threaten them or simply shoot at them. But I did.

And sure enough, before we had managed to take our first few puffs of the narghile we saw the tanks starting to move towards us to investigate. We were soon forced to pack and leave.

When I asked the men why they had chosen to smoke there where they were sure to provoke the Israeli’s they laughed. To me it had seemed a careless act of bravado. I suspect that it was also a small act of defiance – to be where the Israelis had warned them not to be.

Last night in Gaza City, I went out for a narghile with some young Palestinians I have come to know while working here documenting the aftermath of Israel’s Operation Cast Lead.

We sat and talked about ordinary things. The Palestinians always ask me the most ordinary questions; how do you spend your time with your wife? What do you do when you are not working? How do you play with your daughter? What games do you enjoy?

In turn, they tell me about their most important aspirations, and I am always struck by the ordinariness of them; The desire to find a good wife. The hope of finding a job that will bring them financial security. The hope of children, many children.

Ordinary things that over a narghile become the thing of dreams. And the water-pipe, a small act of defiance in the face of the incarceration and deprivation of life in Gaza.

An object that enables pleasures still available to the people here; companionship, conversation and the laughter of friends.

And in the aftermath of the horrors of this last confrontation with Israel, a small act of living life, a small act of defiance.

Gaza Diary: January 22 2009 14:25PM

On the Getty Images archive you can type in ‘Gaza Destroyed’ and retrieve over 5,500 images to select from.  If you run the query ‘Gaza Funerals’ you will get back over 7,000 images.  I was unable to check the Corbis archives because at the time of writing this entry their site was undergoing maintenance.  But I am confident that I would find a similarly large number of images for both the queries above. 

The challenge for a photographer arriving in Gaza is that s/he is walking into a place that has been consistently and extensively photographed for decades, and that there are many fine, talented and professional Palestinian photographers who carry out this task for their various agencies.  In addition, some of the best and most talented international photojournalists have also made Gaza the focus of their work.

I have arrived in Gaza in the aftermath of Israel’s most recent military operation against the region, Operation Cast Lead.  And I find that though the scale of this latest venture is larger than anything I can remember from my previous travels to Gaza, its impact and consequences are very familiar. 

The official numbers state that over 1,300 people have been killed, of which it is believed that nearly 400 were children, about 50,000 made homeless, and over 5000 left seriously injured.

I arrived in Gaza just as the cease fire had been declared and I had been immediately struck by how familiar it all seemed.

The day before as I stood on the Egyptian border with Rafah and watched Israeli jets dropping their payload on buildings and tunnel construction sites I was unsure of my decision to proceed.  Cowardice has been my best friend and protected me from many dangers. 

Why would I not listen to it now?

My first trip to Gaza was in 2003.  I then returned and continued to document the situation here, particularly in Rafah, Gaza, in 2004 and 2005.  The settlers were still in Gaza then, and so were activists from the International Solidarity Movement, and the armored bulldozers and their accompanying tanks that were constructing the massive steel wall along Rafah’s border with Egypt. 

Home demolitions were frequent along the Rafah border as bulldozers tore down Palestinian homes to make way for this steel wall.  Tank patrols would terrorize residents living along the border, and there would be frequent firing into these neighborhoods resulting in deaths and maiming of residents.
 
As a photographer I documented my fair share of funerals, Hamas marches and families salvaging their belongings from the ruins of their destroyed houses. 

And now, as I walk through the devastation in Gaza from the most recent Israeli operation, I am struck by how familiar and how similar it all looks.  My photographs from this morning look little different from those I took back in 2003, 2004 and 2005!  In fact, a simple re-edit of the captions of my previous work and I could convince you that the photograph was taken just yesterday!

The scale is different.  Absolutely.  But the visible consequences are the same as: dead bodies and lost lives; destroyed homes and displaced families; angry funerals and political exploitation; protest marches and armed men promising revenge; physical destruction and families trying to rebuild. 

We have been here before.  We are here again.

As I walk through Gaza with my little camera in hand, and around me scramble some of the world’s finest photojournalists capturing yet more of what we have already known and seen, I am desperately trying to find my own voice to this story.  And it is not helping that I know that in the not too distant future there will be yet more confrontations, and more military operations, and more funerals, and marches, and destroyed homes and displaced lives. 

The cycle repeats itself.

Is there a way to stop the images from doing the same?

What We Are Is Only What We Do

Huwaida Araf is a young American of Palestinian descent and a founder of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). Here is a video of what it means to have the courage of your convictions

In 2003 I was in Rafah, Gaza on the day Rachel Corrie, another brave woman, another member of the ISM, was crushed under an Israeli bulldozer while trying to stop it from destroying the house of a Palestinian doctor along the Rafah/Egypt border.

She, and her ISM colleagues, showed me then too what it means to have the courage of your convictions. I had known her briefly – we would often run in to each other in Rafah, and even shared a lunch one afternoon as we discussed how control of water sources in the West Bank may be determining where settlements and Israeli presence is focused.

Then, as today, the Palestinian protesters were engaged in non-violent resistance to a brutal, maiming, dehumanizing and murderous occupation force.

Members of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) block Israeli tanks accompanying armoured bulldozers used for destroying Palestinians homes along the Gaza-Egypt border - September 2003 Photo By Asim Rafiqui

I had never met a young woman like her – passionate, committed, sharply intelligent and determined.  She was only 24 years old.

At 24 I was still trying to figure out how to date women!

And they were all young and from many different countries around the world.  And some paid with their lives while fighting for something they believed in, something that gave them a reason to live before it killed them.

Rachel Corrie died that year, and so did Tom Hurndall just a few months later.  Shot by an Israeli sniper he too was 24, young, and committed.  His killer was a Bedouin in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) who was singled out for prosecution despite his statement that there was a policy of shooting at unarmed civilians in effect.

I suspect that there still is.

It is conventionally believed, and the truly ignorant and arrogant will lecture the Palestinians on this, that the Palestinians have not engaged in non-violent resistance to the occupation.

The facts are that that is all that they mostly day.  Every day and all the time.

The construction of the separation Wall has been resisted peacefully each and every day of its existence and these peaceful protests have been met with live bullets, tear gas and beatings.  I know, I have been there.  And yet they continue, despite the threats to their lives.  The Palestinians even went to the highest court that would hear them – the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and presented their case.

The ICJ found that the construction of the wall and its associated regime were in breach of international human rights and humanitarian law.  It also said that Israel was under an obligation to cease construction of the wall, dismantle the structure and make reparation for all damage caused by that project.

That was back in the summer of 2004.

Many deaths ago.

Many disppossessed acres go.

Many lost olive groves ago.

Many lost school days ago.

Many humiliations ago.

Many summary arrests go.

Many settlements go.

Many beatings ago.

Many imprisonments ago.

The Limits of Photojournalism And Things More Worthwhile

It is perhaps the most interesting, creative and compelling book of photography I have ever read. I have looked and read it over a dozen times in the last 8 years.  Edward Said & Jean Mohr’s ‘After The Last Sky: Palestinian Lives’ is perhaps the only example that I know of of a brilliant writer and a sensitive photographer collaborating to produce something remarkably insightful, intelligent and provocative at the same time.

For the first time a writer has worked directly from photographs to produce essays that speak to the deeper, human and ever lasting issues concerning the question of Palestine and the lives of the Palestinians in exile and under occupation.  And has done so without resorting to hysteria or sensationalism. As a book, an endeavor, setting aside its subject, it is a masterpiece of photojournalism that informs and elevates its subject beyond images and words alone.

And similarly, Jean Mohr, a wonderful Swiss photographer I fear is mostly forgotten these days, has traveled beyond the devastated and desperate Palestinian landscapes to excavate the gentle and human rhythms and to reveal the humanity and daily ordinariness of Palestinian’s life.

This is real photojournalism; engaged, creative, insightful, committed, patient, lasting, influential and thought provoking.  It is photojournalism that attempts to contribute to the dialogue about an issue, without seeming desperate to sensationalize or be recognized.  It is photojournalism that goes beyond the personality of the photographer, and instead highlights the lives of the subjects, and issues on hand and the questions that are relevant.  It is real photojournalism, and for the last 8 years, Said/Mohr’s ‘After The Last Sky’ has been my personal measure of how photojournalism should be done.

Anything less is mere picture making.

I met Jean Mohr in Jerusalem in 2003 at an exhibition sponsored by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). He was one of my earliest influences and inspirations, and in fact my early work on the Sattar Edhi Center in Karachi, Pakistan was inspired by one of his pictures from the same center.  Lets be honest, I set out to imitate him! I was drawn to him because of the complexity of his images that never crossed the line into voyeurism, sensationalism or some desperate attempt to titillate.  In person he was appropriately shy – I seemed to scare him.  I thought I saw his champagne glass shake with fear when I introduced myself to him and said that he had been a major influence on my work! The creative, exciting conversation that i had imaged we would have never materialized.  After a few minutes of clumsy and formal introductions and pleasanteries, Jean Mohr was pulled away (or found an excuse to leave?) and I never got a chance to speak to him again.

I have on my shelves a few hundred books of photography and photojournalism.  Most of them large, expensively bound tomes that suggest gravity of intent and purpose.  Serious artists at work.  Only a handful have I poured over in detail, savoring each page, and learning something new from it.  Robert Frank’s “The Americans’ is one that I have come back to again and again.  That is a cliche.  Said/Mohr’s “After The Last Sky’ is in fact not even on my photography book self.  It is instead placed in along my other books.  And that I think is it’s highest achievement.

Said/Morh’s “After The Last Sky’ is the only photography book I know that is filed under ‘Middle East History’, and not under the ‘Photography’ section of any mainstream bookstore.  In fact, that is where I remember finding  my copy – in the ‘Middle East History’ section of the Barnes & Noble store on 555 5th Avenue in Manhattan in 2001.  And that is this book’s greatest achievement – that it has lifted itself away from the shallow and limited value of being just another photo book to being a book about history!

My shelves are laden with these high art tomes of photography.  Most mere decorations.  Clutter.

And so much of today’s photojournalism is mere clutter.  Illustrations really, not illuminations.  We no longer seem to know the difference.  We no longer appear prepared to go beyond the picture and to reveal the more complex political, economic, social and historical issues at stake.  Perhaps worse, there is something rather close to middle class voyeurism in what passes for essential photojournalism.  This is perhaps a little discussed subject when it comes to the field of photojournalism i.e. the class divisions between those who make the pictures and those who become the subjects and how it influences what, who and how we represent.

A brief perusal of the kinds of subject matter that is recognized as ‘photojournalism’ or ‘documentary photography’ reveals this bias;  drug addicts (anywhere), transvestites (anywhere, but especially in Asia), prostitutes (anywhere, but especially in Asia), drugs and drunks in Russia, street children, the mentally ill (like shooting fish in a bowl!), strip clubs/strippers, prisons, the physically handicapped, hungry/pleading Africans, crazy/blood thirsty Africans, exotic ritual/false exotic culture stories that offer us the ‘other’ as primitive etc.  All subjects popular with young photographers, grant committees, and photojournalism education institutes shoving students out towards the ‘downtrodden’ neighborhoods to find their stories. All about comunities that can ’shock’ middle class sensibilities and offer us a mean to sneer, pity, or simply express remorse.

There have been many discussions and endless arguments about where photojournalism stands today and what ails it.  Few seem prepared to say that it has stagnated, and that its creative energies are being wasted on the purchase of new toys and technology gizmos rather than on the complex and demanding art of constructing and telling new stories from new angles and in new ways.  To the human art of seeing our world for its complexities and attempting to speak about them.

I continue to look for stories that connect us to them, reminding us that their lives and our lives are connected in intricate, obvious ways if we would only bother to look. From Kivu to Khartoum, to speak of African alone, what transpires there is directly connected to what transpires here.

Maybe a new photo reportage on Zimbabwe perhaps that does not fall into the simplistic and easy narratives about a nation misruled by a yet another mad African leader – see again Mamdani on Zimbabwe . Or something on Africa’s HIV/AIDS crisis that reveals to us how effective indigenous, small scale programs of prevention and care have been in contrast to the waste and corruption engendered in the multinational/NGO industries involved in the matter – as demonstrated by Helen Epstein in her book ‘The Invisible Cure’.

And maybe that is why Said/Mohr’s work continues to stand out because it is not constrained by the limits of the image, or the need to have a story published in a weekly news magazine, or the preferences of a particular photo editor.  It reveals connections, human, political, social and historical, between its subject and us and does so without cleansing the matter of its uncomfortable realities.

It remains a work liberated from the constraints of the craft, and the media structures that sustain and also constrain it.  Jean Mohr does not like to write, but in the book’s Introduction he reveals the personal, moral and perhaps dissident motivations for his nearly 50 years of work on the lives and displacement of the Palestinians.  He tells of a conversation with ‘… a respected reporter and a perfect connoisseur of the world of photography.’ where this individual asks:

‘And what projects are you working on at the moment?’

‘An exhibition…and…I’m working on the completion of a new book, something very close to my heart.’

‘What’s it about?’

‘The Palestinians’

There was a rather long silence…my friend looked at me with a slightly sad smile, and said ‘Sure, why not! But don’t you think the subject’s a bit dated? Look, I’ve taken photographs of the Palestinians too, especially in the refugee camps…its really sad! But these days, who’s interested in people who eat off the ground with their hands? And then there’s all that terrorism…I’d have thought you’d be better off using your energy and capabilities on something more worthwhile!’ (From After The Last Sky, page 7)

It seems to me today we are all working on ’something more worthwhile!’ i.e. avoiding works that question our prejudices and misunderstandings, or are just politically impolite and rude, or focus on issues and angles that may reveal new truths and insights to situations considered known.

I simplify; photographers like Jason Ezkenazi, Jon Anderson, Simon Wheatley, Sara Terry to name a few continue to pursue the complex, complicate and demanding.

I am speaking about works that take risks, that reveal independence of thought, and a commitment to confront our seemingly endless need to simplify.  Works that are not constrained by the need for the obvious image, but given flight by the possibilities of what the subject can reveal.  Works that are about teaching us which questions to ask.

I have struggled with these thoughts for every year that I have been working as a professional.  They are guides in my personal journey as a photographer, with all my current works revealing the vast distances I  have yet to travel to reach these ideals.

In the mean time, today, the last day of 2008, I have a copy of ‘After The Last Sky’ in my hands, and a prayer in my heart for the voiceless and forgotten people of Gaza.  As Darwish himself said it best (didn’t he always!)

Where should we go after the last frontiers,

where should the birds fly after the last sky?

The Anti-Semite In Me

In 2002, just before I left for Gaza to begin nearly 2 years of work on the impact of Israel’s occupation of that land, I wrote a short email to Edward Said.  Much to my surprise, he wrote back.  It was a short response, wishing me luck with my project and expressing an interesting in seeing my work once I thought it was ready to be shown.  Edward Said died about a year later and I never got a chance to take him up on his offer, though I knew that he had made it out of politeness.  And I could never tell him how much even that polite offer had meant to me and how much it had inspired the work that I did eventually manage to produce.

I am thinking of Gaza today as its people are once again asked to bear the brunt of the world’s indifference and casual justifications for their murders.  On this first day alone, over 200 have been been quietly killed. Indeed, it is Israel that is carrying out the air raids but it is we who have permitted this to be done.  Prepared as we are to quickly forget the political aspirations of the Palestinians, eager as we are to reduce this struggle from the broader one about throwing off an occupation to a petty one about ‘rockets’ and ‘retaliations’.  All to avoid the fact that we are not prepared to ask of Israel the very things she and her citizens insist on asking of European powers that once wronged her people: justice, compensation, respect for law, criminal prosecution, acknowledgment of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

After 2 years of work in Gaza the images were published in a few obscure and unread Internet and print journals.  It took just a few days for the reactions to come in and unsurprisingly I was accused of being an anti-semite, and a supporter of terrorism. By friends, and by strangers. The work had offended them, and dismissed as the rantings of a misguided, unqualified and naive photographer. 

Apparently I had not understood anything, or realized the foolishness of my ways.  Many who attacked me were quaintly ignorant of the history of the conflict.  And determined to remain so.  Most had in fact never even been to Israel but defended her history and her actions on the basis of a religious, ethnic, or some other affiliation.  Many had read a book or two, largely biased.  Most had not read the best of even Israel’s own.

Israel’s academies and individuals have produced some fine historical research and independent writings about her emergence as a nation, its Palestinian victims and the perpetuation of myths that sustain the conflict.  It surprises me even today and I can’t help but admire the courage of these men and women who have so bravely carried out their work as Israeli citizens about Israel’s history, in a national and social atmosphere imbued with an extremely militant and sectarian nationalism.

Benvenisti’s Sacred Landscape, or Pappe’ ‘The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine’, or Sternhell’s “The Founding Myths of Israel’ to name just a few.  I list the Israeli’s first because I will be accused of ‘bias’ or anti-intellectualism if I list voices from the Arab and the rest of the world, a world painted as irrationally hostile to the Middle East’s ‘only liberal democracy’.

But for those interested in works that reflect academic rigor, intellectual honesty and excellence in research, they should also look at Khalidi’s  ‘The Iron Cage’, or Shehadeh’s  ‘Strangers in the House’ or Nusseibeh’s  ‘Once Upon A Country’, and Edward Said’s masterful ‘The Question of Palestine’.  And there are a lot more.

Some years ago journalist Jonathan Cook wrote an essay called From Highcombe to Nazareth: How I Found Myself with the Islamic Fascists He was writing some years after my time in Gaza, but it captured wel the things I felt back in 2004.  Jonathan has been accused of being an anti-semite as well for his rigorously researched writings and honest appraisal of the realities of Israeli politics and policies in the Occupied Territories.

If you have not read Jonathan’s work, make sure you do.  He has written 3 books on Israel and a number of insightful articles and essays on the situation inside Israel, her management of the Occupied Lands and on broader geo-political matters.  I am proud to call Jonathan a friend.  He has also been called an anti-semite.  I guess misery loves company.

We live in a world where an unarmed population, trapped inside what can only be described as a prison, is being attacked with missles and soon with sophisticated armoured vehicles.  One of the most powerful military nations in the world has convinced us, us with our civilized codes of behavior and morality, that this tiny little portion of the earth with its dangerous and barbaric people, are a threat to its existence.  We have been convinced that this is about ‘rockets’ and ‘peace’ all so that we do not remember that this is actually about an occupation, oppression, dispossession and simple theft.

We live in a world where we, the educated, modern, evolved, superior, civilized and wealthy have decided that the evil that we confront is the unarmed, hungry and trapped masses of Gaza who have the temerity to refuse our ‘peace’ and to demand something more: justice, compensation, respect for law, criminal prosecution, acknowledgment of war crimes and crimes against humanity. And I find, illogically perhaps, that I cannot be part of this civilized, modern, progressive, evolved, superior world.

I find that I remain accused of being an anti-semite.

I can’t look away.

I can’t explain it away.

I can’t accept the ‘truths’ I am supposed to.

I can’t accept that the only alternative to ‘us’ is the ‘terrorists’.

I can’t forget their history.

I can’t ignore their dispossession.

I can’t excuse their murders.

I can’t justify their suffering.

I can’t remain numbed by a media bought.

I can’t ignore their courage.

I can’t ignore their right.

I can’t explain away their struggle for justice.

I can’t transform what is clearly wrong into a geo-politically convenient, socially acceptable, polite-company approved  ‘right’.

I can’t.

I have with this same naivete and foolishness continued my work on the Palestinians – both in Israel and in the Occupied Territories.

I remain in awe of the courage, dignity and determination of the Palestinian people.  I am proud of having stood alongside them.  And if being an anti-semite can be contorted to mean anyone who argues for the rights and justice of the Palestinian people who have suffered decades of dispossession, expulsion, and oppression, than I remain an anti-semite.

And for those who may have forgotten, this is the Palestinian flag, bloodied and torn as it may be today and for decades past, but that it is the Palestinian flag.

Read: Chris Hedge’s ‘Party To Murder’

Read: Sara Roy’s ‘If Gaza Falls’

Read: Tariq Ali’s ‘From The Ashes of Gaza’

Read: Richard Falk, Princeton University emeritus professor of international law who has also been an investigator of Palestinian human rights for the United Nations, report on Gaza human rights, where if I may summarize the following statements can be clearly read

1. ‘…a policy of collective punishment, initiated by Israel to punish Gazans for political developments within the Gaza strip, constitutes a continuing flagrant and massive violation of international humanitarian law as laid down in Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.’
2. ‘…an urgent effort should be made at the United Nations to implement the agreed norm of a ‘responsibility to protect’ a civilian population being collectively punished by policies that amount to a Crime Against Humanity.’

NOTE: The term “anti-Semitic” (or “anti-Semite”) usually refers to Jews only.  It was coined in 1873 by German journalist Wilhelm Marr in a pamphlet called, “The Victory of Jewry over Germandom”. Using ideas of race and nationalism, Marr argued that Jews had become the first major power in the West. He accused them of being liberals, a people without roots who had Judaized Germans beyond salvation. In 1879 Marr founded the “League for Anti-Semitism”.  (See Wikipedia Entry)

However, The term Semite means a member of any of various ancient and modern people originating in southwestern Asia, including Akkadians, Canaanites, Phoenicians, Hebrews, Arabs, and Ethiopian Semites.