Before the fires: Al-‘Auja, July 22, 2017
Fields were burning in the fall of 2017, but in late July the story was different.
Continue readingHollywood Endings: The Northern and Southern Jordan Valley. Text and photographs: Margaret Olin
photographic activism
January 14, 2020. Al-‘Auja. Text: David Shulman
November 11, 2019: ‘Ein Rashshash. Text by David Shulman.
We are three—Guy, Nina, and me. We reach Rashshash with the dawn. Tea is served. How are things? “Settlers at our throat every day.”
Photograph: David Shulman, 2019
Continue readingReflections of a demonstration: the woman’s march, 2017, New York City
I am trying to make the best out of an unwelcome break from the Palestinian territories with a few modest digressions. This one, from January, 2017, could also have been titled “the lonely demonstration.” I prepared it in a more innocent time, but never posted it until a thread on crowd photography, on the FlakPhoto Network, inspired me to take it out of mothballs. The third to last image is the cover of a book due out next week, Photography and Imagination, which I co-edited with Amos Morris-Reich.
Blind justice – and blindness
Al-‘Auja Jordan Valley, April 20, 2018. In the back of the police car, a newly arrested Palestinian shepherd was about to be driven to the police station, blindfolded.
Nothing Happens: Three stories from the South Hebron Hills
Nothing can happen in many different ways. When it does happen it is always eventful, full of tension and suspense. Sometimes nothing takes a very long time, and often a lot of work to happen. Here are three brief stories:
Continue readingOut of sight: Ein ar Rashshash in December, 2018. Post by Margaret Olin
December 12: “If a tree falls in the forest . . . “
There is barely a single tree here, but nearly everyone today voiced some version of the famous philosophical puzzle about the observer and existence. Or coexistence.
Continue readingOctober 7, 2018: al-Khan al-Ahmar. Post by David Shulman
Photograph: David Shulman
Al-Khan al-Ahmar: still waiting. Now that Angela Merkel has come and gone, and the holiday season is over, and the court has spoken, there are no further obstacles to the coming devastation. Germany joined other EU countries in condemning the planned demolition as a war crime, and Merkel herself is clearly against it; the government politely delayed execution until after she left Israel. We had hoped she might issue a strong statement while here: hope, or desperation, conjures up hopeless dreams. Continue reading
September 21, 2018, Autumnal Equinox: Al-Hamme. Post by David Shulman
Shirat Ha-Asavim. Photograph: David Shulman
Once there was just the firing zone, largely fictive. It spreads over thousands of acres in the northern Jordan Valley, and it’s been in place, on paper and plastic-wrapped military maps, for maybe forty years. This is not the only one in the Valley; a huge percentage of the land here has been declared either a military zone or a nature reserve, or both. But until recently, Palestinians were still grazing their herds in the firing zone just west of al-Hamme. On the two or three days in the year when the army was about to carry out training exercises there, the soldiers would let the Palestinian residents know a few days in advance, and for those days the shepherds would keep away. Continue reading
July 5, 2018: Susya. Post by David Shulman. Photos: Margaret Olin and others
Susiya, 2016. Photograph: Margaret Olin
1.
So there is the Big Destruction, the one everyone in Susya and in al-Khan al-Ahmar knows will happen, the one everyone fears, and there are the Little Destructions along the way, the tremors that presage what is to come, as if the army were testing the water. ‘Azzam Nawajeh, whose home is on the demolition list, says he wishes they would do the big one already; waiting day after day, for many months, in the certainty that they will come, is torture enough. This morning we thought it was happening, but in the end what we saw were two Little Destructions. They were awful. Continue reading