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SCENES FROM THE WEST BANK I am not a war correspondent, even
less a war photographer. There are no pictures here of the immediate traumas of
occupation: no gunbattles, no settler attacks, no bulldozers wrecking homes.
These pictures have been taken in quieter moments, in the lulls between military
assaults when an observer can ponder the grinding nature of occupation and the
entrenchment of what the Israeli activist Jeff Halper has called Israel's
"matrix of control" over Palestinian life. The features of that life have been
the slow erosion of all sources of Palestinian physical and financial
independence: by ghettoising the population behind a wall, Israel has enslaved
it, making Palestinians dependent on the good will of military commanders to
complete even the simplest everyday tasks, such as getting to work, or hospital,
or college. According to this military logic, an impoverished Palestinian
population living behind a wall has to concentrate on survival, not on the
struggle for liberation and a state. The army may be right at least in the
short term. And Israel's current thinking is very short term indeed.
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Jonathan Cook News Archive, last updated on Thursday, 04 February 2010 |
