Rula Halawani: A Biographical Sketch
By Michket Krifa
Translated from the French by Rana Hajjar

The first time I saw Rula Halawani was in 1995, a little more than a year after the Oslo Accords. She had been accompanying Palestinian adolescents who were facing Israeli adolescents in a photography workshop organised by the International Center for Peace in the Middle East. The objectives of this workshop were to allow adolescents of two nationalities to get to know each other better and to begin to approach each other’s culture and vision. Rula had, with courage, accepted to take on this challenge. It was not an easy feat. The young Israelis, full of the arrogance of power and riches, remained together and did not give much attention to their enemies of yesterday with whom they had to coexist. As for the young Palestinians, they were full of mistrust and saw in every Israeli a future soldier who would imprison one of theirs or destroy one of their homes. It was not until the last 3 days of the workshop, after 9 months of regular contact, that the ice was finally broken. Rula, who felt a great deal of responsibility towards these young adolescents, took them under her wing, though she feared that their hopes of being acknowledged would be disappointed. She was very engaging. At the time, she was a photo journalist for the Sygma agency and was covering the political events of the country. I immediately loved her rebellious yet tender side, and her instinctive look at things. She always evinced a bit of mistrust and mockery, while suppressing her greater dreams of peace.

A year later, I exhibited the work of those youngsters and I proposed some of Rula’s photographs to the FNAC (the international art center in France). The public was impressed by the quality of these photos, their force, and the violence that they denounced. As for Rula, she had begun to think about realizing more personal projects that would bring her less anxiety than the daily confrontations known to the region even in times of peace. So, after having seen hundreds of her photographs, I suggested to her to keep working on the memoir of Palestinian walls and more particularly on graffiti. She had already done a lot of work on this, and the work that she did thereafter was exhibited again at various French and foreign centers, and was published in a book "Le Printemps Palestinien” (The Palestinian Springtime).

In the meantime, Rula left Sygma for Reuters, where she worked full-time. At the same time, she worked on more documentary or other topics for the Swedish, Norwegian and other presses. She was very overwhelmed and always in the field. I would be with her, leisurely debating some topic, when her beeper would start ringing and warn her of an event. Her cameras were always at hand like a soldier; her arm was the daily testimony of injustice that her people suffered. As soon as she arrived in the field, her colleagues from the Palestinian press would let her pass because they were sure that she would be the one to open the negotiations with the Israeli army so that they would let them do their work. Once she had argued enough with the stubborn soldier, he would end up letting her pass and other photographers would then follow. She was amazing, courageous and was never afraid, or at least she never showed it. It was only once she was back from the front line that she would let herself cry or give up.

We were at a café in West Jerusalem one day, in one of those rare moments of tranquility. We were sipping our drinks when suddenly a Palestinian kid was attacked in front of us by an Israeli who was about to fracture his skull with the legs of a chair. No one was intervening. We interrupted to protect the child, and asked for an explanation. The man said that the Palestinian was trying to sell contraband lighters to the café customers. We took the boy aside, offered him a soda, gave him some money, and asked him not to come back to this place. Rula was about to fight with the man. We were presented with innumerable scenes of daily racism that the Palestinians lived in. This child, who was school age and should have been playing football with his friends, was obliged for the survival of his family to walk 20 kilometers and go through checkpoints to sell crayons and lighters to Israelis. He was one of the many victims of the precarious status of Palestinian families, in which the majority of the men are unemployed, imprisoned or wounded. As a result of this, Rula got the idea to do a documentary on the lives of these young kids, who are deprived of their childhood and obliged to work to feed their families. This work took 2 years and was filmed in black and white, with two photos for each child -- one showing the child at work, and the other a close portrait which framed the traits of childhood.

Tired of the political events and the violence, Rula decided to leave for London where she took the risk to go towards a more personal step to approach photography. Photojournalism no longer satisfied her in itself and she needed to express her deep feelings about the tragedy of her country with another form of photography. On her return, she first started teaching this medium in children’s workshops, and then at Bir Zeit, the prestigious university next to Ramallah. At the same time, she was working in Jerusalem, the city that she particularly loves. The intifada began shortly thereafter and movement became very difficult. During the invasion of the Palestinian territories by the Israeli army in the spring of 2000, Rula took photos of the besieged villages, the invaded roads, the destroyed homes, the humiliated men, women and children, wounded on the ground. And to accentuate the vision of the nightmarish landscape, she printed the negative of these images so as to evoke even more the troublesome aspects of this almost inhumane violence. In one of her installations, she placed a photocopy of her Palestinian of East Jerusalem passport. This work has become a sort of manifesto. In her constant attempts to humanize Palestinians, Rula photographs the details of the hands at checkpoints when they hand their papers to the soldiers who control the roadblocks. These are daily gestures, and yet anonymous -- where the act of letting people pass can decide the kind of day, month or life to be had by those who await the approbation of those in power. More than ever, in these latter works, Rula Halawani, far from abandoning the testimony of reporting, has fixed on a new form of artistic expression, the search for humanity, and she waits, like the rest of the people, for these hands to be extended only in gestures of friendship.

Michket Krifa is a Paris-based curator and art writer.