Arts and politics in Palestine through my photographs
Rula Halawani

I am a working artist, a photographer living and working in an intensely political environment. I am more comfortable taking photographs than writing or talking. Therefore I will try and talk about the relationship between art and politics from my own personal experience. The question of doing "political art" is not a question in the Palestinian context. Our whole existence is so overwhelmingly defined at the everyday level by our political circumstances – there is really no escaping it. Even when we don't think we are doing something political, because we are Palestinian, everyone else thinks we are. But more importantly, if artistic expression is about how we express certain experiences, sensations or feelings, then for Palestinians, the total reality of the occupation is something that is always there, in one way or the other in our art.

I was born and grew up under occupation in East Jerusalem. I only started learning how to take photos in Canada, when I was going into my fourth year of study in Math and physics. I had nothing to do over the summer so took a photo course. In my first class in photography I realized that’s what I wanted to do with my life – that I'd found myself. I came back home end of 1989, when the first Palestinian uprising was in its second year and began a career as a photojournalist. My family didn't like my choice and it was not easy for my society to accept a woman photographer either. As a Palestinian Moslem woman it was not a proper thing to go about in with a camera. Besides, my family was basically disappointed, because they thought for a smart woman I could do better than this job. I ignored them and people's reactions and carried on taking photos. My training in photography had only been technical, basic things with no real theory behind them. Because of the uprising, it seemed obvious to do what other photographers were doing – photojournalism. I started just like any other photojournalist taking photos that represented some of the basic issues going on such as, land confiscation, or that tried to capture the direct face of the conflict, such as Israelis soldiers shooting at kids, young Palestinians throwing stones and petrol bombs at Israeli soldiers, or Israeli army arresting Palestinians.

From the beginning it was not an easy job. Besides the fact that I was a woman and there were very few other women working, there were even fewer Palestinians working as photojournalists. Most of the others were westerners or Israelis. My problem in comparison to the others was that I could not put my feelings aside. I was trained like they were to "get the picture" and I know many of them felt sympathy towards the people they were shooting. But for me, the relationship to what I was shooting was different. The problem for me was that the picture was not a separate thing or event to document, but the pictures I was taking were part of me, and I was part of the pictures I was taking. Photographing my own society in conflict from the pose as a photojournalist was somehow not working for me. The pictures were fine, they got published in many places, but I felt something was wrong in my relationship to what I was doing.

The first intifada ended and was followed by the Oslo peace process. Like many Palestinians I really wanted to give peace a chance. I had a break, I was able for a while to take photos of people being happy….But as the peace process developed, the events that followed filled me with worry: the worry of losing my city, Jerusalem, and the right of exiled Palestinians to return to their home land. The days went by and in my eyes things only got worse: Jerusalem became closed off to the West bank, Palestinians couldn't move, more of the land was taken; more Israeli settlements, more killings.

In April 1997, I went to Hebron to cover demonstrations that had been set off by Israel refusing to leave the city. Some young kids about 16 and 17 years old appeared and started throwing stones at the Israeli army. I recognized them from the year before when I'd met them playing soccer. They were fun kids. I had got to know them a little, we got to talking and I showed them how to use my camera. Now one year later, they were in the middle of clashes with soldiers. One of them came and threw stones and he was slightly injured by a rubber bullet in the leg and some Palestinians took him away. His injury wasn't too bad, so I thanked God. But after a few minutes he came back and started throwing stones again. Within a few seconds there was a loud shot and he fell down. He had been shot point blank in the head and died instantly. Later, when I saw the photograph I'd taken of him lying on the ground, I realized he'd still had a stone in his hand. I was devastated by the incident. Why did he come back after he was already shot? I couldn't understand, why such a beautiful kid, so full of life would come back to die. I am a nationalist, and I believe in struggling for our rights but I couldn't understand the boy's willingness to sacrifice his life for the land. I felt very confused, what is more important – the lives of people or the piece of land we live on. I'd always thought life was more important than land, but after the incident with the little boy, I realized that without land, a free land, there is no life.

After witnessing his death, I decided I could not continue as a photojournalist, after 9 straight years of photojournalism, I realized I couldn't just keep documenting kids growing up and getting killed – I couldn't just keep watching and thinking that my camera was doing something about it. I didn't want to be a photojournalist but I still wanted to take pictures, the problem was I had to find a different way to relate my photography to how I was feeling, to being Palestinian in Palestine.

I decided that one of the things I wanted to do was teach photography. There were no professional photography courses in Palestine, and I thought that perhaps that could be a role for me, my contribution. I found a scholarship and went off to do an M.A. in London. I wanted to give the children and young people of Palestine something I have cared for very much, I also wanted to see them happy growing and graduating, carrying on something I have loved so much. In terms of my own photography, I hoped that I might learn an alternative way of doing it.

When I finished the course and I came back, I was able to achieve what I'd aimed for and set up a photography teaching program at Birzeit University, near Ramallah in the West Bank. But very soon after, the major Israeli army invasion of the West Bank happened, "Operation Defensive Shield" they called it. On 28th of March 2002, I was in Ramallah when the Israeli army invaded; I was shocked; the city that I knew very well suddenly had been transformed into a dark and scary place. Every street and square I visited was dark and empty; no one was in the streets that day except the Israeli army and its tanks. I felt depressed, cold and scared. The only Palestinian I met on the road that day was an old man who sold coffee. Later he was shot dead. I never knew his name, but I had seen him walking around those same streets before. That night I could not take away his face from my memory, and many questions without answers rushed inside my head.

The pictures I took of the invasion on the surface of could be considered regular photojournalism. I could have published them just as they were, as documents of the invasion. Instead, I printed them in negative. Why? In negative, the pictures were able to express my own feelings merged with the feelings of my people, to explain what had happened to us and to Palestine. As negatives, they express the negation of our reality that the invasion represented. Their darkness allows the spectator to feel the darkness of the days I had witnessed during this incursion. The photographs represent some of the stories I had witnessed in Ramallah and others tell stories I had heard and learned in Jenin. But only by manipulating them, do I think it was possible to tell the larger story of one period of the Palestinian experience of Israeli repression and destruction of our lived reality.

A later project called “Intimacy” is a series of photographs I took at the Qalandia checkpoint, between Ramallah and Jerusalem. This body of work examines and captures the experience of 'the checkpoint' which has become a hallmark of the Israeli occupation. There are very few faces among the collection of images, rather we are invited to view a multitude of close-ups of encounters between soldiers and Palestinians trying to cross the checkpoint. One of the distinctive characteristics of the Israeli occupation is the way it is both faceless and also highly personalized. Palestinians are treated like numbers, and we avoid remembering the faces of the soldiers who dominate our lives. At the same time, the occupation is very personal in the way it invades and penetrates the space of the individual. At 'the checkpoint' there are no privileges, everyone waits in line, and is reduced to an ID number, and everyone is searched and questioned. The machine of the occupation affects each of us one by one, but it is also blind to our individual and collective humanity.

My most recent project is about the Wall. I’m not just telling my feelings towards this ugly construction of the wall, but also each photograph symbolizes what the years of Israeli occupation have done to my land: …the standing stone symbolizes tombs of the dead, those I have seen killed by the Israeli army, the water symbolizes all the water that was stolen from the West Bank by Israel, the ugly shadow reflected on the wall symbolizes the monster of the settlements that casts a shadow over our lives. And finally: the emptiness in my photographs symbolizes Israel’s continuing attempt to erase Palestinian society, which began in 1948 and continues to this day. So each photo tells part of the larger story of Palestine, a story that all Palestinians know deeply from their own experience, but one which the world only sees the surface of, or has sometimes chosen to ignore.

My projects are political, yes. But they also try to express aspects of our experience and feelings as Palestinians, as a people. I hope very much, that they allow others to look and enter into the pictures and reflect on their own relation to these experiences and feelings. Instead of simply telling a story, a very terrible story about a people and what has happened to them, I want to go further and create pictures that no matter where people are from or where they are living, can find themselves part of our story.