Photographers: Elizabeth Dalziel, Lefteris Pitarakis, Enrique Kierszenbaum, Reinhard Krause.
The reality which exists beyond the ”Green Line” border is brought to the Israeli public controlled and filtered through the media. The Jewish-Israeli public’s viewing of the Palestinians (living in Israel and in the Occupied Territories) has always been conceptually molded through a military-security prism. As such, the individual Palestinian and even Palestinian society as a whole have been perceived as a threat, which has had to be studied, in order to know how to deal with it when the time comes.
By relating to Palestinians and to the whole Israeli-Palestinian conflict only through a limited military prism, Israeli society has exempted itself, knowingly, from the need to turn to additional information sources – cultural, historical, economic etc., which may have enabled it to alter its perception, make it more complex and yet more realistic. This has fixed the status of the military as the highest-ranking commentating authority on the situation. Without access to additional aspects and to a wider range of opinions the media ”consumer” has no ability to voice any criticism. The Palestinian society does not get any media coverage of the civilian aspects of its daily life.
Articles from the ”Arab Sector” were usually broadcast or written following a military incident, i.e. through the military or police point of view in which Palestinian society, living in the Territories under occupation, is not perceived at all as a civilian society, but only as a constant and potential threat. Consequently, daily life under military occupation has never been and certainly is not so now, a subject considered worth media treatment.
The visual aspect of media coverage of the present conflict is an extremely important factor in forming this outlook on both the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Palestinians as individuals and a society, where the verbal coverage both in the daily press and over the electronic media is very similar in content. It is therefore the photograph, which is the main element the viewer sees on the news on T.V. or on the front pages of the Press. Articles have a lesser degree of interest, and the photograph has huge power in forming images and fixing messages, which serve the ends of forming a desired viewpoint.
An examination of the photographs published in the daily press will see the Palestinians usually in a state of movement – running, stone throwing, hiding, and fighting. Soldiers are usually seen in a state of waiting – resting on their vehicles, standing in line, while the background shows stone-throwing Palestinians in a violently ecstatic state. These photographs serve the desired impression, which presents the Palestinian violence as limitless, destructive, unreasonable and illogical against Israeli restraint, waiting and order.
The Foreign Press photographers in the field document the reality from both sides of the fence, with no obligation to either side. In the course of their work they create a huge visual database documenting the history of the conflict. This visual database can provide an alternative source of information to the one offered to Israelis and Palestinians via their own media. This information usually does not reach the public (either due to a lack of access of the local press to the other side’s territory, or due to editing and self-censorship created to conform to public opinion) and can provide a fuller and more complex picture of the conflict. This neutral viewpoint often alienates the foreign media; they are perceived as an enemy and identified as a means to an end by both sides.
Both the Israelis and the Palestinians try to influence the way the foreign media will present the conflict, in order to gain international public opinion on their side. The pressure put to bear from both sides and the dissatisfaction shown to the foreign photographers and press from both sides, proves that in most cases the material presented does not serve either side. The photographers, being ”foreign” to the area as well as to the emotional and ideological aspects of the conflict, are able to carry out their work divorced from those same emotional loads that local photographers carry into their work. This is not to say that foreign photographers do not come to the region with pre-knowledge and even prejudices about the conflict. However, this cannot compare to the emotional involvement of the Israeli or Palestinian photographer.
The choice of photographs for this exhibition was designed to offer the viewer a different, fresh way of looking at the conflict through the eyes of the Foreign Press photographers. The familiar images of the conflict - demonstrations, stone throwing, funerals, terrorist attacks etc. were purposefully left out. Their exemption neutralizes the military-security outlook and offers the viewer a human, civilian angle. The photos show daily life in the Palestinian towns, in the Refugee camps, inside people’s houses and in the Jewish Settlements. The conflict is present in each and every photograph. It is there in peoples’ lives, in their homes and their public surroundings but it is not expressed through the presentation of direct confrontation.
This, somewhat distanced, viewing of the conflict by the photographers may make it possible to have a different perspective of it. It shows daily life in the shadow of the conflict - hard, miserable and sometimes even bordering the ridiculous. This perspective confronts the viewer with the additional aspects of the conflict and disconnects her or him from the potential military-security perspective that has been presented as the only way of observing the other side.
The CDA's archives are operating with the support of the Ostrovsky Family Fund and Artis
