This is personal.
After four and a half month at the West Bank, I still feel very privileged. Probably more privileged than ever. Even though, I’m also getting pretty fed up with the occupation. I’m Fed up in a more abstract way than I would imagine. The occupation is often more abstract than you would expect. Its presence is more abstract.
Yesterday I talked to a taxi-driver, he was complaining over the economical situation (in fact I was his first customer that day, at 12.30), the lack of tourists in Bethlehem, and how people have to live on a day to day- basis without any financial security. Two months ago, having this conversation, I would have nodded patiently and said: “Yes, I understand”, yesterday I said “Yes, I know” and nodded my head harder and faster than ever before (just to make sure he got the message, “Yes, I know”).
There is of course a difference between understanding and knowing. Even though I’m free to go wherever I want to go, I’m paid enough money to live a good life here, and my biggest dream is not to leave this place rather sooner than later, I still think that I the last weeks have learned more about what the occupation is, and how it affects me. How it after four and a half month is making even my quite luxurious life more complicated. I can see the Israeli soldiers at the checkpoints, and of course several other places at the West Bank, and I can touch the wall and ride cars with “West Bank- only” green license plates. But even more important, I have to acknowledge that daily life isn’t as simple as it could be, and I know that someone is doing their best to keep it this way: Complicated and restricted. I might sound paranoid, but everyone who goes to a Supermarket at the West Bank would understand what I mean. Try to go by car from Bethlehem to Ramallah, or pick olives in areas that are still in the West Bank, but cut off from the rest of the West Bank land by the apartheid wall. It is all a part of this occupation that I’m learning to hate.
At least I’ve been exposed to the occupation for so long that I feel like I’m being occupied. At this point I would probably not be able to tell the difference of being occupied and feeling occupied anyway. All I know is that yesterday I told someone that I know what the occupation is doing to people. I know how hard this occupation is on most people in the West Bank. And I hate it. I really do.
I hate the occupation, even though people laugh and smile, and continue their life in a way that would be abnormal and outrageous less than 12 kilometers west of Beit Sahour (in West Jerusalem).
Sometimes I feel small, helpless and insignificant, and I feel like I’m not doing anything good here. Still I have the time of my life, in a weird and confusing way.
Life here at the West Bank isn’t gold. Look at the young children wearing the Fatah- hats. I am so glad I don’t have to take in to consideration Palestinian politics while I’m here. Palestinian politics belongs to the Palestinians, and I will not even try to have an opinion about it. But I don’t like the Fatah- logo: Two guns and a hand grenade! I don’t like it at all, and I don’t like the uncritical use of it. It is a problem for me when I’m introducing people to Palestine, and it is a problem for Palestinians when I’m introducing people to Palestine. I don’t think most Palestinians react to it as I do, and they probably don’t share all the associations I have every time I’m exposed to the logo. Even though the logo is old, and Fatah and PLO has a history of being more violent than they are today, it says something about how some people still justify an armed struggle to end the occupation. I don’t think that I’m in a position to moralize, but I can’t possibly think of any good endings to an armed Palestinian struggle. In the same way I can’t think of any good endings to a military occupation of the West Bank, and I can’t remember any wars in history with a happy ending.
The occupation has in its abstract way forced me to a point where I have to find out how I can be a bigger tool as possible to advocate for a non-violent end to the occupation. It might be simple; I am a photographer. I take photos. I communicate (at least this is what I should do). And this is how I should advocate. This is how I want to advocate.
I’m not sure that my photos will ever have a big enough impact on decision makers and the public opinion to change anything at all. All I know is that I have found something that I want and need to continue to work on, something that at least makes me feel useful, and something that I want people to notice and to appreciate. It’s about right and wrong. It’s about how I justify enjoying eight months of Palestinian hospitality in Beit Sahour, It’s about how injustice is being justified by an occupying force, and it’s more or less about everything I believe in (as a Christian Humanist). In a way it is just as much about me, as it is about the Palestinians and this awful occupation. I want to use all of myself to communicate the crime that this occupation is, and to advocate for a non-violent struggle against the occupying force. Not because I want to, because I need to.
It is personal.
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