Hebron Collage 7

This man was sitting in the entrance to his shop. Beside him is a scale that is overflowing with testimonials regarding the Israeli occupation of Palestine. I chose to break up the surface of his coat with fractured images of the marketplace to indicate the shattered lives of so many Palestinians.

Hebron Collage 8

This woman was actually photographed in the Arab souk just inside the Damascus Gate. Her expression was so poignant that I placed her  in the Hebron marketplace. When the term "apartheid" is used to describe the situation of Palestinians, it not only refers to the West Bank and Gaza, but to the laws regulating the lives of Palestinians living inside what is now called Israel. While Palestinians in Jerusalem have Israeli citizenship unlike those in the West Bank and Gaza, they are still living subject to a different set of law than the Jewish citizens, and are treated as second class citizens. The settlers' high rise can be seen towering over her, and more lines of testimonials of Palestinian women are providing her support.

Hebron Collage 9  SOLD

This piece incorporates images from the Ibrahim Mosque in Hebron where in 1994 Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli settler and member of the far-right Israeli Kach movement, opened fire on unarmed Muslims praying inside. Twenty nine Muslims were killed, and one hundred twenty five were injured. The niche made of ceramic tiles provides a place for the Israeli soldiers in this image; half of the mosque has been converted to a synagogue, and on Jewish holy days, Muslims are not allowed to enter their mosque. Spilling out of the niche are a pile of plastic rugs kept in the mosque. These rugs are used to cover the carpets when non-Muslims who refuse to remove their shoes are in the mosque. Our guide told us that Israeli government officials have been guilty of this disrespect, as well as Jewish settlers.

Hebron Collage 10

In this collage, I captured a woman approaching a checkpoint for passage to her neighborhood. She is behind a man that has tied his donkey to the fence as he requests that an Israeli soldier open the gate for his animal to pass through. These Israeli checkpoints are everywhere, and while I was allowed to pass through, our guide, a Palestinian activist, was not. I enlarged the physical size of the soldier of soldier before placing him in the guard shack to indicate the David/Goliath nature of the situation at the checkpoints.

Hebron Collage 11

These two women were walking very purposely  down the street. I placed them in front of a barricaded dead end alley; the only place I saw in the marketplace that did not have the protective fence overhead. The trash thrown down from the settler's high rise is piled up 3-4 feet tall in this area. Amidst the trash and barbed wire I created a symbolic protective "roof line" with words of text from a 2009 report on Israel's human rights violations against Palestinian women. More of the text provides a foundation for their feet but some of it has crumbled to pieces, indicating the fractured nature of the protection human rights watch groups can provide.

Hebron Collage 12

I wanted to point to the length of time involved in the displacement of the Palestinian people by including an image of two different generations. The situation has continued for over 60 years.  The older man was a child when the occupation began, and the young men may live to see Palestine become an autonomous nation. For symbolic reasons, I chose to leave out the third, middle generation of Palestinians whose entire lives have been spent as persons of an occupied country.