Montreal photographer Darren Ell is back from Palestine and making his images matter.
In 1993, close observers of the Mideast “Peace Process” predicted the social and political catastrophe in Israel-Palestine, a small part of which we now see on television. The media at the time, as usual siding with power, sang its praises, welcoming the 1993 Oslo Accords and subsequent agreements between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) as great leaps forward on the path to peace. The sheer repressive splendor of these agreements came into sharper focus in 1995 with the signing of the Oslo II Interim Accords. In one tiny clause of the first of seven annexes to this agreement, Israel insisted on maintaining control of the military installation along the Egyptian border in the Gaza Strip, an area highlighted in pink on the agreement’s maps. What this meant for Palestinians living in the “pink zone,” a crowded refugee camp in Gaza’s southernmost city, Rafah, was left unclear. Some middle class Palestinians were confident enough to build new homes in the area. What began 7 years later, in October 2002, could only have come as a shock.
During my 3-week stay in the Occupied Palestinian Territories in November 2002, I stayed in one of these middle class homes in Block O, a neighborhood in the refugee camp. Here I witnessed a serious breach of International Humanitarian Law and a war crime according to the Fourth Geneva Convention, one that continues to this day: Palestinian homes are being demolished daily by Israeli bulldozers under cover of sniper and tank fire to make way for a 6-meter high steel wall along the Egyptian border. The construction occasions daily gun battles and Israeli shelling which have left scores of Palestinian civilians dead and wounded. Demolition teams give little warning. Resisting occupants are ordered to leave by loudspeaker, then forced out of their homes by machine gun fire and tank shells. There is no compensation. At the time of my departure, over 350 homes had been demolished, 500 partially destroyed and hundreds of others damaged by shelling. The number of homeless is high, since Rafah’s average family size is 11. Tragically, Rafah is off the radar of western media, even though it has suffered more death and injury per capita than any other city in the Occupied Territories in the 28 months of the Al-Aqsa Intifada. As of November, there were 206 dead and 2460 injured. In two years, 800 related life-saving operations had been performed in Rafah’s main hospital.
What is happening in Rafah is happening daily throughout the Occupied Territories. During my 21-day stay, 52 homes were demolished without compensation and 255 dunams of agricultural land were razed. A 10-metre high concrete wall lined with armed watchtowers is sealing off the West Bank from Israel. While I was there, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) conducted 90 military actions in 45 Palestinian communities throughout the West Bank and Gaza, leaving 25 dead, 92 wounded, some critically. Scores of people were detained and arrested, others used as human shields to carry out arrests and assassinations. Virtually none of this was reported in Canada.
Two years ago, the PLO finally realized that the Oslo Accords were doing nothing to stop these types of crimes. The borders were sealed, walls were being built as were new Israeli settlements; the IDF had destroyed Palestinian TV stations, roads, bridges as well as the new Palestinian airport in Rafah; Israeli-only highways were connecting settlements to each other and to Israeli cities, encircling the Palestinian people. In an important study of the effects of the Israeli occupation, Sara Roy notes: “Already in 1999, Palestinians were living in 227 separate enclaves surrounding by Israeli settlements and roads ... The physical division of the West Bank has become so pronounced that families living in the northern region do not want their children to marry spouses from the southern region because they fear they will not be able to see them (even though the distance between the north and south West Bank is no more than forty miles).” In addition, over 2 years of closure of Palestinian borders have driven the unemployment rate past 50% and the poverty rate up to 70%. Not surprisingly, in 2001, the World Food Program announced that Palestinians were among the poorest people on earth.
Human rights organizations have been compiling statistics since the beginning of the Israeli occupation in 1967: 50,000 Palestinians tortured, 1500 deported, illegal transfer of 400,000 Israeli civilians into the Territories, and pillage of Palestinian natural resources, including water. A US-led attack on Iraq will worsen the situation. Recently, 800 US academics publicly warned of a possible “full-fledged ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians should the “fog of war” in Iraq blind the world to Israeli actions in Palestine.
The following photo essay documents only a small slice of this ongoing tragedy. It is a look at life in the “Pink Zone” and offers a view of the impact of the Israeli occupation - in particular house demolitions - on the people of Block O in Rafah’s refugee camp. To view slightly different versions of the photo essay, go to the following two links:
http://electronicIntifada.net/v2/article995.shtml