“Continuity for them the dominant population, discontinuity for us, the dispossessed and dispersed” Edward Said

“A man bringing home a sheep from from the Eid Feast, smokes a cigarette, as traffic finally clears at a checkpoint in Kalandia, West Bank”,

Picture taken at
The World Press Photo of the Year 2014 exhibition.

Back to the workshop that I attented at SOAS, Walls, Barricades. Borders, Gates: Political Negligence and the Twenty-First Century City. It focused extensively on City Walls, and more specifically on the West Bank Wall, West Barrier, West Fence, “Apartheid” Wall…it depends whom you ask.

Sophia Brown, talked about the Kalandia checkpoint, the main entry into Jerusalem from the West Bank using the personal story of Rema Hammami, a Palestinian Academic. Sophia’s interest is on the human stories during the crossing; their challenges, perceptions.
The schizophrenic life of sleeping at one side of the wall and working at the other one; a division within West Bank, a volatile expansive border.

“How long have you been waiting?”
“Since I was born”

Next came Wendy Pullan. She analyzed the wall as an object, a powerful image of fascination and fixation. Walls have always been around through history either to unite or to separate us.
” Walls just don’t do their job very well. We don’t have examples of walls solving problems. Suicide bombings may have fallen dramatically since Israel built its wall. But it’s hard to say whether that’s cause or correlation. The regime has also got much firmer, in other ways,”

Walls can fall, but settlements and bypass highways are more permanent, Wendy comments.
Why then so much attention to the Wall? The Media filter our perception, differently depending the audience. How can journalists freely report anything around the wall when there are guards around them?

Perceptions are different.

The Israelis during their daily lives don’t come in contact with the Wall. They mostly see it as a news story and if they do come across it, it is usually camouflaged in an aesthetic manner, with advertisement or trees. Wendy called it, “dematerialization” of the wall.
As if it is not there.

The Palestinians deal with it on a daily basis. They interact with the Wall through direct experience no mere media representation. Graffiti, Messages;
Their side of the wall talks. It is a witness of their lives.

The wall’s power according to Wendy is not its concrete cement but the image it represents; an anaesthetizing image that normalizes the separation and limits the capacity to understand and to act.

African Migrants to the Shore of Djibouti City at night raise their phones in a attempt to catch an inexpensive signal from neighbouring Somalia-a tenuous link to relatives abroad.

World Press Photo of the Year 2014 exhibition.

Dr. Glemm Bowman gave me some hope. He talked about the pre Wall connections that have not vanish altogether after the Wall. There is a countermovement even today, trying to bypass the separation. The enclosed cyst-like culture that Israel is promoting exists, but there is penetration.There are the ones breaking the rules and nourish the long lived economic, emotional or personal connections,

Before the wall Jews and Muslims used to share common places and interact with one another. There were still social imbalances; Israelis used to employ Palestinians, but there was no obvious room for policies or propaganda of dehumanization, for fear, for poisoning or hate.
After the wall, the knowledge of the “other” can be easily manipulated and exaggerated.

What you don’t see becomes foreign, alien, an enemy.

I leave as a final food for thought the photographs I took of the World Press Photo of the Year 2014 exhibition.

What characterizes our daily interactions?
Are we choosing to connect or separate?
Ignoring the other, the different and build invisible yet solid divisions or entering in uncomfortable challenging emotional interactions yet connecting accepting empathizing, respecting?

And trying to end on a more positive note;
“The human being is the connecting creature who must always separate and cannot connect without separating” George Simmel

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P.S Next Blog from Bolivia