This conflict, which others have referred to as terror, genocide or war, has been with me literally all my life. It is even significantly older than I am, and I dare say that it will easily outlive me. Since I first traveled to Israel and Palestine in 2005, more or less by chance, this topic has touched me very much and subsequently. It has also become a major chapter of its own in “War without War”.
Between 2013 and 2017, I spent a total of seven months in Israel and Palestine, spread over seven visits. Why did I get involved in this perhaps most photographed conflict? Rationally, it is not so easy to explain, except that this long-running conflict, with its regular and sometimes violent eruptions, fits perfectly into my approach of war without war. I am not religious, so I can probably rule out the beginnings of a recognized mental disorder called Jerusalem syndrome, which can throw believers into a state of ecstasy when they visit Jerusalem. But this area, to put it neutrally, exerts a strong and almost metaphysical attraction on me with its people. It is a kind of energy that I feel everywhere. This energy, which sometimes seems positive and sometimes negative, is difficult to describe. Is this energy ultimately due to the contradictions or simply to the conflict?
When you approach a subject as a photographer, one that has been covered countless times, you have to deal with the various approaches that already exist and ask yourself what your own might be. I quickly realized that I wanted to look for the traces of this conflict in the landscape and in the people on BOTH sides. I wanted to make the entire disputed land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean my “subject of investigation”. So, I moved around in the heartland of Israel and in the occupied and annexed territories, i.e. in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Golan Heights and the Gaza Strip. This back-and-forth between the most opposing realities was thus on the program for me and a great challenge.
This led, for example, to my attending a training session for young Israelis who were preparing for the entrance exam for the military's elite units one day and a funeral for a Palestinian shot by the IDF the next day. He had wanted to carry out a knife attack on a soldier, the Israelis say. He was shot in cold blood, after which the Israelis placed a knife next to his dead body, the Palestinians say. These are the two contradictory narratives, which in my opinion could both be true.
And then I am asked again and again who I am rooting for. As if it were a football match, as if I wanted there to be a winner and a loser. For the radicals on both sides, the other does not exist and must disappear. From the river to the sea, the victor sinks the loser into the ocean. Both claim the same land. Both have robust, mutually exclusive, narratives that legitimize their claim. A key image in this series is the Israeli artist painting his vision of Jerusalem on the bomb shelter. He projects his version onto this canvas-like surface; his counterpart's version would look completely different but would manifest itself in the same space.
How can I remain “neutral” in the face of this toxic situation without hiding behind neutrality? How can I criticize one side or the other for their behavior without being anti-Semitic or anti-Arab? How can I simultaneously and unreservedly muster empathy for all victims, for example for the more than 1,000 Israelis and more than 40,000 Palestinians who have died since the cruel terrorist attack by Hamas on October 7, 2023? Am I, or we, capable of showing empathy for both sides, at the same time? We are definitely reaching our limits, but trying is a human imperative for me. This human ability is called the tolerance of ambiguity and, in my opinion, can only be achieved to some extent through daily work. At least that is something that I expect of myself personally in this conflict and in life in general.
All the more so as I have neither Arab nor Jewish roots and live in a safe and prosperous country. However, to have the same expectation of the local people in the conflict area is presumptuous. A question that concerns me in all my reporting, whether at home or abroad, is how I would behave in the place of my protagonists, how I would feel in their place. For example, I remember an Israeli settler in the West Bank in a settlement that was even declared illegal by Israel. He said to me: “Look here, I came here from America and built this house, so I'm a settler. Now look at my children here, they're not settlers anymore, they were born here.” It is relatively easy for me to consider the settler's behavior as morally wrong. But what about his children when they grow up? Would I consider myself illegal if I were in their shoes? Maybe then I would also want to defend my right to live in this country. Being born here would give me the right to stay!
And how would I behave as a teenager born in a Palestinian refugee camp, who only knows the Israelis as soldiers who shoot at him with tear gas in the better case or in the worse case with live ammunition? Would I speak of non-violent resistance in the face of powerlessness and lack of prospects and rebel against the majority? And what about the traumas that were given to me in both cases on the path of life? The Holocaust, the Nakba, the occupation, the terrorist attacks and the bombings? What would these traumas, some of which I experienced myself and some of which were passed down from previous generations, do to me?
Is there any way out of this system at all? The people living in these precarious spaces are likewise trapped in an endless cycle of building, destroying, and rebuilding; of construct volition, and destruction. For them, the conflict is omnipresent in symbols, it is presented to them as a quasi-script to act out. Escape does not seem possible. Reactions and counterreactions, images and counter images supply a steady stream of fresh fuel for the conflict. This is what I tried to capture. The mutually exclusive narratives, which have nested in minds for decades, supposedly offer the parallel societies something to hold onto. A persistent sense of threat is upheld; it is part of the raison d’être; the conflict remains unresolved.
I am encouraged by those local people who, despite this intractability, rebel against it. Even if there are only very few of them and their influence on society and politics is small. They do exist. They are Palestinians and Israelis who dare to approach each other and talk about their traumas. They are people who actively fight against the dehumanization of the enemy, who try to forgive. In doing so, they also fight against those political forces that benefit from the situation and do not want to lose their power.
In view of the hopelessness, there is always something naive about this pacifist behavior. War is part of being human, some say. But we are at least temporarily capable of peace. Every effort towards peace, however hopeless it may seem, is actually our human duty.
