Translating Silence

Lilith Antinori’s Gallery

I believe that the power of photography, when appropriately harnessed, is to incite a visceral need to understand in its audiences. Photography can create a discourse, and that is my aim here. The plight of the Palestinian people, a people who live daily under the illegal colonization of the West Bank and in the open prison of the Gaza Strip, is one that is not heard enough in the very countries that are instrumental in providing Israel with the money and weapons to do these things.

When I walked into the West Bank, I saw hatred and terror as I had never encountered it before. Everyone I met, Palestinian or Israeli, had a reason to be afraid and a reason to hate. In my last week in Palestine, settler violence erupted and spread through the West Bank. I went to a village called Al-Funduq, a village surrounded by hostile settlements, to photograph settlers coming in. The army blockaded them, and there was no violence that afternoon. But, afterwards, as I walked away, a settler woman in a car called out “taal”, attempting to make me come to her in gender-confused and mispronounced Arabic spoken with a distinct American accent. The hatred in her voice stopped me dead in my tracks, and I realized that this woman, who is also American, would be ready to beat me to death with a rock if I went near her. It floored me. I walked away from her, my jaw clenched, fighting off that toxic hatred and fear that had so utterly consumed her and everyone that I had spent the afternoon photographing. It soaks through like the blood it spills, through the parents, through the soldiers, through the settlers, into their children. And those children, with their old, enraged or completely hollow eyes, are forgotten, abandoned and ignored by a world more concerned with the ideology of freedom and purity than the life that ideology has cost us. When you meet them, those children hit you like a bullet. They deserve that. They deserve to haunt us, they deserve to deafen us with their screams. We should fall to our knees at their feet, but at the very least we can make the effort to understand and contest the circumstances that have so robbed them of the chance to have a life free of hatred and terror.