And in its heart, there is a wall

Photographing the separation barrier contains a certain paradox: among the wall’s essence is blocking the viewers’ field of vision so that they cannot see what lies on the other side, all while installing observation systems to track anyone approaching it. In its impermeability, it is as though it is silently saying to anyone that turns their lens towards it: ‘Go away; there is nothing to see here. Move along.’

Some twenty years have passed since the construction of the separation barrier began, and what was perceived in the past to be grotesque and petrifying, has become almost normal. The eye has become accustomed to the foreign object that the occupier has placed there, that has bisected the physical space into two: insiders and outsiders. Alongside the militant graffiti that decorates the wall in and around Jerusalem, neglect is perceptible. Ferns are erupting from the wall; piles of garbage are heaped up next to it; washing lines stretch across it; traffic crawls along at its foot; children carrying colorful book bags on their way to school pass by it; and parking spaces are marked out on its stones. Life at its fullest, it seems.

But as the wall has been normalized in our field of vision and consciousness, the influence of the separation barrier on the reality of life for Palestinians is only becoming more severe. The barrier runs for hundreds of kilometers, and is intermittently made of concrete slabs, stone blocks, and topped by concertina wire. It cuts villages in half and travels across the backyards of houses; it obstructs freedom of movement and opportunities for earning a livelihood; and creates enclaves that thwart any chance for an independent Palestinian existence.

About a third of East Jerusalem residents live in harsh conditions of deliberate neglect in neighborhoods where the separation barrier has physically separated them from Jerusalem, and they are subsequently forced to pass through checkpoints in order to enter into their own city.

Over the past few months, photographer Alex Levac has documented the neighborhoods and villages through which the separation barrier passes in the Jerusalem area. In the following collection of photographs, there are no influential moments or great dramas. They also do not reflect the fatalities that are the result of the everyday reality of the occupation. This is journalistic photography whose purpose is specifically to document the non-event. It is the insistence to capture this horizon, from near and far, frame by frame, neighborhood after neighborhood, village after village, as a political act. The act of photography wishes to tell us, “There is something to see here, and this is it.”

Tammy Riklis