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Reconsideration The image of young boys trying to protect each other from enemy bullets in 1989 is still vivid in my memory, even seventeen years after I started my photographic career. That image has changed now as Palestinian is pointing his gun at fellow Palestinians.I couldn’t carry my camera in the light of this disarray. I couldn’t take photographs of the current inner fighting. With great sadness I resorted to following the news in the Palestinian dailies, whose front-page headlines and images featured that fighting. I compared the daily news one with another, being struck by how concepts and terminologies are now being exchanged to have new usage. For example, the word shaheed (martyr) now means both people killed by fellow Palestinians as well as those killed by the Israeli occupation forces. This “casual" news coverage of Palestinian massacres whether perpetrated by Palestinians or Israelis, has the same form of headlines or image colors. Is it conceivable that the word shaeed applies to those killed in both situations? Taking a first look at the front pages of the newspapers often confused me. At a first glance some photographs representing the violent confrontations, seemed to me as those of an Israeli incursion somewhere, to soon realize that these confrontations were between Palestinians, whether between Fateh and Hamas, civilians and soldiers. Behind these events which are highlighted in the headlines, there are other news items of less significance, scattered here and there in the front pages. In my opinion some of these smaller items require deeper scrutiny. One day a news item focuses on the inner fighting followed by another about the continuation of colonization and the building of the Wall. The crime is the same but the manifestations take on different styles. In all of this one reads every now and then there are the American and British pledges promising an independent state, while none of these promises are ever fulfilled. And the days go by…. the situation is becoming bloodier while the front page headlines in the newspapers continue to grow larger or smaller with the events and we look at them unconcerned and without truly realizing their precariousness and their effect on us. This is why I decided to collect all the front pages, every day, during the last month of 2006, of a Palestinian newspaper which is delivered daily to me, and to present them all in one space, lest we would "reconsider" one month in the lifetime of our people. Rula Halwani |