Side by Side, Israel & the Occupied Territories
In July of this year, a group of fourteen Palestinian and Israeli children will complete an ambitious six-month photographic project which hopes to not only achieve dialogue between the students, but to give a voice to a group whose perspective we rarely hear.
The ”Side-by-Side” project brings together seven Palestinians and seven Israelis, all members of the Palestinian-Israeli Families Forum/Parents Circle, a network of bereaved families dedicated to non-violence and dialogue.
The students first picked up their cameras when they met in the monastery of Abu Ghosh near Jerusalem in January and since then, they have followed and photographed their own individual stories. While the project faces continual challenges – including the summer 2006 war, violent clashes in the West Bank and regular checkpoint closures - the students are determined to represent an alternative view of the conflict.
Noam Burger, a 13-year-old participant from Zichron Yacov is very aware of the media images of the Palestinians and Israelis that reach the rest of the world, and he is hopeful that the students’ photographs can add a human face to the news. “In the news we always hear that the Palestinians want to blow us up or kill us,” he says, “but we can see that Palestinians aren’t like this. Whenever we distance ourselves from them, we’ll see them in that way.”
14 year-old Shadi Khaled Abu Awwad, from Beit Ummar, says “If there’s another war, maybe things will be worse. There’ll be more death and more pain. We’ll kill, and they’ll kill for the same reasons. Maybe there’s another way.”
And it is not just the children who came to learn. “I want to learn, [and] I want to teach,” said Sami Said, the project’s Palestinian photographic facilitator. He hopes to offer his students “the tools to use the camera to express themselves. To have a new way of thinking. To have a new way of communicating.”
Limor Melzer, a member of the Families Forum and Side-by-Side co-coordinator knows all too well the challenges in running such a project. “I think we all sit together and smile together, but inside each one of us has a lot of things that he doesn’t want to say,” she explains . “I can understand that, but I think that we don’t have to say everything, we can just try to do it from the side, with this camera.” Such a subtle approach is crucial to the Families Forum and PhotoVoice. Rather than tackling politics and violence head on, the groups encourage the children to reflect on their own lives and not be afraid to ask the difficult questions.
No one expects immediate changes – for some of the children it is the first time they have sat and talked to someone from the “other side” of the conflict. “It won’t change [the situation],” explains Aisha Ashour of Nablus, the project’s Palestinian co-coordinator, “But at least it can send a message [and] attract attention to the situation they live in.” Discussions between the students are often challenging, revolving around images like house demolitions in Nablus and an Israeli military graduation ceremony. But for many of the children involved, just the notion that someone outside might be listening is a very powerful thought. Sameh, a 16 year-old participant from Nablus wrote in his personal statement “I hope this project can connect our lives with the world.”