Tuesday, June 29, 2004

Israeli-Palestinian conflict photos

A group of young Israeli soldiers took pictures of what they were doing in Palestine, and those pictures are now a traveling exhibit, Breaking the Silence

Yesterday military police raided the exhibition, confiscating items from it. An army spokesman insisted that the raid was not to stop the exhibition or to punish the soldiers for going public, but to see if there is a case for court-martialling soldiers who mistreated Arabs.

...The idea of the exhibition did not occur to the soldiers until they had left the army (for most of them that moment came earlier this year). The photographs were taken strictly for private consumption. "Some pictures I took because I knew I couldn't handle what I was seeing at the time and I wanted to think about it later," says Jonathan Boumfeld, 21, "and some I took just as souvenirs."

But, in the words of the leaflets they sent out to advertise the show, they then discovered that the memories captured in these "souvenirs" were "common to all of us who served together ... In coping daily with the madness of Hebron, we couldn't remain the same people beneath our uniforms. We saw our buddies and ourselves slowly changing.
  Independent article

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