PHOTOFILE | A CONVERSATION WITH
THE BITTER LANDSCAPES OF PALESTINE
A CONVERSATION WITH MARGARET (PEG) OLIN & DAVID SHULMAN
BY ELISABETH FRIEDMAN
Ethnographic exhibitions Using both photographs and written narratives, The Bitter Landscapes of Palestine provides a depiction of the lives and struggles faced by Palestinians living in the occupied Palestinian territories on the West Bank, in particular the South Hebron Hills and the Jordan Valley.
Ta’ayush (from the Arabic for “living together”) is a grassroots movement working to break down the walls of racism, segregation, and apartheid by constructing a true Arab-Jewish partnership. For more than two decades, Ta’ayush has been working in area C of the occupied Palestinian territories, especially in the South Hebron Hills and the Jordan Valley, to support Palestinian residents in their struggle to retain their homes and agricultural lands. Palestinians in these areas face constant harassment and violence by Israeli settlers and the army, which aims to cleanse area C of its Palestinian population by compelling them to leave to areas B and A, and to seize its land for Israeli settlements. Preventing access to agricultural lands and water cisterns, house demolitions, setting fire to tents, and physical attacks are all common methods in the authorities’ and settlers’ attempts to push the Palestinian residents from their homes and towards the area’s urban centers, such as Yatta, Samua, Dura, and Dahariyya. A life of dire poverty, unemployment and distress awaits those Palestinian who are forced move to these cities.[1]
Could you talk about how you met and about your activism with Ta’ayush?
(Margaret Olin) David [Shulman] visited Yale with a troop of Indian performers. I was told that I should meet him for this reason, and then I realized that the guy named David Shulman was the same person who wrote about activism in Palestine. And I was really interested because I was going to a conference at Tel Aviv University. It was a moment when the boycott movement (Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions) was going rather strong, and some people dropped out of the conference. I had been looking for an excuse to find some kind of activist work. So I thought I might write something about the use of photography in activism.
David, how did you get involved with activism?
(David Shulman) Oh, it was a very long process. It didn't come naturally to me at all. I came to live in Israel in 1967. I was 18. Officially I was at the University but most of the time I was just roaming around, writing poetry and falling in love, and things like that. Those were very happy years, and that was a different Israel. It's nothing like the country that we know today.
But in 1977, Menachem Begin was elected, and the right-wing came to power. That was a huge shock to me. I came from a Jewish family in Iowa. My mother used to say that we, the Jews, were once slaves in Egypt, and that means that we will never, ever enslave another people and that we will always be with the oppressed and the underdogs. I thought that was the essence of being Jewish.
And so, hysteria began to take root when the right-wing came to power. I was shocked and alienated. I started by going to the Peace Now demonstrations like everybody else, all my friends and colleagues. But I've never really liked demonstrations very much. I feel kind of foolish in demonstrations, and I was for years looking for something that would be more satisfying to me. And so in the year 2000, which is when the second Intifada broke out, that was when Ta’ayush was founded by friends of mine who had asked themselves: what are we called upon to do at this juncture when the West Bank is really totally in flames. The answer they came up with was that we have to be physically present in the West Bank to protect the Palestinian population from the settlers and the soldiers because if we're not there, nobody else is going to do that. It took a long, long time for us to even think that idea. I'm slightly ashamed to say that we should have known earlier. So then Ta’ayush came into being, and it became a central part of my life.
(Margaret Olin) I started a blog called touchingphotographs.com, intended to cover a wide area of photographic practices. But the first post was about my first day with Ta’ayush and I never changed the focus. A year later, David had written a report and knew I was photographing. He thought I might have a photograph to add to his report. And so I invited him to write a guest post on my blog, and that was that. We've been working on this together ever since.
(David Shulman) I think I should mention Zanuta because it embodies the very heart of the logic of the occupation as we speak. I was trying to sleep over there, actually, just three nights ago. There are about 250 people in Zanuta. They were driven out by armed Israeli settlers, who were continuously attacking them and harassing them over a long period of time, actually for years. But it got particularly bad once the Gaza war began. The violence has escalated a lot, and it reached a point where the people of Zanuta could simply not go on living there. So they left their homes. And when they left their homes, the armies came and destroyed absolutely everything on the site, all the buildings, including the school. That was in January 2024. Then, a few months later, there was an appeal by the Zanuta people and their representatives to the Israel High Court of Justice, asking that they be allowed to go home to their own place. Somewhat surprisingly, the High Court of Justice issued a ruling saying that they could indeed go home, and the second part of it was that the army and the police had the responsibility of looking after them and protecting them. The trouble is, there's no chance in the world that the soldiers and the police today on the West Bank will protect Palestinian civilians. They just don't do it.
So the Palestinian residents went back. The Civil Administration, which is the army unit that runs the occupation, had issued a decree saying that they were not allowed to build anything at all, and that was even before they were expelled. So that ruling was already in place. The result is that they can't build even the tiniest little thing like a clay oven or a cloth divider. Nothing. And if they do try to build something, it gets taken down. Little pieces of the old walls are still in place. When they put up these cloth dividers, within minutes the army came back and tore them down. It's this absurd situation where there's a homecoming without homes – and that's, in a way, what the occupation is all about.
In the end, I didn't get to Zanuta for various reasons, but friends of mine were sleeping there. It is very close to the southern edge of the West Bank, close to the so-called green line.
Peg, how did you come to start taking photographs?
(Margaret Olin) That’s what I originally was going to do with my life. I decided that's what I wanted to do early on in college. I then went to graduate school at the Institute of Design in Chicago to study photography with Aaron Siskind. Ultimately, I decided that I wasn't good enough for something like that. I wanted to save the world with photographs. Dorothea Lang was my hero. But I gave it up.
So, I went to graduate school, and I was interested in what the function of images was. Eventually, I turned and started studying series of photographs, etc. Gradually, I also started photographing again and doing photographic projects. And then, through this activism with Ta’ayush, I found myself in this situation in the south Hebron hills that seemed to demand the kind of photography I wanted to do in the first place. And I just started doing it.
Can we discuss the book's structure? How did you divide it into chapters with these pauses or laḥzat (moments)?
(Margaret Olin) I had been teaching a course on the photographic book for many years at the School of the Art Institute. [The structure] seemed to me a way to make it clear that the texts were impressions. They were different ways into the same thing. And most of the little inserts, the pauses, do have a relationship to what comes before and what comes after. They mark transitions. It’s a way to highlight the personal quality of this whole book.
The interlude pieces began with an exhibition David and I did together. I wanted to add texts next to the pictures, framed the same way to be equal, and so David wrote these little prose poems to accompany specific pictures. Then, we carried the idea into the book.
For me, the book is a whole new kind of representation of Palestine and the Occupation. Because we so often see photographs portraying the Palestinians as either terrorists or victims. But we almost never see the settlers or the army in action, nor do we see Palestinian civilians rebuilding or going about their daily lives. Between the text and the images, you're showing us a different way of being with the Palestinians and a different sense of the power dynamic. These aren't people who are just victims. These are people who are actively engaged in the non-violent defense of their lives, their lands, and their livelihoods.
(Margaret Olin) One of the things that I was interested in making clear is that these people have their own problems. In some of the passages we talk about what those problems are. But they can't concentrate on those problems in the situation that they're in. So I wanted to show all of that, which is another way of showing their humanity beyond the victimhood.
(David Shulman) Palestinians are not cowed by the asymmetry [of power]. They're afraid; they have very, very good reasons to be afraid; they're afraid of losing everything, of being killed and being driven out. But you don't feel around Palestinians that they're in any way obsequious. They're proud and dignified people with an ancient history behind them.
Another thing I want to say, though, in response to what you said, Elisabeth, is about being with them. I often feel that although we do all kinds of things, we work beside them, and we try to protect them if an attack is coming, and there are legal things that we're involved in. But I often feel that the real point of the whole adventure is to be with them, just to be there with them, so that they're not so terribly alone in the face of this system that is trying to destroy them; just to be with them, so that they feel that there are people who care, and who will actually take the risks along with them and understand them, and understand the nature of the injustices that they suffer. It's something like that.
It’s such a fundamental human gesture to just be with others, you know. I think you're right. I love the way you put that: just being with them. What we can bring as humans is ourselves, our bodies, minds, our hearts.
(David Shulman) That's right.
What do the Palestinians you work with think about this project? What do they make of these photographs? Do they see them?
(Margaret Olin) We sent sections that were about specific people to those people. They saw those photographs. But I'll answer with an older anecdote. Which is that while walking through one of the villages about 10 years ago, I met a woman [Fatma] there. We wandered through the village together. One of the first things she said that day was when she took me to a little store they had; her mother was there, sitting on the floor, and Fatma said, I don't want you to take any pictures of my mother. I do not want to see my mother on social media, right? This is not happening. But of course, I managed to take a picture anyway. I sent it to her after that, and I said, “Look, we're writing this blog, and I would really like to use this picture in it.” And I explained to her what it was about. And she wrote back and said, “Yes, you can use that picture.” And for that purpose. That's when she started inviting me to spend real time in Susiya. Eventually, we became friends. I went to visit her. I visited her several times actually and stayed overnight with her. She wanted me to document everything. The picture of her mother is in the book.
I really love the section about Fatma. Given cultural norms, the world of women is more difficult to photograph and present. I love how you manage to find ways around that, like showing the hands, the shop, or the photographs that she's looking at, but not by photographing the women directly.
(David Shulman) One of the great advantages of working together was that Peg had immediate access to the women. Male activists might see some of them some of the time, and even chat with them, and so on. But we don't have that kind of intimate access.
What is it that you want readers to take away from this book? As you mention in the Introduction, the book is an archive of landscapes that are vanishing. It's an act of witnessing.
(David Shulman) Actually, what we want to do is to convey to the reader the kind of shock that we felt ourselves when we first entered into that reality. And just simply by the immediacy of those pictures, but also by some verbal description, they convey some sense of the whole life that is endangered. Even in the course of writing the book we would say to ourselves that this might be the last documentation of this entire way of life, though I hope it's not. But it could be. It could be. Once you get to know it, it's an amazing and beautiful human achievement, that way of life, rooted in the very distant past. People have been living this way for many centuries.
So I just have one question left. I think it's for you, Peg, or maybe it's for both of you. But can rocks feel pain? [This question is the title of the first chapter of The Bitter Landscapes of Palestine.]
(Margaret Olin) I think of rocks as being the essence of sumud (Arabic for perseverance), that sort of extreme patience and ability to endure. Or at least that's how I tried to describe them.
(David Shulman) In India they would tend to say that everything is alive, and, in fact, everything has some kind of awareness. Maybe it's a very rudimentary awareness. But rocks have, I think, a higher level of awareness than many other objects and creatures in the world. Of course, the Indians know that even human beings are not always aware. Most beings are actually blocked a lot of the time, one way or another. So they know there's that distinction. But there's a sense that the universe is a very alive, breathing place. I love that. So I think on that level, one would have to say, yes, rocks can feel pain.
[1] This paragraph has been slightly edited from: https://taayush.org/?p=2846.
How to cite
Friedman, Elisabeth. ‘THE BITTER LANDSCAPES OF PALESTINE. A conversation with Margaret (Peg) Olin & David Shulman.’ Archivo Photofile, 17 December 2024. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14506906.
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