Closing Your Eyes

Exposed work sites, disembowelled hills, deforestation, and landscapes made unrecognisable by an industrious violence. The besieged Naplus is cut off from the rest of the West Bank by checkpoints and systematically subjected to complete curfews. Nearly 20,000 people are prisoners in their own town. In Hebron, the army’s protection of the settlements is emptying the city from the inside and paralysing the centre. The desert is a inner one. Qalqilya is encircled by barbed-wire and a 9m- high wall, surrounded by watchtowers and censors. A third of the farming land and water reserves has been confiscated. Three towns that are suffocating, dying slowly, caught between revolt and abandon. “Here, you close your eyes. Men and women that are deprived of everything, as if there were no people, no human beings, but only a plague that has to be contained at any price.”