Borderline
Bat Yam / Jaffa - border, 2009
Ten months after the Israeli army’s attack on the Gaza strip, in December 2008, I travelled to Israel as a participant in an international group of eight people belonging to the Anna Lindh Foundation for Euro-Mediterranean Dialogue.
The purpose was to meet with networks, organizations and civil society groups. In October 2009, Gaza strip territory remained under siege and under severe conditions of isolation and submitted to restrictions in circulation and in access to food and supplies.
When in Bat Yam, a town on the outskirts of Tel-Aviv, our group was informed that, contrary to what we had been told before, we were not granted permission by Israeli authorities to travel to Gaza. On that same day we took part in an urban tour of Bat Yam / Jaffa with anthropologist Daniel Monterescu at the border between a largely Jewish and a primarily Arab neighbourhood. At one point, a young Arab man suddenly appeared on horseback on one side of a street bordering both neighbourhoods.
Other than the members of our group, there were three women passing by, who in all likelihood came from the upper class, mainly Jewish neighbourhood located in the surrounding area. The picture was shot immediately after this young man had almost fallen off his horse, causing the three women’s astonished reaction. In the picture it seems like it is solely the young man’s disrupting presence that is causing their astonishment.
Boderline is an image that depicts an anodin epidose while being in Bat Yam in 2009. Over the years I came to identify it with my own effort of trying to understand how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, checkpoint controls and West Bank settlings, permeate the struggle, the daily lives of thousands of Arab citizens of Israel and Palestinians in the West Bank. I came to identify with the impossibility of going to Gaza and of trying to grasp the daily struggles of people under a permanent state of siege.
Borderline is a personal mnemonic, a visual reminder on the fact that both touristic experience and the settling are mostly visually structured through a set of invisibilities and silences that justify the occupation and ongoing conflict. In Gaza, the conflict turned into a genocide of its population in 2023, 2024.
