"Laughing?! They were dying"

By Nur Elmessiri
Four children in school uniform hold hands. They are smiling. They are Palestinian. On the wall past which they walk are spray-painted the words "Israeli peace means killing children".
As with many of the colour photographs taken by Texas-born Thomas Hartwell and Barcelona-born Enric Marti showing under the title "Peace That Kills: Gaza, October 2000", this image, showing as it does a flagrant incongruity, is not easy to take. The words "Israeli peace means killing children" do not square with the fact of children in the same shot -- alive, thriving and well. They do square, however, with the photo below in which 13-year-old Adnan Sayed lies in the Shiffa Hospital, Gaza, hooked up to a life-sustaining machine "after receiving," the blurb in the catalogue tells us, "multiple skull fractures from a tear gas canister fired by Israeli soldiers", and with the photo on the wall across in which 12-year-old Sami Abu Jazar "brain dead with no chances of recovery", lies in his bed at the Gaza Hospital the day "after being shot in the head by an Israeli army sniper", the day before his funeral -- captured in a powerful image -- on 12 October 2000.
Outrage can only go so far in the struggle against the well-oiled machinery of falsehood, in a world where there exists a scandalous incongruity between facts and the way in which they are spoken of by the powers-that-be. And though the self-contradictory machinations of falsehoods eventually (as Marx and other sages have suggested) undo themselves, evil eventually turning in on and feeding upon itself, what to do in the meantime if your back is against the wall -- the limit explored not only in tragedy but also in comedy -- and a gun is pointed at you?
Children will play. No power on earth can silence their laughter in the face of the grimmest of odds. They can, among other survival tactics, play dead -- and hope. In Khan Younis a child on a play-stretcher carried by his playmates grins at the camera and makes a victory sign, this "in an alleyway just several hundred yards from where older children are clashing with Israeli soldiers" who, it doesn't need repeating, shoot to wound, maim, paralyse and kill.
Armed struggle, struggle with "unconventional weapons" (stones and sling shots), play -- and hope which, as defined by American director, actor and writer Woody Allen in one of his short stories, is "a bird without feathers." A strange, self-contradictory, incongruously-built comic creature this, a pie-in-the-face that can upset the calculations of the mightiest of foes, throw a giant off balance, a beatitude (like the Bethlehem-born revolutionary's "Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth") well-suited to face up to the fatal incongruities of falsehoods and injustice. The comic mask, drama critic Walter Kerr wrote in his Tragedy and Comedy, is a defiant grin in the face of death, the tragic mask tactically subverted, turned upside down, all the better to see the lopsided nature of hegemonic ideological things.
Many of the photographs on exhibit at the Sony Gallery confound the viewers' expectations. Yes, there are bulldozed houses, hospital scenes, funerals, mourners, smoke, fire and blood. Yet, seen without the aid of the exhibition title or the daily-journal-like blurbs in the catalogue, at first glance many of the photos come across as holiday snapshots: youths horsing around on a beach, children playing cops and robbers, a soccer match, stills from an action movie. Second, careful glance (the one that takes in the Israelis keeping a safe distance, their guns pointed at children), tells you otherwise.
Real life stories gleaned from photographers who went to Gaza, themselves did some shooting, filed with their news agencies, and only afterwards thought of putting together an exhibition:
Tom Hartwell: "About the children, we tried in these pictures to show, especially in Khan Younis, that almost daily you'd find kids there. When it was a big day, there would be spectators, and audience response and participation. It looked almost like a football match, bizarre, but people were being shot. And sometimes the audience would get shot. It was strange, surreal. Like a gladiator sport going on in this big sand bowl. It wasn't a particularly good strategic position for the kids either, because they couldn't find many stones, so they'd have to have [Hartwell chuckles as if remembering a childhood game], supply lines to supply the front... You see the kids hiding behind tin sheets? It is like a game. Unfortunately you cannot really look at it as a soccer game, but all the elements were there. There were guys [he laughs] selling tea too!
"The spectators would warn the kids when they saw the settlers' jeeps coming. When they saw them getting out, the audience would yell at the kids, because when they get out of the car they shoot.
"One day there were many spectators, and this Israeli soldier goes to the left, jumps out of the car and shoots. And then, running back to his jeep, he falls flat on his face. And the whole crowd, they went crazy. [Hartwell, excited, laughs]. It was just like the play of the day on TV. [They were laughing? I ask Hartwell]. Laughing?! [The scene flits before his mind's eye] They were dying... and the guy just fell down, nothing else."
Hartwell explains why one day he positioned himself among the "spectators" rather than among the "players". "The kids like to jump up in front of the lens, so that made shooting difficult. Something would happen and the kids would jump up in front of your lens. So you have to be in a high position, but you don't want to be too high either because they're [the Israelis] shooting."
Hartwell describes an amateur documentary video clip he watched: "The audio is really hysterical. This group of journalists is trapped behind a building where everyone was hiding because the Israelis are shooting, and the French-Israeli CNN guy manages to contact Tel Aviv, and somehow gets connected to the commander of the guys who were shooting. And then in a heavy French accent he goes: 'Zis is eh CNN. We want to arrange a cease-fire for 10 minutes, five minutes, just five minutes, OK? We're going to walk out now. Do you see us, do you see us? OK. We're walking now. Stay on the line with me to be safe'... And then next thing you hear is: 'Oh shit we lost the line... Run!'"
Photographer Randa Shaath, Hartwell's wife starts off the next round of stories:
-Shaath: A narrow street with bunkers, and the Israelis are shooting from where they can't be seen, and the kids and the people are on either side. And the whole aim to fame is to cross this thing [the street]. And my brother was there at one point and he said that the heroism is that the kid would go, and go in front of them, like this [Shaath, miming the kids' and the shabab's comic-defiant gesture, wiggles her shoulders like a belly dancer], and go... and that's it... And get shot, or not get shot.
-Hartwell: This happened in Khan Younis too. They would stand up and curse them in Hebrew and in Arabic and in English and stand up in front of being shot at and curse them. Unbelievable.
-Marti: Or go with their shirts like this [he mimes the lifting of the shirt to bare the chest].
-Shaath: And one had two bullets, my brother was saying, and he said [Shaath mimes the lifting of the shirt and the pointing at the center of the chest defiantly, imperiously]: 'Give me the third, come on, give me the third.'
-Hartwell: I remember one time standing behind a palm tree. And then after a while there was shooting. And all of a sudden we were two, three, four, all standing in a line behind one palm tree [He laughs nervously and I, reminded of black-and-white slapstick scenes, laugh too]. So we were standing there shooting from behind the palm tree, the photo with all the stones flying in the air in front of this big bunker, it's taken from there... Eventually we decided to go in the street to shoot from another angle... [He pauses].... and we started seeing these kids dropping, being shot at, but we didn't hear it...
-Marti: No sound.
-Hartwell: No sound. And then we realised they're shooting them from behind us. From a bridge, with sniper rifles...
-Marti. With silencers.
-Hartwell: With silencers. You couldn't hear a thing. They just started dropping.
Asked about a couple of images that might "go down the wrong way" with a western audience, particularly the one of a group of masked protesters bearing striking resemblance (to one pair of eyes at least) to the Klu Klux Klan, Marti explains: "That's part of the thing. The guys with the masks. They're all over the place. They're trying to project an image... This is what they want. It's kind of scary like you say, and I think that's what they're aiming for when they go around like this. They are scary you know. 'Be careful with us,' is what they're saying: 'It's not just kids throwing stones you see.'"
On a narrative-series of photos telling the story of how a Palestinian child made off with an Israeli army sign saying in Hebrew "Stop, Stay Back", Hartwell tells the story: "It took half a day to shoot that one. There had been a suicide bicycle bomb in Khan Younis. They closed the road. I was stuck there. Red Cross people came and asked whether they'd let ambulances through. They said we'll see when they come, but they wouldn't give any guarantees. Soon, spectators, journalists, the crowd arrived. They kept us so far back. Then they came and started bulldozing the trees, huge palm trees, and the men, they all left. They could not stand to watch it. They all left. That was when the crowd dispersed. They put up the road blocks and they didn't bother to take their sign. So the kid went and grabbed the sign. I'd been kind of watching him. But I didn't see him pick it up. I saw him walking away with it -- and then he turned and looked at me. And then, he stopped [Hartwell chuckles], and made a victory sign."
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