Drama in Gaza told through art

Moving images portray a difficult sort of beauty

By Jenna Smith and ChristianWeek | February 1, 2010

On December 27, 2008, Israeli forces entered Gaza and occupied it for 22 days. The operation resulted in the deaths of 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis. To coincide with the one-year anniversary of the attack on Gaza, Canadians For Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) held a double event: a photo exhibit entitled Human Drama in Gaza, organized by the CJPME, and the opening of Rachel, a documentary about 23-year-old Rachel Corrie, an American idealist and activist crushed to death by a military bulldozer in Gaza in 2003. The exhibition and movie will be showing across Canada over the next year. Both works opened at Montreal's Cinema du Parc.

Rachel, directed by Simone Bitton, painstakingly investigates the details of the activist's death, revealing that much of the evidence had been tampered with. Military video footage is missing, autopsy reports leave questions unanswered, eyewitness statements contradict each other. Corrie initially went to the Middle East to peacefully protest the demolition of Palestinian houses along the Gaza strip.

Daniel Saykalay, of Palestinian and Jewish Unity (the organization provided part of the funds for the film's distribution) spoke at the introduction, along with Thomas Woodley and Grace Batchoun, president and vice-president, respectively, of CPJME.

"It is natural for the media to be impartial," commented Saykalay, "but part of our motivation in distributing this film was to build awareness with people that real injustice is occurring, and it needs to stop. There is too much silence around this issue."

An exhibition of photographs taken during last year's occupation in Gaza is displayed alongside the documentary. A special committee narrowed down 6,000 photos to the 44 exhibited. The committee's criteria ruled out images with too much blood or military personnel. Coincidentally, and perhaps intentionally, none of the photos held any written political content, slogans, persons holding banners or graffiti hate messages.

If the exhibition seems to avoid propagandist tendencies, there is a reason for this. "We wanted the pictures to be of the daily goings on of the people in Gaza during the 2008 Israeli occupation," explained Woodley.

"This is not just about politics," said Batchoun. "These are human beings going through human drama. The photographs show this side of it: they are mothers, sisters, children, neighbours. We wanted people to understand their everyday stories through the pictures—standing in line for water, babies crying on the rubble, children clinging to the bodies of their dead parents for days before people found them. These are the stories that needed to be told."

Told these stories are. Images include families huddled together in a small room, a mother crying over the corpse of a baby, a young boy retrieving a schoolbook from the ruins of his house. They are painfully simple stories written on the pages of one of the most complicated scenarios of hate and conflict of our times.

The images are desperate, poignant, beautiful. I am not a photographer, so I cannot comment their technical value (although to my eyes, this too was excellent). However, the emotional depth of these pictures left me feeling more than moved. I was hurt. They are a difficult sort of beauty—one that leaves its viewer feeling raw and unsettled.

It takes a special sort of exhibition that can achieve the delicate combination of provocation and softness, anger and affection, evil and love. "Our politics and religion can be different," said Grace Batchoun, herself a Palestinian Christian, quoting Martin Luther King: "But injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."