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Intifadat Al Aqsa
By S. Abdallah Schleifer

Catalog essay for thr Sony Current Show "Intifadat Al Aqsa " December 12, 2000-February 1, 2001

Osama Silwadi began his career as a photojournalist at the age of 19 in the last years of the first Intifada. In 1992 he was wounded by Israeli gunfire; in 1993 he was beaten by Israeli settlers. This time around he (like several other Palestinian photojournalists) was lightly wounded by Israeli gunfire; a few have been seriously wounded.

Silwadi began as a photojournalist for local Palestinian newspapers and then for Agence France-Presse. Since 1997, he has been working as a freelance photographer for Reuters. His boss at the Reuters bureau in Jerusalem, Jim Hollander, describes Silwadi as "a dedicated and talented young photographer who has been closely covering this story since it began."

Osama Silwadi is a photographer whose vision is broadened by interests that transcend photojournalism without detracting from it. He contributed photographs to the first Palestinian tourism guidebook and since 1998 he has been documenting the lives of the West Bank bedouin who are constantly harassed and forced off the land by the Israelis. He has already published one book of photographs devoted to the lives of Palestinian women. Randa Shaath, whose own work appears regularly in "Al Ahram Weekly" and who has exhibited at the Sony Gallery, had Silwadi as a student at a workshop she conducted on documentary photography in Ramallah in 1997. She was very impressed: "Osama was always trying to improve, he really took the work seriously, he was really keen."

This exhibit contains some very powerful and by now familiar, almost classical invocations in color of stone-throwing Palestinian youth. The shots are valuable because they remind us that this is how it all began: unarmed Palestinians throwing stones and Israeli armed forces who responded not with standard baton charges or tear gas or even water canon but with crippling gunfire be it, "live ammunition" or bullets encased in rubber to limit their lethal potential but bullets nevertheless. Only after these exchanges did Palestinian police and Fatah militia begin to return fire and at that most ineffectively or perhaps symbolically when one considers the relative body counts; that did not, however, deter an Israeli response with tank fire, artillery and air strikes.

But the photo for the cover of this catalogue is black and white and not at all in the nature of classical, almost Olympic-like renderings of stone throwers. That is as a reminder that this conflict does not occur in the abstract. "If they stopped throwing stones at our soldiers and police we would stop shooting them," is how some Israelis put it," as if these contests took place in an arena outside of Tel Aviv. The catalogue cover, in all its haze, speaks to a specific area of combat, not of arenas, but of the streets of the occupied or partly re-occupied West Bank, where the Palestinian youth go up against the armed presence of an occupation that has defied more than three decades of international censure for its ongoing illegalities: colonization, endless land seizure, the razing of Arab villages, usurpation of water rights, seizure of religious sites in defiance of international convention, deportations, torture and in the case of Arab Jerusalem, annexation. The Palestinian response to Israeli and pro-Israeli simplicities is equally simple but not at all abstract. It is rooted to place, to specific experience: "If you don't want to have stones thrown at your soldiers than withdraw your soldiers, your tanks and armored cars from the territories you have occupied in a war you began and withdraw your settlers from the sites you have colonized."

Silwadi is a still photographer and his work is in the West Bank and Jerusalem. But the most famous picture that seems more than any other to encompass the moral assumptions of occupation was taken, as video in Gaza: the sequence of shots that portray the last moments in the life of 12-year-old Muhammed Jamal Durra. The cameraman, Talal Abu Rahma, a Palestinian working for French TV, has since then been the object of countless death threats sent to him by Israelis, outraged by his daring to bear witness to the murder of this boy. I mention the Durra pictures because even as video they suggest the lifetime of still photography--those images endure as freeze frames; they live on from one end of the Arab world to the other no longer in the video format in which they made their first shocking appearance but as frames, as still photos that move across endless cybermiles of website and email to be printed, blown up and reproduced as posters and in pamphlets. Shortly after the incident a modest shrine in the form of a plaque was placed on the spot where young Durra was killed and his father badly wounded. Palestinians passing by would lay flowers there until even this pathetic place was destroyed by Israeli shelling.