Crossing Over - Caroline Suzman photographer

ISRAEL AND GAZA: POSTCARDS FROM THE FOREVER WAR

"It's a long time since I've seen work that excited me as much as your Israel / Gaza series" David Goldblatt (Hasselblad Photography Award, Henri Cartier-Bresson Award, ICP Infinity Award), Johannesburg, South Africa, November 2009

Artist statement

In July 2006, on assignment I crossed over from Israel into Gaza, two days after the capture of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. In response to Shalit's abduction, Israel launched ‘Operation Summer Rain’, a military bombardment of the Gaza Strip. I set off to the beach. These portraits are largely metaphorical and so transcend the grind of violence and geopolitics; a black dog walking the beach in Herzylia that I called Dog of War, (after ‘Man o’ War’ or the stinging bluebottle), an Israeli lifeguard diverting stinging sea creatures, two small Bedouin sheep herders doggedly guiding their sheep around a bombed bridge. The intention of the series was to reflect on how civilians in Israel and Gaza tap their inner resources to adapt to the ebb and flow of war. Photographing on the beach in Israel with the threat of missiles was surreal and in Gaza it was eerie, with drones and apache helicopters circling overhead and the sonic boom of jets breaking the sound barrier reverberating out to sea.

At midnight on the CNN rooftop, we watched a missile strike the Islamic University targeting a suspected Hamas official. The next day female students held up angry placards, “KEEP AWAY YOUR SAVAGENESS, in Arabic and English to make sure the message was well understood. It could well have been directed at Hamas, an organization not known for the care of any civilians. When the fighting intensified, we fled through a concrete tunnel with a throng of international journalists just before the border closed. So this is an unfinished series, the subjects and photographs in limbo, fleeting vignettes, scattered postcards from a Forever War.

Background

On the 25 June 2006,Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was captured by Hamas fighters. Shalit was released 5 years later in exchange for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners. Six months before, in the 2006 January election, the party of Yasser Arafat and President Mahmoud Abbas - Fatah, a party that supports a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - had been defeated by Hamas, an Islamist faction, which is designated as a terrorist group by the US and Europe. The founding charter of Hamas commits it to the destruction of the Jewish state. One of the men released in Shalit’s prisoner swop was Yahya Sinwar. Israeli investigators identified Sinwar, then the military leader of Hamas in Gaza, as the mastermind of 7 October attacks on Israel. Sinwar conceived of what he called Operation al-Aqsa Flood and planned the assault almost alone. About 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed and 250 abducted. The Israeli offensive has killed 42,500 people, mostly civilians. Circa 2025 the Forever War rages on another has begun with Israel and Iran. How do civilians endure when there no end in sight?

Interesting media :

NYTimes: The Tunnel That Leads Underneath a Hospital in Southern Gaza

Jewish settlers set their sights on Gaza beachfront

Prints : email studio@caroline.suzman.com