Rural Resistance

As a photographer it is easy to focus your work on the ‘action shots’, images of soldiers with guns or some unimaginable image of violence from war. When most people think about the Palestinian resistance they think about children throwing stones against armored cars and masked fighters taking up arms against one another. This is only one side of the resistance. Resistance in Palestine can take many forms: peaceful, violent, cultural, musical, religious, artistic and rural.

Helping the Palestinian resistance in the SSH (South Hebron Hills) results in the basic act of surviving. This not-so-simple act is due to the intense amount settler violence that takes place because of the extremely small Palestinian villages with little to no media coverage. These extremely zionist settlers poison large fields of Palestinian crops destroying their food source, cut down and burn olive tree groves, poison livestock which later poisons the villagers who eat them, attack children on their way to school and have even shot livestock before killing the shepherds. For internationals living in the SSH activism is about spending the day out with the shepherds in the hillside to help stem the violence from the settlers which is often watched over or even joined by the Israeli military. It is an overwhelming experience when the act of living becomes resistance.

This photo series focuses on the rural resistance of living from the indigenous Palestinians in the SHH region. One week ago settlers from a nearby settlement came down and destroyed a Palestinian’s olive grove which held about 20 trees. In response the local farmers gathers a handful of internationals and replanted the destroyed olive trees. During the planting settler children came out with slingshots as the military pushed the Palestinians off of their land and declared it a closed military zone. In an act of resistance the trees were planted regardless of the orders and dangers at hand. 

A shepherd tends to his roaming flock outside the remote village of Al Tuwani

A boy passing time with his herd on a hillside

A Palestinian resisting occupation by planting an olive tree

A child raises the Palestinian flag while looking at a settlement across the valley

The SHH - South Hebron Hills