military rules

The military's ubiquitous in Israel. Troops patrol the streets, many of which are named famous battles and generals. Uniformed soldiers work as teachers in remote schools, and playgrounds feature tanks along with the more innocent swings and slides. It's something that I just couldn't get used to.



One of the country’s most popular radio stations is owned by the military. And there is mandatory national service for all 18-year-olds - except those of Palestinian descent (referred to as Arab Israelis) or certain ultra-orthodox Jews. Even after their three years of service, men continue to serve a month each year as reserves until they're in their forties.

An illustrious army background can be a ticket to success, with many senior officers moving into politics after retirement.

Questioning the status quo is not a popular thing to do in a country whose identity is so entangled with the military. Helping concientous objectors to avoid the draft is seen by many as the ultimate tretchery to a nation that perceives itself to be under threat by any number of enemies - both outside its borders and within.

This is exactly what New Profile is known for doing. The group has outraged the Israeli religious right (ironic considering the orthodox exemption), and is now being targeted by a government that is struggling to deal with a spiralling number of teenage refusniks. In 2007 almost 28 per cent of eligible young men evaded enlistment. Even the daughter of a spymaster in Mossad recently ended up in jail for refusing to serve.

While I was in Israel, a criminal investigation was launched against the NGO by the attorney general, following a request from the IDF. It centres on information New Profile gives about how to fail psychological tests carried out as part of the enlistment process. The government has now appealed to the Israeli High Court to close the group.

Aside from these activities, the small but group works to persuade Israelis that over-militarisation must be addressed and the army restricted to defence. Member Ronit Marian-Kadishay believes it's a throwback to Zionism and that her country needs to move on.

She says: “Israeli culture generates an image of the world in which war was, is and will always be inevitable – a necessary and acceptable way of solving our problems.
“The army permeates our whole society. Our children’s textbooks are full of army imagery, there are tanks in their playgrounds and soldiers are used as teachers when staff can’t be found.

“Pictures of soldiers are used all the time in advertising. Battlegrounds have become memorial sites. It’s completely normal to see uniformed, armed soldiers everywhere.”

The effect is to perpetuate the belief that Israeli lives are in danger, and that a strong military is the only way to keep them safe.

“We would argue that this feeling that we are living among enemies and must be strong to survive is outdated and actually harmful,” she says.
“If Israelis believe everyone else is against us, they don’t want to know about ‘the other’ and continue to fear our neighbours. This mindset has to be changed because it simply drives us from one war to another."

swimming through treacle

Things are moving slowly around here at the moment.
I'm never feeling at my most productive when the weather starts to draw in, and I have been pretty busy between my work and doing everything necessary for a photography qualification that I'm currently studying for, hence little time to blog.

Below is a montage that I intend to put in as part of my project work. In time my career may change course to include more photojournalism...who knows.
I hate the idea that specialist writers or photographers are becoming devalued but sadly this is a feature of my industry today and we have to be multi-skilled...you can't do both jobs well but for a handful of low-budget publications it is something that can work.

I still have heaps of material from the Holy Land that I intend to upload bit by bit, as I wade through the 100 or so pages of Word that I transcribed directly from my shorthand over the course of the month. I have a number of features from my time there due to be run between now and Christmas, and have a few others I have to crack on and sell. With such a large amount of material though, I feel a bit like I'm swimming through treacle. There is a fair bit that won't make publishable stories that I'd still like to get 'out there' as and when I have time...so watch this space.

On another note, I found this article about India's sex trade quite interesting today. It doesn't really say anything very new, but I was interested to look through the photo gallery that went with it...it helps me to empathise with the subjects of a feature so much if I can put a face to them. It's fairly rare to be able to do so with sex-abuse or sex-work related stories.

good Samaritans

When people think about the Israel-Palestine situation they talk about Jews, Muslims and very occasionally the Palestinian Christians. Together these three communities account for most – but not all – of the people living in this region.
There is another group – religion or ethnicity if you will – who has lived in the Holy Land since the earliest days of the bible. The tiny Samaritan community has friendly relations with all its neighbours but has suffered quietly over the past 60 years.
Reputed to be the smallest ethnic group in the world – with less than 850 members left – these people live in two distinct communities, one near the West Bank town of Nablus and the other near Tel Aviv, in Israel.
The two groups are fairly separate – the Israeli Samaritans tending to speak modern Hebrew in their day-to-day affairs, while the Nablus Samaritans speak fluent Arabic and pray in ancient Hebrew or Samaritan Aramaic.
After many years living in Nablus, the Palestinian Samaritans were forced to retreat to a gated community on a nearby hilltop to escape the second intifada.
I was lucky enough to visit the Samaritan village on Mt Gerazim – considered by them to be their holiest site - during my month in Israel and Palestine, and to meet with one of its elders, an ebullient middle aged man named Khader Samaritan, who talked me through some of their traditions and the issues they face today.
Centuries ago, the Samaritans inhabited the biblical land of Samaria. They always had good relations with the successive powers that have occupied the West Bank – the Ottomans, the British, the Jordanians and now the Israelis.
Today, this mean Samaritans get more rights than their fellow Palestinians. Those of them who live in the West Bank have three official nationalities – Palestinian, Israeli and Jordanian – and carry the passport of Israel. This bestows on them all manner of priviledges that the Muslims and Christians of Nablus can’t get. They can cross the security barrier into Israel, visit friends and relatives that side of the border and fly, if they wish, from Ben Gurion airport.
Their cars carry the white Israeli number plates (Palestinian plates are green), meaning they get waved straight through the dreaded army checkpoints.
Khader explained that Samaritans believe theirs is the true faith of the ancient Israelites. Unlike Jews, they do not recognise the sanctity of Jerusalem and instead revere Mt Gerazim as being the holiest site.
Their faith has five pillars – God is one; belief in Moses and his bible; the ‘old Torah’ or first five chapters only; Mt Gerazim is the most holy site, and judgement day. They keep the Jewish holy days including Passover and Yom Kippur, and have in their possession the world’s oldest Torah – a scroll they claim is more than 3,600 years old. Animal sacrifices remain an import part of their tradition.
“We pray like Muslims, bowing down on the floor, rather than sitting on chairs. We don’t put any paintings, icons, music in the synagogue. On the Sabbath we wear traditional clothes and can’t smoke, cook or do any work. We only go to the synagogue and read the Torah,” said Khader.
“We believe this mountain is holy because it’s the place where Abraham came to slaughter his son Isaac. Joshua built a temple here on Mt Gerazim. This area is mentioned in the Torah as that important site.
“We hope to be at peace with everyone. We would like Mt Gerazim to serve as a bridge for peace between all the people living here.”
The biggest challenge facing the survival of this tiny community however, is genetics. Samaritans have been persecuted and assimilated to the brink of extinction and have been left with serious issues as a result. Traditionally reluctant to accept converts, members have been forced to think again and look outside their community for partners to overcome a skewed population that has left two men to every woman, and high rates of genetic disease.
The tiny gene pool and implications it brings means that all marriages within the Samaritan community must first gain the say-so of a geneticist at Israel’s Tel HaShomer Hospital.

turfed out

A few weeks ago, while I was in Israel and Palestine, I wrote about an Arab family from East Jerusalem who were about to be evicted from their home of 52 years to make way for the Jewish settlers who are gradually taking over their neighbourhood.

Well, it happened yesterday. During the early hours of Sunday, police threw the Al-Kurd family out of their home in Sheik Jarrar. The house had originally been built for Palestinian refugees by the UN, when East Jerusalem was occupied by Jordan and not Israel.

The Jewish community who now live there claim the land was previously owned by Jews and is rightfully theirs. They have now acted - with the support of the authorities - despite several court rulings to the contrary.

The wife, Fawazieh Al Kurd, pictured, was incredibly calm about the situation that was brewing when I visited her in late September.

As observant Muslims, she and her husband were putting their trust in God, she said. But she did make the point that land property rights should benefit all residents - and not just Israel's Jewish community.

Her family, orignally from West Jerusalem, and her husband's - internally displaced from Jaffa - both lost their homes to Israelis in the upheaval and war that followed the state's creation in 1948.

"I'll get through this because I believe in God and I have never harmed anyone. God will decide what happens to us, and whatever they do, I won’t do anything back to them. God will punish them [the settlers], not me," she told me.

"If they own this property, fine. But it works both ways and Israel should give us back our property too. We lost a lot in 1948. My family was living on the other side of Jerusalem and was chased out of there.

"My husband is a refugee from Jaffa – his family has a three-floor building there. Now it looks like we're going to be refugees twice."

school's out

Second - and, for now, final - installment of features that came out of my work trip to Delhi in August, this time looking at education in the slums. It's in this week's Big Issue in the North magazine and my images have been used throughout.



The other India feature I've uploaded can be found here.
Other images from the trip are over here

faces of Delhi

Another day, another time-wasting slideshow. This will be the end of them for now, but I thought this might be a nice way of quickly showing a few of my unused images from my trip to Delhi in August, as well as some of my favourites that I've already put online at Flickr.
Many of these people are from the fringes of society: slum-dwellers, beggars, rag-pickers and the like. But life seems to seep out of many of them and they retain their dignity.

check-in

It's always obvious when I've got a lot of work I should be doing. Why? Well because I prat around doing irrelevant things and wasting valuable time, of course.
Which is exactly what I've been doing this morning. I have put together a mediocre at best slideshow of my morning at a West Bank checkpoint a couple of weeks ago. The quality is terrible and the music ends too abruptly. But you get the idea. And it was my first go and making one of these...

off the tracks

A couple of months back, I described a visit to a project that works with homeless children who end up living in India's railway stations. Project Concern International runs drop in centres and education projects in Delhi, among other places, and rescues children as young as five from a life on the streets.
The story was published in the Big Issue in the North last week...

history girls

Following on from this post about India's missing women, an Indian woman is making history by making an official complaint after her husband and in-laws tricked her into having a foetal scan and then pressured her into aborting her unborn twin girls.
She resisted and now has two beautiful three year olds. The doctor who performed the scan - it's illegal in India to check the gender of a foetus - has now left the country and is believed to be working for the NHS.

child's play

I'm back in drizzly Manchester in body now, but my experiences in Palestine continue to occupy my thoughts and I imagine they will continue to do so for quite some time yet.
One thing that bothered me while I was there was the question over what effect the tension, the bitterness, the human rights abuses and the omnipresence of the military uniforms and guns has on the children who grow up in such an environment.


Kids are kids, of course, and will adapt to most things...it is after all mainly down to the parenting. But one thing that I noticed was that the main game among little boys in the West Bank and East Jerusalem seems to be soldiers, and the toy of the moment is a gun. It's well documented that youngsters have often been killed an injured by army gunfire, sometimes when throwing stones but often while doing nothing to attract attention.
While visiting one community that has been adversely affected by Israel's segregation barrier, I had the opportunity to ask about this.
In this particular village, there has been hundreds of curfews and terrifying night raids launched by soldiers, in which families are woken at all hours by tear gas, rubber bullets, concussion bombs and other devices.


"The effect is considerable...our kids have been psychologically affected by the raids and the brutality. This has a big impact – in the schools they only talk about the army, the wall resistance and when they play they play army and Arabs and guns," I was told by one activist.
"Many have been injured and arrested and imprisoned. My son was injured several times by rubber bullets in demonstrations - he was about eight years old at the time.
"This has a negative impact on their academic life – they can suffer post-traumatic stress, bed wetting and bad behaviour. "


How, under such circumstances, could parents ensure that they were not raising a generation filled with bitterness and hate for "the oppressor", and as such more inclined to extremism - religious or otherwise?
"We have to tell our children that peace-making is possible," came the response. "They see that there are many good Israelis because we have Israelis supporting us – they are the minority unfortunately but we hope the number will grow."