The Patriotic Activist

‘Breaking the Silence’, a group of Israeli combat veterans who
bear witness to the moral cost of the Palestinian occupation,
have a touring photo and video exhibit in the United States.
The exhibit captures the mundane inhumanity of a decades
-long occupation – especially its subtle and horrifying effect
on the occupier, says Eyal Press.

Critics of the State of Israel are often faulted for failing to appreciate the dangers that country faces and for ignoring the burdens that those who risk their lives to defend it bear. But even Israel’s staunchest backers would likely hesitate before leveling these charges at the men and women whose photographs and video testimonials were recently on display at The Rotunda, an arts center on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania. The exhibit, which on March 1 will open at the Harvard University Hillel in Cambridge, Massachusetts, catalogs the daily routine of life in the West Bank city of Hebron, as seen through the eyes of Israeli soldiers who’ve been dispatched to serve in an occupation now in its forty-first year.

The soldiers are members of Breaking the Silence, a group of Israeli combat veterans who, upon being discharged from the army, decided to bear witness to the moral cost that the politically incendiary occupation has entailed. To judge by the montage of images in their exhibit, the toll has been as internally corrosive as it has been externally damaging. Some of what’s in the photos — the rubble and garbage cluttering the streets, the settlers strolling around in yarmulkes and guns, the racist graffiti (“Arabs Out”) scrawled in Hebrew on Palestinian shops — will be familiar to anyone who’s been to the West Bank. And some of what’s not in them may strike some viewers as exculpatory: There are no blood-splattered walls, no mangled corpses, no children cowering in fear as tanks roll by.

Full story:http://www.middle-east-online.com/English/?id=24603