Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Structural displacement

Today I took my first field trip with the team of the Wi’am Center (http://www.alaslah.org/); we went to al-Wajala, a small community outside Bethlehem, South of Jerusalem, deeply affected by the building of the Separation Wall. We met with the representative of a grassroots organization of popular resistance who told us about the multiple negative effects the building of the Wall and the settlements is having on the the village: individual houses cut off from their community, settlements sewage drained in Palestinian fields, orchards being kept on the Israeli side of the Wall, etc. (read about it on the following site: http://www.paltelegraph.com/opinions/diaries/8389-palestinian-popular-resistance-committees-operating-under-strain.html/)

More than once, she mentioned the notion of "structural dsiplacement" as one way to describe what is happening with these ongoing constructions in the Occupied Territories. I pondered it for a while until she said: "Israel cannot afford to displace us like they did; they cannot just move families, with women and children, from one place to the other." Then I understood: structural displacement is literally faceless! The world will not see crying children, screaming women, or men being pushed around. Only construction sites, dirt roads, concrete walls... How powerful it is to play with images, the other way around.

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