لا شكر على واجب “La shukran, hadha wajebi.” Don’t thank me. This is my duty. These are the words of my Moroccan aunt, Fatima, whose artistry takes the form of warm meals, embroidery, tailoring, and the making of a home for all members of her family and her community. 

It is in that same spirit which she inspired in me that I have embarked on a twenty-year journey of photographing and documenting the stories of a multitude of Palestinians whose lives have been forever damaged by the building of the Apartheid Wall, otherwise referred to as the “Separation Barrier.” This photographic endeavor started in 2004 as part of my Master’s thesis research. What began as a small university project resulted in thousands of images and hundreds of stories that I both lived and witnessed in Palestine on a daily basis. From military checkpoints, gunfire, physical assault, arrests, and environmental destruction, the path of the wall which weaves and carves through Palestinian villages, deep into the West Bank, and well past the internationally-recognized Green Line, has demonstrated the intentional architectural mapping of a structure that is designed to ignore pre-1967 recognized borders and develop additional, illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Throughout the early 2000’s, and until now, Palestinians, leftist Israelis, and international activists continue to regularly demonstrate against the Wall while attempting to protect Palestinians’ right to their lands, to water-wells, to take animals to pasture, to see friends and family freely, and to simply exercise their basic rights to stay put in their own homes. 

Many of these people, whose pictures I share, have throughout the years made the same request: “Share our story”. They have been willing to forgo their desire for privacy and their anonymity in order to generously share their wounds and their lives for the sake of telling their urgent story to the people of the United States and others around the world. This generosity of Palestinian men, women, and children who have allowed me to zoom in with my lens and to interrupt their daily lives with my camera has ignited my sense of duty to deepen my own understanding while inviting others to learn more about Palestine beyond the framings of mainstream western media. 

As a photographer, and a human being born of both Jewish-Ashkenazi and Moroccan-Muslim descent, and as someone raised in the Jewish faith, my hope is that my witness will invite you to a deeper investigation and a move to action, and most importantly a sparking of the same sense of duty that has inspired this project. Don’t thank me. This is my duty!