On War

With the onset of the coronavirus, the city’s spaces closed, forcing its dwellers indoors, while the government invaded private spaces – giving Jewish Israelis a taste of strategies routinely employed by the state against Palestinians.

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This inspired the first part of this project, featuring processed excerpts from Carl von Clausewitz’s “On War”, regarded as the bible of modern military strategy.

In an attempt to restore a sense of home during the pandemic, the fields became a refuge from the city, leading to the second part: a series of photographs documenting a botanical epidemic ravaging the sabra cactus.

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While in the Zionist context, this non-native prickly plant is a glorified nickname for Israeli-born Jews, it had mostly been planted by Palestinian villagers before the 1948 war. The epidemic now threatening it renders it an ambivalent symbol of the local space.