Editorial Photography

Every Friday, Palestinians from the town of Beita gather to protest near the site of a reportedly abandoned Jewish settlement. Elders cluster around fires to talk and keep watch from the rear as younger men lead the protests at the van, trying get as close to Israeli soldiers as they can manage. Some call out locations and others shout their support as the more motivated sling rocks and try to return activated tear gas canisters. Chaos is palpable through sound of yelling and stun grenades, but also through the frying sensations in the nose and eyes caused by traces of airborne tear gas. Some are momentarily consumed by the blue-white smoke and they retreat to the back, crying, coughing, and shouting. Unluckier protesters, hit by the popping canister of a stun grenade or by rubber bullets, fall to the ground before being picked up first by front-liners and then by Red Crescent volunteer medics waiting for wounded further to the back.

The more seasoned protesters stand stoically behind the scene, their gaze shifting back and forth from the glint of military patrol lights ahead of the protest to a large, white, wire-framed Star of David on the opposing hilltop. Next to the star, the few buildings of the illegal Israel settler outpost of Evyatar look empty and dark.

Something in the dynamic seems obvious. No Palestinian can seriously harm an armored and armed solider by slinging rocks nor smoking tear gas canisters. But while harm to the soldiers may be desired by the protestors, it is not the goal. Every week, the Palestinians of Beita and those who stand in solidarity with them come to these hills to make themselves heard and seen. They turn their backs to the delicious banalities of life to put life and limb in danger for the production of a stable and constant show of presence.

To see stateless youth facing the materiel of a state with bible-like weapons and rocks, is to see a people arguing to the world that a conflict is still unfolding on these contested lands and that the locals are no less present for being much less powerful.

Shortly after setting off into the desert of Jordan under a rainy pre-dawn sky, I noticed the small figure of a young boy walking towards me on the dim trail. I paid little mind to him while I focused on brooding from under my soaked hoodie over my decision to hike on the only rainy day in months. But as we approached each other, he stopped. And rubbing the sleep from his eyes, the boy casually asked me if I wanted “the key.”

“To the mosque, to the tomb of the prophet Aaron,” he replied to my perplexed look in an unbothered accent.

I tried to be thoughtful and respectful in my rejection of his bizarre offer. But I had been hiking less than an hour and already my sense of adventure was washing away from me under the rain. I figured that maybe this was normal around these parts. And, really, the little one seemed genuine.

“Ok,” I said. “May I have the key?”

"Ask there," the boy directed, pointing at a nearby hill.

After kind gestures, smiles, and tea and with English as skeletal as my Arabic, a family of nearly fifteen offered me a key and, most unexpectedly, the boy’s sister as a guide.

I spent the next five hours following closely the wide berth of a donkey's rear, on whose back sat a girl of no more than fifteen years, who patiently repeated the rounded nuances of her name, and who frequently inquired with a shrugged shoulder and a thumbs-up about how I was doing

The rest of the memory exists only in a haze: the leap off of a harnessed donkey, the flapping of her outfit's many multi-colored layers made taut by the gusts, the easy maneuvering through old carved stone steps, the clanging of an empty metal kettle against an iron grill in a canvas bag.

I indeed reached a mosque that I had not intended to find. I found solace there in the silence and shadow of its single room. I felt a breath of spirituality that had eluded me in the ostentation of my native churches. I embraced it with unexpected relief.

But it was her company that lingers. We could speak of nothing else but of "thanks," "more tea," and "beautiful view." But why talk of anything else? We didn't hesitate while offering a seat to an unexpected visitor who had also decided to make his way up Jabal Harun that morning, to the mountaintop resting place of the brother of Moses. For a short time, three of us sat there, unconcerned about our names, how we had gotten there, or what we did in life. And later, for a length of time that eludes the privilege of my narrative, two sat there, watching me head back down into the guarding fog of the Wadi Musa.

The keffiyeh was the mark of the rebel in Palestine during the British mandate. The black and white patterned scarf was so strictly associated with militants that British soldiers were ordered to shoot anyone seen with it, regardless of circumstance. As the mandate wore on, a unique act of solidarity caught on; everyone - men, women, and children - began to wear the black and white pattern to keep the British from distinguishing rebel from civilian.

Today, the symbol has lost some of its ubiquity and most keffiyehs are made in China. In Hebron, however, the last Palestinian manufacturer of keffiyehs still stands. It is a small textile factory of some twelve-odd functioning looms. The clanging noises inside are so thick that it makes the atmosphere tangible, an effect enhanced by the milky green light that pours into the otherwise dimly-lit space through a single large warehouse door facing a backyard olive grove.

On the factory floor, members of three generations of the Hirbawi family shuttle from one loom to the next, replacing thread, mending tears, and occasionally gracing kind glances and welcoming gestures at visitors. In a quieter room at the entrance of the factory, an older patriarch-type sits at a desk in front of a backdrop of the factory’s products.

He sits casually, regularly reaches into his desk to produce grape gummy candy which he insists upon each new guest, and calmly chain-smokes while entertaining the naive attempts of bargaining Westerners. Watching tourists trying to knock the equivalent of a few cents off the price of a “scarf,” it becomes clear that he’s developed a sense of humor for the ritual over the years. He indulges them, nonetheless, assuaging their fears of “being taken advantage of,” by pretending to engage in the back-and-forth.

By the time the ritual wraps up, the man will have made what he intended, and the patrons will leave with a great gift and, perhaps more importantly to them, a sense that they fought the good fight with the local textile merchant.

They talk of the “condenados” late at night in the cook tent as they huddle over the heat of a gas stove lit under the pretext of boiling water for the trek clients. Passing around a pitcher of hot spirits, every pour is a story of a close relative, a friend, an infamous colleague who has come too close to the mysterious circumstances of the high Andean snowfields.

They are stories of lurid atrocities that occur most often under cover of darkness. The condenados, the condemned, sinned while alive; they must now spend their eternities atoning for their sins. But old ways die hard, the porters caution, even harder when the ways are those of a soul in anguish.

Under the cover of a heavy blanket of stars, I came to hear of half-men-half-llama monsters who split livestock into bloody pieces, of long-dead cattle poachers who still brandish whips in the hazy distance of the high pampas, of disembodied human torsos floating in the silver radiance of a moonlit snowfield, and of grotesque disfigurations that are still borne by the living who have had the misfortune of bearing witness to the legends.

When I grew tired of the tales and rose to leave the group, I noted that the guides’ storytelling tone did not change when they sternly warned me to keep my flashlight off as I walked back to my tent.

Slowly stumbling through those few meters that separated me from my bed, I came to feel just how bountifully the mind can spill when fertilized by the darkness of that high place. Who was I to turn on the light and expose myself to whatever was waiting for me to put out the bait? I decided to heed the words of my colleagues and I fell asleep very long after my eyelids closed to make the darkness around me just a little smaller.