mardi 16 février 2010

# Death in Gaza by James Miller

"Such precision is combined with the tactics of medieval siege warfare adapted to the networked sprawl or urban refugee camps. An orchestrated and systematic sabotage of the enemy's societal and urban infrastructure networks complements the appropriation of land, water, and airspace resources. Critical to these techniques of disabling the enemy is bulldozing."
Achille Mbembe. 2003:29

"Houses are destroyed, olive trees uprooted, orange groves laid waste...to improve... visibility...The bulldozer one runs across at every roadside seems as much a part of the strategy in the ongoing war as the tank. Never has such an inoffensive machine struck me as being more a harbinger of silent violence. The brutality of war. Geography, it is said, determines war. In Palestine, it is war that has achieved the upper hand over geography."
Christian Salmon quoted by Stephen Graham in Cities, War and Terrorism. 2003

This image is excerpted from the film Death in Gaza (2004) and carries according to me an important symbolic value about the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. It actually comes from a film that makes no compromise to the Hamas' violence, despite the fact that its director James Miller was killed by Israeli soldiers while carrying a white flag. This symbol is therefore not a unilateral propaganda from an activist director but the bare reality of an asymmetric conflict. Palestinian have stones, Israeli have armored bulldozers -transforming and claiming the land- that shoot back to the stones every once in a while with real bullets.

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