Gaza is a strip of land measuring 6 by 45 kilometres. To the south the Strip borders on Egypt, to the west on the Mediterranean Sea, and its northern and eastern borders face Israel. Gaza is inhabited by approximately one million Palestinians. In the spring of 1994, Israeli troops pulled out of Gaza after having occupied it for 37 years, and during the following summer the Palestinian Authority was set up in accordance with the Oslo Peace Agreement. Israel is still in full control of security in the area, which means that the Israeli may close the borders and the air territory of Gaza as they see fit. This situation has existed since September 2000, and in actual fact one million Palestinians have been confined since the beginning of the Al Aqsa Intifada more than a year ago.

Not only are one million Palestinians shut up within the closed borders, but among them live 6,000 Israeli settlers on whose security the Israeli government spends countless resources, even though their presence is more than a nuisance to everybody involved. The settlements are regular fortresses encircled by barbed wire, barricades and guardhouses, and concrete fencing and military positions are securing the roads leading to and from the settlements.
Where the %u201Dsafe settler roads cross Gazas main roads, military checkpoints have been established, and traffic in and out of the settlements gets absolute and indisputable priority. All local Palestinian traffic is stopped if just one car containing a solitary settler wants to pass, irrespective of the fact that this may generate traffic jams of up to two kilometres.

98 per cent of all Palestinians in Gaza are Muslim, and as early as during the first Intifada, from 1987 to 1993, popular support for Hamas, the fundamentalist Islamic fraction, increased drastically as Arafat and the PLOs lack of success became apparent. Not only did Israel take a passive position, but it supported and prepared the ground for the new fundamentalist fraction by issuing a remarkably generous amount of permits to all sorts of Hamas initiatives, be it the building of mosques or the setting up of Islamic schools. This was all based on the principle that what damages Arafat will be to Israels benefit.

However, in the reflection of their continuous humiliation and weakening of Arafat, the Israeli succeeded in creating the monster that later turned against them. Most of the suicide bombers that are dreaded among the Israeli population in general and the Israeli soldiers in particular have received their training in these fundamentalist mosques and schools in Gaza. Because of these suicide bombers you never see an Israeli soldier in Gaza. At the checkpoints you are guided past bombproof concrete shelters from which only rifle barrels and megaphones protrude, and you only perceive that there is some sort of life within these shelters when the megaphones bark their metallic orders or the rifles spit out their live ammunition. From the residential areas and refugee camps bordering on the settlements you do not see any Israeli soldiers either. They are all hiding in guardhouses or behind sandbag barricades. In this place you only sense an absolutely terrifying, apparently arbitrary and completely anonymous violence as the guns eject their lethal fire.

The Israeli Army claims that the soldiers only fire in self-defence and that they are often shot at by gunmen from the ruins of the shattered areas. Admittedly, there are Palestinian gunmen operating from the ruins at night, and shoot-outs are heard almost every night in the southern towns of Rafah and Khan Younis. However, none of the shooting incidents that I witnessed during daytime (probably about ten in all) can justifiably be said to have been provoked. They were military responses to boyish pranks! The Israeli soldiers stationed in the guard houses fired heavy machine guns in response to children throwing rocks, even from a distance which was too far for even the most zealous boys arm.

In actual fact the most destructive aspect of the situation is that the kids have no way of knowing when they are going to be shot at. Some days they are allowed to play football on the grounds outside the settlements, and other days they are not depending only on the mood of the soldiers on guard that particular day. The Israeli Army does nothing to discipline its soldiers to self-restraint but rather appears to support this arbitrary behaviour and make the unpredictability part of the Armys strategy to suppress the Palestinian revolt.

More than 98 per cent of all inhabitants in Gaza are less than 14 years old, and for a major part of them violence and stress are the dominant elements of their childhood. The children who are lucky enough not to live at the outskirts of the Strip, and thus are not subjected to the random terror employed by the Israeli Army, have a cruel childhood in the slum of the refugee camps, and they get to know violence in the form of corporal punishment both at home and in school. I would venture the depressing assertion that more than half, if not all, of the children living in Gaza are traumatised to a degree that requires treatment.

I was a target

During the month I spent in Gaza I passed the Kfar Derom checkpoint nearly every day , and often while I was waiting to get through I would get out of my car to take pictures. Usually this presented no problem. But when suddenly one day I got shot at while doing what I used to do I understood the full extent of the terror that the Palestinians are subjected to: never knowing when they will get fired at! I found this extremely provoking, and it almost ruined the rest of my stay in Gaza. It left me with a feeling of insecurity that I found very difficult to handle.

The fact that I was shot at, without notice or reason, in a situation no different from previous situations and in a situation where the soldiers had nothing else to do but control the traffic, frightened and confused me! From that day I no longer trusted my own judgement and could no longer make any attempts to evaluate situations rationally. What was even more provoking, however, was the fact that I was not able to see the faces of the soldiers who shot at me (I only saw a gun barrel protruding from the concrete shelter.) In other gunfire incidents the fire also came from faceless soldiers.

I have walked around in the outskirts of the refugee camps, the ones facing the settlements, and have experienced four- to five-year olds guiding me safely around through the shattered alleys. Every time I was about to take a step too far in the wrong direction, they shouted warnings at me: Lo! Lo! Lo! (No! No! No!), and waved their small index fingers admonishingly. They knew with terrifying certainty exactly where death and mutilation lay waiting, and the spontaneity of their warnings was ominous. As a result, I was never in doubt when a corner of a house was the last protection and I should walk no further. And nobody had told them this! They knew because they had experienced too often that they risked being shot at without warning from those anonymous fortresses, no matter what day of the week or what time of the day. And these kids live in those areas and are supposed to have a life there!

I do understand that young Israeli soldiers feel somewhat paranoid about suicide bombings. That being said, it is both frightening and in violation of all known and unknown rules and norms that the soldiers get away with their arbitrary and traumatising terrorisation of the Palestinian people. One thing is that it destroys the life of an entire generation of Palestinians; on top of that it will backfire at them and us in the long run, because it only paves the way for more, increasingly desperate Palestinian suicide bombers. When children know that they may get shot at no matter how they behave, they lose control of their own lives. That leads to defeatism, which in turn will foster the next generation of suicide bombers.

Kamikaze

When 19 young, mainly Arab men boarded four American passenger aircraft on the 11th of September 2001 and later smashed the planes into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, they did so in the name of God. Nevertheless, their act was essentially different from the suicide bombings we know from Gaza. The September 11th hijackers were not themselves confined in hopelessness and desperation. On the contrary, they lived in the West, were relatively well educated and more or less controlled their own lives. Their suicide was driven by fanaticism, whereas the young men in Gaza are driven by political desperation.
To the September 11th terrorists (al Queda), the dominance and power held by the modern Western World constitute an insufferable provocation that sets off the failure of the formerly so powerful Islamic culture, and modern western life is turned into a hideous symbol of all ungodliness.
To the young suicide bombers, it is more likely their anger not to be allowed to take part in the modern western life that triggers their desperation.

I find it extremely difficult to comprehend how young men, some still in their teenage years, can throw away a promising life of friends, parties and women and exchange it for an ascetic way of life founded on rigid interpretations of the Koran. Can any cause be so great that it is worth sacrificing your life for? How should these young mens lives have been improved to prevent them from signing up for martyrdom?

I do not believe that suicide bombers are the product of fundamentalist Koran schools. I have no doubt, however, that many of these schools manipulate young men who have decided on uncompromising revenge into completing their mission. Many young men who have chosen to wear an explosive belt around their chest do not even come from very religious families. They may be ordinary young men who have suddenly had enough of being humiliated every day by the Israeli Army and of their claustrophobic confinement to Gaza, and who are suddenly prepared to sacrifice literally everything to put an end to the humiliation. These young men seek out the fundamentalist movements and Koran schools because they need someone who can offer them a means of understanding their desperation. These movements allegedly hold the key to a unified religious concept which replaces the frustration and the humiliation with the conviction that there is a better life after this one; this conviction may be useful if a young mans courage should threaten to fail him in the critical moment. To give an example: it is not at all a bad deal for a sexually frustrated young man who has lived his entire life in Gaza that in releasing the bomb he will get an instant martyr status, which will in turn immediately open all doors to Paradise where 72 young virgins are waiting just to service him. As a bonus, the doors are also open for his mother, his father and the rest of his family.

I think that the basis for the Palestinian suicide bombers is created outside the fundamentalist Koran schools i.e. in their surrounding environment, the place they grow up. And I believe that by eliminating the humiliation and the despair it is possible to take away the breeding ground for local terrorism.

I am fully aware that this sounds terribly banal.
And then again! Today it may not be so banal as you might expect.

I stayed in Gaza for the duration of October 2001 with the purpose of investigating the physical environment that appears to breed young men who are prepared to sacrifice their lives uncompromisingly – in an attempt to show the environment that will influence still more future suicide bombers.

You might say that I have a political axe to grind.

My basic attitude to the conflict is that the Palestinians do not constitute a threat to the existence of the State of Israel, that the State of Israel acts as an occupying power, using the settlements as bridgeheads for the annexation of the occupied territories, and that a prerequisite for peace is the evacuation of the settlements.

Naturally, I too abhor the Palestinian suicide missions against school children and other civilians in Israel. And I do not accept the allegation that defending the Palestinians right to an independent state amounts to defending these cynical acts.
And I will not refrain from insisting that the constant humiliation of the Palestinians and the suffocating hopelessness in Gaza are the main causes for the desperate suicide missions.

But why not try for a moment to set aside the eternal discussion over who were there first? Who fired the first shot? Who are right? Who are the most evil? And let us also set aside everything that has to do with Jesus, Jehova, Mohammed, David, the Torah, the Bible, the Koran, the Dead Sea scrolls and the UN resolutions .. and then let us ask ourselves the simple question: How is an innocent child transformed into a terrorist?

I have a number of ideas that may be useful for this sort of reflection.
First of all this exhibition is an idea: an attempt at balancing the creation of images.
I have made an effort to make a toned-down documentary aiming at objectivity.
I chose simply to take photographs with an old-fashioned large-format camera placed on a tripod in order to avoid the traditional press photo style. I chose to use slow-working equipment that necessitates a more deliberate and reflective approach. You might say that I subjected myself to a photographers dogma-concept based on the principle: Possibilities in limitation.
Consequently, many of these photos are justified by their detail. Traces of destruction. The victory of aggression over beauty. The absence of poetry and love of life that turns war and death into icons of hope. Where suicide is the ultimate heroic act.
For we are dealing with a proud people, who has been so destroyed by humiliation and shame and whose wish for revenge has become so fierce that they were able to cheer the loss of more than 3,000 American lives at the World Trade Center.

Henrik Saxgren