I will admit to some degree of ambivalence over my decision to exhibit photographs from Israel and Palestine in the Bernstein Annex Galleries. The conflict dividing the modern-day inhabitants of this ancient land is so existential, so enduring – and, as recent events have demonstrated, so explosive – that capturing it through a camera lens to display in a basement hallway halfway around the world seems both pretentious and trivial. Now is not the time for pictures or words, but for action.

Yet images can lend a sense of immediacy to calls for action that isn’t often felt in classrooms or lecture halls or chambers of state. Such immediacy can only be felt by touching the cold, hard concrete of a wall separating families from their relatives in the next town over, or by walking through the deserted streets of a city cut in two to keep resentful residents out of contact with hostile settlers, or by hearing a young Palestinian man describe the humiliation he suffers at Israeli checkpoints and then listening to an Israeli soldier reveal the shame and anguish he feels each time he is assigned to checkpoint duty.

As an American given the opportunity to witness this sense of immediacy firsthand – and conscious of my own government’s complicity in the history of the conflict as well as its potential resolution – I feel a responsibility to share what I have seen with those who haven’t been there to witness it themselves. And so it is my hope that these images, taken during a personal visit to Israel and Palestine in August 2008 and a return trip with my WWS Graduate Policy Workshop that October, may help illustrate and inform the debates about the causes and consequences of conflict that occur in these basement hallways halfway around the world.

I have chosen the theme of “walls” both because of the ubiquity of physical barriers (both holy and mundane) throughout Israel and Palestine and because of the profound sense of separateness that pervades the two societies after more than sixty years of conflict. My intent is not to make a political statement about the legitimacy of “security barriers” or any other matter; opinions on these questions are best expressed in open debate. My purpose here is simply to offer a glimpse of everyday life as it is lived on both sides of this tragic conflict, unvarnished by prior beliefs or political agendas. In this modest goal I hope I have succeeded.

Asher D. Hildebrand
February 2009

Biography

Asher D. Hildebrand is a Master’s in Public Affairs candidate in the Woodrow Wilson School concentrating in international relations with a regional focus on the Middle East. During the Fall of 2008, he participated in the WWS Graduate Policy Workshop "Constructing a Palestinian-Israeli Peace Settlement," under the direction of former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer. Limited copies of the Workshop’s final report are available in the WWS Graduate Program Office in 122 Robertson Hall. Asher can be reached for comment at ahildebr@princeton.edu.