Foto Friday – Local Testimony
One of the troubling things about photography, especially at times like these, is that a picture is worth a thousand words – and not always the right ones. Israel’s military operation against Gaza is only entering its seventh day, and already, hundreds of thousands of images have flooded the web, the papers, the airwaves. Some are powerful, others are weak. Some are informative, others deceptive. Some are strong enough to make a statement on their own, others serve to illustrate text. And so many seem besides the point right now — but it may be too early to tell.
Sometimes, even in a networked world of instant communications and citizen journalists, a bit of time is needed before passing judgment on what makes a good news photo. And so, each year, concurrent with the international World Press Photo exhibition, Israel hosts its own photojournalism competition, called Local Testimony. The pictures chosen capture moments with both a media value and a human significance, and is also a retrospective on the events of the past year as reflected in its main categories: news, culture and art, nature and environment, portraits, daily life and sports.
The winning photo is by AP photographer Muhammed Muheisen was taken at the village of Bil’in in June 2008. It shows a Palestinian youth running to avoid tear gas grenades that were fired to disperse a demonstration against the separation barrier.
The winning photo series, Homeless, is by independent photographer Felix Lupa, who documented the lives of two homeless people living in an abandoned car in Tel-Aviv: blind foreign worker Boris, aged 54, and his self-appointed caretaker Genady, aged 70.
The winning photo in the sports category was taken by Dudi Vaaknin, a staff photographer at Ynet and Israel Hayom. It’s a picture of Beitar Jerusalem soccer player Yoav Ziv, and is pretty self-explanatory.
Up until last week, going by the topics covered in the exhibit, Israel was preoccupied with domestic politics, a stalemated security situation, social welfare issues and a hefty amount of navel-gazing. Now, it’s the war. There’s no telling what images will come to represent this new year when it ends. What’s for certain is that Israel is a fantastic canvas for photojournalists and that Local Testimony 2009 will continue to present the best of the best.
Local Testimony is on at the Dizengoff Center in Tel Aviv until January 11, after which it moves up to the Open Museum at Tel Hai until mid-February. The full exhibition can be viewed here as well.
Another Front
Besides the action in the air and on the ground, Hamas and its supporters are fighting Israel on another front – in cyberspace. And that’s a war Israel’s enemies are doing very well in. Hundreds of Israeli websites have been compromised in the past week, with groups of Arab and Muslim hackers leaving “calling cards” on sites they manage to infiltrate with bad code. The mechanics of defacing a website are not too complicated – there are many well-known flaws in web servers, and if a programmer isn’t careful (as many seem not to be), a hacker can easily subvert web pages, replacing the main index page with one of their own.
According to a professional spoke to this week (he’s a former “black hat” – i.e. bad guy – hacker, who saw the light and now uses his powers for good), today’s hackers are well-organized, and are highly skilled. Unlike the “script kiddies” of just a few years ago, who were more interested in showing off their skills, the 2008 brand of hacker is often politically motivated – hence the attraction of defacing Israeli web sites.
The hackers work in teams, with names like Moroccan Hackers, Islamic Crew, and Iran Black Hats, and many of them leave political messages – condemning Israeli raids in Gaza, or promising revenge. One team even uses Hebrew in its messages, describing in Hebrew how “when it’s our turn, we’ll be more humanitarian than you are.” They hack not only Israeli sites (that end in co.il or org.il), but apparently .com and .net sites that have Jewish or Israeli content, based on their names (www.kaitana.info, http://www.benhur-ltd.com) You can see examples of these hackers’ work at http://www.arabic-m.com/. There are solutions (an upcoming 21C article will highlight some), but often website owners don’t realize their sites are weak until it’s too late – and the anti-Israel hackers get to chalk up another “victory.”
Human nature
An SPNI hike - great even if you're not a VIP
Our American friend, let’s call her Lauren, was planning her son’s bar mitzvah celebration in Israel. In addition to the bar mitzvah itself, she was also organizing other activities that her family as well as parents, cousins, etc would enjoy during the week.
She emailed the Society for Protection of Nature in Israel and inquired as to whether there were any organized trips/hikes during the 10 days they were going to be here at the end of December. She was told no, but if you hire a van, we’ll provide you with a guide to take you around.
“I wrote back, thanks, but we’re trying to keep our budget down and we can’t really afford to hire a van,” said Lauren. Next thing she knew, the SPNI contact had written back and said, the van is on us, and one of our director will be taking you around.
Flabbergasted, Lauren didn’t quite know how to respond. “We’re not even members of SPNI,” she responded. “But we certainly wouldn’t mind joining.”
On the predetermined day, her family gathered at the agreed upon spot, and sure enough, a van showed up wth one of SPNI’s head honchos, and they spent 10 hours hiking in the Judean hills, through Sataf, and having a splendid time. The SPNI suit was atttentive, informative and treated the family like VIPs.
At the end of the day, he said to Lauren, “You have to meet Naomi Tsur. I’ll make an appointment for you.”
Uh, ok, who is Naomi Tsur, Lauren responded, and she was told that Tsur was one of Jerusalem’s new deputy mayors on Nir Barkat’s list, and as a former head of SPNI, was going to spearhead efforts to ‘greenify’ Jerusalem.
The next day, Lauren, her husband, and three of their four kids were escorted into Tsur’s office in Safra Square.
“So, tell me, why exactly are you here?” Tsur asked the family of American tourists.
“We have no idea, we thought you wanted to see us.” answered Lauren.
“Right then, we could have admitted that this must be a big mistake and we were obviously thought to be somebody that we weren’t. Or we could have carried on this charade and continued this painfully awkward dialogue,” chimed in Mr. Lauren. “We chose the latter.”
45 minutes later, they were ushered out of Tsur’s office, still having no idea why they had been singled out for special treatment by the SPNI.
“It was as if the United States took each family of tourists that entered the country, and gave them a van for the day, a guide, and a personal meeting with President Obama,” said Mr. Lauren.
Somewhere, I’m sure, there’s a big SPNI benefactor who’s wondering why the van and VIP day has been cancelled.
The filmmakers’ visit
There’s plenty of buzz surrounding the possibility that Israeli animated documentary Waltz with Bashir may end up nominated for a Foreign Language Oscar. The official Academy Award nominations won’t be announced until January 22, leaving us plenty of time to focus instead on how the movie has already helped a great deal with putting Israeli film on the international award map, and how the global movie industry and Israel have been going had-in-hand more and more.
Israeli lawmakers took major steps towards enabling Hollywood “runaway production” here this past summer.
More recently, studio mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg organized for Ben Stiller, Chris Rock and Jada Pinkett Smith to attend the Netanya premiere for Madagascar 2, whipping local fans and less local media outlets into a celeb-feeding storm.
And last month, William Morris Agency senior Motion Picture Department executive David Lonner teamed up with the Los Angeles Jewish Federation to bring several top movie execs to Israel to check out the scene here. Lonner organized a similar trip two years ago, but this time, he managed to bring big names like director Peter Sollett (Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist) and producers Nathan Kahane (Juno), Darren Star (Sex and the City) and Roger Birnbaum (The Sixth Sense, pictured). The Jerusalem Post recounts the experience in detail, with coverage including these moguls’ advice for how ambitious Israeli filmmakers can make it big overseas:
“They’ve got to cross the bridge,” says Kahane. “Make films inside the system, like some directors from Mexico have recently – Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Alfonso Cuaron and Guillermo del Toro. They came and conquered Hollywood, then they can go back and work at home again. But they’ve branded themselves in the international community. It creates the opportunity to grow and play in the A-game. And it broadens the conversation on cultural identity outside the film industry as well.”
Birnbaum agrees, saying, “If they want to be competitive in the world marketplace, they need to tell stories that are more universal and make movies that work all over the world.”
Moreover, the trip included visits to tourist hotspots, a Q/A session at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque and a meet-and-greet dinner with local industry luminaries like actress Ronit Elkabetz, the Oscar-nominated writer-director Joseph Cedar and writer Etgar Keret. “They were very eager, very knowledgeable, a talented and diverse group of people,” Kahane says of the group.
A new year
I was sitting this morning, checking out the status reports of my friends on Facebook, and thinking about the New Year, and the situation in the South.
The American friends were mostly writing about going to dinners, New Years resolutions, travelling, being cold, or referring to some other aspect of New Years and winter revelry. The Israeli friends were mostly alluding to the war in some fashion.
But that’s not to say that people here are fixated on Operation Cast Lead. My daughter reports that downtown Jerusalem was packed last night for ‘Sylvester’ celebrations, the endearingly nerdy way Israelis refer to New Years Eve, while thinking they’re being cool.
So we have a situation that, like the rest of the world, Israelis are out partying despite what’s going on in the south of the country. And when you stop to think about it, what’s going on in the south of the country is just mind-boggling. According to news reports last night, 600,000 Israeli citizens are within range of Hamas rockets and Kassams.
A Home Front commander was on TV advising residents of Beersheva, Sderot, Ashkelon and other southern communities not to gather for New Years Eve parties last night out of fear that a well placed rocket could cause major casualties. A couple that was getting married on New Years Ever in Beersheva changed the venue at the last minute for that very reason to the safer confines of Rehovot.
How long can we – meaning the people of the South and the country at large – endure this kind of situation? Well, for quite a while actually, as the Second Lebanon War in 2006 displayed. Israelis are quite resilient, and we realize that the pre-war situation, when it was just Hamas attacking us, is unacceptable.
But it would be nice if someone was telling us what’s going on, and providing the residents of the South with some encouragement and guidance during this unfathomable situation.
Why haven’t Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, or Ehud Barak or Tzipi Livni, given a ‘State of the Union’ address, particularly the residents of the South, and told them ‘listen, this is going to get bad, you’re going to get bombed and it’s going to be unpleasant and dangerous. But we’re doing this to disable Hamas from being able to fire rockets at you ever again.”
But no, nothing. It’s all implied that we – the government and the army – are going to do what’s neccessary, and you – the people – will only have to be told things on a need to know basis. We may be great fighters – although between the Lebanon War and our current inability to stop Hamas, that assumption is being challenged – but we’re terrible communicators.
Imagine the United States attacking Mexico in order to prevent a constant barrage of missiles from Tiajuana onto San Diego, and nobody from the government from the President on down addressing the people of San Diego and warning them that it’s going to be getting a little rough, but we have your backs covered.
Anyway, that’s what I get for checking status reports on Facebook. I guess if I was going to write a New Year’s wish for 2009 on my own status report, it would be that, instead of rockets, peace and quiet begin raining down on the South of Israel.
Subscribe
Subscribe to Israelity via email:
Social Media
Categories
- A New Reality
- Art
- Blogging
- Business
- coexistence
- Crime
- design
- education
- Entertainment
- Environment
- Food
- Foto Friday
- General
- health
- History and Culture
- Holidays
- Immigrant Moments
- Israeliness
- Life
- Medical Breakthroughs
- Movies
- Music
- News
- Nostalgia Sunday
- Picture of the Week
- Politics
- Pop Culture
- Profiles
- Religion
- Science
- Social Justice
- Sports
- Technology
- Travel
- tv
- War
The Face of Israel Today
-
About Israelity
Free newsletter
Stories from ISRAEL21c.orgPopular Posts