Jérôme Equer

Yet what do we know of the everyday life of the 1.4 million Palestinians stuck in this “open-air prison”? What sort of life do they have from one day to the next, caught on this strip of sand while war is waged against them, living in dire poverty, and for four years now? How have they survived now that the Erez check-point lets through only a few hundred workers every day, compared to the 80 000 people who used to commute to work in Israel? How do crop and cattle farmers manage to keep going with only the small stretch of land left to them, water rationing and their fields constantly being laid waste? How can the children – with some of the best school attendance rates in the world – cope with the pressure and hardship? What dreams can these young people have when unemployment and isolation cast a shadow over the future? What do the fighting forces stand for and what are their strategies? Then, like Russian dolls with elements enclosed within ever smaller and tighter elements, what do the Israeli settlers feel, living in voluntary isolation, and some of them for thirty years? What will the scheduled withdrawal mean for the people of Gaza? Will the handing over of 40% of their territory mean that the Strip will be sealed off even more hermetically? In a bid to find some answers to these questions, and with Hervé Kempf who wrote the text for the book, we adopted a straightforward, documentary approach, taking our time, staying behind, investigating both sides, coming back at different times of the year, once a season, calling on the same families, visiting the same districts, seeing people we knew, and always meeting new ones. We have tried, quite simply, to translate an extreme situation, using our own words and pictures, to convey the meaning.