NOTE #10 PALESTINIAN GRAFFITI

It is late at night and I am hopelessly lost in the labyrinth of Split's old town. Above me and deep beneath my feet, the evidence of thousands of years of cultural history in this strange palace, once the retirement residence of a Roman emperor, is blurred. What have all these walls seen? So much has been destroyed here over the centuries and so much has been built from the ruins of the old buildings. The remains of temples and state rooms now serve as ordinary residential buildings, and a stone sarcophagus, the remnant of a former chapel, stands in the middle of a wine bar. People dance next to the remains of Roman mosaics.

This place is unlike any other, resembling a distant city full of beauty and tragedy: Jerusalem. I have already recounted my experiences in this city, when I was writing my law thesis on the human right of religious freedom, in my Note #1 ‘Jerusalem's Underworld’. At that time, there was no eleven-metre-high concrete wall, which now winds its way through the holy city like a grey snake, separating children from their parents and farmers from their fields. Ten years ago, I wanted to film this wall for my film ‘Separated’. But this third and so far last trip to Israel ended before it had even begun. I travelled without my children on a cold November day and pretended to be a tourist. That alone was enough to make me look suspicious to the Israeli secret service at Madrid airport. They knew a lot about me, but they had no idea that I had been in contact for weeks with a Palestinian camera team with whom I wanted to film the human stories surrounding the wall in the West Bank. In the end, I was allowed to fly, but the secret service agent did not let me out of his sight. I asked my parents to alert the Austrian embassy if I did not give the all-clear immediately upon my arrival in Tel Aviv.

But they let me go, and I breathed a sigh of relief when I crossed the wall into the Palestinian West Bank that same evening. What I found behind it then, and still find today more than ever, is the damning evidence of an inhumane ‘defence policy’ for which, despite all my sympathy for the Israeli people, I can find no justification. The memory of everything I experienced there in those days still fills me with anger and sadness today. One encounter in particular has stayed with me. There is a picture of it that I cannot forget. An old woman sits on the dusty ground baking flatbread over an open fire. Behind her, the concrete wall topped with barbed wire borders directly on the back wall of her small cottage and obscures the view of the world beyond. The wall is so disproportionately high that it blocks the old woman's view of the sky and casts deep shadows over the small garden. What she misses most are the sunsets, says the old woman resignedly. On this trip to Israel, I learned that you can take everything away from people, even the sun. In protest, her grandson has painted a huge, colourful graffiti: a fist breaking through the wall and revealing a view of a paradisiacal seascape. A wonderful daydream surrounded by the grey of the concrete, which perhaps makes life behind the wall a little more bearable. I remember this graffiti every time I encounter borders and walls anywhere in the world. And I think to myself that you can take everything away from people, even the sun, but never their hope and dreams.