IN STEREO

Because we are between the borders, I don’t only know what we have. I also know what’s there on the other side: what they think, what they do in these areas. Maybe city people don’t know these things. What’s more beautiful than escaping the pressure in the village or in the city – or from the two sides too, the Israeli and the Authority – [is that] we also discover areas that we don’t know. I mean, we go camping a lot. We camp in one area for a while, then that’s it, we know it, [so] we go to another area to camp. We discover. We see homes that we’ve never seen: old, abandoned houses. We see lands that were confiscated. There’s a cave I saw a while ago, inside [Israel], in Sataf. You enter it [and] there are like veins that drop inside it, like… You know how ice is?

I like feeling more myself. I mean [like] a citizen in the area. Not like a slave, my life just going to work and sleeping, and waking up the next day to go to work. When I go to these border areas, I enter and venture despite the danger. I mean, people fear going to these areas because this may cancel one’s permission [to enter Jerusalem]. Maybe they’d get arrested; anything [could happen]. But when I enter these areas, I see new things – the country and the people of Palestine. I find new stories to talk about and I publish that there’s something like this. Maybe the stories were old, known, [but] now the Israelis started to say that they belong to them and that we don’t know. I see these things on the way too. – Mohammad