Roth - The power of the camera

Frimet/Arnold Roth..
This Ongoing War..
23 February '12..

We don't know much about the man in the picture above. Clearly he's a photographer, wearing a vest with the name of his occupation in large letters. (This is meant to keep him safe in dangerous neighborhoods like the one in which he's standing.) He's just doing his job, standing by the side of the road, in a town a few kilometers south of Jerusalem. A moment before this shot was snapped by Nasser Ishtayeh (who takes excellent pictures for several international syndication agencies), this photographer was standing and waiting, camera at the ready, while young men around him gathered cement blocks and rocks and prepared to hurl them at people inside cars with yellow license plates. Around here, yellow license plates mean Israeli vehicles. The people inside are statistically quite likely to be Jewish.

We know a few things, but not much, about the woman in the picture above.

Her name is Zahava Weiss. She is Jewish, a school-teacher. She is driving a family wagon on her way home to Karmei Zur. She wrote a Hebrew-language note that was translated into English earlier today and we published it here a few hours ago. She's not alone in the car. There's a female hitch-hiker sitting in the seat behind her. This is because in the front seat, there is a special seat/harness which under normal circumstances would be holding the woman's young child as securely as possible. The infant is not in the car which, as it turns out, may have saved the child's life, and the hitch-hiker whom we don't see also escaped injury because of that safety device. The woman is hunched up and looks frightened. The larger context tells us why.

Same picture as the two above but cropped differently. And also cropped differently from the similar one we published this morning (see here). Unlike that one, here we see the photographer standing on the far side of the road. And here we see the young Palestinian Arabs who have been waiting, rocks at the ready, to attack a car and its passengers, once they are able to ascertain that the license plate is yellow and the people inside Jewish. This picture tells us more than the earlier version.

(Read full "The power of the camera")

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