This is the Erez Crossing — a checkpoint
between Israel and the Gaza Strip.
Close to two-million Palestinians
live on the other side of this fence.
They've been largely isolated from the
rest of the world for more than a decade.
The lives of the people who
live here are shaped by
the unresolved conflict between
Israelis and Palestinians.
Marwan Tarazi is helping to
preserve Gaza's history.
This box contains photographs
from the 1940s through the 1970s.
They're part of a huge collection
from the former Kegham photo studio,
which which was later in the
care of Tarazi and his family.
This is a picture of Anwar Sadat
when he was a young officer in Gaza.
These photos were
taken by Kegham.
Here's a picture of
Mohammad Naguib,
the first president of the
Arab Republic of Egypt.
This is Che Guevara when
he came to Gaza in 1959.
He was welcomed by the mayor and
some other local dignitaries.
Here's Che meeting some Egyptian officers
who worked for the military administration.
This is the train station of the
railroad that connected Gaza and Egypt.
The station was
later torn down.
For Marwan Tarazi, these photos are
a treasure trove of Gaza's history.
The negatives and prints
reflect the culture and
identity of the
local residents.
But only a few of the
photographs have survived.
Many were not properly stored, and
suffered significant damage from moisture.
Some of the negatives
were never developed.
The date and location of the
photographs were not always recorded.
The photographs were taken
by this megham Djeghalian.
He was born in
Armenia in 1915.
His mother fled the Armenian genocide, and
took her infant son with her to Syria.
Kegham later settled in Jerusalem, and
in the early 1940s moved to Gaza,
where he started working
as a photographer.
I'll tell you about Kegham. He started
his photography studio in 1947.
Then, the war
broke out —
and in 1948, many Palestinians
fled to Gaza and the West Bank.
Kegham had experienced a
similar situation in Armenia.
He considered Gaza his second home, and
started taking pictures of various events —
including
the war.
He archived all of his photos, so that
future generations could see them.
Marwan Tarazi is trying to
preserve this material because
it provides a detailed account of
Gaza's rich and turbulent history,
with displacement and loss looming
large in people's collective memory.
Kegham and others took these
dramatic photographs in 1948.
After the founding of the state
of Israel that same year,
and the Arab-Israeli War that
followed almost immediately,
tens of thousands of Palestinians
sought refuge in Gaza.
Many were housed
in refugee camps.
In 1949, a United Nations
agency was created to
provide humanitarian aid and
economic support for the refugees.
Even today, many refugees
and their descendants
still live in refugee
camps like Al-Shati.
Over the
years,
they built houses and corrugated metal
structures to replace their tents.
Shareef Sarhan knows
this area well.
He's a photographer
and artist,
and spent many years working for the
UN's Palestinian refugee relief agency.
These children are fourth- or
fifth generation refugees.
Many of the Palestinians demand that they
be allowed to return to their former homes
in what is now Israel
and the West Bank.
I'm photographing you,
and she's filming me.
Thanks,
boss.
Like many Palestinian photographers
who came before him,
Shareef Sarhan believes that it's important
to portray every-day life here —
the stories that don't
make the headlines.
These crab fishermen
can't go far out to sea,
due to restrictions imposed
by the Israeli navy.
Through my photographs, I try to portray
the rich diversity of life in Gaza.
All that most people
know about Gaza is war,
destruction, the blockade,
and the occupation.
But there are other
sides to the story.
What is life like on the
street, and at home?
People hope, and love,
and go to work.
I try to capture all those aspects
of life in my photographs.
In ancient times, Gaza was an
important Mediterranean port city.
It was part of the Ottoman Empire
until the end of World War I.
The British Mandate over Palestine,
including Gaza, lasted until 1948.
Gaza was then administered
by Egypt until 1967,
and subsequently occupied by
Israel following the Six-Day War.
A form of Palestinian
self-government was created in 1994
with the establishment of
the Palestinian Authority.
In 2007, the radical Islamic group
Hamas took over the Gaza Strip.
Israel then stepped up its control
over Gaza's seacoast, air-space,
and land routes, citing
security concerns.
There have been three wars and
several smaller conflicts in Gaza
over the
last decade.
Palestinian militants
sometimes fire rockets at
fnearby Israeli
towns and cities.
Israel responds
with air-strikes.
Palestinians continue to hope for the
creation of their own independent state —
but those hopes
are fading.
The Middle East peace process
is currently stalled.
The new generation of Palestinian
photographers document the
ongoing conflict as
part of their work.
But Shareef Sarhan also believes
that he and his colleagues have
an obligation to record the history of his
homeland through visual representation.
Through the lens
of his camera,
he presents his own perspective on
the daily lives of Gaza residents,
and how they see
themselves.
A lot of people enjoy looking
around for old photographs.
They go through family
photo albums to find
out how their parents
or grandparents lived.
Our task is both important and difficult,
and it's not limited to photographers —
and that task is to document the
lives of Palestinians today,
and for the
next 100 years.
That's probably a lot easier today
than it was 50 or 70 years ago.
We need to put together an
archive that documents the
daily lives of Palestinians from
the beginning of the 20th century.
But how should
we do that?
How do we develop
this concept?
Where should this
archive be stored?
The goal is to help people
learn about their history —
through photographs, not just
by hearing stories about it.
Shareef Sarhan is a co-founder of the
artist collective called Shabbabeek —
which means windows
in Arabic.
Because Gaza is essentially
cut off, communication
with the outside world
is always an issue.
Few people visit the strip, and only
a small number of Gazans are able to
travel via Israel to the
West Bank or further afield.
We're
artists —
but we can't leave Gaza to visit museums in
London, Paris, or Rome, or anywhere else.
We can't even go to the West Bank
to see the works of other artists.
Our work at the Shababeek collective
is aimed at bringing the world to us.
Every month, or
whenever we can,
we host events where Palestinian or
foreign artists talk to us on Skype.
We want to promote the exchange of
culture, ideas, and expertise —
and bring all that to
Palestinian artists in Gaza.
Today Marwan Tarazi is visiting
the traditional market district.
Omar al-Mukhtar is one of the oldest
commercial streets in Gaza City.
This is where Kegham Djeghalian
opened his photo studio in the 1940s.
Marwan Tarazi's older brother
Morris began working for Kegham,
and learning the art of
photography, in the 1960s.
Thousands of kilometers and
a world away from Gaza,
Kegham Djeghalian’s
photographic legacy is also
being preserved in
southwestern France.
Anahid Boutin is the oldest daughter
of the Armenian photographer.
Anahid was born and
raised in Gaza.
What memories do
I have of Gaza?
It was
happiness.
He and my mother were
warmly welcomed in Gaza.
She did not know how
to speak Arabic,
but she spoke French and
a little bit of English.
She became very good friends with
some young women who were her age;
she was 20
at the time.
People were wonderful, and beautifully
accepted us as Armenians in Gaza.
Anahid Boutin grew up in
Gaza in the 1950s and 60s,
when the area was under Egyptian
military administration.
Later, she studied
in Egypt.
She now lives in France
with her husband.
When she moved to France, she brought
along photographs of her family.
She left her other
possessions behind in Gaza.
These pictures of Anahid Boutin
were taken by her father.
I did go upstairs several times
in fact to the darkroom.
And I would stand
there with him.
Now that we
are talking,
I remember the smell of all these
chemicals that were there.
All these buckets
of chemicals.
It's coming back to me and I
can feel it, and remember it.
And I would sit
there with him.
And I was always amazed to see
pictures appearing, you know —
slowly, slowly, after it had been
printed, and then put into the chemicals.
And the picture
started to appear.
Her father's studio
was a busy place.
Only a few people owned
their own cameras.
Many portraits from those days
have been preserved for posterity.
Everybody went to have
their portrait done there,
especially the middle class and upper
middle class and lower middle class.
They all went to have
their portrait done.
Everybody was photographed
by my father, I think —
either my father or my
uncle, or Coco at least.
The UN Relief and Works
Agency for Palestine
Refugees has its own
photo archive in Gaza.
The photographs document
the lives of refugees
and their descendants
over the last 70 years.
There's often a lot of detective work
involved in archiving these photos.
That's particularly true
of older pictures —
where there's little or no information
on where or when they were taken,
or the people who are
portrayed in them.
In the old days, they used a different
system for archiving than we do today.
Families came to the studio, the
photographer took their pictures,
and made a file
for each family.
He marked the negatives with everyone's
names, and stored them in a box.
But a lot of ordinary negatives were filed
without a date or any other information.
Today, photographers keep
track of everything —
including the date and the place
where the photo was taken.
That's not how they
used to do it.
When I first found the archive,
everything was just tossed together.
We use the same system for
black-and-white and color photos.
We write down all
the details —
the name of the photographer,
the year it was printed,
copyright date,
and the credits.
Together they look for clues
as to the photo’s provenance.
These photographers are documenting
and preserving Palestinian history.
Photographers around
the world do this.
They archive their work as art, and
they document history at the same time.
Recently, much of this
archive was digitized.
Since the early 1950s, UN photographers
have been documenting the lives of
Palestinian refugees and
their descendants in
Lebanon, Syria, Jordan,
the West Bank, and Gaza.
Time and time again, the lives
of Gaza residents have been
impacted by
international events —
like the Suez Canal crisis in 1956, which
led to war between Egypt and Israel.
In '56, there was the
war, when Israel stayed
in Gaza for about five
months, until March.
From November
to March.
And I remember details
of that period, as well.
In fact, as we lived on the main
street, my mother and the children,
all the Armenians, were immediately
sent to the house of Morris and Marwan.
There were some ancient houses
near the Christian church,
the Greek
Orthodox Church.
We were sent there because the house
was bigger, and had huge walls.
Gaza has lots of
ancient houses.
But my father did not come, because he
wanted to stay at home and take photos.
There are lots of pictures
from that period, I remember.
But I don't
have them.
He took a lot of photos of
the Israeli occupation.
Marwan Tarazi found these photographs of
dead civilians in one of his archive boxes.
It's not known when or where the
photos were taken, or by whom.
Even before
the 1956 war,
there were frequent
clashes between Israeli
troops and Palestinian
militias along the border.
There were casualties on all
sides, including civilians.
The war ended in
November 1956.
Shortly
afterwards,
the UN sent peace-keeping
troops to patrol both
sides of the border
between Egypt and Israel.
They stayed there until the Six-Day
War broke out in June 1967.
In '57, when the United Nations
troops arrived to protect Gaza —
that was
the UNEF —
Gaza became almost a
free zone for Egypt.
Egyptians came to Gaza to buy
what they did not have —
so Gaza flourished enormously,
enormously in that period.
You could feel
it, and see it.
And my father's work
also flourished —
because he was the agent
for camera companies,
for everything that had to do with
photography, like paper and film.
And he was the distributor for
all the other photographers.
And by then, many other young Palestinians
who were working either with my uncle,
or with Coco, or with my father started
their own businesses all over Gaza.
During this time, a number of high-profile
international visitors traveled to Gaza —
including Che Guevara
in June 1959.
Local newspapers reported
that the communist
revolutionary visited
the Shati refugee camp.
Hollywood actor Yul Brynner also visited
Gaza, on behalf of the United Nations —
to call attention to the plight
of refugees in the region.
In 1960, Indian Prime Minister
Jawaharlal Nehru arrived in Gaza to
visit Indian troops who were part
of the UN peace-keeping force.
Gaza's landscape has changed
considerably over the years.
Marwan Tarazi is trying to
document this transformation.
This is the Great Omari
Mosque, the oldest and
largest structure of its
kind in the Gaza Strip.
The centuries-old building
was severely damaged
in World War I and
rebuilt in the 1920s.
But some buildings have
fallen into disrepair —
like the former
Al-Nasr cinema.
Most of Gaza's movie theaters
were shut down in the late 1980s,
often due to political
considerations.
They were seen as having
a liberal influence.
A number of historic buildings that were
no longer used have been torn down,
like the former
train station.
Here, Marwan is visiting
the site of the railroad
that once operated
between Gaza and Egypt.
The days of train travel
in Gaza are long gone.
Over the years, restrictions
on the movements
of local residents have increased.
Only specific groups of people, such as
those who are ill or who are on business,
can apply for a permit
to travel via Israel —
but the application process
is long and complicated.
The Rafah border crossing
between Gaza and Egypt has
been frequently shut down in recent
years, usually due to political tensions.
Those who want to travel to
Egypt have to get permits
from the Hamas authorities
and the Egyptians.
Ayman Mghamis is a rapper
and music producer
who collects old
photographs of Gaza.
He used some of these pictures
in a video he made recently.
A lot of people want to leave Gaza,
says Ayman, but he's decided to stay.
I've found some great photos
of Gaza on the internet.
They show that people in the
Gaza Strip and elsewhere
in Palestine used
to have freedom.
This makes me want to
write songs about the
miserable conditions
that we live in today,
and how people
here used to live.
The economy in Gaza and
Palestine was growing.
They had trains
and an airport —
but there's no airport
in Gaza today.
It's just ridiculous that back in the 1960s
we had an airport in the Gaza Strip —
but now, in
2020, we don't.
Over half of Gaza's residents
are under the age of 30.
Most of them have never
been outside the territory.
Ayman Mghamis has come to see a
friend who's also a musician.
They're going to try
out a new song.
Musicians in Gaza don't
earn a lot of money.
Youth unemployment
is at 60%.
Full-time jobs
are rare.
Young people do odd
jobs just to get by.
Sometimes, their families
help out with money
The chorus says 'Get
me out of this coffin.
It's not you who
decides when I die.'
I want to
breathe —
but right now, I feel
like I'm buried.
It is my right to experience life, travel,
to laugh and plan for the future.
But here in Gaza, I
can't plan anything.
I don't know what's going
to happen tomorrow.
Will I still be alive?
Will there be a war?
I can't plan, and I
can't see the horizon.
Some older folks have told us
that they were happy back then.
They say they used to travel from
Gaza to Nazareth and other places,
and there were
no restrictions.
But now, there are border posts, and
problems based on religion and politics.
The whole situation
has changed.
The kind of life that these older
people enjoyed doesn't exist anymore.
I haven't gone to the border crossing
in a long time — about 15 years.
I'm 26 years old, so I should
have done some travelling by now,
to experience other people and
cultures — but I haven't.
Ayman Mghamis teaches a rap-music
course at a local break-dance school.
The project is
called Gaza Lives.
Rap is not considered part of
traditional Arab music culture.
The artists distribute their
music via the internet.
They have to get official
permission to perform in public —
and the authorities
usually don't grant it.
Sarah has written a text
about life in Gaza.
Gaza is a nice city, but
life here is hard —
with all the conflicts
and so forth.
And there's no
future here for me.
Marwan Tarazi is on his
way to the Church of
Saint Porphyrius, in the
heart of Gaza City.
Christians have played an important
role in the life of Gaza for centuries.
Saint Porphyrius is one of the
oldest active churches in Gaza City
and belongs to the Greek Orthodox
community, of which Marwan is a member.
An estimated one thousand Christians live
in Gaza, but that number is falling.
Much like other
youths in Gaza,
many young Christians are
eager to leave the territory.
Marwan has now stopped by his
sister's home for a visit.
After Kegham Djeghalian
died, their brother
Morris took over the
photo business in 1986.
His studio became just as
well-known as its predecessor.
The whole family loved
to work in photography.
We all learned
from Morris.
My sister really
enjoyed photography.
She'd work in the
darkroom all day long.
That was
her hobby.
She developed photos that
were taken all over Gaza.
Only women worked
in the darkroom.
Young men weren't
allowed to,
to guarantee the privacy of the
people in the photographs.
Business at many traditional photo
studios has fallen off in recent years.
These days, more and more people are taking
pictures with digital cameras or phones.
The Tarazis closed their
studio over a decade ago.
A lot has changed
in Gaza since then.
Gaza's population
is growing rapidly.
About 1.8 million people live in
the small territory wedged between
Egypt, Israel and
the Mediterranean.
Overcrowding has become
a serious problem.
The sea and shore are
part of Gaza's soul.
Local people love to come
here to take a break.
It's the only
place, they say,
where they can get away from the
stress and problems of daily life.
Shareef Sarhan tries to capture the mood
of the seashore in his photographs.
People here seem to be enjoying
themselves as they would on any beach,
anywhere in
the world.
The sea means
everything to us.
It provides the air we breathe,
and freedom and security.
It's our
future.
It's our blue
horizon.
Anahid Boutin still has strong
ties to Gaza, through her
fond memories of the past,
and images of her father.
She also remembers the friends
she made when she lived there.
She still stays in touch
with one of those friends.
But Anahid has not been to
Gaza for more than a decade,
because of the
travel restrictions.
So the two friends
talk by phone.
With a Bedouin
costume.
Me with a Bedouin costume,
sitting next to a television.
So ridiculous.
We speak like we
did just now.
We talk about
everything.
She told me that Nisreen, her daughter
in Canada, has made a wonderful Maqluba.
OK? We try to live as
if life is normal.
She lives as if life is
normal, and I encourage her.
How else can
you live it?
Can we keep crying
all the time?
And we do
cry then.
In spite of all the beautiful things I
said about Gaza, or my joy in Gaza,
and my happiness in Gaza, it's true that it
was a region that was constantly at war,
and constantly
changing.
Changing situations
and all that.
And yes, it would be very
good if somebody would
put things together to
preserve the history,
at least the history
that we know of Gaza.
And the documents
are there.
I mean, the prints are
there, somewhere.
That would represent a part
of the history of Gaza —
a troubled history,
a moving history.
The photos from Gaza
connect people from
different places and from
different generations.
Like Marwan Tarazi, with his
treasure-trove of photographs,
they all want to preserve this
material for future generations.
Their common goal is to
keep alive the history of
Gaza and the cultural
identity of its inhabitants.
These negatives and prints are so important
to me because this is our heritage,
and our
civilization.
All that we have left
are these photographs.
Everything else was destroyed
in the wars and conflicts.
These negatives and prints
mean everything to me.
