-Operation “Guardian of the Walls”

Watching the events that are currently unfolding in Israel and Palestine, we are witnessing a chain of events that we have already seen many times in our short lives. The conflict over the land between the river and the sea is in made up of a lot of different stories and tragedies, yet the same things and the same themes keep repeating themselves, in a endless cycle of violence with only slight “new variations to the same old shit”, as an Israeli friend of mine put it the other day.

-Nightclothes For Guests

Tel Aviv, Israel – 12th of February, 2014: A youth movement shirt and army sweatpants serve as nightclothes for guests sleeping over at Avichai’s flat. Past membership in Zionist youth movements and in the country’s armed forces are both extremely common among Israelis, leaving many traces such as identification clothes from one’s army unit, training sportswear and more or less funny shirts commemorating events or anniversaries.

-Fighting Falcon

Ma’ale Tzviya, Israel – 10th of February, 2014: An F-16 fighter jet of the IAF (Israeli Air Force) flying over Ma’ale Tzviya, a small communal settlement lying in the middle of several Palestinian communities in the Galilee. Numerous jets flew over the yishuv (village) repeatedly for about an hour and at a low altitude, filling the surrounding valley with the sound of their engines.

-Go to the Nearest Shelter

Over the course of three days at the end of May, Israeli authorities held a nationwide drill of the Home Front Command, the IDF’s unit tasked with protecting Israel’s civilian population, testing and displaying its capabilities to respond to what has become the Middle East’s most popular way to wage war against Israel: shooting rockets at it.

-Nahal Haredi

Jerusalem, Israel – 26th of May, 2013: Soldiers of the Nahal Haredi battalion, a religiously observant unit of the IDF, take part in their swearing-in ceremony at the Givat Hatachmoshet (Ammunition Hill) museum.