Maree Makom

Partition
In one of those abandoned fields, behind the row
of bald hills toward which the highway is wellpaved
only up to the juncture of the road leading
to the ugly stone houses with the jutting red roofs
of the nearby Jewish settlement, stands a singlestory
cement structure. The edge of a thin flowery
mattress is visible at the entrance to the back
room, and half of the rectangle of a window. In the
front room four men are waiting. The three young
ones are leaning over the coal-black mouth of an
oven built of earth upon which an ornamented
copper cof feemaker is heating. The four th man, an
older Bedouin in white jellaba, toward whom H.’s
questions are addressed, is sitting cross legged
slightly further away under a high porthole only
hinted at by a diagonal ray of light breaking on the
ground below it. The old man’s murmurs persist
even while the eye stumbles upon the narrow
handsome and sealed features of the lef t-most
man looking beyond and over the camera, his eyes
sharp and refusing contact, the rage blockedclenched
in them, folded burning and inactive like
his body, or the dark pair of hands cuppinglocking
the face of the barefoot teen resting to
his right on a dusty wooden case.
Video Recording Site
Al-Khalil surroundings. A Bedouin tribe
settlement
Video Recording Occasion
1998. Production of a video piece by L. and R.
Participants
H. - A resident of Al-Khalil and an Al-Khalil
municipality engineer, who is aiding the two
women in the making of their piece
Four Bedouin men from the visited tribe
L. - An Israeli videographer residing in Tel Aviv
R. - An Israeli writer living in Jerusalem