Driving in Palestine التحرّك في فلسطين

?In Driving in Palestine, Rehab Nazal takes readers on a sojourn across the prison-like landscape of the Palestinian West Bank, captured in a collection of haunting black-and-white photographs. Images of guard towers, razor-wire fencing, and concrete walls dominate the monochromatic hues in these photos, providing a stark visual testament to a journey across a carceral geography. What is particularly compelling is how the book conveys this visual sense of territorial confinement. All the photos were taken by the author in vehicles moving along roads in various districts of this barrier-laden and surveillance-stricken land. It's a wonderfully successful and original idea for conveying the ground-level atmospherics of the confined and fractured West Bank landscape. There are many works that enlist photo imagery to represent the carceral character imposed on the Palestinian West Bank by the State of Israel, but I am not aware of any book that has used the car as a vantage to recreate the sensory experience of confinement in the way Driving in Palestine does. It is a truly ground-breaking tour of a land that has endured suffering far too long.? - Gary Fields, University of California ?Nazzal's photography book, Driving in Palestine, presents a vivid and powerful account of the infrastructures that segregate, surveil, and suppress Palestinian movement ? checkpoints, watchtowers, illegal colonies, and the expansive Apartheid Wall. The images and accompanying testimonies capture how Israel's occupation continues to fracture and militarize the ever-shrinking landscape of Palestine. And while the camera's lens is a window to the architecture of colonization and mobility control, it also offers an aperture into the courage ? and even defiance ? that marks a Palestinian's daily travel.? - Norma Rantisi, Concordia University ?Rehab Nazzal's Driving in Palestine traces her itineraries across a landscape fractured by the mundane and militarized structures of settler colonialism. The photographs she takes along the way document the texture and imposition of Israel's colonial impediments while clearly asserting the power of the watched who are always watching back. Alongside the photos, Nazzal weaves in narrative reflections on her images from several writers/intellectuals/activists. The result is a visual symphony that evinces what Mohammed El-Kurd in his contribution calls, ?the dignity of negating the cement. - Maryam S. Griffin, University of Washington