Pillar of the Magnum agency, one of the most famous in the history of photography, Larry Towell is rightly considered one of the best Canadian photographers. He was in Montreal in recent days to get his hands on a documentary that Hubert Hayaud and Matthieu Rytz are preparing about him.
This time I missed his visit. At least I was able to get my hands on his most recent book, an old work that he had devoted, for many years, to the Mennonites of America and which he brilliantly revisited. Towell photographed like no other these monks who arrived partly from Ukraine in the 19the century. Behind the wall of our differences, he shows, there is a shared humanity.
In one of the documentaries already devoted to Towell, the photographer is in Palestine. Armed with only his camera, he ventures near the wall that surrounds the Palestinians. From the top of a watchtower, a soldier orders him to stop moving forward, to move away without delay. And Towell vociferates, against this Israeli, that he is only doing his job. To this sentinel who suddenly feels a little disarmed, Towell affirms that she can shoot well, but that he will continue to capture the world we are dealing with. His work, we understand, consists of extracting from the light something to address the universal, without being hostage to an ideology.
When the godless Hamas attacked Israel, I thought of Towell, of his desire to preserve our humanity.
The despicable massacre, perpetrated by Hamas, was revealed to the world on October 7. The Radio-Canada news bulletin juxtaposed, pell-mell, a series of images coated with a musical sauce like sobbing along with violins. In his conferences, the fiery trade unionist Michel Chartrand always wondered what the point of the violin in news bulletins was, if not to stifle reason by drowning it in emotion.
At the head of Israel today is one of the most extreme governments in the history of this country. This government, dominated by fundamentalists and radicals, went so far as to want to crush the independence of the justice system under its heel, which was rightly decried, in a series of unprecedented demonstrations, by a large part of the population. population. These opponents, very numerous, felt that Israel was being diverted from its reason. At a time when their army has remained speechless in the face of a major terrorist attack, some also feel that the state has in fact failed them. But all criticism is now thrown behind the screen of current events, while Netanyahu’s government takes the opportunity to give itself a makeover, purifying itself of its troubled past in the great bloody fire of rage which follows terror .
In 1947, the United Nations finally intended to allow Jews around the world to establish a national territory. The UN proposed its plan to divide Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state, according to an unequal distribution of territory which, from the start of the plan, would be contested and refused by the Palestinians. The war breaks out. The Palestinians are crushed and then pushed back. They are left with a quarter of the territory, while the Israelis suffer significant losses. The great ball of pain will not stop its dancers.
The conflict boiled over again in 1967, during the Six Day War. Israel ultimately considers its territory to include all of Palestine. New blitzkrieg in 1973. The eyes of the whole world are once again on the Middle East. In the exhibition devoted to Leonard Cohen by the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art, just before closing its doors for an indefinite period, a window reminded us that even this bard of genius, willingly masquerading as an apostle of fraternity, had took part in this conflict by offering a concert tour on the front lines.
Between two news bulletins on the war in Ukraine, it happened, here and there, that a dispatch informed us that yet another Palestinian house had been razed by the Israeli army, because one of its occupants was suspected of be linked to Hamas. Authorization to collectively punish Palestinians has always been given promptly. It is today endorsed by the United States, while Canada remains behind.
To explain the surprise and pain of Israelis at the massacres committed against them, the image of the September 11 attacks was projected around. After the savagery of these attacks in 2001, calls for revenge were quickly heard, in outings that called for even more blood and savagery. I remember that even a distinguished professor from Laval University, usually so calm, began to assert in The duty that “a rat must be called a rat, recognized as such and distinguished from other species”. This climate will make it possible to launch military operations which we know today have gone beyond the most basic common sense. In Iraq as in Afghanistan, innocent civilian populations have largely paid the price, without this leading to the eradication of Islamist unreason. On the contrary.
Israel’s victory “will be that of the civilized world,” Netanyahu proclaimed. Are we sure of this? On Sunday October 8, his Minister of Defense declared that the Palestinians must be treated like animals. “We are fighting animals,” said Yoav Gallant. Gas, water, electricity, food, nothing was going to enter Gaza, he said. Except the army.
In this pocket handkerchief that is the Gaza Strip, thousands of bombs fall from the sky. Hospitals are overwhelmed. The assault is still given. Should we ask civilians to cling to the clouds there since all hope of life on Earth now seems forbidden to them? The long sobs of autumn violins will change nothing. Can killing indiscriminately, on all sides, allow political redemption? What picture will we end up keeping of this mess?