Palestine

"Dima, at my request, accompanied us along the wall that now sets out the boundaries of her people’s existence. She obligingly posed in front of the tangle of concrete blocks, barbed wire and video cameras that mark out access to the colonies newly set up around Bethlehem. Until the moment when she told me to stop: we were photographing her in front of the wall under construction. 

Barely had we started the session when a patrol turned up. On the other side of the wall, kids worked up the courage to throw stones, or at least pretended to… She said to me straight away: we have to go. The leader of the intervention force had just issued an order: 'The next kid who throws a stone at us will get shot.'"

Extract from Zoé Zoé, Femmes du mondes, 2007, Éditions Gallimard