Top Palestine
This is my last blog post. I have been thinking about it for quite some time now. And however ridiculous the idea might sound to you, it has been great fun for me. Early in my stay in the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt) I noticed that quite a few stores had “top” in their names. Right outside the apartment in which I have been living you can for example find the two stores, “top house” and “top hair”. What is this, I asked myself. Just a coincidence, or are there abnormally many “top”-stores in the occupied Palestinian territories? So one day among days (as they say in Arabic) when Lars and I bought tobacco for our argileh in “top smoker” and Marie gave me an avocado also labeled “top”, the project was born: Documenting as many “top” things as possible!
The project has now come to an end, and the result you can see in this, my very last, blog post. 29 “top” signs from different places in the occupied territories: Hebron, Beit Sahour, Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Ramallah, Qalqiliya and Nablus. Many people have been involved in this project, and I even was pulled over by the police in Qalqiliya when photographing “top cars”. I had a hard time making him understand what I was doing, but he also had a hard time explaining why the sign “top cars” was a military installation, which could not be photographed.
And so it ends: thirty times “top” for the occupied Palestinian territories! But why do I keep on writing “the occupied Palestinian territories,” instead of the West Bank? Because in spite of the suffocating occupation and shocking injustices in the oPt, it has been toP to be here.
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