Anata, West Bank 2008: Rebuilding Houses Among the Rubble
In the summer of 2008, I traveled to Palestine as part of an international delegation organized by several Spanish platforms. Our destination was Anata, a town east of Jerusalem in the West Bank, near an Israeli military base.
The following photos include some taken by myself and by the colleagues who accompanied me on the trip.
Upon arrival at Tel Aviv airport, two of our companions—Spanish citizens of Palestinian origin—were detained and interrogated for over seven hours by Israeli military personnel. They were subjected to constant psychological pressure: repetitive questioning, veiled threats, isolation. The reason was their surname, their origin.
They had done nothing. Their punishment was to exist.
For two weeks we worked with ICAHD (Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions) and Meir Margalit, a critical voice from within Israeli society.
We rebuilt two Palestinian homes that had been demolished by Israeli authorities, using reinforced concrete structures.
At the time, the murder of Rachel Corrie was still recent. She was crushed by an Israeli bulldozer while trying to stop a demolition in Rafah.
Her case became known internationally, but for every foreign name remembered, there are thousands of Palestinians killed without mention.
The occupation also manifests itself across the land: a matrix of control described by architect Eyal Weizman.
Every element in the Palestinian landscape is part of a system of domination: segregated roads, settlements, military bases that protect illegal Israeli infrastructure, antennas that justify the colonization of new hilltops.
The separation wall snakes deep into Palestinian territory to seize resources like water and arable land.
The occupation is not only military—it is legal, logistical, administrative, and spatial.
We walked along several segments of that wall in different towns. In Bethlehem, we painted with artist Maria Imaginario a mural on the militarized separation wall, in a section where no soldiers were present at the time. It wasn’t art: it was a symbolic act.
The mural portrayed the resistance of Palestinian hearts that refuse to be broken, but whose strength ends up breaking the very bulldozers sent to destroy them.
We also went to Hebron and Ramallah.
In Hebron, settler violence is constant. Many are armed, protected by the army, and live in homes taken from Palestinians. Entire streets have been emptied, entire neighborhoods blocked.
One day we were alerted to an imminent eviction in East Jerusalem. A Palestinian family was about to be expelled from their home after years of legal harassment. The settlers already had a court order. We arrived as fast as we could. Some of us chained ourselves to the entrance; others took up positions throughout the house. The Israeli soldiers arrived later and played with the wait, dragging the tension out for hours. They didn’t act immediately, but made their presence felt. It was a strategy of exhaustion. We didn’t prevent the eviction, but we forced it to happen under scrutiny, with witnesses.
In another action, we approached a militarized fence, and the Israeli army responded with tear gas. The repression was immediate.
You pass through dozens of checkpoints. They are spaces of control and humiliation. Israeli soldiers, 18 or 19 years old, decide whether you may pass, whether you wait, whether you get shouted at. Everything is designed to remind you that you have no power.
During those days, one question became unavoidable: what exactly is expected of a people under permanent occupation? How many martyrs will be enough?
The selective condemnation of Palestinian resistance, divorced from the context of occupation, is a form of complicity. Moreover, “Hamas” has become the permanent excuse to justify a collective punishment campaign against the entire Palestinian population. Israel uses its existence as a pretext to bomb, besiege, blockade, and dispossess millions of Palestinians.
This position aligns with that of Norman Finkelstein, whom I deeply admire.
One cannot demand that Palestinians resist purely while it is being bombed, imprisoned, and displaced.
Condemning the violence of the colonized without understanding its origin only reinforces the narrative of the occupier.
What I witnessed in 2008 was a landscape of destruction, control, and resistance.
Today, in April 2025, the situation in Gaza and the West Bank has reached levels of devastation without precedent.
According to the Ministry of Health in Gaza, at least 50,810 Palestinians have been killed and 115,688 injured since October 7, 2023.
The majority of these casualties are women and children.
Entire neighborhoods have been wiped out, infrastructure has collapsed, and famine is advancing rapidly.
Humanitarian agencies report that 1.1 million people face catastrophic levels of food insecurity, while aid convoys are blocked or attacked.
https://www.ochaopt.org/content/humanitarian-situation-update-278-gaza-strip
This is not a war. It is a genocide—called as such by jurists, scholars, and recently brought before the International Criminal Court (ICC).
The silence, inaction, and even support of the European Union and the United States are not neutral or innocent positions.
They are part of the structure that allows this to continue.
Publishing this is not only an act of memory—it is a refusal to remain silent…
(To be continued and expanded with more scenes, experiences and locations)
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