Simon Weil wrote that attention is the rarest kind of generosity. How to extend this generosity to a single photograph, made in 1949 in the port city of Haifa, in the new state of Israel? There are three soldiers from the Haganah watching over a Palestinian father and his three sons. Each face has a story to tell as they take a long walk into exile, feel their homeland in moments that seem to last forever, but are never long enough.

"The world is the closed door. It is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through. Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but it is also their means of communication. Every separation is a link." Simone Weil

“I appreciate your visitations to moments past, to photographic evidence of coercion that resulted in the numbers of Palestinian refugees. The extent my mother repeatedly parroted the state narrative that Palestinians fled of their own volition is challenged by photographs such as these.” bh Yael

“From the end of November 1947, one place after another was destroyed and turned to rubble to prevent Palestinians who were expelled from returning to their homes. So too, this systemic destruction was sought out to facilitate the fabrication of an Israeli memory from which Palestine could fade away and emerge as the name of a threatening enemy. Alongside the expulsion of the 60,000 Palestinians from Haifa alone, Zionists started to destroy the heart of the city, approximately 220 buildings… This condition inscribed here reveals itself in endless images taken throughout the years, in which it is always Palestinians who are being targeted. Under UN leadership, the world clock was set on May 15, 1948, to mark the birth of Israel, while Palestinians’ accounts of the genocide they endured were silenced, distorted, and replaced with other narratives. Institutions of culture and education flourished to promote this newly invented colonizing subject, the Israeli, whose identity is premised on the obliteration of the memory of its own birth.” Ariella Aisha Azoulay