Home	Contents	Site Map	Links	Search

Truth in Photography

From Electronic Intifada web page

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. However, those unspoken words don't always tell the truth.

Here is a truthful caption for this picture:

Pictures can prove the opposite of what you think you see. For example, the endless pictures of Palestinian civilians confronting Israeli troops prove only that in most cases the Palestinians are in very little danger. As long as they don't threaten the lives of Israelis, by dumping rocks on the heads of Jewish worshipers or harboring armed men in their ranks, there is little chance that the soldiers will shoot at them, and the demonstrators are well aware of this. This is the reason there are so many pictures of Palestinians confronting Israeli soldiers and so few comparable pictures from other military occupations of the twentieth century - Germans, Soviets, or French in Algeria. Truly brutal occupying forces would shoot such civilians on sight. (Yaacov Lozowick, Right to Exist [New York: Doubleday], p. 282.)

Israeli-Palestinian Conflict:
Peace with Realism