H2Hebron

A street serves as a crossroads of various narratives and fates.

H2 is the Israeli-administered area in Hebron, the most populated Palestinian city in the occupied West Bank. It is “sterilized” according to the terminology of the Israeli army, that is to say emptied of its Palestinian inhabitants to “protect” a few families of ultra-radical Jewish settlers. A zone where destinies and narratives intersect, juxtapose and clash in a violent and absurd microcosm.

This work began in 2017 when Ruth Rosenthal contacted her childhood friend S. who had become a settler in Hebron, in order to record some long interviews. Winter Family then decides to extend this research by meeting those who frequent this neighborhood: Palestinian residents, resistance fighters and political leaders, ultra-Zionist Jewish settlers, Israeli soldiers, international observers and activists... They all describe their H2 zone by telling their history, their stories, their myths, their texts, their massacres and their laws. They speak the city and their too radical lives, chosen or subjected, in the shadow of the Tomb of the Patriarchs / Ibrahim Mosque and the feeling of exaltation or exhaustion generated by an unjust military occupation, increasingly violent and that persist. Manipulating a model, an exact replica of the area, Ruth Rosenthal guides us through zone H2 by transmitting these dramatic testimonies.