Khirba
On Saturdays during my childhood, I used to walk with my father from our home in Yad Eliyahu to Kfar Shalem. Along the way, we would always pass an ancient structure that we simply called a Khirbeh (a ruin)—a common term that became, for me as for many Israelis, a way to describe debris without questioning its history or politics. Today, I explore my immediate surroundings, returning to the places etched into my childhood memories. About two years ago, I walked that same path again, but this time I stopped. I began photographing the tomb of Sheikh Salama Abu Hashim, which once served as the mosque of Salma village before it was captured in 1948 and its residents fled. Later, it became the "Shimshon Club," where neighborhood children ate lunch and did their homework. Due to its sacredness, the building was spared from demolition, remaining an isolated remnant and a testament to a presence erased from both the public square and collective memory.
I circled the tomb for long months, at different hours and through changing seasons. The sealed, locked structure forced my camera and my body into a cyclical, almost ritualistic path around its perimeter, unable to step inside. Photographing the interior was only possible through narrow slits—a voyeuristic gaze that revealed thick walls and vaulted ceilings layered with modern graffiti, vandalism, and neglect that speak to the site's lost sanctity. Through this slow act of photography, I try to surface the tension between the landscape as it appears today and the loaded history it carries.
The photographs capture the tomb from all angles—the holes torn into its dome by past shelling and combat, alongside the olive trees and prickly pear cacti growing wild around it. In the spring, they burst with green, threatening to cover and conceal the structure entirely. Directly adjacent to the tomb now stands a Tel Aviv Municipality sign, announcing the future establishment of an "urban community nature park." The sign presents a green, ecological narrative completely detached from the site's past, part of a mechanism that replaces a story of displacement and destruction with the language of leisure and nature. My camera does not attempt to reconstruct the past, but rather to linger on what is present and what is absent, and on the history that never truly disappears but continues to operate beneath the surface.