When I touch the land, I feel the softness. When I watch the landscape, I feel emptiness. When the rain touches the land, it becomes tough, and behave salinity, floods create and modify my endless landscape. The landscape feels open, but something stopped my footsteps.
(Loess is silt sediment, which formed by the accumulation of wind-blown dust.)
This series taken on the last six years when I drove along the Israel-Jordan border were the farming communities, and the silence of the picturesque landscapes fascinate me – on the one hand, softness and quiet on the other hand stiff. This route follows the border between Israel and Jordan. The look-out points along the way offer stunning views of cultivated fields, the Edom mountains and the Arava streambed. I wrote above poetry during my work on this project. The region the silents and the open areas of this region are like a meditation process; in one hand there’s a free landscape, but in the other, you can not just go and cross the board to Jordan. Fences and suspected minefields restrict your steps, as a silent testimony to conflicts occurred in this area in the past.
The Peace Road is the name of a route that follows the length of the border between the State of Israel and the Kingdom of Jordan. Along the way, you can view the cultivated fields of the settlements of Arava (a region in the Israeli desert bordered with the Kingdom of Jordan), and across the border, you can view the mountains of Edom.
Despite the extreme weather conditions in the Arava, much radiation, lack of precipitation and salinity of the soil – Farmers manage to work the land and make some of these disadvantages advantages by advanced technologies and cultivation methods developed specifically for this region. These methods have also been exported from the Arava to many other places in the world and allow for the existence of agriculture in arid desert regions.
The border between Israel and Jordan first determined at the time of the British Mandate in 1922. In the region of the Peace Road, the borderline drawn in the middle of the Arava streambed. During the negotiations for the peace accord with Jordan in 1994, it became evident that some of the agricultural fields of the settlements Hatzeva and Idan located on the other side of the streambed. The Jordanians received alternate lands in exchange for the farming areas of the Israeli communities that retained. A drive on Peace Road illustrates this. Treaty of Peace Between the State of Israel and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan signed in 1994. The contract signed by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and King Hussein of Jordan. And US President Bill Clinton as a witness.
