an image of resistance

I recently discovered this picture on a Facebook friend's profile, and instantly fell in love with it, because it seems to me to encapsulate so many things about the Palestinian struggle, and about asymmetric warfare in general. On one side, you have overwhelming military force; on the other, nothing but solidarity and defiance: a face-off between two kinds of power, staged at that ubiquitous symbol of occupation, the checkpoint.

The photograph is by Ryuichi Hirokawa, a Japanese photojournalist who has been photographing war zones for over four decades, and was one of the first journalists to get into Sabra and Shatila after the massacre whose anniversary was commemorated this week. Hirokawa has been interested in Palestine ever since 1967, when he went to work on a kibbutz in Israel as a young student, only to discover that it had been built on the ruins of a destroyed Palestinian village.

Although the black and white printing gives this photo a timeless quality, it was in fact taken in 2002, at Al Ram checkpoint in the West Bank. Hirokawa writes about the circumstances under which it was taken here, in yet another awesome feature I've discovered on The Guardian's website.