Gatekeeper

The Hebron Hills garbage dump serves the Israeli settlements in the area and is a source of an eked-out livelihood for 200 Palestinian families from in and around the Palestinian village of Yatta. The stories of eleven-year-old Harun, seventeen-year-old Ibrahim, forty-year-old Yusuf, and sixty-year-old Badawi, expose a daily struggle for subsistence in an inescapable reality of occupation. These are the children of the Occupation, born after 1967, who know no other reality. The violent daily struggle for every scrap of metal in the dump distracts from other everyday pains: a son who sold lands to the Jews, a woman who cannot reunite with her family in Jordan, a father serving a life sentence in Israeli prison, and illiterate parents who push their children to work in the dump while simultaneously holding onto the dream of seeing them break out of the vicious cycle and completing a high-school degree. For the average person in Yatta, who has lost all faith in politics, personal success and education have become a personal weapon against the Occupation, one that might extricate them from the suffocating trap of the garbage dump, both literally and figuratively.