Fashion Shoot Slated for Israeli Barrier

By STEVE WEIZMAN, Associated Press Writer

JERUSALEM - An Israeli fashion house plans to shoot its summer catalog at Israel's West Bank security barrier this week, the company said Monday, less than a week after troops shot dead two Palestinians protesting the network of walls, wire and ditches.

AP Photo AFP Slideshow: Mideast Conflict

A statement from the fashion house, Comme-il-faut, said the one-day shoot Wednesday would take place at a section of the barrier on the edge of Jerusalem "for the purpose of creating a dialogue around boundaries."

The statement said the event would contrast beauty, femininity and fashion with a "concrete wall of insult, ugliness and humiliation."

Israel says it needs the barrier to prevent suicide bombers and other attackers from entering its towns and cities. Last Thursday two Palestinian protesters were shot dead by Israeli forces not far from the site the company picked to send its models and photographers.

Palestinians say the partially built barrier — which would dip deep into the West Bank in some parts of its planned 400-mile route — is a land grab meant to prevent them from establishing an independent state.

Under international pressure, Israel has begun making changes in the route of the barrier to minimize hardship on the Palestinians, thousands of whom face being cut off from their farmland, schools and medical facilities elsewhere in the West Bank.

Comme-il-faut got its summer catalog idea from students at a Jerusalem design school doing a course on the use of ideology in advertising. They came up with the concept of fashion on the fence, with the slogan, "women cross boundaries."

The fashion firm's CEO, Sybil Goldfiner, said the project reflects Comme-il-faut's feminist agenda. Asked by The Associated Press if she was concerned that Wednesday's front line fashion fest could be seen as trivializing a deadly serious issue, she responded: "You're a man, you wouldn't understand."

"We live in a state of constant trivialization," she added. "Every time there is a terror attack we soon afterward go back to life as normal. We want to emphasize those paradoxes."

Noam Hofstatter, of human rights group B'Tselem, said that if Comme-il-faut really meant to draw attention to human rights abuses caused by the fence, "then that would be welcome."

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