Meeting ‘the Other’ Face to Face
With “The Enemy” project at M.I.T., the photojournalist Karim Ben Khelifa hopes to engender a form of empathy beyond the reach of traditional documentary film.
But when I stand, I quickly find myself in a featureless all-white room, a kind of Platonic vestibule. On the walls at either end are striking poster-size black-and-white portraits taken by the noted Belgian-Tunisian photographer Karim Ben Khelifa, one showing a young Israeli soldier and another a Palestinian fighter about the same age, whose face is almost completely hidden by a black hood.