These five photographs show the walls surrounding a building in Bethlehem known as ‘Rachel’s Tomb’. The walls have effectively destroyed a formerly busy and prosperous neighbourhood in the city and are outgrowths of the concrete wall separating citizens of Israel from those of Palestine. They promote a view that the means to achieve “security” in the region is by violently imposed separation. David Grossman, the distinguished Israeli writer, asserts that this bleak notion symbolically affirms the “triumph of despair over hope” by driving out the “healing power of the everyday, of the basic human desires for family, livelihood, and study: the fabric of life”. Yet, as they appear in the bible, Rachel herself and Ruth – the “Two Women of Bethlehem” of Selwyn’s paper – both speak precisely of the assertion of life over death, in so doing revealing themselves as figures deeply engaged in the fundamentally contemporary struggle between separation and sharing.

© Tom Selwyn

© Tom Selwyn

© Tom Selwyn

© Tom Selwyn

© Tom Selwyn

Professor Tom Selwyn, an anthropologist, is Professorial Research Associate at SOAS University of London and a Visiting Professor at Breda University, The Netherlands, and Bethlehem University, Palestine. He was awarded a Leverhulme Emeritus Professorial Research Fellowship in 2014.