CHAIN & ITAMAR

The camp wasn’t in the middle of nowhere, it was on the outskirts of nowhere. When Itamar missed the bus he had to walk an hour through the desert from Shivta. His military service ended at 21 and he’d only just turned 18. His regiment, The Rams, moved every three months but this did nothing to alleviate the boredom. He was already tired of the smell of boot polish and WD40, of the endless sand and the routine of army life. Thursdays were good though. He got to go home and was back in Jerusalem for Shabbat. Sundays weren’t so good. So this particular Sunday he stayed home with his girlfriend. Going AWOL meant when he returned to camp, it wasn’t to his usual dorm but to a cell. The boredom was more extreme but ‘it wasn’t so different from the regular army’. Itamar passed the time smoking cigarettes and bartering for cigarettes. He wrote appeal letters for inmates in exchange for ten-packs of ‘the roughest Israeli smokes’, each green packet made four links to his chain. This chain represents each day of his time in prison, the last red link is taken from the celebratory Winston that he smoked on his release.

01 Dec 2013