Yaqoub Al-Natsheh (Abu Waheed) has worked with glass since he was a child; his family’s glassmaking history can be traced back to the 13th century. Each family in the trade used to have its own traditional recipe, but since Israel carved up the West Bank with its illegal apartheid wall, traditional recipes were replaced by melting down recycled glass into raw material.

Abu Waheed’s studio is located 50 feet from the Ibrahimi Mosque, where in 1994 a Jewish American settler massacred 29 Palestinian men during morning prayer. Since then 900 illegal Jewish settlers have moved into the heart of Hebron, protected by a thousand occupation soldiers and their checkpoints, where Palestinians experience daily violence and intimidation as they try to live their lives in their own city.

I filmed Abu Waheed with my friend Fadi in May 2022 and as we parted ways Fadi told me “I think things are going to be OK." The next morning, his journalist cousin Shireen Abu Akleh was deliberately targeted and killed by an occupation sniper, despite wearing her high-visibility press uniform.

The title You May Laugh at Me a Little refers to an expression Abu Waheed used as he described his work process:

Now the designs,

you may laugh at me a little...

The shape comes to my mind

mostly when I'm back home,

and I’m about to fall asleep.

I have a cup of coffee and a cigarette,

and think about what I shall make the following day.

The next day at the furnace,

I begin to shape what I imagined.