The latest art gallery in Tel Aviv is the city itself. Alternately put up - and ripped down from - a half-dozen city sidewalk locales, is a photographic exhibit depicting the struggles between Israeli security forces and peace activists protesting the construction of the separation fence a small Palestinian village in the West Bank.

"I didn't want photographs of soldiers beating people," one photographer said, his earnest conviction underlying the approach of the contributors (working under the name Activestills) to their public exhibit.

"If I were submitting photographs to a newspaper, I would submit a picture like that. We didn't want to shock people, we wanted to make them think."

Every Friday for the past year, Palestinian, Israeli and international activists have gathered for a weekly face-off in Bil'in (population: 1,600), the rural community four miles east of the Green Line border with Israel.

The demonstrations have become a reigning symbol of the fence controversy and a sort of hands on "Israeli-Palestinian conflict 101" curriculum for internationals seeking exposure to the many passions and impossibilities of everyone's favorite Middle Eastern conflict.

Though the demonstrations are now a staple on Friday evening news broadcasts, the tradition began with only a handful of Israelis joining Palestinian villagers in protesting the construction of the fence. Its proposed route is to isolate residents from some 60 percent of their land on which most of their olive trees are grown.

Activists from near and far gradually received word, and protesters these days reach anywhere from 200 to 1,000 in number. The name of the game doesn't quite amount to friendship circles and "We Shall Overcome," however. Provocations by security forces or protesters (depending on who you ask) turn into full scale riots, and nine unarmed demonstrators have been killed during the demonstrations.

In the face of bulldozers, teargas and rubber bullets, and despite confrontations that flare at times into violence, protesters brandish nonviolent resistance as their most powerful weapon in the press and in courts.

Documentation is a close second. Though Bil'in is now an old haunt for photojournalists and documentary filmmakers, many demonstrators also come bearing cameras in order to "contribute to general awareness of the issue while keeping in check violence on the part of the security forces," according to a statement by the exhibit's creators.

The presence of the photographs on the side of a Tel Aviv building will not cause the average soldier to think twice before he acts, but the intended trickle-down effect of the exhibit is the same: to kindle a sense of self-consciousness in the Israeli mind.

This objective is what establishes protest art as an art form in its own right; its purpose is to be received. Illegal flyering on public walls may be less glamorous than an art gallery, but "we didn't want to appeal only to the gallery crowd. We wanted everyone to see it."

The crucial barometer of public art, and particularly protest art, is its effectiveness.

Violent pictures would only antagonize the average Israeli viewer, and an understanding of the Israeli psyche underscores the process by which the photographers chose the 16 photographs to be displayed, from a collection of hundreds.

Rural landscapes, familial moments and celebration are evoked here alongside bulldozers, rubble, despair and riot gear. The objective of these contrasts is obvious: humanize the Other, then present the struggle.

It's difficult not to identify with a romantic black and white shot of a grinning little girl, the palpable anguish of elderly women or even the despondency of a man sitting on a pile of rubble next to a sign reading "No Walls Allowed."

Bil'in has made its name from the battle against the fence, but the local Popular Committee has recently turned its attention to another front. On the village land confiscated by the fence lie hundreds of housing units constructed without government permits by the settlement of Modi'in Illit.

This effective expropriation of Bil'in's land by a settlement has raised public outrage and government concern, and is to go before the Israeli High Court of Justice on February 1.

Two shots featured in the exhibit show Palestinians sitting on rubble or torn down olive overlooking their farmland, now dotted by replicated settler homes. These images best illustrate broader symbols of the conflict; the vastness of the landscapes meets the cookie-cutter methodology of construction to evoke the danger of the figurative walls between the two sides.

In the words of one photographer, "The basic instinct of the Israeli when seeing a soldier is identification. When I did shoot a military picture, I wanted the soldiers to represent a symbol, not to show a face."

Security forces appear in less than half of the exhibit's photographs, and as secondary actors. In a more poignant shot, soldiers and activists face off in two straight lines, with the facelessness of uniforms, helmets and shields evoking a symbolic barrier in juxtaposition to the activists' bandanas, tennis shoes and backpacks.

The exhibit creators have printed multiple copies of the exhibit, touching it up almost daily in places where it is sure to be torn down. They measure personal success by the number of hours the photos remain in place, before they are inevitably torn down by irate neighbors or city officials.

Their first late-night illicit posting stint revealed some Israelis did not find comfort in the written pledge that "we have no intention to deface the city, but rather to present art. We apologize if our work harms anyone or anything, and we promise to return everything to its previous form after the exhibit."

Photos were found strewn in puddles or had disappeared altogether in the morning after the first all-nighter. But as it must be with any effective protest, civil disobedience overcame niceties, and the photographers promptly set out to find stronger glue.

Visit www.activestills.org for more information

The exhibit is to last until February 1 in the following locations: