Jerusalem. Image by Maggie Svoboda.
“Ramadan is a month of prayer and compassion, but it is Israel’s conduct as an occupying entity in Jerusalem and the West Bank that has led to escalation,” said Dr. Mahmoud al-Habbash, the religious affairs adviser to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, according to Haaretz.
Given the atrocities committed by the state of Israel over many years, and especially in response to violent attacks at Al-Aqsa mosque in recent days during the Holy month of Ramadan, we at Photographers Without Borders are reiterating our position condemning the actions of Israel, and in supporting innocent people (you can support them here).
According to journalist Ahmed Eldin, who has been documenting the conflict on his Instagram page, Israeli soldiers assaulted worshippers in the mosque, forcing them to the ground with tied hands as 152 people were injured (with 3 in critical condition), 400 were detained, and ambulances were actively prevented from reaching the site (all actions that constitute multiple human rights violations). On April 14, 2022, Eldin wrote that “reports that the Israel’s Occupation Forces are confiscating cameras and cellphones from journalists who have documented Israeli aggression in Jerusalem today” and that live ammunition and gas were used on the worshippers.
Elders outside of Al-Aqsa mosque. Image by Maggie Svoboda.
Today, Gaza is being bombed while thousands of Israelis marching in Palestinian villages and Jerusalem with genocidal chants, proclaiming that they will continue to steal, displace and settle on Palestinian land.
Were this any other part of the world, these attacks would be making international headlines, and we would all be denouncing the senseless violence that is happening in different parts of Israel and Palestine on an almost daily basis.
Image by Maggie Svoboda.
Those in Gaza and the West Bank (strategically separated “zones” of fragmented Palestine) are increasingly fearful of yet another war where they have to fight for their lives in what can only be called “open-air prisons” where they are bombed with impunity. With each strategic offensive, Israel continues to inflict trauma and steal more and more land in their colonial project of military occupation, settlement and displacement of Palestinians. To generate context, in 2019 alone, the United Nations registered more than 5.6 million Palestinian refugees.
It is worth noting that according to Al Jazeera “Israel holds some 4,650 Palestinians, including 200 children, 40 women, and 520 administrative detainees, in prisons”. Israel Prison Service has also stopped providing human rights watchdog B’Tselem with figures in response to requests under the Freedom of Information Law, according to their website.
As an organization that values decolonization and ethics (among other things), we can not stand idly by as the colonial settler state of Israel continues to escalate violence in Palestinian territory, and on the Palestinian people.
We are accountable to our partners, friends, and relatives in Palestine—who are of multiple faiths including, but not limited to, Muslim, Jewish, and Christian—who have been denied their basic human rights and continue to face the devastating impacts of a settler colonialist state that has been driven by greed, power and impunity. We are also accountable to our partners, friends and relatives in Israel who are also anti-zionist, and who do not condone the actions of the nation they were born into.
We make ourselves abundantly clear in advocating our position against the state of Israel alongside organizations such as Jewish Voice for Peace, who shared these words as part of a larger statement:
“Rather than accept the inevitability of occupation and dispossession, we choose a different path...We choose collective liberation. We choose a future where everyone, including Palestinians and Jewish Israelis, can live their lives freely in vibrant, safe, equitable communities, with basic human needs fulfilled.”
One way we are taking this into practice is by not partnering with any zionist organizations.
Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem. Image by Maggie Svoboda.
Tzedek Chicago synagogue, who recently adopted “anti-zionism” as a core value, puts their decision into these terms: ‘In its 2021 report, the Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem concluded that Israel is an “apartheid state,” describing it as “a regime of Jewish supremacy from the river to the sea.” In the same year, Human Rights Watch released a similar report stating Israel’s “deprivations are so severe that they amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.” Given the reality of this historic and ongoing injustice, we have concluded that it is not enough to describe ourselves as “non-Zionist.” We believe this neutral term fails to honor the central anti-racist premise that structures of oppression cannot be simply ignored - on the contrary, they must be transformed. As political activist Angela Davis, has famously written, “In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist.”’
This is perhaps one of the defining matters of our time, which will decide how we react in the face of injustice in any other circumstance. Therefore how we all respond and react to these matters is a matter of collective integrity, responsibility and liberation.
We encourage more organizations to come forward against the crimes that Israel is committing so as to stand in integrity, and to put an end to this senseless violence that seems to have become normalized all over the world.
Photographers Without Borders created a documentary with our partner, Seeds of Peace, featuring photographer Maggie Svoboda in 2015, which offers some background on this topic: