I have wanted to meet the Afro-Palestinian community for a long time. It is especially special to meet members of the Najar family. They are one of the last Afro-Palestinian-Bedouin families living on the fast-changing outskirts of Amman, Jordan.
I had the deep honour of photographing Awad and his daughter Eman.
Their family story is told beautifully in the feature doc called Concrete Land.
On this day 26 years ago, the world watched, as Jamal al-Durrah tried to protect his 12-year-old son Muhammad from Israeli bullets that rained down on them in Gaza for 40 minutes. Despite pleads, Israeli soldiers intentionally shot Muhammad in the stomach- whose final moments of fear and horror were caught on camera and streamed by France TV, and injured his father.
Muhammad became the defining and haunting image of the Second Intifada.
Rape is caused by one thing:
A rapist.
Not her clothes.
Not alcohol.
Not flirting.
Not walking home alone.
Not trusting the wrong person.
Stop interrogating the victim’s choices and start blaming the person who chose to rape.
Black Muslims are often overlooked in conversations about Islam, and Afro-Arabs are rendered invisible in the discourse of Arab politics and culture.
I poured into the historical framework of antiBlackness & the work we need to do to move forward. https://t.co/KSRERaIZ4k
The pro-Palestine movement needs to stop being a safe haven for every disgusting grifter who uses Palestinian suffering to whitewash their own history of antisemitism, neo-Nazism, racism, or whatever other form of bigotry they’ve spent years promoting.