Ziv spent countless days and nights in the village this year, documenting the nonviolent struggle against the Israel army’s planned demolition and forcible displacement.
+972 Magazine and Local Call* correspondent Oren Ziv won a prize for his photography of the struggle against the demolition and forcible displacement of Khan al-Ahmar this week. Ziv won first prize for a series of photographs in the Society and Community category of the Local Testimony photography exhibition, which opens Thursday in Tel Aviv.
Photo of the year was awarded to Haaretz photographer Olivier Fitoussi for his photograph of Prime Minister Netanyahu and members of his Likud party taking a selfie to celebrate the passage of the Jewish Nation-State Law. The photo was widely circulated, and a long-time Jerusalem Post cartoonist was fired for parodying the photo in the image of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.”
The Local Testimony exhibit, in its 16th year, runs concurrently with the World Press Photo exhibition. It features documentary and press photos from Israel and Palestine submitted by professional photographers working in the area.
Ziv, one of the founding members of Activestills, spent countless days and nights photographing and reporting on the Palestinian, Israeli, and international activists who set up camp in Khan al-Ahmar to nonviolently resist Israeli military plans to demolish the village and forcibly displace its residents. Ziv’s reporting on Khan al-Ahmar was conducted on behalf of Hebrew-language site Local Call, where he is a staff writer, and was also published in English on +972 Magazine.
Spending so much time in the village, Ziv wrote in October, showed him “that despite all of its previous losses, the popular struggle in the occupied territories is still alive.”
When Prime Minister Netanyahu, under unprecedented international legal pressure, called off the demolition, “[f]or a moment, it was possible to see how a defiant, popular, nonviolent struggle could accomplish the impossible,” Ziv added.
Another member of Activestills and +972 Magazine contributor, Keren Manor, won the same prize in last year’s competition for her reportage documenting the Israeli police killing of a Bedouin man in the village of Umm al-Hiran.
The Local Testimony photography exhibition is open to the public from Friday, December 21, 2018 through February 2, 2019, at the Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv.
*Local Call is a Hebrew-language site co-published by Just Vision and 972—Advancement of Citizen Journalism, the latter of which is the nonprofit that publishes +972 Magazine.
Correction:
A previous version of this article mistakenly named photographer Keren Manor as Keren Ziv.
