“My mother wouldn’t allow me to go to the beach on Fridays. That’s the day the Arabs go. “They go with their clothes on,” she muttered. Ever since, I’ve carried around in my head an image of Arabs half-submerged in the middle of the sea, struggling to get up, with the weight of their wet clothes pulling them down. While I remember this image as if it were a photograph I actually saw, I know it was planted in my brain, courtesy of my mother’s tongue as she tried to embody her warnings. When I was a bit older, in high school, and I went to the “territories” with Peace Now to demonstrate against the occupation, I saw only Jewish Israelis with crisp white shirts, equipped with a vision of how to wipe out the occupation. Even then, toward the end of the 1970s, the image from the sea remained the only image I had of Palestinians.”
— Ariella Azoulay, writing in the introduction to The Civil Contract of Photography
Photograph by Irina Rozovsky, from One to Nothing.