December 11, 2025 - “The Nobel Peace Prize is now dead … It’s become a war prize.”
As the Nobel Committee praised right-wing Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado for her so-called efforts towards peace, protesters gathered in Oslo, Norway to protest the granting of the prize to someone calling for foreign military action against the people of her own country. [video]
December 12, 2025 - The United Nations voted to declare December 14 2025 the first International Day against Colonialism in All Its Forms and Manifestations.
The proposal was adopted by a recorded vote of 116 in favour to 2 against (Israel, United States) with 54 abstentions (mostly current or former European colonial powers and their closest allies). [link]/[link]
How one views these images today will likely be colored by knowledge of what was to come for the communities and land depicted — the huge shifts in demography and power that would prove so devastating for the Palestinian Arabs in particular, from the Nakba of 1948 to the horrors of Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza. In Camera Palæstina (2022), Issam Nassar, Stephen Sheehi, and Salim Tamari argue, however, against reading photographs like these as nostalgic, “a reading that suggests the loss and erasure of Palestine as a historical and present fact”. Rather, they believe such images “illuminate Palestine as a lived and living social fact”. In Against Erasure: A Photographic Memory of Palestine Before the Nakba (2024), Johnny Mansour speaks about what such photographs mean to him: “I firmly believe that while the people of Palestine lost their land, they refuse to lose their history. As one of the children, the survivors, of this people, I know how sincere our relationship is with the land, its past, its history, its images, its documents. Taken together, they return to us what we need the most: our homeland.”
