The FRANCE 24 Observers team were able to get in contact with the person who took the photo, Jonathan Small, who is an American photographer based in Tel Aviv. He explained what happened before and after the moment that he captured with his camera.



I often stroll along the beach in Tel Aviv. This evening, on Tuesday 24 April, it was around 6pm. I saw a group of three people, acting a bit boorishly, who went up to two black men who were using the shower on the beach. I have no idea who the black men were, but I thought they might be migrants in Israel. [There are around 35,000 asylum-seekers in Israel, primarily Eritrean and Sudanese]. One man with a red T-shirt came over to joke around with them. There was something weird about the whole situations: He was mocking and teasing the migrants, who were smiling, but it was more like he was deliberately intimidating them. I was about six or seven metres away and I couldn’t hear what they were saying. But just by looking at how the black men were behaving, I knew that something wasn’t right. So I took out my camera to take a few photos, zooming in. "No one really did anything" It was just then that the man grabbed the migrant’s hair in his fist, like an animal. His attitude was strange: He was both friendly and violent at the same time, with a patronising air, as if he was saying to the man, “You are inferior to me, so entertain me”. While this was happening, the two black men were smiling, even laughing.



In the three photos that Small took, and which FRANCE 24 has seen unblurred, the two black men seem to laugh and joke at the situation. There were other witnesses. The whole thing only lasted a few minutes. No one, including me, did anything, other than take photos. I didn’t even go to speak to the black men, because they didn’t seem entirely sound, maybe they were high or drunk and didn’t even realise what had happened. I had a feeling that talking with them wouldn’t lead anywhere. So then I went home, and I didn’t feel alright. I decided to publish the photos. No one, homeless or not, black or white, in Israel or anywhere else, deserves to be treated like that.”



On social media, and particularly on Reddit, lots of people thought it was staged. Others thought it showed how “Israelis treat people of colour”. The photos were shared over 3,400 times, in the case of this Facebook post, and this tweet retweeted more than 6,000 times. The outrage comes at a time when the Israeli government has cracked down on illegal migrants, and migrants are often victim to acts of racism and aggression.

>> READ ON THE OBSERVERS: Israel denies African migrants the chance to apply for asylum

Jonathan Small noticed that his photos were being used to illustrate a made-up narrative.

“My photos have been used to make up a false narrative” I saw a lot of people conflate what happened on the beach in Tel Aviv with the fact that the white men were probably Jewish. There are even photomontages where they’ve put my photos alongside pictures of concentration camps [suggesting alongside that “Jews have forgotten history”]. What I saw could have happened anywhere and I’ve no idea if the white man in the red T-shirt is Israeli, Jewish or even a tourist. And it doesn’t matter, anyway: My goal was to show a situation that isn’t normal, wherever it is, and to say to those who witness something similar to do something so that we stop seeing this sort of thing.



FRANCE 24 got in touch with the Tel Aviv police force to ask if they had been contacted about the situation or if they were investigating. They said they would look into our request. We will publish their response if we receive one.