To Whom it May Concern review – searing images of Israel by Haaretz

At first it’s so abstract you can barely make sense of it: hundreds of squat little beige boxes, punctuated with little black squares. But the featureless boxes in the photograph are in fact ramshackle dwellings, stretching as far as you can see, in the Balata refugee camp near the West Bank city of Nablus. Look a while longer and the image starts to open up: everywhere, in every direction, are hastily improvised dwellings constructed with little infrastructure, and little regard for human life. What appears visually confusing ends up being morally unfathomable.

The photograph, shot by Nir Kafri, appeared in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 2001, and it forms the opening salvo of To Whom It May Concern, an insistent, eye-opening exhibition in New York of photojournalism from one of the world’s most important newspapers. Haaretz is Israel’s oldest daily, just shy of a hundred years old. “It is the very model of a liberal newspaper,” the Guardian affirmed in 2014 – a bastion of seriousness, scepticism and oppositionality in a country with little time for nuance. Its detractors, inevitably in a region of such angry divisions, decry the paper as far-left or even anti-Israel, but in fact it espouses a disappearing sort of Zionism, one intertwined with liberal values and freedom for all. In a lengthy 2011 profile, the New Yorker editor David Remnick called Haaretz “arguably the most important liberal institution” in Israel. But as the country continued its drift to the right, and as oppositions between Israelis and Palestinians hardened further, Haaretz has grown lonelier – and thus even more vital.