Meet the squadron of photographers chronicling Israel’s protests for the world
For the past four years, the Israel Democracy Photography and Drone Squadron has been providing voluntary free documentation of demonstrations for local and foreign media
Over the last year, weekly protests have rocked Israel as citizens demonstrated against the judicial overhaul introduced by the government in January 2023.
Many saw the overhaul, which sought to strengthen the government at the expense of the judicial system, as a threat to democracy. Every Saturday night for most of last year, massive crowds took to the streets across the country to protest against what they saw as an undemocratic reform and called to preserve Israel’s democracy.
Telling the visual story from every protest was the Israel Democracy Photography and Drone Squadron, whose more than 300 stills and drone photographers and videographers documented every event and distributed the images to the media and the public free of charge.
The group was started in 2020 by Yair Palti and Amir Goldstein during what were known as the Balfour protests against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during the COVID-19 lockdowns and Netanyahu’s ongoing corruption trials.
Similar to last year’s demonstrations, the Balfour protests saw crowds of Israelis protesting in multiple locations across the country with a focus on the Prime Minister’s Residence in Jerusalem, known as Balfour because it’s on the corner of Balfour Street.
“The group emerged out of necessity,” Palti, who works in tech and does photography as a hobby, told The Times of Israel. “I realized that no media publication would be able to document a protest like that because it was very spread out and because the media was not really for the protests at the time.”
Palti said that he lives by the philosophy that an undocumented protest never happened. “A protest needs to be seen and reach a variety of audiences to show people what is happening and get more people out and taking part,” he said.
To get the job done, Palti and Goldstein enlisted a group of both amateur and expert photographers who went all over the country to document protests.
During the Naftali Bennett-Yair Lapid government between June 2021 and November 2022, the organization had much less work, but with Netanyahu’s return to office and the introduction of his government’s judicial reform, it “took on new meaning and life,” Margo Sugarman, head of the foreign media distribution group, told The Times of Israel.
Sugarman is a freelance marketing and writing consultant and, like Palti, is a hobby photographer. She joined the squadron because she felt she needed to do more for the pro-democracy protests than just attend them.
“I asked around to see where I could be of use and volunteer, and a friend hooked me up with the group,” she said. “I began volunteering and eventually took over the international group.”
As a former journalist, Sugarman said a combination of her professional experience and her hobby helps her identify which photos and videos, out of of the hundreds she receives, to distribute.
When the pro-democracy protests against the government’s judicial overhaul began, Palti called up the affiliated photographers, and the group grew far beyond what it had been during the Balfour protests.
“At first, our materials were only used for news articles,” Palti said, “but now we’re also being approached by programs like ’60 Minutes’ [in the US] to provide media for TV specials, research, and more historical productions.”
“Some foreign journalists don’t always know what is going on in Israel,” Sugarman explained. “So what has evolved is that now we also provide background, information, and connections” for foreign journalists to get the full picture of the events they are reporting.
When the war in Gaza began with Hamas’s unprecedented October 7 attack on Israel in which terrorists murdered some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and kidnapped 253, the judicial overhaul demonstrations stopped, but the protest groups remained active, turning their focus to volunteer work to help the war effort.
“We extended our reach,” said Sugarman. “We felt the need to cover the hostages’ families and the protest groups’ volunteering. It was a natural evolution to begin following them and distribute media on what they were doing.”
Members who are drone photography experts also volunteered where they could be helpful, training IDF soldiers and southern towns’ emergency response teams on how to operate drones and use them to increase security.
The organization also found that its work helped it “fight the hasbara [public diplomacy] war in our own way,” Sugarman said.
“I’ve ended up speaking with journalists from countries that aren’t so friendly to Israel, and I have been able to provide information and answer questions that are skewed in one way and give them some perspective,” she said.
Meanwhile, as the war nears the five-month mark, the pro-democracy protests have begun to power back up, and Sugarman promises that the organization will be there as it was last year.
“It’s important that we show Israel is a strong democracy and that the majority of citizens want democracy and don’t want to get rid of the judicial system that keeps it in place,” Sugarman said.
