These heartbreaking and incredibly moving images show the affection and love shown during the height of the Aids crisis. Photographer Gideon Mendel’s project The Ward began in 1993 when he spent a number of weeks on the Charles Bell wards in London’s Middlesex Hospital. All the patients on the ward were dying with the knowledge that there was no cure for the disease. During this time antiretroviral medications were not available and patients on the ward faced the prospect of an early death.
Described by his closest supporters as “the Moroccan Mandela”, Serfaty endured 17 years of imprisonment, torture and 13 years of exile for his political views, including his opposition to Morocco’s position on Western Sahara.
Serfaty once famously told the media: “Conveying the image of a democratic Israel is a fantasy. You cannot be a democrat while oppressing another people. Zionism goes against democracy. I was 10 in 1936, when my father told me at the synagogue that ‘Zionism goes against our religion.’”
His unique identity allowed him to break taboos and inspire others, according to those who met him. “He established a new concept of the Arab Jew who didn’t renounce any element of his origins as a Moroccan and an Arab Jew,” explains university teacher Michelle Fay. “One can be a hundred percent Jewish and a hundred percent anti-Zionist.”
Together with Abdellatif Laabi, Serfaty developed an artistic journal called “Souffles”, meaning “Breaths”. Printed in Arabic and French, it was a creative space for political expression that its authors felt had been silenced for so long by politicians and the monarchy.
“It gave a new orientation to both journalism and creativity in an era that was giving birth to new ideas in Morocco, Palestine and the world,” says Noureddine Saoudi, a former prisoner and teacher.
As a champion of universal human rights and democratic principles, Serfaty sits alongside the likes of Che Guevara, Martin Luther King and Patrice Lumumba. A product of his environment, he belonged to the freethinking era of the 1960s and 70s; and of the post-independence period when many Arab countries were freed from colonial rule. There was a global movement to end authoritarian rule, war, poverty, racism and the nuclear threat in which primarily young people inspired by left-wing Marxist ideology, saw spreading political awareness as a duty.
