Painting in the West Bank and expulsion from Israel

Jorit and another artist Salvatore Tukios were detained for three days after painting a mural depicting a Palestinian adolescent activist, Ahed Tamimi, who had become an iconic figure among Palestinians after slapping the face of an Israeli soldier outside her home in the West Bank village of Nabi Salih. The mural – whose completion was scheduled to coincide with Tamimi's release from an 8-month prison sentence – was set on the Bethlehem side of Israel's Separation Barrier.^[13][14] Upon their return to Naples on July 30, their families, waiting at the airport, asked that no photos be taken, as they wished to remain anonymous.^[15][16]

Russo-Ukrainian war

After Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Jorit stated that Italy should have been supporting the Russian-backed separatists of the Donbas region in Ukraine since 2014.^[17][18]

Jorit made a mural in Naples of Fyodor Dostoevsky, in whose eye is a child in the colours of the Russia-controlled Donetsk People's Republic. He argued that the issue had to be seen from 2014, and that the peoples of the Donbas had self-determined through two referendums (which were illegal and widely condemned as fraudulent), and that children of the two republics had been killed by the Ukrainian army for eight years.^[19] His street art was mentioned by Russian president Vladimir Putin during the invasion of Ukraine to illustrate his view that it would be impossible to obliviate Russian culture.^[20]

Jorit described a mural of a young girl that he made in July 2023 on a bombed-out building in occupied Mariupol (after a siege that the Red Cross called "apocalyptic"), as seeking to present a narrative of the bombing of the city and its inhabitants by "NATO missiles".^[21] He also said the mural was "a living little girl from Donbas who spent her first years in Mariupol surrounded by war".^[21] Australian photographer Helen Whittle protested that the mural is based on a photo of her daughter and unauthorized.^[21][22] Jorit later said he had come across the photo by searching on Google for "pigtails", and he had redrawn the shirt and the pigtails.^[21] Jorit's mural was criticised on the basis that the bombs that killed children in Mariupol were Russian, and that the Mariupol hospital airstrike was attributed to Russian forces.^[21] Critics also questioned the appropriateness of Jorit's mural after Russian forces had previously removed a mural by Sasha Korban in Mariupol that depicted a Ukrainian girl who lost her leg and her mother in an artillery rocket attack by pro-Russian separatist forces in 2015.^[7][21][23]