Ways of Seeing : Palestine and Images
The role of images in managing shock, grief, and action
There is a long-held understanding that a camera is a Palestinian’s weapon. Palestinian author, Ghassan Kanafani, assassinated by the Israelis in a Beirut car bombing in 1982, famously said that his pen was his rifle; words given greater, awful weight this week with the assassination by the Israeli army of beloved Palestinian writer and translator, Refaat Alareer. Refaat five weeks ago wrote this beautiful poem, as an instruction to the world he knew he might be snatched from, precisely for the courage and strength of his words.
The fixation on a Palestinian camera or pen as their weapon is in some ways proportionate to Western reluctance to talk about Palestinian armed resistance, which I wrote about recently here. This is a logical displacement, in that if it is assumed that armed resistance to Israeli violence should not exist (even though it inevitably will), forms of unarmed resistance — particularly writing or photography — take its place. This in itself is complicated, because — followed to its logical conclusion— this then means that Palestinian writers or photographers are treated as combatants (and the Israeli military very clearly targets them as such) while those who resist through documentation are still denied any meaningful Western protection — such as an end to facilitating Israeli war crimes.
Until we reach that point, images continue to be fired out of Palestine in the hope of getting a sufficient number of Westerners to understand the enormity of suffering, loss and Israeli violence. We see missing limbs, the bodies of children— impossibly small— inside shrouds, we see a horse under a collapsed building, unbearably total destruction as bombs fall. We see the faces of the living caked in blood and concrete dust, we see children shaking in a state of permanent shock. We do also see the determination to live, as people cook together, or care for one another with a resoluteness that Palestinians have been cruelly forced for decades to master.
On the most basic level, it is my opinion that it is important to see such images, and —because, though not in a time of bombing, I have already seen realities of the conflict in Palestine with my own eyes — maybe even more important for others to see them too. Westerners, especially in the US, pay for or manufacture the bombs that are killing Palestinians. Why should anyone sit or sleep comfortably, oftentimes complicit by their silence, while Palestinians are murdered and made homeless? If the images can penetrate this comfort, can unsettle it, and by this we can alter an intolerable status quo, then let the images fly.
Image Parity
On other levels, I have at times questioned the legitimacy of my sharing such images. Not because of the sensitivity of those who’ll see them, but because I did not share images when Al-Qassam fighters broke out of Gaza on October 7, took over military positions, and took hostages. Upon breaking out of a concentration camp in which you’ve most of your life seen your loved-ones murdered by the enemy outside, although almost all of the most headline-grabbing Israeli stories of that day were since retracted or debunked, I don’t doubt that unpleasant things did also happen. I also suspect that some, breaking out, were not professional Al-Qassam fighters with precise military objectives to execute, and some individuals may have been guilty of a cruelty that Zionism has always practised against Palestinians, but the reciprocation of which will not bring Palestinian liberation.
These things being said, I am certain that there is no need or reason to add my small voice to the global juggernaut of industrial propaganda, most of it lies or embellished with lies, by sharing any evidence of bad things done by Palestinians in those days; such is just the unfortunate nature of the war that the Israeli state has waged against all elements of Palestinian society since 1948. I am, moreover, certain that, for the Israelis — as enshrined in their Dahiya Doctrine of using colossal violence against civilians in order to instil fear— visiting cruelty and death upon Palestinians is a feature and not a bug. For Palestinians engaged in, or outlying of, the Al-Aqsa Flood operation, I am certain it was a bug and not a feature.
But still, if I didn’t share images then, why start now?
War photography and visible race
Overall there is a more complex set of reasons that make me uneasy about sharing images of destroyed Palestinian lives, and while many Palestinians choose to do just that, and I respect them in that choice, I’m never sure it feels exactly right for me.
This isn’t only about Palestine: war photography is often more comfortable with showing in death the faces and bodies of black and brown people. I recall the Sebastiao Selgado 2014 film, The Salt of the Earth, and while on first viewing I thought it brilliant, and Selgado’s command of images is rightly renowned, it was conspicuous that images of death in say —Rwanda — were unafraid to show the faces of piled bodies, but when the white bodies of Yugoslavia became his subject, a greater sense of dignity and decency, respect for the dead, was restored. A sprawled arm and hand became enough to signify death. A head and body slumped against the window of a bus with a bullet hole spiderweb. Salgado, I suppose you could say, and quite apart from any tact, with white victims became compelled to leave something to their imagination, rather than show his audience what such horrors might look like for people visibly like them. The expression “leave to the imagination”, is perhaps also worth unpacking a little, because it infers the audience must do a little work of imagination themselves, or indeed that the leap of it is reflexive, and they understand the enormity of the image more accurately. They are not only passive consumers of the image.
When earthquakes earlier this year left thousands of Turkish children as orphans, I instinctively recoiled at images showing their wide eyes looking imploringly at a camera. Quite apart from child protection concerns that should arise from showing the identities of unaccompanied minors, these images not only reduce the individual to a victim — in that case victims of fate, in the Palestinian case victims of the Israelis — but because of the presumed audience (not that people don’t also share for and within their own society), the faces are also those of a presumed victim being shown with a presumed appeal for Western help. The victim-status troubles me; the Western sense of saviourism (and its ability to survive so much Western violence) disgusts me, and the logic of appealing to what are often the most racist and selfish societies on earth, as a primary method of relief or resistance, frankly terrifies me.
You can’t be what you can’t see
A recent case exemplified the problem, when a Palestinian man spoke to the camera, showing his baby who had been murdered that day in an Israeli massacre. The child, in rigor mortis, and in the middle of an evil war zone the sort of which few Westerners have seen, did not look lifelike (aptly, because the child was dead). At this, a depraved Israeli media and similarly depraved Western accusations ran wild with the — of course now debunked and retracted — lie that the child was a doll and not in fact a child.
The writer Chimene Suleyman, in response, gave a reaction that I felt spoke to the wider issue I am discussing, and with which I found it hard to disagree.
There is a catchy US expression (the US is good at some things) mostly applied to visual diversity in representation: You can’t be what you can’t see. It is a staple of the movement around the so-called “Squad” of young, leftish US politicians including AOC, and normally it makes the sensible point that if black and brown people, especially children, can see writers, astronauts, and politicians who— in a white-dominated society— look like them, then it is easier to see themselves in these roles; they have an example rather than only an imagination to build towards.
It is maybe a sign of our natural optimism bias that we don’t take for granted that “You can’t be what you can’t see” doesn’t— or shouldn’t — also run in the opposite, negative, direction. While the campaigning version is optimistic, to see that these war crimes carried out by the Israelis are done, and so can be done — to Palestinians, to brown people, to global southerners — can be as great a defeat as the astronaut or vice president might be an aspiration.
In some respects, this recognition —of how lives are being viewed, and the value of them being afforded— is intuitive anyway. Younger generations, more ethnically diverse and less racist, are all around the Western world as well as the actual world, solidly pro-Palestinian. Those susceptible to, or holding on to, Israeli propaganda and their policy of genocide are, certainly in the US, disproportionately white people. For anyone familiar with Islamophobic tropes about Arab men chasing after white girls, the (since-debunked or retracted) claims about mass sexual violence during a military operation were interpreted with an awareness of a media and state tendency to distort that people long ago adopted. That such prominence was given to such claims while tens of thousands of brown people were being murdered and having their homes destroyed was — to anyone who ever experienced any kind of racism — suspicious to say the least, and grotesque to put it more plainly.
There is, in the very existence of an image, a permission being granted for a certain reality to exist, because it shows that reality has already existed. If that reality is unacceptable, as Israeli violence is, then seeing this image can have two conflicting outcomes: to see it in a limited fashion, to know of it and then stop it, is not the same as seeing it repeatedly and feeling unable to alter what becomes normalcy. Palestinians also often share images of those killed living the lives they lived and — military apartheid aside — the lives they deserved: faces alive, smiling, healthy. We must see those lives as they were, but know that they are now gone, and that we had and still have the power to stop the forces that ended them. Similarly, it is perhaps of value to interrogate myself and my own view: I know that no image — for or against Palestine — will shake my support of Palestine, and so do I need to see more images until a reality incredibly far from the current one has come about? Perhaps, by increasing my anger, it will galvanise me into further action. Perhaps the images are necessary to galvanise others in the first place.
Even in this though, even where they are successful, still the very word “image” troubles me. Because an image is almost by definition the surface of something, and so the word image itself promotes a dislocation from the whole of a situation, and therefore it somehow also promotes a dislocation from our ability to have an impact on it. In Western society, saturated by images and almost entirely dislocated from action, the very currency of images — their centrality to how we discuss or demand or remember the world we want and urgently need — feels very much a part of the wider problem.
Public and Private images
It seems of value to compare and contrast the Palestinian use of images with the Israeli use of them; a difference that, like just about everything else, could not be more marked. The key media asset in the Israeli information war has been, doubtless, their use of the private screening and whatever edited montage they show in it as a representation of the Al-Aqsa Flood operation, colloquially now referred to more often as only “October 7”.
It needs to be said that because of the very first claims, since exposed as lies, of “40 decapitated babies”, the content of this montage will always rightly remain mired in doubt. Because of the decision to screen the montage privately — to initial audiences of known right-wing media, fashion designers, actors and influencers— in a bizarre if not entirely warped culture of exclusive screenings, the method of distribution of this montage will always rightly remain mired in doubt. Because amplified Israeli claims of sexual violence by Palestinians seem to have been made alongside escalations in Israeli bombing campaigns, these claims too should also remain mired in doubt. In general, a military so often found-out in its propaganda, operating exclusive screenings for a hand-picked audience, deserves only to remain mired in doubt; such is the obvious and necessary price of such methods. It is notable, too, that the gala model of exclusive Israeli screenings fits perfectly with how Western industrial media would like its industry to work, not only in the glamour of an elite event, but the basic model of trust: we saw it, you didn’t: you don’t know, we do; we were chosen, you weren’t. It is, in short, a wet dream of modern media.
The overarching point I wish to make, maybe already obvious, is that the Israeli images that are given as evidence of suffering are kept not exactly private— for most of those seeing it are strangers, and exclusivity and privacy are not at all the same thing— but they are exclusive. Palestinian suffering, to an awful degree, is obliged to be public. In some respect, the different burdens of proof correspond to the different values placed by the West on these lives, and the value of a person’s word alone. In some respect, the non-showing of death or bereavement correspond also to the sacrosance of the life, just as Salgado felt a dead hand would suffice in Yugoslavia and a dead face was permissible in Africa. In its invisibility, too, it can enter the imagination of the audience with a greater hold over the idea that perhaps it was our own life, or could be, because we did not see the direct visual evidence that it was someone else’s. It is possibly in the grip of this hold that an immovability of opinion is also formed.
Questions of Methods
None of this is anything but me thinking aloud on a subject many have and do discuss. Nor do I think I am definitely correct about anything, these are only views that could be useful to some. In many respects, the public-private distinction is unsurprising: the Israeli model in its entirety is premised on influence inside military, political and corporate elites, all of which are mostly closed affairs. The Palestinian model is obliged to go about winning-over a global public, which by extension leaves much to be done in public. Though — and as we are seeing — it can prove no less effective than state military campaigns, guerrilla and asymmetric warfare has always rested on knowledge-sharing, so there is a natural logic that the idea of a networked and open culture of ideas and even images is what finally pulls apart the military-industrials structures of Zionism.
As a final point, and quite apart from the fact that I will never tell a Palestinian how to resist, my view on image-sharing is not solidly opposed to it because — for all the Israeli privilege to not do their loss and their grieving in the public eye — the open Palestinian model is right now clearly winning against the exclusivist Israeli media effort, and so clearly something is working. This partially misses the point, because to say that 20,000 dead Palestinians, razed homes, dead children, lost limbs and Israeli war crimes, is to be winning anything is of course far-fetched; it is more a testimony that some truths are too big and obvious for some lies to complete with. The goal, also, is not to suggest any altering of course so that Palestinians do or do not have to grieve publicly in future, it is to win a future where Palestinians do not have to grieve at all.