‘Mankind’s . . . self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic.’
— Walter Benjamin
In 2014, in response to Israel’s attack on Gaza, which was the most deadly in decades, killing over 2,300 Palestinians, I made this series of images drawn from contemporary photographs. My aim was to draw out the Biblical tropes in the representation of Palestinians in Western media and how their repetition both fetishises and desensitizes us to their suffering.
Although impoverished by the Israel blockade, Gaza is (or was, before the current genocide) a modern city that for 76 years now has been under attack by one of the most technologically advanced militaries in the world, the ironically named Israel Defense Forces. The photographs appearing in our media, however, draw on the vocabulary of Biblical painting, and especially the chiaroscuro and dramatic gestures of Caravaggio, to mythologise modern war — with its F16 fighters, bunker-busting bombs and drone missiles — as a form of redemption through suffering. That is to say, they Christianise Israel’s occupation of Palestine, transforming Palestinians into the sacrifical lamb through which the crime of the Holocaust is expiated and Western civilisation redeemed.
To this end, press photographs of the Gaza Strip turn the violence and horror of war into an aesthetic experience that allows the Western viewer, idly perusing their Sunday papers, to sympathise, to empathise, to experience the catharsis of strong emotion, but not to analyse, understand or criticise the geopolitical realities of Israel’s war crimes against the Palestinian people. The focus, accordingly, is on the mourners rather than the dead or their killers, and particularly on the women, whose Islamic robes and — to Western eyes — exaggerated gestures of despair, set against stone walls with all traces of modernity cropped or eliminated from the picture frame, transform the sites of war crimes — and, specifically, of collective punishment under international law — into scenes drawn from Hollywood films about Christ, Moses and Ancient Rome.
There’s a reason the Palestinian cause has such unconditional support from a Left indifferent to the immiseration of the working-classes in their own countries. The Western middle classes from whose ranks the Left is overwhelmingly drawn prefer the object of their indignation to be brown- or black-skinned, to live in a country as distant from theirs as possible, and to be victims always and to the exclusion of any other identity (businessman, politician, doctor, teacher, poet). This allows them to identify vicariously with the suffering of Palestinians, while having no impact — beyond the catharsis of protest — on stopping it. Above all, the strength of this double catharsis — anger and empathy — allows the middle classes to absolve themselves from all responsibility or culpability for the actions of their governments or themselves, which is rather harder as they step over the bodies of the homeless and destitute of Western cities on the way to their well-remunerated jobs. In its own way, this is as reductive of the political realities of Gaza, and the West’s military, financial and political support for the crimes of the apartheid State of Israel, as the polar representation, from the Right, of Palestinians as always and exclusively terrorists.
War photography, which has a long history whose most influential era was the heyday of Magnum and the wars of the USA in South-east Asia and Latin America, functions not to document the atrocities and suffering for some future accounting that never comes, but, rather, to create a framework of perception for Western eyes through which the obscene and the criminal can be consumed, first and foremost, as an aesthetic experience. The representation of Gaza, in 2014 as in 2024, is exemplary of this function.
To bring this out, I drew on the example of Andy Warhol’s Death and Disaster series (1962-65), in which he reproduced photographs of everything from car and plane crashes to suicides, police brutality and the electric chair, silkscreened multiple times over a single canvas, sometimes with a blank canvas hung beside it. As Warhol commented: ‘When you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it really doesn’t have any effect.’ Each of my images is titled after the name or names of those Palestinians whose funerals and mourning the original photographs represent.
Simon Elmer
If you liked this article, you may be interested in ‘10 Questions About Gaza’, which I wrote last November, and which is a reminder of what we should have asked before adding our voices to the hatred and violence that has fuelled this second Nakba.
A Communist in Hong Kong 
An excellent piece on the comfortable “Biblicization” of the Gaza genocide as well as the particular appeal of this on what passes for the Left these days.
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Your perceptions and observations here are laser-like, as always. But how do you read the visual representations of the current onslaught on Gaza? It seems to me that like the “live footage” of drone killings, subject of your recent poem, they are quite different, owing both to the willingness of the military at all levels to share their mass snuff porn (lacking any biblical context apart from Amalek) and, of course, to the prevalence of your particular bête noir, the mobile phone. But it also seems to me that too many of the images of violence and suffering recorded on mobiles are caught at the too-precise moment and angle not to be staged. I don’t question the suffering or sincerity of the inhabitants of Gaza (though to be honest, I have sometimes wondered at the “staginess” of certain scenes coming out of there), or the latest outrage in Moscow, real enough in its bloodiness, if not in its attribution. And the Israelis are unapologetically consistant in their grotesque displays of brutality. I’m thinking more of several recent attacks in Europe I’m convinced were false flag operations staged by our own governments. The same thought might well have crossed your mind… I’ve just been told that a video I haven’t yet viewed, supposedly proving the Moscow attackers are ISIS members, supposedly shows them swearing allegiance to the fanatical Islamist group by raising their LEFT hands! If that’s true, I wouldn’t wipe my arse with it.
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I agree there’s a difference between the photos published in the Western media in 2014 and the far larger number of images coming out of Gaza in 2024. That’s partly because of the ubiquity of smartphones and social media today. What I’ve called here the Bibilical representation of Palestinians has prepared the frame through which the genocide is being perpetrated, but the images and footage of the current butchery are very different. As I’ve written elsewhere, I don’t think we’ve ever seen what genocide looks like at such close quarters. As I wrote in my article, during the 2021 attacks on Gaza, the social media accounts of Palestinian activists were shut down, and I would imagine that something similar could be done now. The US military had complete control of the media during the invasion of Iraq, and so could the IDF, particularly given the openly pro-Israel stance of the owners of social media. It’s odd that Israel is not allowing food, water and medical supplies into Gaza, but is allowing the effects of their actions to come out.
It’s pretty clear that Israel is expanding its limits ‘from the river to the sea’, within which Palestinians will live as something close to slave workers within an apartheid state. The world has shown, pretty conclusively, that it’s happy with that situation. That means greatly expanding the number of Jews in Israel. As of 2023, nearly 30% of Jews in Israel were first-generation immigrants, and that figure will need to rise, particularly to combat the higher birth rates of Palestinians, which even the IDF can’t kill in sufficiently large numbers.
It’s particularly striking that so many images and so much footage has come out of just how dehumanised the Jews of Israel have become under generations of Zionist indoctrination, and which has prepared them to perpetrate the crimes they are. I’m thinking of the documentation of soldiers posing in front of Palestinian prisoners in the manner of the US marines at Abu Ghraib, of them playing around with the clothing of the women they’ve killed in the ruins of the homes they’ve destroyed, of them dedicating the mining and explosion of buildings to their children, of the footage of Jewish children singing about genocide, of US Jews talking about buying condos on the ‘sea-front’ real-estate of Gaza, etc.
That may be because Israeli Jews have become so dehumanised that they really aren’t aware of how this look to the rest of us, or, at least, those of us horrified by their behaviour. I also think that, as the West slides deeper into fascism at every level of society, we’re seeing, in far greater focus, the boot George Orwell said would be stamping on the human face forever. But I also think, as I’ve said before, that the actions of Israel in committing this genocide, which have been overwhelmingly condemned by the peoples of the world while being supported by their governments, has turned more people than ever before not only against the State of Israel but also against the Jewish diaspora. I can imagine Natanyahu using these crimes to draw more of that diaspora to Israel on the grounds that Jews are ‘no longer safe in the West’, as we’re constantly being told by the Western media.
I don’t believe, as some have speculated, that the existence of the State of Israel is threatened by its crimes. Israel is the base for Western imperialism in the Middle East, and until the USA falls it will remain there. The documentation and dissemination of its crimes in the Gaza strip serves that purpose. Perhaps the most worrying thing for the rest of us is that, as with the Spanish Civil War, which history reduced to the opening act of the Second World War, the genocide in Gaza is a crime of such gravity that only a Third World War can erase it from the memories of the politically amnesiac peoples of the West, and protect the Israeli people from justice.
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