The author wishes for liberation and justice for Palestine
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A few months ago I walked in on my friend Jack unannounced. He was hunched over, facing away, eyes glued to a screen, completely unfazed by my trespassing. His indifference didn’t surprise me once I recognized what was occupying his attention–I knew this state of stupor quite well. He was heeding the Call of Duty™ (specifically, as I later found out, Call of Duty Modern Warfare III, the 12th installment of the best-selling first-person shooter (FPS) video game franchise). I hadn’t played the game much since 2009’s Modern Warfare II (apparently the series went downhill from that point anyway), but seeing the violence unfolding on his TV still activated the ape-brained gamer inside of me that had been nurtured by an adolescence in the suburbs and subsequently repressed by a liberal arts education. Upon taking a seat next to him, I called next game.
After a quick refresher from Jack on how the controls work, the next round started. I leaned forward, assumed the same hunchbacked posture that Jack had shaped himself into moments ago, and began exploring the environs in which the firefight would momentarily ensue. The map felt familiar despite me never having played this particular game before: lifeless, rubble-filled streets lined with palm trees and crumbling buildings; the occasional perpetually burning vehicle; disfigured storefronts marked by half-intact signs with Arabic characters; a few seemingly oriental rugs hanging from bombed-out balconies–all of this washed out in a sepia miasma. This was a variation on the well-explored theme of a vaguely Middle Eastern battlefield–immediately recognizable yet geographically anonymous. The map could just as easily have been Fallujah as it could have been Rafah. A quick google search revealed that the map is called “Invasion” and evidently depicts a scene from a future war in Afghanistan. According to callofduty.fandom.com, “Invasion is an excellent map for car bombing other players”.
Invasion, in essence, is representative of the broader constellation of Western video games, films, and news depictions of the Middle East that have surrounded me for most of my life (the works of Kiarostami and Elia Suleiman didn’t quite get the same airtime on the AMC channel as Black Hawk Down and American Sniper). In totality, these media make up a lifeless, homogeneous phantasmagoria of the Middle East composed of real and imagined images where cities and towns are military hideouts and civilians are either suspected terrorists or inevitable casualties. Culture and identity are not phenomena to be understood in and of themselves, but rather signifiers of unforgivable difference, of a looming threat. This compression of a living, breathing region into a map to be interpreted militaristically seems largely reflective of how the U.S. and its Western allies engage with the Middle East–a territory supposedly in perpetual need of intervention, where violence is exported and laundered in the name of protecting Us from an irredeemably foreign Them.
Around the time of my reintroduction to Call of Duty, I went to see Thomas Hirschorn’s show Fake it, Fake it – till you Fake it at the Gladstone Gallery. In Fake It, Hirschorn lines Gladstone with rows of computer monitors fashioned from cardboard and packing tape. The screens house printouts of scenes from anonymous wars. Surrounding the screens are cigarettes, energy drink canisters, life-sized cutouts of soldiers from video games, blown-up emojis hanging from the ceiling, among other digital-as-physical detritus–all cobbled together from cardboard and packing tape in typical Hirschorn fashion. The space resembles a nightmarish video game cafe or perhaps a military control center. This ambiguity feels appropriate as the way the West wages war–through surveillance and remote-controlled drone strikes–seems more and more to assume the distanced, quotidian spectatorship of war media consumption. Fake It’s ambiguity extends to the scenes depicted on the cardboard monitors themselves. Upon close inspection, it is evident that some of the scenes depicted on the cardboard monitors are warzones from first-person-shooter games, like “Invasion”, while others bear photographs of horrific scenes from recent wars. At a distance, these images are largely indistinguishable and anonymous. This ambiguity poses the question of whether war media, particularly in the Middle East, simply broadcasts the state of perpetual conflict or whether it enables it. The symbols of mundanity in Fake it–the cigarettes, energy drinks, and blown-up emojis–ask the viewer whether they have been ground-down by the deluge of images to accept this horrific state of affairs. If Call of duty is one element of a broader phantasmagoria of Middle Eastern war imagery that haunts the West, then Fake It is a monument to the psychological and political consequences of the phantasmagoria.
At the time of me viewing Fake It and playing Call of Duty with Jack, the latest assault on Gaza had been raging for over four months. It has now been over half a year. The toll is unthinkable: over 30,000 dead civilians, widespread famine, the destruction of holy sites and hospitals, the erasure of entire bloodlines. Unthinkable as it may be, this has been the reality of Western intervention in the Middle East for my entire life and well before it–from Gaza, to Afghanistan, to Iraq, and beyond. The unthinkable is sublimated into reality–into fact of life–in no small part because of the visual phantasmagoria of the Middle East that frames our conception about what is inevitable and what is necessary. What we see in the Middle East, and what we don’t see, is part of a greater superstructure of war-realism that deconstructs horrific violence and reconstitutes it as peacekeeping, self-defense, promotion of democracy, and necessary to maintaining a global order. This “order” being one in which Western countries maintain dominion over an entire region by subjecting it to an unlivable milieu where violent intervention is always a looming possibility.
The very defining feature of the visual phantasmagoria of the Middle East is its featurelessness. The entire area is captured at a distance, vast regional and cultural differences are condensed into oriental caricature, identities are anonymized. The Middle East that is transmitted in the West through media is a placeless and faceless one, and, within that manufactured void, the cultural and social topography is flattened into a battleground, what Edward Said might refer to as an “imagined geography”. In the case of Palestine, this process renders the people and their homeland into amorphous, otherized objects whose constitutions are confined by the logics of warfare, which, in turn, provides the pretext for the confinement of Palestinian bodies through the maintenance of the apartheid state. Because the Gaza dreamt up by the West amounts to little more than a battlefield, we have manufactured a fantasy-as-reality no less absurd than that of a war video game: a reality where hospitals and schools are military assets and civilians are fated to be terrorists or human shields. In this way, the West’s mediation of images of the Middle East and Palestine is a process that does not just claim truth but creates it. As a consequence, Palestinian photojournalist, Motaz Azaiza, in an interview with The New Arab, laments about how must now document the reality the West has created for Palestine by putting faces to its countless victims. He can only “dream” of capturing his Gaza–one of “children playing on the swings, the elderly smiling, families gathering, and the sights of nature and the sea.”
The U.S. military-intelligence apparatus has a long history of framing the Middle East as the world’s principal manufacturer of anti-American terror, a territory fated to violence. A report released by the CIA National Intelligence Council during the Iraq war stated that “Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as the training ground for the next generation of ‘professionalised’ terrorists”, and a U.S. intelligence official even went so far as to say “this is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush administration is looking at this as a huge war zone.” What is especially sinister is that the reduction of a region into nothing more than a placeless, faceless battleground, provides a tacit license–manufactured consent even–for the treatment of the region as such. If the West’s reformulation of the Middle East is defined only through the presence of terror and contestation, then the regime of Western, state-sponsored “counterterror” and intervention is prima facie legitimized. The broader superstructure of war-realism is not only generative in that it that reifies the West’s war fantasy relationship with the Middle East by providing a pretext for neoliberal interventionist policies, but also degenerative to the West’s collective capacity to fantasize about the future of the region. The reduction of the region to a perpetual battleground–a zone of war–engenders a perverse fatalism among the Western spectator where the empathetic instinct is blunted as is the will to imagine a Middle East that is free from neocolonial violence (a violence enacted upon both identity and life)–where liberation, self-determination, and justice are political possibilities.
To render a people faceless and placessless–through the mediating mechanisms of distance, homogenization, and concealment–is in itself an act of violence that is fundamental to how the West wages war in the Middle East. In large part, this is because those in the Middle East have historically been afforded limited agency in the construction of their own identities in Western media. Palestinian photographer, Adam Rouhana, reflects on this phenomenon in an essay written during the current assault on Gaza:
As I got older, … I noticed a dissonance between the West’s conception of Palestinian society and the images I was making — the life I was living. In the news media, Palestinians were often portrayed as masked and violent or as disposable and lifeless: a faceless, miserable people.
Rouhana’s is just one of many accounts of Palestinians bearing witness to the deprivation of their identities through the proliferation of dehumanizing, culturally low-resolution images at the hands of Western image mediators. To strip a people of their faces is to deprive them of their subjectivity, of their divinity; it is the ultimate act of solipsism. As Emanual Levinas famously states in Totality and Infinity, “The face resists possession, resists my powers”. For Levinas, the face-to-face encounter is fundamental to realizing the infinite transcendence of the other–it is the primordial bedrock of our interpersonal obligations. The face compels us with a mystical, unutterable demand to preserve the other. The faceless other is damned to be defined in terms of—and in opposition to—the self. On a geopolitical level, when the hegemonic nation turns its gaze to another state or region in this very way—rendering its people faceless—an Us-versus-Them relationship between the two entities is formalized, a relationship that is central to colonial ideology, where the colonized are dehumanized into a non-entity.
The formation of a people as a Them implies that they are less worthy ethical subjects than the Us, if they are ethical subjects at all, whereas the Us is conceived of as an ethical protagonist whose intentions are presumed to be righteous. Not only does this relationship exile the otherized nation into an ethical periphery, but, the implied centrality and familiarity of the Us casts a shadow over this periphery that obscures the Them to the point of formlessness and invisibility. As Derek Gregory writes in The Colonial Present, “To build a conceptual framework around a notion of Us-versus-Them is, in effect, to pretend that the principal consideration is epistemological and natural—our civilization is known and accepted, theirs is different and strange…”. U.S. efforts to avoid corporalizing the victims of its campaigns in the Middle East to this end are well documented. During the War in Afghanistan, the Obama administration denied journalists meaningful access to the military to maintain the illusion that the conflict was progressing smoothly and to keep civilian casualties in the shadows. Now, we are seeing similar tactics employed by the Israeli regime, even going so far as to murder Palestinian journalists. In the new paradigm of grassroots social media reporting, social media platforms and the U.S. government are colluding to throttle the proliferation of first-hand, close-up images of state-sponsored terror. Within the first few weeks after the October 7th attacks, millions of posts across Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok were removed, and many are speculating that the recent push in Congress to ban TikTok is motivated in part by a desire to exert more control over the spread of information related to the war in Gaza.
This tactic of shrouding through the dual processes of image mediation and image production enables the Us to perpetuate the notion of an amorphous, invisible Them. The invisible victim is one which is excluded from the sympathies of the Western liberal observer; in the words of Judith Butler, they are ungrievable. According to Butler, lives are ungrievable precisely because, in the eyes of the Us, they have never lived or counted as a life in the first place. Only lives that never counted in the eyes of the hegemonic state can be profaned as “excess civilian casualties” and “human shields”. The West’s irreverence towards the lives of the foreign Them stands in stark contrast to the sympathy readily dispensed towards those who can be located as an Us, as was the case in the IDF’s murder of seven World Central Kitchen aid workers. The aid workers were primarily white and Western and operating under the aegis of a Western humanitarian organization, meaning they were free from the presumed guilt and violence that West associates with the Middle Eastern Them. Thus, the aid workers were worthy victims deserving of the liberal West’s collective outrage which has largely been withheld from Palestinian non-lives.
The liberal observer’s demand for neutralized, whitewashed (and thus innocent) victims is particularly insidious given the racialized nature of the Us-versus-Them formation. As Jackie Wang writes in her landmark essay Against Innocence, “a liberal politics of recognition can only reproduce a guilt-innocence schematization that fails to grapple with the fact that there is an a priori association of Blackness with guilt (criminality)”. The real and imagined Western depictions of Middle Eastern life produce a similar association between Arabic identity and guilt; the consequences of which manifest in the way war is waged in the Middle East and perceived in the West. Tragically, the presumption of guilt surrounding those in Middle Eastern conflict zones can often only be shed in the eyes of the Western observer through martyrdom–death ensures that the Arab is sufficiently nonthreatening to be the object of liberal sympathy. The IDF and its enablers know this perhaps best of anyone. In 2014, Benjamin Netanyahu proclaimed that “all civilian casualties are unintended by us but actually intended by Hamas. They want to pile up as many civilian dead as they can, because somebody said they use telegenically dead Palestinians for their cause” (telegenic here meaning visually attractive or persuasive in the context of televised media). Netanyahu can rest easy knowing that Mahmoud al-Saadi, who was killed in 2022 at the age of 18 while walking to school, and Joana Mohammad Khalaf, who was killed in an airstrike four days before her fourth birthday, never made it on to television.
If the faceless Them is presumed guilty until proven innocent, then their status as military targets is legitimized as the distinction between civilian and terrorist becomes distorted to the point of disintegration. In testimonies made to Breaking the Silence, an anti-war IDF veterans organization, multiple IDF sources recalled how everyone and everything in Gaza was assumed to have a terroristic valence during 2014’s Operation Protective Edge. One veteran IDF soldier claimed that “if you shoot someone in Gaza it’s cool, no big deal. . . . they made it clear that there were no uninvolved civilians.” Another noted that “a few hours before you went in the whole area was bombed, if there’s anyone there who doesn’t clearly look innocent, you apparently need to shoot that person.” The very act of the Western Us waging war on an otherized territory acts as a guilty verdict condemning the territory to be understood as a legitimate site of warfare. This is precisely because warfare, and the imagery it produces, is the only readily available lens through which Western audience observes the Middle East, which is otherwise kept faceless and placeless. War waging becomes a truth-generating process in this instance, as the West’s construction of Middle Eastern identity is confined to the Western-centric Us-versus-Them, innocent-versus-guilty logics of warfare. Allen Feldman captures this truth-generating capacity of warfare in his article Wars of Public Safety and the Policing of History:
Visualized violence here is a powerful system of naming and un-naming. The sheer act of targeting a topos specifies a zone of objective guilt, and effectively “weaponizes” entire communities, turning them into zones of aggression and consequently de-individualizing the concept of victimage in the destruction of these spaces.
The truth-generating logics of warfare can then be understood as an initial masking, or deconstruction, of an other and their land through image mediation and the production of phantasmagoria which, in turn, supplies the justification for the subsequent unveiling, or reconstruction, of the other by subjecting them to warfare. In Gaza, we see this in the suggestion that entire neighborhoods need to be razed in order to extract the shadowy terrorists dwelling in tunnels, hospitals, and schools. War waged in the Middle East has long been portrayed as a sort of deranged investigatory process in which the underbelly of the Arabic world is triumphantly brought to light by the crusading West. In the wake of 9/11, George W. Bush referred to the Iraq War as a “conflict with opponents who believe they are invisible. Yet are mistaken,” and lie after lie was peddled about Sudan Hussein’s secret arsenal of chemical and nuclear weapons buried underneath hospitals, waiting to be unearthed.
In fact, the very nature of modern warfare in the Middle East, through its regime of surveillance and algorithmically-informed drone bombing, can be understood as a process of unveiling and reconstituting the amorphous, faceless enemy. In the case of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Feldman writes that “[modern warfare] in Afghanistan, as in Iraq, is a new Orientalism, the perceptual apparatus by which we make the Eastern Other visible.” Since then, warfare has only moved further towards spectator sport. Take remote-controlled drone warfare, for example, in which the assailant assumes a godlike posture, watching over, and eventually smiting, its earthbound subjects—the ultimate technological embodiment of the colonizer-colonized relationship. Warfare waged on screens necessarily flattens—both conceptually and physically—the humanity of its victims; it is the antithesis of seeing the other face-to-face.
Drone warfare, particularly in Gaza, is increasingly informed by algorithms that operate under the presumption that every civilian is a potential threat. Digital and physical surveillance is harnessed to gather hundreds of data points on civilians–from geolocations to photos to phone contacts–to assess their threat likelihood. The surveillance apparatus deconstructs Gazans into what Deleuze refers to as “dividuals”, a series of data points that make up the essence of subjugated life as defined by the control society. The divinity of the other, as revealed through Levinas’s face-to-face, is defiled by constructing an illusory simulacrum of the other through the harvesting of their “patterns of life.” According to an investigation by +972 magazine, Israel’s AI-powered machine named Lavender has marked about 37,000 Palestinians as potential terrorists through its threat-assessment algorithms. In Totality and Infinity, Levinas discusses how the face of the other places a principal command on the spectator: “do not kill me.” The delegation of the encounter with the Palestinian other to a non-human, artificial entity is a profound denial of the sanctity of Palestinian lives, which allows the agents of war to avoid reckoning with fundamental obligation that the face places upon us.
Speaking on Project Lavender an Israeli intelligence source told +972 that “in war, there is no time to incriminate every target. So you’re willing to take the margin of error of using artificial intelligence, risking collateral damage and civilians dying, and risking attacking by mistake, and to live with it.” So long as the West continues to conceptually render these victims as never having lived in the first place, then this will be a reality which we will continue to generate, let alone “live with.” In this way, Palestinian resistance is about preservation and self determination. It is an effort to prevent the Western war fantasy from supplanting the realities that Palestinians have created for themselves in their homeland throughout time—an effort to ensure that their reality is not reduced to a dream.
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