Debangana Chatterjee
December 5, 2024
Israel’s War on Gaza: The Power of Death’s Unholy Nexus with the Politics of Visual Representation
Imagine a drone kill, and its graphic footage used to weave a narrative with an eerie jubilance—essentially celebrating death with inhuman detachment. This is exactly what unfolded during the killing of Yahya Sinwar, Hamas leader and purported mastermind of the attack on Israel on 7 October 2023. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that Sinwar’s death heralded the ‘beginning of an end’ to over a year long, largely lopsided war. However, accompanying the military war—fought with ammunition—has been a war of narratives that has played out visually, using the power of death and the politics of its representation.
‘Necropolitics’—a term coined by Achille Mbembe to refer to the economic and political management of populaces through death—is omnipresent in conflicts. It is the sum total of socio-political forces that relegate racialised and colonised bodies to a precarious existence by subjugating ‘life to the power of death’. We are all aware that death is not an equaliser in the Israel-Palestine conflict: Palestinian lives have been more fungible. Reports suggest the Hamas-led attack on Israel on 7 October claimed close to 1,200 lives. In comparison, the Israel-led aggression has claimed 42,000 lives, and counting. In this war, necropower has been monopolised in favour of Israel. It hinges upon the economy of death which determines the ‘killability’ and ‘grievability’ of lives.
The spectacle of death reaches us via an ecosystem of visual representation, comprising primarily of war images and videos rapidly circulated through ‘the democratisation of visual politics’. This visuality develops an aesthetic of war which exacerbates geopolitical discourses by ‘seeing, sensing, and thinking’—the politics of ‘what can be seen and not, felt and not, thought and not’. Hence, there is disparity in what visuality triggers across the world. The gruesomeness of the 7 October killings was captured in the visuals of mutilated bodies—a contact attack perpetrated by the Hamas militants. On the other hand, the mass-scale contactless missile attacks on Palestinians, burying lifeless bodies under rubble, are met with numbness.
Visual politics is a political act of gaze-making: it exudes the power relations between the gazer and the gazed. Needless to say, the most powerful gazes determine what is to remain in memory and what must be forgotten. And this manipulated construction of memory dehumanises lives. In this post, I invoke three such gazes: the gaze of surveillance, of media representation, and of those who consume digital images circulated on social media.
In this conflict, the first gaze is often unseen and unknown to the targets. Surveillance produces images of human lives facilitated by AI-based face recognition systems and drones. A 2023 Amnesty International report indicates how Israel has been implementing an ‘automated apartheid’ system to monitor and control the movements of Palestinians in the West Bank. A software called Red Wolf enables the colour-coded segregation of Palestinians. When the algorithm codes a facial image as yellow or red, the person may be detained for questioning or arrested.
Drones, the tool of modern warfare, are also used to surveil ‘dangerous’ bodies. However, the gaze of a drone can also quickly be turned into the eye of a killer. Drones perpetuate a ‘de-territorialised conception of war’. Drone operators sitting miles away from their targets determine their ‘killability’ based on intercepted information received through surveillance, and all it takes to attack the target is the press of a button. This detached form of killing is relayed through sophisticated optics in an algorithm-led ‘kill box’.
Even Hamas has used this biopolitical technology. Israel has been relying on advanced unmanned vehicles fed with programmes like Lavender and Gospel to surveil Palestinians on a much larger scale and to identify killable targets like Sinwar. Unlike the immediacy of combat killing, the detached and desensitised gaze of drones enables a certain ease of and impunity of killing.
The second gaze is that of the mainstream media, which portrays some lives as dispensable. It attempts to equate the sufferings of Palestinians with those of Israelis, though they are incomparable in scale.
For example, the image galleries of leading western media houses and agencies such as the Associated Press and Reuters present a photograph from Israel followed by one from Palestine. This representation seems to equalise the intensity of the impact on both sides for the distant onlooker—a vicious logic that condemns all violence and downplays the incomprehensible level of suffering faced by the Palestinians in particular. Discussing Israel, media headlines identify Hamas as the perpetrator. However, Palestinian suffering is attributed to a nameless perpetrator. The narrative of a genocide is spun as an act of ‘retaliation’. Coverage from Israel shows the Israelis suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) post the Hamas-led attack. However, the same coverage fails to acknowledge the perpetual saga of trauma faced by Palestinians, who are living life under the spectre of death.
The third gaze—and perhaps the most unusual suspect—is that of the consumers who contribute to the normalising of digital war images circulated through social media, a gaze that manipulates the dissemination of information. The selection, circulation and consumption of digital visuals of death germinate the social media paradox of living in a flux between the digital normal versus a state of emergency. While being labelled as a ‘livestreamed genocide’ of history, the images of Gazan suffering are quickly scrolled up to normalcy. This normalises the pain of their racialised-colonised bodies. Hinting at the racial genesis of ‘the right to take life’, Michel Foucault famously said: ‘Racism first develops with colonization, in other words, with colonizing genocide.’ Remember the image of the three-year-old Aylan Kurdi’s dead body. The toddler, fleeing conflict-battered Syria, became a victim of a boat capsizing. He was found face-down on a Turkish beach in 2015. The image, which trended on social media as an emblem of refugee plight, was quickly forgotten.
The memory of information on social media is momentary. In an age of rapidly flowing information, opinions get polarised quickly. In the wake of Israel’s Rafah offensive in May 2024, an AI image with the message ‘all eyes on Rafah’ went viral with 46 million shares on Instagram alone. Meanwhile, Israel continued to kill already-displaced Gazans. The mindless scrolling habits of consumers soon got used to it.
Big tech companies, steeped in their own biases, add fuel to the fire. For example, the top positions in Meta are filled by people with Israeli connections. Guy Rosen, its Chief Information Security Officer who helms Meta’s content moderation policies, was formerly part of Israel’s Unit 8200—notorious for its surveillance operations. Meta-engendered social media platforms paved the way for the spreading of misinformation around the beheading of Israeli babies and the perpetration of sexual violence by Hamas forces. As narratives against the Israeli genocide gained momentum early this year, Meta rolled out a policy to limit political content on Instagram. This policy was diametrically opposite to the one in place during the aftermath of the 7 October attack, when the narrative was in Israel’s favour.
Besides its historically complicated geopolitical context, the present Israel-Palestine conflict is marked by a war of images that uses the power of death to shape the politics of representation—the meaningful conveyance of developments through select images and narratives. Representational practices are fundamental in shaping political practices through portrayals of ‘truth’. The deliberate arrangement or rearrangement of truths in present-day Israel’s war on Gaza is indeed a political act with historic repercussions.
About the Author
Debangana Chatterjee is Assistant Professor of Social Science at NLSIU.