In 1987, during the First Palestinian Intifada, I was working in Paris with the news periodical Israel and Palestine. My stay at the journal was brief, but my name appears on the I&P masthead for a few issues, below the editor, a socialist Israeli dissident, together with a number of leftist and progressive reporters, and two communist Chileans in exile. Israel & Palestine was exceptional for its strong advocacy for Palestinian rights and a two-state solution. Especially valuable was the paper’s regular, detailed reporting on conditions in the Occupied Territories, from gross political abuses to the quotidian humiliations of life under military rule.
Given the paper’s strong focus on life under occupation, in December of that year, at the start of the protests, I asked a senior staff member whether they planned on covering the Intifada first hand so as to observe the events up close. My question may have been naïve, but the dismissive answer amazed me. They were categorical: the uprising was a minor event, the protests would end soon. (They would last four years, of course — and eventually bring the occupiers to the bargaining table.) It was my first close encounter with journalistic myopia, and it was instructive. I was left with questions that have stayed with me ever since.
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A photographer, David Wojnarowicz, is driving in the desert. A military air station comes into view. He is in the American southwest, but he could be like Rehab Nazzal, driving in Palestine. “What do these eyes have to do with surveillance cameras?” he asks himself. Is it possible, he wonders, to “short-circuit” the programming that makes a person conform to the social vision of things, to comfortably inhabit the “erector set” of violent infrastructure? The artist suggests that to do so is to deeply estrange oneself, to become a kind of alien surveyor of the given, to look “past the windshield into the pre-invented world.”1
The photographers Rehab Nazzal and David Wojarowicz illuminate a general truth. To live in a military or imperial culture is to be saturated by the logistics of power. It is to be exposed at all times to words and images that justify domination. Such justifications establish a regime of truth, a version of things that is self-serving, self-corroborating, and commonly passes as self-evident. Journalists play an important role in framing these ‘self-evident’ truths, the “pre-invented” groundwork of occupation, inequality and dispossession — what a notorious land-grabber once called “facts on the ground.”2 In such a context, even seemingly ordinary, innocuous statements can be loaded with violence. It is important to note this offhand discursive violence, to oppose it, to remember it — and to never forget. The opening of a Time magazine story, for instance, 20 years ago, during a terrible episode of the Second Intifada (I cite from memory: “Bethlehem has never been a peaceful place.”3 At the top of the hour, on NPR News, introducing the story of an American-style mass shooting in Tel Aviv (I quote from memory (it’s burned there, like a wound (insults, too, are wounds)): “Israel is not a very violent place”). Disavowal and repetition establish an ever-familiar reality: even the ‘new’ is made redundant.
This discourse has its visual analogues. The Palestinians have been habitually viewed through a distancing framework, as if through a telephoto lens or the scope of lethal overwatch. Social media challenges the corporate monopoly on reporting, but one wonders to what extent the current war in Gaza is still framed by distancing protocols. After months of reporting and political advocacy, the photographer Motaz Azaiza, ever dignified, generous and positive, could not help launching a bitter remark to his Instagram followers: “You like to watch.” Azaiza says he would rather be known for his photographic practice — how he sees the world — instead of his war documentation — the pictures imposed by violence. The photographer, victim of the “pre-invented.” What Azaiza compels us to notice is that even occurrences seen close up can be persistently framed so as to render them remote from the public. “Sensitive content” warnings become superfluous; they protect the already desensitized. The viewer’s numbness sustains a paradoxical distance: the remoteness of the ever-familiar. This framing has long given cover to the Israeli occupation. It normalized violence and prepared the discursive and visual regime of the current unfolding genocide.
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I was in Palestine in October last year, and I left the West Bank just two days before the war. As events in Gaza escalated, I wanted to contribute something by writing up an account of my visit to Palestine. I had photos to share, as well. A friend put me in contact with a local left-leaning newspaper and I heard back from the editor that I would need to make some changes to make my piece publishable. I was chided that my portrayal of Israelis was too negative. And — journalistic myopia again — I was told I had to mention the October 7 attacks. The strong implication was that I would need to “condemn” them. But was it not obvious — since it was, indeed, obvious as of the first day, and within the very first hours of the war — obvious that the demand was coercive, and to obey was to condone a genocide? Also obvious, if you were ever paying attention: the coming effort to crush any lingering prospect of a two-state solution. (‘Obvious,’ here, means something quite different than the violent, consecrated truth of the discursively ‘self-evident.’ “Obvious,” derived from the latin ob – viam, means “in the way,” like evidence that bars your approach, brings you up short, stops you in your tracks — like a “flying checkpoint” or the “apartheid wall.”) I chose instead to publish it here, on my blog. I haven’t changed a word.
I am a documentary photographer. My pictures are anchored in visible evidence. This photo was taken on October 7, 2023, the day the war began, looking westward across the Dead Sea, with the contrails of military jets in the sky over Gaza. The image is a factual document, then, a truthful record from an unfolding history. At times, though, one has to intervene in the subject — to enter the frame. Before taking the picture, I pressed a button next to the pool to stop the water jets that were troubling the surface. Only then, with the waves somewhat stilled, was I able to truly capture what I saw. The blue-eyed Dead Sea: sluggish, uncaring, going on unperturbed. The pool in the foreground: a vision of calm and solitude under the pitiless sky. A private oasis, like the palace of some petty colonial Nero. It was an illusion of distance with the evidence of proximity. It stands in your way. It’s an image, maybe, of your October 7.
- David Wojnarowicz, “We Are Born Into a Pre-Invented Existence,” Aperture, Fall 1994 (link). ↩︎
- “Everybody has to move; run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements, because everything we take now will stay ours.” Wikiquote. ↩︎
- My memory, it turns out, was only slightly faulty. The story reads: “The Church of the Nativity, one of the world’s oldest working churches, has never been an especially peaceful place.” See “The Saga of the Siege,” Time, May 20, 2002. Looking back now at this middle-brow account, a purported “inside story” of the Israeli siege of the church in 2002, one notes all-too familiar elements of the current genocide. The apparatus of control: “surveillance cameras,” “an aerial photo,” and Israeli snipers (“the best marksmen” (professional, discriminating) who “pick off the gunmen one by one”); sly, deceptive “‘peace activists’” (the words in scare quotes, as if held by tweezers); “bickering” holy men and religious scholars (implies eternal, irrational cycles of violence); entrapped, besieged Palestinians threatened with starvation (their own fault); treachery of the resistance fighters who “believed this was one place the Israelis would not dare to strike” (implying honorable restraint of the occupying force); a “violent clan” of Palestinians (primitivism, inherent vice); and, of course, “the machinery of Palestinian terror.” I wonder today whether the reporter, Matt Rees, has ever had the occasion to regret putting this in words: a Palestinian fighter “disgusted” by his comrades’ behavior, quoted as saying “I wish the Israelis would come in here and slaughter every one of us.” ↩︎
The Purgatory Press 