Regarding the Pain of Others in Israel and Gaza: How Do We Trust What We See?

For those of us on the outside, the “fog of war” is beginning to resemble a total eclipse of the sun.

With the contraction of print publications, the front pages of newspapers and the covers of newsmagazines have essentially disappeared, no longer providing a unifying focus. With a multitude of people, political factions, and organizations weaponizing media, using fake or misleading imagery in a parallel media war, viewers have been left largely in the dark, not knowing with whom to empathize, their tribal loyalties reinforced. And now, with increasing skepticism fueled by the emergence of artificial intelligence systems capable of simulating conventional media, the photographs and videos that actually depict the conflict between Hamas and Israel are increasingly considered suspect.

As a result, the BBC can publish an article on how two four-year-old boys, Omer and Omar, one Israeli and one Palestinian, were both killed in the early days of the war, their deaths becoming the subjects of a social media battle. Some have argued that it is not Omar who has been depicted but a doll; others that Omer and his sisters did not die but are “crisis actors,” people paid to perform a tragedy. Omar’s mother, who confirmed to the BBC that her son had been killed by an air strike, has been forced to protect her child’s memory from this grotesque accusation: “They have no right to say he is a doll,” she told the outlet. And a friend of Omer’s family, all five of whom were reportedly massacred, told the BBC, “To deal with their death is hard enough, and all these comments make it even worse.”

Previously, the photographs of children brutalized by adults became icons that served as pleas for the violence to stop. Such was the case, for example, with the horrific pictures of 14-year-old Emmett Till, an African American child beaten and lynched in 1955 by racists in Mississippi. When his mother decided to allow pictures of young Emmett’s body to be shared with the press, public reaction to those images helped spark the civil rights movement. Viewers responded with outrage, as well, to the the photo of nine-year-old Kim Phuc, her body burning from the napalm that had been dropped by a South Vietnamese plane in 1972; of 12-year-old Hector Pieterson, a student killed in 1976 by South African police in a peaceful protest during the apartheid era; and of three-year-old Alan Kurdi, lying face down on the beach in 2015, having drowned as his family tried to escape from Syria. There was empathy for these children, their tragic fates mourned, not belittled or dismissed.

Today, while many people who post imagery on social media are credible and responsible, providing insider perspectives and expert insights, there are a considerable number of online fabricators without any commitment to a common good. Now, for example, as Vaibhav Vats reports from India for The Atlantic: “A grim video of a beheading by a Mexican drug cartel was shared as an attack on Israeli citizens. A nine-year-old photograph of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his son, taken before the latter departed for his military service, was portrayed as the leader sending his offspring to war. Footage of a funeral staged in Jordan to evade a pandemic lockdown was misrepresented as Palestinians faking deaths in Gaza. A 2014 video of the Islamic State destroying a mosque in Syria was labeled as the Israeli bombing of a Palestinian mosque.” Why? Vats explains: “Dispensing with complexity and real-world consequences, the disinformation machinery of the Hindu right has been operating in an amoral zone, treating the Israel-Hamas war as little more than an entertaining spectacle happening somewhere far away, and as a windfall for its Islamophobic agenda.”