Violating intimacies

It was the tongue that stopped me cold. The tongue and the savage, shit-eating grin on the soldier’s face as he and his buddy mug for the camera. Look at us! Look what we found. It’s a bra, a woman’s bra, a Palestinian woman’s bra left in a home she was forced to flee. And now it’s ours, and we’re going to play with it because we can, and we’re going to take it on the street and pose with it and show the world who we are, frat boys pumped for genocide. 

There is something unspeakably vile and infantile about the images of Israeli troops circulating on social media showing them posing for pictures with intimate apparel pilfered from the bedrooms of Gazan women. Amid the daily onslaught of murder, deprivation, and forced starvation, not to mention images of mutilated Palestinian children, here are Israeli soldiers beside themselves with self-congratulatory glee, gallivanting around snatching bras and ogling panties.

How could they? But of course, they could. Of course, they would. While most militaries strive to present at least a public veneer of discipline and self-control, the IDF is charting a new course in the socially grotesque, delighted to revel in the foulest behavior aimed at total disregard for Palestinian life.

But these images, showing soldiers playing amidst their dirty work, shook me more than others. The video of women IDF soldiers dancing awkwardly with Gaza crumbling in the background was more pathetic than painful. The soldiers blowing up a building for their IG livestreams was brazen cynicism. The soldier who made a how-to video showing how he defecates in a plastic bag because there is no water in Gaza toilets, and then throwing that bag casually amid the rubble, was just plain disgusting.  

These pictures enter a different realm where one’s most intimate relations and private thoughts, feelings, and desires have been penetrated, looted, picked apart, and turned into jokes. 

These images are performances of masculinity based on humiliation, which day in and day out, is the fuel powering the occupation.

What do we do with pictures like these that burrow in the brain? 

They join a long line of conquest images, some more brutal and explicitly violent than others.

I’m thinking of the spectacle lynching images from the Jim Crow American South, where crowds assembled to publicly celebrate and photograph the torture and murder of black men.

I’m thinking of the Abu Ghraib images where American soldiers posed laughing with Iraqi prisoners who they tied up and stripped naked and then forced into the camera’s frame as an additional humiliation.

While these images of IDF soldiers do not explicitly show murder and torture, they implicitly speak to the missing women and their missing men who loved and touched and cared for each other and shared private moments and pleasures. For that space to be violated makes the pictures unbearable.

How do we take the power of these images away from the image makers?

We do that by looking past the uniformed buffoons who are the direct subjects of the pictures and instead dwell on the women not seen but who once lived in these homes and wore the garments, who were mothers and sisters and daughters and lovers with dreams and ideas and concerns.  

We do that by insisting on both imagining and preserving in our minds their full beings and refusing the narrative that attempts to sully and flatten them, which is how misogyny operates.  

There is another picture circulating. It shows an IDF soldier with a box of new white jeweled dress high heels, which he’s looted from a Palestinian woman. He’s going to bring them home and give them as a present to his woman instead. A souvenir from a genocide.

My mind focuses on the texture of the shoes, the intricate design, and the dimensions of the box. I travel to a place where I can see the woman who bought those shoes. Maybe she was planning to wear them for the wedding of a son or a daughter, or maybe she was going to celebrate her own anniversary or wanted something special for an upcoming family gathering. I eliminate the soldier from the frame and instead hold her close in my thoughts away from his prying hands.