Image Problems

Some reflections on perception and violence

A British journalist ended an in-depth piece, “Israel is accused of the gravest war crimes - how governments respond could haunt them for years to come,” by detailing a conversation he had with an Israeli officer.

“He started telling me how they did their best not to fire on Palestinian civilians. Then he trailed off, and paused, and told me no-one in Gaza could be innocent because they all supported Hamas.”

The truth can be lodged in an aside, when the officer trails off, pauses, it comes out.

The official version of what Israel is doing in Gaza, much parroted by the Israel state and its allies, is of a humane army doing what it can not to kill civilians. But the truth? No one is Gaza is treated as “innocent.” There are no civilians, no human beings with rights, only military targets. They are all Hamas; all terrorists. Anyone who speaks for Palestinian freedom? They are all Hamas; all terrorists.

We have heard such sentiments expressed so often it can be a struggle to ensure they remain audible.

To say no. Not normalise them.

In that aside is the genocidal intent: you treat human beings who reside there not as people who exist but as threats to existence.

We can only shout. To hear what they say, shout.

NO-ONE IN GAZA COULD BE INNOCENT

THEY HAVE A RIGHT TO KILL AND TO STARVE EVERYONE IN GAZA

THAT IS WHAT THEY ARE DOING

AIDED BY ALLIES

OUR GOVERNMENT

GENOCIDE AS SELF-DEFENCE

Genociders never think of themselves as committing genocide. They can and will and do describe themselves as motivated by a moral purpose, concerned with protecting a nation or a race or a religion or civilisation itself. They keep affirming their right to exist and demand other actors affirm that right as if any and every of their actions is an expression of that right to exist.

By presenting all of their actions (even in advance of being committed) as self-defence, genocide is treated as virtuous.

Yes, one can speak of virtuous genociders. How the genociders live with themselves.

Colonisers too (as Fanon taught), smug with virtue, high on “Western culture,” as if stealing land and people is spreading civilisation, smooth; like butter on bread.

Palestinian poet Mohammed El-Kurd, in his devastatingly brilliant book Perfect Victims, writes of how Palestinians are under perpetual scrutiny. Even in grief, or especially in grief, when whole families are murdered, Palestinians, he shows, have to be careful about how they express themselves. For Palestinians, being dignified in grief might mean maintaining as much distance from rage as possible, distancing themselves from past perceptions; from history, too. El-Kurd talks about a friend Ahmed Alnaouq, a Palestinian journalist and human rights activist “who lost twenty-one members of his family in Gaza at the hands of Zionists.” Ahmed “had shared on social media that he does not hate Jewish People.” El-Kurd makes a complaint (“the world I am complaining about”) about the world that leads Ahmed to, as it were, rebury his murdered family so that all of that loss, all he has lost, or had stolen, becomes a “subclause of the main point.”

El-Kurd also refers to how a British left-wing journalist later described “Ahmed’s response to the killing of his whole family apart from two sisters as ‘so human.’”

We learn to hear how that word human matters. When some people are told that they have entered the category of “human,” they are reminded that they were not already there, how they had been “violently excluded,” until they were not.

Their inclusion in humanity is made conditional: but on what?

That they pass over the many inhumanities?

What if you are being told that to become human means passing over all the violence that has been enacted against you, your history, your family; your land, your people?

When even speaking of what is “yours” will be heard as aggression?

Almost having to apologise for the murder of so many members of your family?

Making your grief a footnote in someone else’s history?

Making other people uncomfortable when you count your losses as well as having them?

For your receipts?

As Sara Saleh writes, “Every Palestinian I know is forced to become a bookkeeper. One day, our receipts will come in handy.”

A receipt: a record of all that came before.

Counting. Still counting.

El-Kurd cites Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti on “secondly,” how colonial encounters are storied by starting with what came “second” or “after,” such that “the arrows of the red Indians are the original criminals, and the guns of the white men are entirely the victims.” You start with the reaction to that violence, that structure, not event. What causes that reaction: gone. When the story begins “secondly,” the reactions to violence end up being what is seen, the object of suspicion and surveillance. So, Israel justifies genocide, which it does not call genocide (not calling it that does not stop it being that), by where it starts, how it starts, with the violence enacted on October 7 2023, not the violence that came before, the brutalising violence of colonial occupation. And then their “right to exist” is reaffirmed as a defensive justification for genocide, the destruction of a people.

So then no one in Gaza “could be innocent.” Not even unborn babies.

A death sentence if you ever heard one. Mere existence, turned into vice. Birth, into betrayal.

A justification for mass murder.

It should be beyond belief that this is all happening. Now. Still. But perhaps we are learning something about the function of belief. A state can conduct the mass murder of human beings with the intent to claim their land by getting those who resource that action not to believe that is what they are doing or to act as if they don’t believe it. They stop the recording before the officer pauses and trails off, or find some way to turn off.

We have to record violence if it is not to be reproduced (a lesson from complaint).

We might use the word ideology for how they turn off, or what they turn off; how the violence is screened out.

And then those who show the violence, the extent of it, the scale of it, who name it, what is screened, are treated as violent.

As if you cause what you reveal.

When we say, this is genocide: we are told, our perception is wrong.

When you see the violence, name it, call it genocide because that is what it is, you are treated as deluded. Or insensitive. Every time I used the word genocide for what Israel is doing in Gaza in No is Not a Lonely Utterance, a legal reader of the book “flagged it” because of “global sensitivities.”

A flag, a red flag: danger, alert!

The genociders are rather sensitive about being called genociders?

It is hard to keep writing through all of this, but we need not to stop speaking the truth because of “global sensitivities.”

We need that NO to genocide, to business as usual to be infectious; to become what they fear.

NONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONO

There will never be enough nos until it stops.

Until Palestine is free.

Until then:

GENOCIDE IS TREATED AS AN IMAGE PROBLEM.

So much violence has been treated thus: as an image problem.

And so, we keep drawing on our resources the best we can, to explain how institutions resist being held to account. We call it institutional violence, how institutions enact violence by treated violence itself as a problem with how those who complain or protest are seeing things.

When I talked to diversity practitioners, I learnt so much about institutions and why they are so resistant to change. I was in the middle of one such conversation. A practitioner was telling me about a project conducted by human resources she described as “perception research.” She explained: “it was about uncovering perceptions about the university as an employer.” The research revealed that the organisation was perceived as elitist and as “white and male dominated.” The the findings were interpreted thus: that “most of the external people” didn’t have “the right perceptions of the university,” they had “the wrong perceptions.”

I was struck especially by the implication that seeing the institution as white was “the wrong perception” because of what I knew about the staff profile of that institution. It was, indeed, a very white institution with an all-white senior management.

When to see whiteness is to see wrongly, whiteness is not seen.

The institution’s response to this research was to change how it represented itself to external people. In other words, the research led to the commissioning of new publicity highlighting the diversity of the organisation. Although I did not see the new publicity, it is likely that more pictures of brown and black people were added to existing brochures. Images can be recognised in an instance as images of diversity.

Diversity is a way of picturing organisations rather than changing them. In my book, On Being Included, I drew on this interview to show how the institutional version of diversity work does not change very much at all. Changing the whiteness of an image does not change the whiteness of an organisation; it might even be how organisations remain white by appearing more diverse than they are.

To be included we then have to smile for their brochures, smile over the violence that led many of us to be here.

When a problem becomes an image problem, so much is obscured. We can be asked to be the obscurant. As if the organisation is friendly, as if we are all in it together, have a hand in it.

Another organisation conducted a research project that could also be called “perception research.” Police at a university campus had targeted students of colour with inappropriate levels of aggression and violence. The report that followed described what happened, focusing in particular on how events were captured by video.

“A segment of the restraint of the students was captured on video and distributed across campus as well as on the Internet. A portion of the captured video showed students being restrained and immobilized on the floor and also recorded a student being sprayed in the face with pepper spray. The College administration received numerous emails and telephone calls from members of all College constituencies questioning the efficacy of the means used against the students and the security/safety of students – particularly students of color.”

Even from this short description, you can tell how the problem for the college was partly about what was seen, what had been captured on video.

The following statement has much to teach us about the problem of how problems become image problems.

“The reaction to these events cannot be disaggregated from the visual that many students witnessed: five security officers using forceful measures to restrain two students of color who were significantly smaller than the security guards. The imagery became even more vivid when one student began to bleed. All of these elements created a polemical climate that needs to be rectified.”

What is revealing here (there is so much that is revealing here) is how the violence directed towards the students was treated as “visuals,” bleeding as “imagery.”

The institution treats the problem as beginning with the image not the action.

Or the action becomes another image.

This is an example of what Barghouti called secondly: you start not with the event that is recorded but the recording.

When that violence is recorded for others to see, it creates a climate “that needs to be rectified”. When that violence is treated as imagery, the “solution” becomes to change the image, to create a less polemical, less enflamed climate.

When racial as well as sexual violence are treated as image problems, excessive force is only bad because it makes those who enact it look bad. Those who protest the violence of institutions, are then viewed as a crisis of public relations, as potentially damaging the reputation of institutions. Again, it is not the violence that is treated as damaging but the action of revealing it. Student activists are quickly judged as motivated by a desire for publicity, as if calling it out is about creating “vivid imagery.”

Even a bleeding body can be treated as a will to power as if that body by bleeding is damaging not damaged. So many bleeding bodies. Filmed or not.

If exposing the truth damages the reputation of institutions, reputations need to be damaged.

GENOCIDE IS TREATED AS AN IMAGE PROBLEM

One way you keep things as they are, or justify what is being done when it is in contradiction with laws and policies and moral codes or just basic humanity, is by stopping a record from being created.

You don’t show the film, as if when the violence is not shown, it does not happen. Shame on the BBC and not just for not screening Gaza: Doctors Under Attack. Ben de Pear, the producer of that film suggested that the decision to drop it was made by the director of the BBC acting as “just a PR person.”

PR for the BBC, Israel, the British government: this alignment of interests that is behind so much suppression.

Of the truth.

If truth were a person, truth would be called a terrorist.

When we counter that suppression, showing the truth, of the destruction of Palestinian life and land, it is used as evidence against Palestinian people. Why? Because to show what Israel is doing in Gaza and Palestine, to depict the truth, is treated as damaging Israel’s reputation as a modern and progressive nation (the only democracy in the Middle-East, remember). And you are pathologised as if opposition to genocide is just about using publicity for your own ends.

Consider how the Israeli state described the freedom flotilla as “a selfie yacht.”

"‘The 'selfie yacht' of the 'celebrities' is safely making its way to the shores of Israel. The passengers are expected to return to their home countries,’ the ministry wrote on X. All passengers were safe and unharmed, the ministry later added. ‘They were provided with sandwiches and water. The show is over.’”

It is not a fucking show. But we are showing the truth.

So many protests are treated as empty, as gestures, as performatives (in the sense of theatrical). Actor and activist Khalid Abdalla, speaking with such eloquence and care at Glastonbury, called the designation of the freedom flotilla as “performative” as “absurd.”

Abdalla stated, “No it is not performative.” He adds that what is performative is David Lammy and Keir Starmer “rhetorically saying something is intolerable,” but then “doing nothing.” Abdalla points out that “going there, and carrying stuff on your boat, and trying to pierce through, that’s an action.”

That’s an action. Yes, doing what you can to get aid people who are starving is an action. And that action is also about “piercing through” or “puncturing through,” that wall of perception, that wall of silence, that seal of indifference, that prevents too much violence being seen.

The government and mainstream media in the UK are more outraged by people who say no to genocide than by the state committing it. More outraged by those who paint on military weapons than those who use those weapons against people deemed not innocent because they still exist. More outraged by those who say “Death to the IDF,” than by the brutalising and vicious actions of the IDF they have happily livestreamed themselves for the world to see.

We need to be the world that sees. They should be worried about a chant at Glastonbury but not for the reasons they think. They should be worried because all the people protesting all over the world in seeing the violence, naming genocide, are seeing their complicity. As we must. Until it stops. #FreePalestine