When I first saw it, it had enormous meaning for me. That said, whatever that meaning might have been, the clarity of it escaped me for some reason. Notwithstanding that, I knew that I was viewing something exceedingly poignant.
It’s not my intent here to get into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict currently raging in Gaza. I do have thoughts on the topic, but that’s something I’ll leave to others for now. For me, I just wanted to get at how this photo made me feel, and maybe, help me discover the essence of my reaction.
Two weeks ago I saw a photo in the media. It was taken by a reporter/photographer who was tasked with capturing the conflict as best he could, from the Israeli side of the battle lines.
In the distance, this reporter noticed a number of Israeli soldiers climbing up a slope to get to the top of it, a place where you could look down on Gaza from Israeli territory, a place where Israeli tanks shelled the city down below. The reporter had no idea what may have been happening, but he was intrigued enough to stop, swap his lens to his most telephoto-capable, and use the lens almost like a telescope to see what these soldiers were up to.
At once he noticed that the Israeli soldiers were all female, something not as extraordinary as it might be in other nations, but in Israel, where conscription of both men and women is a reality, such a sight would not stick out as being out of the ordinary.
He followed them with his lens as they climbed, eventually reaching the top of the slope where they gathered, assumed a very familiar position, and snapped a picture of themselves with the ruins of Gaza in the background.
A selfie in a war zone. A selfie with a killing zone in the background.
I’m not ready to judge just yet, so I’m still kinda sorting that out. These Israeli girls, and that’s what they were, young women, are likely no different than young women the world over, other than their military service, especially in a time of war.
Many viewers might see such a photo to be abhorrent, what with the destruction in the background and the many hundreds of lives that were surely lost in the part of the destroyed city that was featured in the background.
Morally repugnant.
Yet, I suppose to be fair to them, they’re just young women. They do young women things, not that bombing the crap out of Gaza is something most young women do. But they’re probably afraid somewhat, in uniform in a time of war, fully cognizant of what it feels like to be an Israeli, surrounded on all sides by enemies both perceived and mostly real. What it might feel like after witnessing the horror of the Hamas attack on Israel in early October, an event that took over 2000 Israeli lives and included the taking of another 200 or so people as hostages.
Things are different for all people in Israel, not just young girls. They face, and have faced for years, what they consider to be an existential crisis, what with a number of nearby nation-states and hostile armed militias seeking to drive them into the sea.
Soldiers of many nations have been castigated for taking “war trophy” photos in other conflicts, notably American servicemen in Afghanistan taking selfies with dead Taliban militants. They have been roundly and rightly criticized for the practice which goes against the grain of what it means to be humane. In fairness to the soldiers, the people doing the criticizing are not the people with bullets whizzing past their heads or IED’s killing them on the roads and pathways. A certain amount of animus develops when you’re locked in a life or death struggle, and dehumanizing the enemy has been a human thing for a long time.
I don’t know if this is that.
There are no dead bodies in the photo, although how many were pulled from the rubble behind them, while not known, would be more than plenty. And rather than dead enemy soldiers, this background was the final place of life for thousands of non-combatants, people who we know as women, children, and the elderly. Some might say this is actually worse than a trophy photo.
For perspective though, the photo that we see is not the same one the girls saw in their phone camera as they were forming up to take their selfie. For one, the selfie would have the girls dominating the foreground with much less background behind them. That’s because the lens taking the photo is very close to the subject, in this case the girls. So the photo they likely shared amongst themselves would be dramatically different from the one published in the media. That picture was taken from over 300 yards away using a fully zoomed-in telephoto lens. It captured ten smallish figures in front of a wide and deep background, the deadly background of Gaza. Two totally different photos, different because of the rules of photography. In the selfie, the girls probably fill the frame. With the journalist photo, they’re a small part of the frame, with the ruins of Gaza dominating in the background.
Was it ethically responsible for these Israeli soldiers to take the photo of themselves with that background? Probably not, especially since they made the effort to climb the slope to get to that background in the first place. The soldiers were not in Gaza, but in Israel, at some distance away, although the photo makes it look like they’re right there. Nevertheless, they knew what they wanted for a background, and made the effort to attain that background. It would be like one of us taking a selfie with a car wreck in the background. Not the kind of thing most of us think to do when we come across tragedy.
As to Gaza, that background speaks for itself. It shows a human tragedy written large, a demonstration of what sometimes happens when mere humans can’t find a way to live in harmony and peace with one another despite differences of language, thought, faith, and history.
It serves as a poignant reminder of what human failure can look like.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 