Imagry and Oversimplification

Mike’s research into the rhetoric of the Israel-Lebanon conflict over the past few weeks suggested some thoughts about this story:

Two days ago, I posted a brief about a series of photographs posted on the Lebanese Embassy’s website. The series began with a couple of recent, now famous picture from Israel. They show a few Israeli girls signing shells to Nasrallah, ‘with love’ as one of their mothers looks on in approval. What could be more clearly sinister? Then follows series of truly terrifying images of the corpses of their counterparts in Lebanon. What is more clear than a corpse?

The embassy was not alone in this application of the picture, according to Lisa Goldman, a blogger in Israel. She reports that several blogs and websites carried their own version. It hardly needs to be spelled out in words, as it were. Fresh faced and smiling under the watchful eye of a mother; they look as if they could as easily have been drawing on posterboard as on shells. They seem completely comfortable with the firepower that surrounds them. That is awful enough to contemplate. There is a twisting visceral sense that something terribly wrong with this picture and perhaps with the culture that created it….

The darkest interpretation is extremely simple. They are monsters. On a slightly larger scale, their society is monstrous.

… But the ‘text’ of this picture wasn’t created in Israel, according to Goldman or at least not entirely and the ‘culture’ that informed it was not confined to Israel either. As the image made its way around the internet, its origin was forgotten, or at least not deeply questioned. All that accompanied it around the blogosphere was the notation that the children were Israeli and the translation of the sharpie. (although the Columbia Journalism Review notes that the translations suffered some mistranslation.

Goldman watched the reaction unfold, and then did an eminently logical thing. She phoned the Associated Press photographer who took it, to ask him what the children were doing there among the shells. Were they burning with hatred and instilled with a terrifying indifference to human life, or… what indeed are we looking at?

According to the accounts of the photographer and reporter the pictures showed something much more personal and immediate, than political and indefinite. They had just emerged from a bunker after listening to Hezbollah shells rain on their city for five days. They were without the means of evacuation and were among the few people who remained. The streets were empty except for a crowd around a military unit. They were drawn not to the shells, but the crowd of foreign photographers… that were drawn to the shells.

Their parents took up the pens first, in frustration, said the reporters, with their circumstances. They allowed the children to do the same, they were blowing off steam. Goldman quotes the reporters as saying the children liked the attention. We can at least entertain the idea that emerging from a bunker under attack to meet a dozen photographers, the desire to send a message to the world would be strong, however ill conceived that message is.

This second account, whatever weight you give it, creates at least reasonable doubt by the sheer act of questioning and proposes a very personal and subjective element for the image. What were the parents thinking? Could they even be sure themselves after those five days? Was it a tragedy of hatred and ignorance to address bombs that almost certainly would strike civilians like themselves? Or was it more like a vain wish that these ones would finally strike Nasrallah instead and end the attacks? As Goldman tells it, the idea was ‘silly’, but not inconceivable.

For that matter, we should ask what leap of intellect made a handful of parents and their children the proxies for a nation.

Of course this account also has its difficulties. One of my least favorite is that of a dozen photographers evidently no one, (at least the AP photographer who declined to go on record about his picture, will not own to it) foresaw that such an image would be inflammatory if circulated.

What it should perhaps do is make us aware of the ideas we turn to in order to interpret these images, and to consider the contribution of human fallibility and personal, subjective motivation to acts that appear purely political. Ironically, it is the dehumanization taking place with this image that is the subject of outrage.