There was a great deal of death in my childhood, almost all of which came by way of Palestine. As a matter of fact, death and Palestine were synonyms. Well, I’m not speaking of actual deaths, of these there were very few, but death at large, death as a specter, as an ever-present image, death as ecstasy, death ritualized, stylized, and aestheticized — a death that wills itself as the apotheosis of time, place, and man. Death and Palestine were indeed synonyms.
News of death and the dead was carried almost daily, especially during the years of the Second Intifada, on television and on every front page of every newspaper my father brought home. One of my earliest memories of this kind of death was a close-up on the corpse of a Palestinian child on the screen as it was being pulled out of the rubbles of a collapsed building. As the men lifted it, the body turned out to be torn at the torso, and it flapped in the middle as if it were empty, eviscerated of content. I may have been ten at the time, and to say the image was horrifying is an understatement. I recoiled in panic backward, and my mother, who was sitting next to me on the couch, immediately wrapped her arms around me and pressed my head into her chest, saying ma’alesh, habibi, da shahid. It’s okay, habibi. He’s a martyr. She used her words to try to provide protection from my first encounter with the abyss of senseless destruction by placing the image in a frame that made it okay; a teleological frame that closed death to interpretation and domesticated it to the understanding of even a child. Horror domesticated and subdued. A martyr is a hero, a good thing, an eternal winner of life. Her love and her protection of me were thus inseparable from the transmission of what is quintessentially — and unbeknownst to my loving mother — an ideology. In other words, her profound love required the falsification of reality.
Palestine never ceased to supply martyrs, a supply that never failed to generate ever higher demand. A few years later, as I reached the troubled years of puberty and adolescence, Palestinian death and its visuals took on a whole new meaning. The martyrs, as part of their eternal winning, are promised to be surely rewarded with an eternity of virgins for their every sexual pleasure and whim after death — a promise which supplied a fertile sexual aperture for the budding, unwieldy erotic imagination of young boys. It made for a private erotic theater that was religiously sanctioned, approved, not to say encouraged, an imaginative world whose deathliness and eroticism reinforce one another. It was often the case, especially in those troubled years of Intifada and suicide terrorism, that the imams’ Friday sermons would alternate between lamentations of death and the massacres of the innocent in Palestine and sensuous descriptions of the joys awaiting the martyrs in heaven; the breasts hanging like ripe pomegranates, the skin as soft as water, and the ecstasy of a million unions. The mosque, thus, helped produce an eschatological erotic theater around death. Palestine was the eternal score of the human condition, alternating between the two tunes of death and sex. To a Western reader, these memories might have seemed oriental mysteries only a few years ago. No longer. The sirens of Palestine, singing of death and sex, can now be heard from everywhere. This essay is an attempt to help you understand your new world.
This essay, which will be published in two installments, will attempt to show, not just that Palestinian political culture is heavily dependent on the aestheticization of death which I believe is not a exactly a new observation, but that modern atrocity spectatorship has developed into an aesthetic economy of voyeurism in which real death is converted into reproducible affect and that the Palestinian martyr aesthetics is an unusually perfected instance of a larger post-Christian structure who originates in the secular devouring of Christian sacred representation. In the second installment, the delicate relationship between aesthetized death, death kitsch, and the erotic, especially homosexual erotics, will be discussed.
Note: This essay is not intended as another intervention in the culture war or the information war surrounding Israel and Palestine. It is written against the degradation of death itself. Whatever one’s politics, one should be able to recognize the catastrophe in a world that can no longer grant death its singularity and dignity. This is an attempt to help myself and you to resist that condition, and perhaps, in doing so, to once again feel human.
Part I: Death
My mother’s fundamental desire to domesticate the intolerable is by no means unique. It is an enduring human instinct that transcends time and geography. It is entirely expected, then, that Palestinians, existing as they do within a long and punishing conflict, would seek to do the very same with their own atrocities and their dead. But what begins as a universal mechanism for psychological survival undergoes a radical mutation when it meets the machinery of mass reproduction and the needs of mass ideology: there is a critical distinction between the private act of a mother comforting her child and the structural function of a society mass-producing that comfort as a mobilizing political aesthetic.
Palestinian death footage and visuals have never lacked for transmitters. The front page of newspapers carried them in the morning and TV carried them in the evening, and the cutting-edge Al-Jazeera satellite channel, which dissolved the fixed hour of the evening news broadcast into a continuous stream, carried them at every hour into every Arabic speaking living room, until the phone completed the dissolution and delivered them into the individual hand, no longer at the family’s appointed viewing time, no longer within the communal world of the living room, but privately, continuously, and unbidden, supplied by an algorithmic logic that constantly learns what holds the eye and returns it in increasing concentrations.
Each media carrying the image imposed its own rules. The newspaper photograph was studied at the reader’s pace and set aside by his decision; the televised footage arrives at its own pace and as a managed sequence of images, narrated in the voice of the anchor and the context of the news segment, and could be escaped only by leaving the room; the image in the algorithmic feed arrives without context, anchor, warning, wedged between an advertisement and a personal post, and the hand that scrolls past it has already, in the instant of passing, received it. The voyeuristic consumption of the Palestinian dead has been transformed, over decades of endless production and transmissions from an event to a condition.
The visual culture of Palestinian death—that is, the recurring images, footage, and graphic designs through which Palestinian death is publicly represented and circuilated—gradually consolidated into a recognizable visual repertoire, governed by an accumulated and increasingly codified set of conventions of framing, composition, color, gesture, presentation of the corpse, disposition of mourners, and deployment of political and religious symbolism.
This repertoire is familiar to anyone who has lived within reach of these images, which by now means almost anyone at all: the child’s body pulled from rubble; the mother bent over the body of her son; the funeral procession, with the dead carried aloft on a stretcher or upon outstretched hands; the shrouded body, sometimes very small, laid on a hospital floor; the rescuer running toward the camera with a child in his arms; the row of wrapped bodies awaiting burial; the posthumously composed portrait of the martyr, assembled from photographs taken in life and set against al-Aqsa Mosque, a celestial landscape, or some lurid, Disney-like garden of paradise. Almost every reader will recognize these images immediately. He has seen each of them many times, across decades and cities, produced by different hands and under radically different circumstances; yet, more importantly, he has learned to see them as iterations of the same image, instances of the same form. Their repetition suppresses what death ought most forcefully to disclose: the irreducible singularity of the person who has died and the singularity of the event itself.
For all practical purposes, this has become an established genre of photographic composition, complete with templates, conventions, recurrent poses, and expected objects, no less formally recognizable than the wedding album or the graduation portrait, with its gown, cap, rolled diploma, fixed smile, and standardized backdrop. The difference, of course, is that here the object being subjected to generic form is death itself.
One of the typical photographic compositions of Palestinian death-kitsch goes like this: a woman, usually a mother, leans over the body of a young man and kisses his forehead. The keffiyeh is wrapped around his head, arranged so that the black-and-white pattern frames the face and closes beneath the chin; sometimes white flowers lie across his chest; the covering beneath him is green or white. His face is composed and occupies the center of the frame, lit and clear, while the faces of the living around him are partial, cropped, or turned away. The main event, the kiss, occurs at the point of maximum focus. A viewer formed by the European pictorial tradition will recognize immediately the arrangement of a grieving woman and a dead young man at the image’s center. Nothing appears disordered. Whether this order was produced before the shutter or by the photographer’s selection of angle, moment, and crop scarcely matters for the resulting image, which reaches the viewer as a completed composition.
Another typical visual is the body of a young man, wrapped in the Palestinian flag or the flag of one of the Islamic movements, carried on a stretcher above a dense crowd. The keffiyeh is again wrapped, or alternatively, an Islamic headband, framing a face that is composed, tilted slightly backward, eyes closed, centered in the frame, and catching the light. The flag converts the body’s outline into its own geometry. The visual object at the image’s center is no longer a corpse in any ordinary sense but an emblem with a face. The crowd is young and male almost without exception; the faces nearest the stretcher are grave and turned either toward the body or toward the camera; hands reach from every direction to touch the stretcher’s rails until the rails themselves disappear beneath them; rifles sometimes rise vertically from the crowd, carried as ceremonial objects, their barrels composing the upper register of the image.
At the bottom of such a frame one sometimes finds another figure: a man holding a camera above his head, its lens directed toward the body. The image therefore casually contains representation of its own production. The camera has become as conventional an element of the public funeral as the flag. Photography has entered into the ritual form of the event itself. The funeral presupposes spectators beyond those physically present; its elevation of the body, its gestures, its objects, its lines of sight, and its symbolic arrangements belong simultaneously to mourning and to their future existence as images. The composition presupposes the position from which it will be seen.
A third example is no longer a photograph at all. It is a designed graphic issued by an institution, and it demonstrates that the conventions obeyed by the first two images have become explicit enough to be reproduced digitally and deliberately. A photograph of a flag-wrapped body carried on outstretched hands has been desaturated and darkened around the edges until it reads less as an actual photograph than as texture or atmosphere. Above it, ornamental typography announces the total number of martyrs since the beginning of the war: 71,391. The outrageous number, an attempt at maximum escalation of affect, is the composition’s true visual subject, printed in the largest type and in red. Its performance of precision, down to the final digit, has a function that is not informational, since no viewer retains such a random number, but liturgical, since the figure is merely one sequence in an ever-changing and rising count. The escalatory effect of the rising itself is the content and the rising number itself becomes an affective form.
Here the development of the repertoire reaches a decisive stage. Palestinian death imagery has become a set of specifications that can be fulfilled even in the absence of an identifiable corpse and what began as the representation of particular deaths has matured into a transmissible visual syntax.
Convention by itself, of course, is not kitsch. Funeral rites have always been conventional; religious art is often more rigorously codified than any modern photograph. The Pieta, the Christian icon, the military funeral, and the various forms of funerary monuments all depend upon inherited conventional forms. The decisive question is therefore not whether Palestinian death imagery possesses conventions, but what those conventions do to the singular event they represent. Kitsch appears when the form ceases to submit itself to the particularity of the thing before it and instead receives that thing into an already completed affective structure. The image no longer waits upon this death to discover what this death might mean. The meaning precedes the dead person. The repertoire is already prepared with martyrdom, sacrifice, grief, innocence, nation, defiance, redemption, and the emotions appropriate to each. The individual supplies an instance; the form supplies the meaning and, increasingly, the emotion through which that meaning is to be experienced.
This is why the extraordinary stability of the genre matters. As with a highly conventionalized school of painting, the individual image can become difficult to locate once the identifying insignia have been removed. Gaza or Nablus, 2002 or 2026, Hamas or Fatah may require the flag, the caption, or some incidental marker to distinguish them. The underlying composition survives these differences because it has become refined and stable and possesses reliable conventions.
The final achievement of the repertoire is therefore more radical than the mere aestheticization of death. Death, in reality, resists substitution absolutely. My death cannot be yours; this dead child cannot be another child; this person disappears once, and no other person can occupy that event. Yet the visual form renders death substitutable. One corpse can occupy the place previously occupied by another because the form precedes them both. Complete aestheticization does not merely beautify death or make it emotionally legible. It supplies death in advance with the image through which it is to appear. It turns death itself into kitsch.
The Pseudo-Event
If Palestinian deaths became merely instances in the circulation of highly conventionalized form, does this mean that a Palestinian death is a non-event?
In 1962, surveying what American media had done to public life, Daniel Boorstin gave the name pseudo-event to a class of happening that the age of graphic reproduction had brought into being. The pseudo-event, in Boorstin’s analysis, is identifiable by four marks. It is planned, planted, or incited; someone arranged for it to occur. It is arranged primarily for the convenience of its own reporting, so that the question of its success is the question of how widely it circulates. Its relation to the underlying reality of the situation is ambiguous at best. And it tends toward self-fulfillment, since the report of the thing produces the condition the report describes. Boorstin’s inaugural example was a hotel, wishing to be thought distinguished, stages a thirtieth-anniversary celebration; the celebration is covered; the coverage makes the hotel distinguished; the event has manufactured the reality it purported to report. The press conference, the ribbon-cutting, the photo opportunity, the leak timed for the Sunday editions and the whole repertoire of managed publicity belong to the class. (Sadly, Boorstin didn’t live to see the age of social media.) The pseudo-event is hollow at the center. Its being is exhausted in its being-reported; it realizes, in the historical domain, Berkeley’s principle that to be is to be perceived. Subtract the media coverage and nothing remains. The unreported anniversary banquet is a dinner. The unattended press conference is a room with chairs.
“The only weapon we have with which to face the modern machinery of the enemy is jihad and the love of death. The spirit is enriched by the love of death [...] Mutilated bodies, skeletons, terrorism [...] words so beautiful.” –Abu Musab al-Suri
At first, the Palestinian death visual seems to satisfy every part in this definition. The event is arranged — often the confirmation is incited and planned, and the press is called in, etc. Success is measured in circulation of footage. The relation to underlying reality is ambiguous since what the viewer receives as a spontaneous event is the execution of a template. And the whole thing is self-fulfilling in a way that Boorstin’s innocuous examples never approached: the photographed funeral recruits the next funeral’s corpse, the image of the martyr produces more martyrs, the report generates the condition it reports.