The Rest Is History

Mary Turfah writes on Gaza and the limits of the war photograph, in an essay from the upcoming issue of LARB Quarterly, no. 46: “Alien.”

By Mary TurfahAugust 11, 2025

A CHILD IS MISSING his arms. His arms were amputated—first by bomb, then by surgeon, the latter to control the bleeding or repair the damage caused by the former. Sacrifice the limbs to salvage the boy. The boy was injured—where else?—in Gaza. “Bomb” as the cause of amputation is misleading. By “bomb,” I mean the country whose military instructed its soldiers to drop them. The soldiers drop the bomb to collapse the house or tent or school, and the boy is found and brought by someone who loves him, maybe a stranger, to the hospital.

The child missing his arms exists, for most Western readers, as a photograph in The New York Times. It—he—made the newspaper’s front page on November 25, 2024, a milestone many on social media celebrated (a fair chance, finally, at representation!). In the photo, taken by Palestinian photojournalist Samar Abu Elouf and titled Mahmoud Ajjour, Aged Nine, the boy looks away. His gaze doesn’t commit to an object per se, just somewhere else. Where did you go? I imagine Elouf asking him after she’d gotten her shot. He sits against a plastered wall the color of eggshells, his knees peeking through the bottom of the frame. The sun hits him and lights up the honey in his eyes, reflects his eyelashes against his cheeks. Several moles dot his skin. His head is big—or rather, his chest is small, ribs exposed. He wears a white tank top. I don’t know how else to write this: the rest of him is whole enough that it’s almost like his arms are still there.

No. This isn’t about what my eyes will or won’t accommodate. Israel cut off the boy’s arms to punish him for belonging to a people. The bombs, the bullets, the soldiers, the colony; the means, the ends.

I first saw the photo on X. To find it again, I use Google Search, typing in words and hoping the algorithm will help me. I type: New York Times boy arms. The algorithm has gotten less helpful. I hit Enter, and the first article listed is from 1962, Boston: “Boy’s Severed Arm Reattached in Six-Hour Operation in …” The text trails off. I will click on it in a moment. First, I scan the other results. The second, from 2001, Florida, reads: “Boy’s Arm Reattached After Shark Attack.” The third: “Boy’s Arm and Hand Reattached” (1992, Wisconsin). The fourth—finally, Mahmoud—with The New York Times’ original, front-page headline: “SURVIVING GAZA.”

The descriptions under the top three results include the accident and the intervention. I am told in the first article that the boy’s “arm was severed near the [right] shoulder by a freight train. When the boy was brought to the hospital[,] resident surgeons in the emergency ward mobilized” to do what became, I learn as I read, the first known surgical reattachment of a limb, “sewn back into place.” History was made by doctors of several subspecialties who pooled their skill sets to intervene.

Israel is also making history. Contrary to what the Times’ headline suggests, Palestinians are not struggling to survive Gaza. They are struggling to survive Israel, a state whose existence is predicated on Palestinians’ annihilation-propelled “displacement.” We have, since October 2023, seen images and videos of traumatically amputated limbs—of people, including children, with arms and legs torn off. We have seen a world that shrinks a person. On social media, well-intentioned people repost these images and videos and swear that history will remember. (“History”—this omnipotent thing, made out to be more than what we are, right now, together.) I remember a photo of a mother kneeling on the ground and hugging her child’s shrouded body; the day might have been Eid. I remember hundreds of photos and videos of brothers, sisters, fathers—people whose faces say they are no longer of this world even as they remain in it. Each of us carries at this point a compendium, compiled at a distance mediated by screen or print: a man crushed under the weight of a tank, babies decomposing in a place meant to protect life, children kissing the stilled bodies of those from whom they once waited to hear that God was with them.

God is with them. The United States is with Israel. A friend of mine, a doctor who has been to Gaza many times, called me the other day while preparing a speech she was to deliver before members of the European Parliament. Immediately after exchanging hellos, she clarified, as if to preempt what she knew I would say, that changing these people’s minds, rattling the consciences of those responsible—through money and weapons and political cover—for genocide, was neither worthwhile, nor her intention. She’d agreed to speak, she explained, to have it on the record. To say it to these people’s faces, that none of you can claim you didn’t know. She said she wished she could be in Gaza instead, even as she knew how little she could do there with her decades of training. She said she felt like she was losing her mind.

All I could say back was Me too. I paused, then said it again. She shared with me what’s haunted her since she last left Gaza, how alienated from the people around her she feels, the people whom many of us have taken to calling “the world.” She told me about the photos she considered showing the parliamentarians. We discussed whether this was useful; surely they’d seen what we all had. At one point, she posed the question: how have these images—any one of them—not been enough to stop the world?

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You’ve probably seen Napalm Girl. The photo, taken on June 8, 1972, centers a naked child running, her arms lifted like she is trying to decide how to keep them from touching anything, how not to bend them any more than she must. She has just stepped into a puddle. Covering much of her body are severe burns caused by the highly flammable gel after which the American public nicknamed her; napalm clings to skin, its incendiary effects difficult to make out through the photo’s black-and-white grain.

The girl is screaming, baring her upper and lower teeth. A child to her right, closer to the camera, is crying so hard that he can hardly see in front of him, his fist clenched like he is trying to hold his own hand. Another, smaller child, lags behind, looking back at four soldiers lining the open road. We cannot see his face. The soldiers do not seem to be in any rush. There are two more children to the left of the frame: another girl, about the same age as the one in the middle, runs alongside yet another small boy, trying to help him keep up. These other children are wearing clothes. The girl without clothes had been dressed before she caught fire.

The Napalm Girl photo, taken for the Associated Press and officially named The Terror of War, captured the aftermath of an attack using chemical weapons manufactured in Midland, Michigan, supplied by the United States, and dropped by the South Vietnamese military on June 8, 1972, over a town whose inhabitants were on their side. The friendly fire was characterized by mainstream media as a mistake (the “mistake” here not the targeting of civilians, but of the wrong civilians). The Associated Press called the strike “misplaced.” A New York Times article, following up on its initial coverage of the event and dated June 11, opens: “Nine‐year‐old Phan Thi Kim‐Phuc is recuperating in a Saigon children’s hospital, the unintended victim of a misdirected napalm attack.” Unintended, misdirected. In case it wasn’t clear. A few lines down, the piece quotes the girl’s father, who describes “this war” as “so brutal.” “If only,” he said, “the children had stayed in the pagoda.” The problem was not foreign occupation but “the war”; the problem was the children who wanted to go outside. It is normal for a father to wish he’d done more to protect his children, even when more is impossible. It is notable that this father is politically aligned with those whose interests the Times represents.

The Terror of War stopped it, so they say. An AP staffer in Vietnam, Huỳnh Công “Nick” Út, was credited for over half a century with taking the photo, though there’s controversy around this now (suggestions that the Vietnamese stringer Nguyễn Thành Nghệ may be the actual photographer led World Press Photo to suspend the original attribution this spring). In a photo-essay published decades later, “The Vietnam War Pictures That Moved Them Most,” Time magazine asked photojournalists to offer reflections on the images that, to their minds and Time’s, defined the era. Included, of course, is Napalm Girl. Ut explained to Time that his older brother, killed while covering Vietnam for AP, had always claimed that “an image could stop the war.” After his brother’s death, Ut pledged to “complete his mission.” He was 21 years old and on Route 1 near the village of Trảng Bàng when those kids ran toward him. “No one was expecting people to come out of the bombed-out burning buildings, but when they did, I was ready with my Leica camera and I feel my brother guided me to capture that image. The rest is history,” his blurb in the photo-essay ends, this final phrase baring a casual self-importance.

After getting their shots, Ut and other photojournalists offered the children water. They poured some on the burns covering the girl’s back and arms. Ut brought her and the rest of the children to a nearby hospital, where he was told there was no space and that he’d have to drive them to Saigon. He didn’t think the girl would survive the hour-long trip; he threatened the local hospital that if something happened to these children, the world would know about it. His threats worked: he was able to secure medical care, after which he left for the AP office in Saigon. There, he showed the photos he’d taken to his colleagues. One stood out—so clearly, the story goes, that he was told then and there that it would win a Pulitzer.

The New York Times refused to run it at first, because of a policy against child nudity. An editor airbrushed the girl’s pubic area. Soon, the photo, the girl, Phan Thị Kim Phúc, was on the front page of newspapers around the country, around the world. In the uncropped, since-published original, one of the soldiers to her left busies himself with camera equipment. The focus of his attention contradicts how the photo hopes to pull ours. A soldier fumbling with his film undermines the situation’s gravity; it gives the viewer permission to look away. His presence changes the photo’s overall effect; it changes, for the unconvinced viewer, how much mind to pay the children, how the viewer is left to feel about the expressions on their faces, what their bodies testify. He doesn’t “complicate” the scene so much as texture it with the startling variations in response that emerge at the disruption of human life. Napalm Girl was destined to become a symbol, and symbols are not meant to be alive. They’re not dead but inert, vessels that provoke some high concentration of raw emotion to induce an internal shift. It’s strange to think about the curation of horror at a moment like this—but that’s what moments are for, in war. That’s the business of war photography.

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By the time The Terror of War was published in 1972, the majority of Americans were already against US “presence” in Vietnam. Every year, starting in 1965, Gallup posed a question: “In view of the developments since we entered the fighting in Vietnam, do you think the U.S. made a mistake sending troops to fight in Vietnam?” (A “mistake.”) In May 1971, 61 percent of Americans said yes. Another 28 percent said no; 11 percent had no opinion. August 1968, four years before The Terror of War was captured, marked a turning point: that year and each subsequent year, more than 50 percent of Americans (53 percent, in summer 1968) were against the war.

In November 2000, Gallup compiled their data to mark the occasion of the first time an American president—Bill Clinton—would visit Vietnam since the “fall” of Saigon. Gallup’s summary of their findings is instructive. The opening sentence explains that “Americans still find it hard to forget the memories of a war that claimed the lives of more than 50,000 American men and women.” A few lines down, we learn that about one in five Americans think the US fought on the side of the North Vietnamese. “Hard to forget”—but not hard enough, it seems. Or rather, Americans remember the wrong things; they remember what feels relevant to them. Gallup’s data showed that 72 percent of Americans believed Vietnam veterans weren’t treated well enough after coming home. There’s no poll in the collection asking Americans how they felt their soldiers had treated the Vietnamese.

As it goes with colonial wars, the United States eventually withdrew because it could no longer sustain the financial and human costs inflicted by the Vietnamese resistance against American occupation of their country. In the years since, a version of events has emerged that overemphasizes the role of the American anti-war movement in bringing an end to the war, depicting the protest front as the principal factor in the United States’ decision to finally say “enough.” In other words: history remembers what its people do. We remember Napalm Girl. My brother, born in the mid-1990s, told me he recognized her photo from his middle school American history textbook. A photo, one we still recognize, shocked the collective conscience of people who had no idea what their government was doing in their name. Once they knew, they rose up and shifted the direction of history.

It’s a convenient story for a country invested in rewriting its own past: the US saw the truth with its own eyes, recognized its “mistakes,” and changed course. Ut’s comment that “the rest is history” makes sense. He believes he accomplished, with the click of a shutter, what the entire Vietnamese resistance, with tens of thousands of human lives’ worth of blood, could not.

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In June, I read a tweet from Congressman Ro Khanna that called the Iraq “the biggest foreign policy blunder of the 21st century. Americans—right and left—do not want more dumb wars.” “Blunder” and “dumb” sound like words a friend uses to urge you to move on from an ex. Except here we are not talking about exes but countries, including a global superpower, and the nagging feeling isn’t a lost chance at love but the whisperings of a collective conscience—the moral arc of a capital-H History, which Ro Khanna is suffocating with a pillow. The issue with the occupation of Iraq isn’t that it happened; it’s that it went poorly, for Americans.

Americans, after every mistake and blunder, learn not the “wrong” lessons, exactly, but ones that allow them to feel like they’ve moved forward by pulling the ground backward. Yes, it was bad, but lessons were learned. They learned these lessons themselves, from photographs. There are many ways of seeing. The photo of Napalm Girl showed them: This is what you’re doing. It asked primed eyes, Is this what you want to become? It did not say to unwilling ears, This is who you are and—since the wrong lessons will be learned—will continue to be.

Always, Americans learn their lessons. And to measure their growth, they invest in tracking, by way of mainstream media, the lives of one or two select civilians per occupation. Napalm Girl. Malala. US news organizations report on their love lives; government officials invite them to give talks marrying the future of the United States with that of whatever country it has just destroyed. These chosen people, these symbols, show us where we’re at—always far enough along that they choose to live among us—in our redemption arc.

Some readers will find this ungenerous, and I ask them to consider that anti-racism (and much of anti-war discourse) is functionally a self-help industry. The model is reform, from the inside. When it doesn’t work, you appeal harder: the way to end all the harm in the world is to convince the people doing the harm to see you. And once they see you, they will hear you. This is especially convenient in that it assumes the people implicated in the harm simply don’t know what they’re doing. That they don’t recognize your humanity reflects not moral decay but honest oversight. The road out of hell starts with a photograph; with every country it destroys, the United States gets closer to never doing it again. It’s the story Americans want, a hope they can believe in.

Imagine looking at a photo of an injured or killed child and thinking—at all, even subconsciously—that it makes you look bad. Now imagine that you see nothing beyond how it makes you look, and you have our mainstream media’s current approach concerning Israel’s genocide, set to damage control mode until it becomes time to admit hard truths. It’s not time yet. Still, an April 2025 editorial in Haaretz concluded that “even though [the Israeli] government would like the war to continue forever, it will end someday. And on that day,” the author continued, “the IDF and Israeli society as a whole will be forced to look in the mirror and deal with the knowledge that these atrocities were committed in our name.” Here, Gaza is the mirror. What is reflected are Israelis—and, by extension, us.

This self-centering, generously distributed across both the political right and left, is part of why it’s hard for the Global South to find solidarity with the American anti-war movement. From this self-centering stems the logical outgrowth that a photo could so galvanize the American public as to stop a colonial war. That’s not how colonial wars work. The photo of Napalm Girl didn’t stop the war. That’s not what photos do. It’s especially not, if we allow ourselves to acknowledge anything about the function of the media in this country when it comes to foreign intervention, what its mainstream outlets—arms of the state with a frontline role in manufacturing consent—do. The idea that The New York Times would publish a photo to propel a sea change in consciousness gets backward the order of things: Napalm Girl, on the front page of American newspapers, didn’t shape public opinion. That the photo was circulated by mainstream US media reflects what it felt the public was, and had been for years, ready to see.

There are other photos from the day The Terror of War was captured that didn’t quite catch on. One shows Phúc’s grandmother, her blouse blotted with something, likely blood, holding another grandchild, aged three. Much of the toddler’s skin has sloughed off; in the picture, some of it still hangs around his ankles. He appears to be sleeping. The boy, the girl’s cousin, died in their grandmother’s arms moments after the photo was taken.

There are many reasons this photo might not have stood out, relatively speaking, to the AP staff in Saigon. It’s harder to sympathize with adults (the ubiquity of the refrain “the children of Gaza” appeals to this logic). Yes, the photo includes a dying child, but we can’t see his face. The effects of the napalm on his body are obvious, and perhaps too graphic. Yes, the girl in The Terror of War is naked, but this adds to her vulnerability. Her expression and posture are what John Berger, discussing war imagery in his essay “Photographs of Agony,” calls “arresting.” The girl is looking at the camera and, by extension, at us. Of course this isn’t actually the case: it is the work of the photographer who has arranged both her gaze and ours, wielding her image to say something he, ideally, believes is in her interest too. In the other photograph, the expression of the grandmother holding her dying grandchild close to her chest is hard to place. She doesn’t look at the camera; she is interested in neither the photographer nor the audience his mind’s eye faces. She is not asking us for anything. It is harder, in other words, to make her about us, to use her to convince us that we might still have, within her lifetime, a positive role to play.

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What kind of name is “The Terror of War”? If you listen closely, you can hear an editor advising their team to avoid alienating an otherwise potentially somewhat sympathetic constituency. Better to keep politics out of the nomenclature. By “politics,” they mean proximal and distal causality. The name suggests an attempt to capture the broader, human story. The photo is perfect: it maximizes grief, pain per pixel. The goal is to allow the viewer to feel anguish. This confirms their morality: even for their enemies’ children, they have sympathy. A pat on the proverbial back.

So it goes with Mahmoud, from Gaza. No, put aside the place—he is, after all, a child, and children don’t get to pick where they’re from. Or, keep “Gaza” and add that his only crime was being born Palestinian. Genocide, colonialism—matters of chance, random like oversimplified natural disasters; wrong place, wrong time. A spokesperson for the United Nations declared in December 2023 that Gaza was, by far, “the most dangerous place in the world to be a child.” They didn’t say that the single overwhelming threat to children’s safety is Israel. Gaza, not so much a place but a phenomenon with a gravitational pull that out-tugs the sun, is the problem; the boy, like the Times said, had survived it.

Mahmoud was evacuated to Doha, Qatar, for medical care after Israel bombed his family’s home in Gaza City in March 2024. In the first days after his arms were amputated—one severed from the missile blast and the other due to the extent of his injury—Mahmoud’s mother told NBC News that “he would look at his hands and not see them. He would scream and say, ‘where are my hands?’” The first thing he’d asked, she said, was “‘how will I hug you?’ and ‘how will I pray?’” In the photograph that appeared in the Times, there is no blood, no fear, only a child whose light, or something like that, has been dimmed. A boy rests his back against a blank background. Where is his world? Behind him, now that he’s in ours. It’s clear that the “Terror of War” is in Vietnam. Here, there’s nothing, nowhere, except the boy: Mahmoud Ajjour, Aged 9.

Both The Terror of War and Mahmoud Ajjour, Aged 9 won World Press Photo of the Year. The Terror of War received the award, as well as the predicted Pulitzer, in 1973. World Press Photo’s website describes it as “one of the defining images of the atrocities of the Vietnam War.” The word “atrocities,” like “war,” does a lot. Who did what doesn’t matter where humanity is concerned. Or, as Berger puts it, by making the issue “war,” by talking about “atrocities” in the general sense, “the picture becomes evidence of the general human condition. It accuses nobody and everybody.” This appeals to a stunted ethics, the kind you teach young children. War is awful. War is bad. The conversation rises to first principles only to slip away from blame and into something else that is vaguely chastising yet so dilute and diffuse as to be immaterial.

Concerning the 2025 awards, World Press Photo’s global jury chair wrote: “We started with a wide selection […] Three topics emerged from that pool that define the 2025 World Press Photo edition: conflict, migration, and climate change. Another way of seeing them is as stories of resilience, family, and community.”

Conflict. A child whose people are intra-genocide, “missing” both arms? Resilience, family, and community. There’s something for everyone to take away, including me and you. Something to leave us feeling good. These awards and the images they champion are about “hope,” loosely defined as things have a way of working out. Which is to say, nothing is required of us but to keep on keeping on. Resilience. A commitment to a dressed-up survival of the fittest, eugenics cloaked in narcissism cloaked in positive psychology. Yes, the boy’s limbs were amputated, but at least he’s alive. The people who aren’t? Well, they didn’t make the cut.

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Social media users recently made the comparison between Napalm Girl and a girl in Gaza explicitly, sharing a video of the latter attempting to escape a burning classroom in the school where she and her family—along with hundreds of others—had been sheltering when Israel bombed them. The video is colored different shades of hell. Everything is on fire; we see, through a window, a silhouette we recognize, from the swing of her ponytail and the hesitation in her narrow shoulders, as that of a child.

Every day, there are new photos and videos taken in Gaza by Palestinians and circulated online, most of which feel closer in valence to Napalm Girl than does the photo of Mahmoud. The Terror of War and Mahmoud Ajjour, Aged Nine reflect markedly different moments in the same trajectory. At the time of Napalm Girl, the mainstream media was ready to begin to turn against the war. A threshold had been crossed: the United States had determined it to no longer be in their best interest to maintain their “involvement” in Vietnam. Critiques included commentary on the unpopularity of the war and followed the predictable formula of “costs and lives” (in that order, the costs being taxpayer dollars and the lives being those of American troops). In Gaza, this threshold hasn’t been crossed.

In Vietnam, the terror of war was worth it until it wasn’t. What remained and remains true for many is that the girl in the photo is seen as a price, not a person. The child depicts war or conflict or resilience or community—universality—at the cost of specificity, which is to say, humanity. We say something to avoid saying anything more.

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Early in the genocide, the West insisted that those in Gaza prove they were being killed. Palestinians took to social media, posting photos and videos and asking a disbelieving world to see for itself. Israelis initially claimed that Palestinians were lying about killed babies. The Jerusalem Post claimed—in an article published on December 1, 2023, and retracted a day later—that a baby’s shrouded body was a doll, a prop used to incite violence against Israel. (Meanwhile, in casual conversation all the way up the chains of social and political command, Israelis refer to Palestinian babies as “terrorists”—which makes sense when you understand that, in Israel, “Palestinian” and “terrorist” are synonymous.)

The Israelis are, at the time of this writing, expanding their war, and the photos from Gaza haven’t stopped the world. Photos work along an individual plane. I look up from my phone, after witnessing the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life, and find myself in my kitchen, or in a call room in a hospital whose walls do not shake.

A photograph has the power to induce a private transformation. It happens in an instant: you find before you a human being you may never meet—and you don’t need to, to recognize that everything in you refuses what you see. The change is constitutional; there’s the world before what you saw, and the one after. This feeling of rupture leaves a person with one of two options, really: either you leave the world as you know it, or you put the image away, so incommensurate is it with everything, everyone, around you. The transformation happens in an instant—or it doesn’t. There are many ways of seeing.

That all of this is an indictment of the current ordering of our world does nothing to address or even face the issue of genocide. I will admit that I don’t care, not right now, about reordering the world, in salvaging it at all. The beginning and end of my concern is stopping the genocide in Gaza, whose people—like all people—exist not as a moral lesson or a symbol, but as people.

After Israel bombed Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza in October 2023, photos and videos of the aftermath circulated online. One video, which many will remember, includes doctors standing around a podium, surrounded by blankets covering the bodies of martyred Palestinians. The doctors, including one who speaks English well, tell the world what they have seen and heard. They state plainly who did it. Western media and its imperial tools, including organizations like Human Rights Watch, covered the event. They showed a selection of footage and images, then announced they suspected—although they would need months of investigations to say for sure—that it was an aberrant Palestinian missile that had landed on the hospital.

I remember someone commenting that if Palestinian militants had those kinds of weapons, Gaza would not have been under siege for the last two decades. The reporting was self-evidently absurd, and it didn’t matter. This was about what people wanted to believe Israel, an extension of themselves, was and wasn’t. They were the good guys, and good guys don’t bomb hospitals. Rather than reconsider their absolute morality, they refuted the evidence. Those of us who have been on the receiving end of Israeli or American aggression anytime in the last 70 years, and who understand the consequences of that history, had no issue believing that Israel would do what it had always done. The attack reinforced what we already knew. And Western media reacted how Israel needed it to: it gauged and calibrated public outcry, such that this outcry would not be a limiting factor. From that moment on, it was clear that the bombing of hospitals in Gaza would be normalized, in the West.

Available to most of the world is the internet, and the images you and I see. Seeing isn’t everything; often, people don’t need an image. Do you remember Israel’s claims, in the immediate aftermath of October 7, about 40 beheaded babies? There were no photos, just word of mouth and important racists—including the president of the United States—promising they’d seen the footage, too gruesome and dehumanizing to share. Again, those who were going to believe them believed them. There was no such footage, of course, but it didn’t matter because it wasn’t about babies. It was about what people already believed Palestinians would do to theirs. It was, like the prime minister of Israel said, about the “children of light” against the “children of darkness.” The absence of footage worked in the children of light’s favor: people’s imaginations, their Orientalist fantasies, had free rein. Here was atrocity propaganda, assisted by the racist depictions of Arabs they’d been fed for centuries, deployed for moments like those required by the previous US invasions—for a moment like this.

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Israel perceives the footage taken by Palestinians in Gaza as a threat. Israeli officials have justified killing Palestinian journalists by describing them as “armed” with cameras. For Palestinians, to stop documenting without picking up another tool of resistance is to lose hope that one has a role to play in bringing about the end of this aggression, to lose hope that the aggression will end. It is to lose hope that there will one day be a reckoning that will deserve as much evidence gathered as last breaths taken since October 2023, and before.

What “the world” does with the imagery Palestinians in Gaza capture is a different issue. In early June 2025, a boat left Sicily for Gaza carrying aid and aiming to break the starvation siege Israel has imposed on Palestinians living there. Aboard were prominent activists, including Greta Thunberg. Israel seized the aid boat in international waters, within 24 hours of its planned arrival in Gaza. After arresting the siege-breakers, Israel’s defense minister announced that they would be forced to watch a film about October 7. Neither here nor there is that many suspect the film is heavily doctored (a suspicion not exactly helped by the fact that Israel won’t release it to the public or allow viewers to record or photograph anything from it). What’s relevant for our purposes is that Israelis insist on giving the activists their side of the story—as if it’s not already familiar. They offer up their perceived victimhood as a justification for genocide, as an explanation for starving two million people into submission, for ethnic cleansing. The Israelis impose their film like they impose their reality, to say: You see what’s happening in Gaza with your eyes, and it doesn’t matter.

Western media depicted the activists, especially Thunberg, as attention-seekers trying to expand their personal brands. The BBC called the small boat carrying aid a “yacht.” Israeli media, as well as the New York Post, dubbed it a “selfie yacht,” and characterized the attempt to break the siege as a PR stunt. This language reflects a totalizing lack of self-awareness. It’s almost too perfect to be true, that Western media would accuse Thunberg, who risked her life to bring aid to a people Israel has isolated and starved, of using the situation, created by Israel, to bring attention to herself. A generous reading might call this subconscious projection by a state apparatus trained to make other people’s suffering self-referential. If we assume the action is conscious, its function is good old damage control, and the dissemination of a spirit of defeatism: even the people who claim to care about Palestinians are disingenuous. (It’s interesting to consider all the resources that went into condemning the activists’ intentions, given that their actions are as self-evidently selfless as it gets.)

Quickly, we reach the limits of the photograph. An image changes you, or it doesn’t. That it changes you only matters insofar as you do something about it. Before they left for Gaza, the activists saw the same images as the rest of us. There are many ways of seeing. Their response clarified something Israel and the media that supports it have worked hard to obscure: Gaza is close by. Given the will, there is a way. It would have taken the aid boat just one week to reach it. After the boat left Italy, people in Tunisia and Algeria and elsewhere announced they would start a convoy, heading from North Africa to Gaza by car, to break the siege through Rafah. At the time of writing, still others are making their way to Egypt as part of the Global March to Gaza, while the Egyptian authorities are detaining and deporting those they can.

At a press conference in front of Al-Shifa Hospital in 2023, soon after Al-Ahli’s October bombing, a man found a camera rolling and lifted his martyred child in front of it to show the world Israel’s “terrorists.” His world had been torn open. The man would go to the edges of the earth for his son. He surrendered his right to grieve privately, risked his child becoming a spectacle, for his child’s sake; the boy, Palestine, deserved justice. He trusted the viewer to understand. What choice did he have? Wrapped in this trust, this understanding, was a pact: “the world” shared his way of seeing, would receive the child’s stilled body how he did.

There are many ways of seeing. A surgeon who had been in attendance that day told me recently that he still carries that scene. He remembered thinking then that the father assumed the West’s problem was one of ignorance, that most people here simply didn’t know. If they knew, perhaps that father thought, things would change. That misplaced hope, the surgeon said, crushed him. The surgeon had spent most of his adult life in the West. He understood its logic, the source of its self-regard. “Of course they know,” he said to me, shaking his head. “They know.”

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Featured image: Arnold Eagle. [Six men inspect a large camera], ca. 1940–42. The J. Paul Getty Museum (84.XB.204.55). CC0, getty.edu. Accessed August 7, 2025. Image has been cropped.