The Victory Picture

Alessandro Camon considers the vicious circle of visible carnage.

By Alessandro CamonMarch 21, 2025

• Politics

THE STORIES OF old wars were narrated and painted, made to come to life in the imagination. Photography gave us something different: a presumed copy of reality, capable of producing a more immediate and visceral experience in the viewer. Motion pictures increased the experience’s power, and the age of sound made it multisensorial. The war in Gaza, streamed daily on social media over the last 17 months, introduced yet another level of representation, in which the experience has turned into the pervasive background of our lives.

Many have been writing exhaustively about the history and politics of the conflict, but a lot remains to be said about this dimension of representation. It is, of course, crucial, for spectacle is itself a battlefield. Contemporary war is fought, more and more, with words and pictures as much as bombs. Framing the narrative is a strategic imperative.

To wit: Last fall, Haaretz reported that Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu was trying to rebrand the entire war. The official moniker, “Swords of Iron,” was the kind of military designation used for every other previous bombing campaign in Gaza, such as “Cast Lead,” “Pillar of Defense,” and “Protective Edge.” This war, however, was at another order of magnitude, demanding that it be defined in more distinctive terms. The obvious contender for a new name was “The October 7 War”—inherently memorable, with the added benefit of reinforcing the idea that the conflict was started by the enemy. Unfortunately for Netanyahu, this called attention to his failure to keep the core promise of his political career: security for Israel. On October 7, 2023, the illusion of security collapsed catastrophically, and Netanyahu wasn’t keen on branding the war with such a reminder. The name he favored instead was “The War of Resurrection” (the latter term in Hebrew, “Tkuma,” could also be translated as “rebirth” or “revival”), which promised to redound positively to his own image.

The renaming debate illustrates a larger point. Whether most people use the term “wall” versus “security barrier,” “occupied” versus “contested” territory, or “colonization” versus “return to the ancestral homeland,” that terminology can make a massive and long-lasting difference. Historically, the State of Israel has always been a sophisticated and disciplined practitioner of perception management, its expertly crafted talking points cascading from briefings to op-eds to public conversation. “Hasbara,” the term Israel uses for its public diplomacy, has been a vastly successful national enterprise without which the “reality on the ground” would certainly be very different.

But things have changed. The last year marked a seismic shift in Israel’s ability to control the narrative. From the very beginning, the war’s strategic rationale seemed ill-defined: the palatable notion of “self-defense” was immediately belied by the many statements from the highest levels of government promising punishment for every single person in Gaza and by the wholesale destruction of dwellings and infrastructure, as well as the deprivation of food, water, and power.

Netanyahu’s personal rhetoric centered on the idea of “total victory,” yet it was never clear how exactly victory would be measured—and, most importantly, what would happen next. As with the indefinite goals of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror,” this lack of clarity was largely deliberate: it provided a way for the war to continue until Netanyahu’s domestic reputation was repaired, “deterrence” toward Israel’s enemies restored, and general lust for revenge satisfied—all accomplishments that would be determined within the domain of perception. Ultimately, what Netanyahu always craved was a great “victory picture.”

This proved to be a most elusive prize. Gaza had no royal palace to storm, no major iconic spot to plant the flag. The massive underground “command and control center” depicted in IDF propaganda videos, a multilevel high-tech installation straight out of a James Bond movie, was never found. Actual battlefield victories were off the table, as Hamas couldn’t possibly engage in any “battles” against fighter jets and tanks. In other words, there wasn’t much of a chance to produce conventional heroic deeds or narratives. The closest to a Hollywood victory the IDF ever got was the rescue of four hostages—but any celebration of that achievement required shrugging off the scores of innocent Palestinians who were killed in the operation. And for over a year, Yahya Sinwar, the chairman of the Hamas Political Bureau, remained at large.

Incapable of obtaining a suitable “victory picture,” IDF soldiers could do no better than post photographs and videos of themselves blowing up universities, abusing prisoners, or laughing and cheering in looted homes, oblivious about (or perhaps proud of) what the appropriation of land and homes implies in the larger story of Israel and Palestine. Social media accounts and channels of IDF soldiers displayed a mind-boggling appetite for Palestinian suffering: the popular Telegram channel “72 Virgins—Uncensored,” directly controlled by the IDF, and its successor channel, “Dead Terrorists,” were breathtaking sewers of revenge porn. As images of “victory,” these were the kind that could only horrify most spectators, and undoubtedly strengthen the case for genocide.

The amount of visible carnage created a vicious circle. In order to prevent a guilty conscience, the carnage needed to be offset with images of Israeli suffering, but given the lack of new civilian victims on the Israeli side, these images could only come from constant replays of the events of October 7. The undeniable atrocities committed by Hamas had to be made into a visual and aural mantra; furthermore, they had to be endlessly augmented with new—and often imaginary—details. Grotesque tales of beheaded babies, dead babies on clotheslines, babies in ovens, fetuses ripped from wombs, terrorists playing with body parts, and so forth, created a thick epistemic fog where the real horror blended seamlessly with atrocity propaganda, providing cover to the expanding atrocities in Gaza. History will not forget the astonishing lies of President Joe Biden, who claimed to have seen pictures of the mythical decapitated babies, was immediately corrected by his underlings, and then continued to lie anyway.

Supporters of the war seemed stuck in collective cognitive dissonance. Profound shock and grief for the October 7 victims were accompanied by a complete disregard for the far larger Palestinian death toll. October 7 victims were human: they had names and faces, families and dreams. They deserved to be memorialized as “innocent,” “beautiful,” “radiant,” and “angelic.” Palestinian victims remained a nameless, faceless, numberless abstraction, when not simply dismissed as “Amalek” or “children of darkness.”

The worldwide public, especially younger generations, could easily read the underlying racism behind this double standard. And yet, instead of reckoning with it, propagandists doubled down, going to the inevitable extreme: casting Hamas (and Palestinians at large, since there are no “uninvolved civilians”) as “the new Nazis.”

This move fulfilled many purposes. Evoking the Nazis was emotionally satisfying, allowing the killing of Palestinians to function as a kind of revenge for the Holocaust. It assuaged any residual guilty feelings over the Nakba, and prevented the acknowledgment of how much the stateless, dispossessed, oppressed Palestinians may actually resemble previous generations of Jews. Finally, it allowed for a rejection of any accusation of genocide as “Holocaust inversion,” locking Israel into a permanent status of “victim” even as it decimated another people. As long as the enemy was “the new Nazis,” no amount of violence could possibly seem disproportionate.

Despite the Israeli government’s best efforts, this rhetoric was doomed to fail: Nazi iconography is all about power and domination, while the people of Gaza are among the poorest and most powerless on earth, almost 50 percent of them minors, who never set foot outside their open-air prison. Even the combatants might fight in sandals or sneakers, with primitive rockets and bombs often made out of unexploded Israeli ordnance. Sometimes they fight with slingshots and stones. Israel, on the other hand, is a nuclear power, backed by major countries with long histories of colonialism and genocide (including, of course, Germany).

The optics were simply unmanageable. On one side of the metaphorical split screen were destroyed cities and slaughtered children; on the other, IDF soldiers laughing over the ruins, reruns of October 7, and business-suited ghouls spouting stale talking points.

Israeli war leaders knew from the start that this would be a problem: all too tellingly, they never allowed international reporters to enter Gaza, while the local ones were killed off in droves. The language of mainstream media coverage was tightly policed, and editorial guidelines enforced a lopsided framing by which the adjectives automatically attached to the October 7 massacre (“brutal,” “horrific,” and “barbaric”) were automatically withheld from any massacre of Palestinians. The surreal implication was that those atrocities were somehow gentler, more agreeable, and civilized. And yet, thanks to now-ubiquitous camera phones, social media feeds kept filling up with bodies—dead, dismembered, burned, starved, naked bodies, and so many of them small. You would have to live in a particularly tight bubble to keep finding justifications for it.

Israel’s need for a victory picture became more and more desperate. Short of another daring rescue operation (without a collateral massacre), the best hope was finally killing Sinwar. A video capturing the demise of Enemy Number One—mastermind of October 7, last man standing in the leadership of Hamas, and “biggest obstacle to a ceasefire”—could have been the climactic and cathartic moment of the war. It was the perfect trophy. And so, when Sinwar met his predictable fate, the IDF was quick to release the drone footage.

It could have used what is known in Hollywood as a test screening. Sinwar was supposed to be hiding underground, like a rat or a devil, protected by human shields and sitting on millions of dollars and tons of looted food. For a year, Israel had insisted that killing so many civilians was strictly necessary, because every hospital, school, and refugee camp in Gaza was hiding a “terror center,” and one of them would eventually reveal the game’s final boss: Yahya Sinwar.

Inconveniently, Sinwar was found aboveground, with a few other militants, dressed in combat fatigues. He was targeted and wounded with a tank round, but he did not surrender or attempt suicide. Instead, he lobbed a couple of grenades, then sat in a chair, bleeding out, facing the sky. According to autopsy reports, he had not eaten in 72 hours.

The final image of Sinwar bookended his most famous picture, in which he sat smiling in another chair, amid the ruins of another building, bombed in 2021. The two pictures told a simple story: Here I was born, here I will die. In his last moment on camera, Sinwar throws a stick at the drone, before a second tank round brings the building down on him.

The IDF (and/or the Israeli government) thought that releasing these images would be a great PR coup, making Sinwar look pathetic and impotent. Even after it became clear that, while the tank physically killed him, the video might make him a bigger icon, many war supporters seemed curiously unable to understand why. Popular Israeli influencer Hen Mazzig wrote on X: “The problem isn’t that Sinwar looks like a hero in this video. It’s that we live in a world where people think *this* is what a hero looks and acts like.”

This remark was interesting. Was it the kaffiyeh? The blood? The stick? I’m not debating the sins of Sinwar, which are many and obvious. The question is, what is it supposed to “look like” when a man fights to his last breath, wielding a stick against tanks and drones? Is it really supposed to look terrible for that man, and are we really supposed to spontaneously root for the tanks and the drones? Are we supposed to think that heroes look like stormtroopers, with high-tech armor and night vision goggles, standing over naked bodies, or posing mockingly with the lingerie of women they displaced or killed? Or that they look like a prime minister who kept the war going to avoid being tried for corruption, and who spent months and months hiding from the families of hostages?

Hollywood, of course, knows better. It’s difficult to root for Goliath: sympathy gravitates to the underdog, the rebel, the outlaw. The Luigi Mangione phenomenon might have been surprising to the billionaires who run the US “healthcare” industry but far less so to the merchants of popular culture, which has long lionized all kinds of avengers and citizens who “take the law into their own hands.”

Not only is it human nature to sympathize with the underdog, but we also know that the rebel is often on the right side of history. This means that, when producing mass entertainment, you must either make the rebel your hero or at least make your hero look like a rebel. Not by chance, the aesthetic appeal of American jingoism requires a massive supply of “special operators”: men with bushy beards and shemaghs, who carry handmade knives into battle and call themselves things like “snake eaters.” In other words, “cowboys who think like Indians.” Fauda (2015– ), the popular and well-crafted Israeli TV show, learned that lesson well: the unit at the center of the show specializes in “looking like Arabs,” in order to slip behind enemy lines and infiltrate hostile forces.

The destruction of Gaza, however, was a very different spectacle, and Israel’s supporters seemed to have forgotten the lesson altogether. When they started proclaiming their horror at protesters who wrapped their heads in kaffiyehs, they weren’t just willfully ignoring that this was protection from doxing and harassment: they were also ignoring popular culture. It was as if they never noticed that so many of America’s “superheroes,” our main cultural exports—including Batman, Spider-Man, and even the one called “Captain America”—wear masks. It was as if they never saw Star Wars, Pirates of the Caribbean, Zorro, Avatar, Dune, or Gladiator, where the heroes always fight against the empire, the colonial powers, the authoritarian rulers.

To be clear, this isn’t to say that Hollywood promotes revolution. But while the industry maintains a general allegiance to capitalism, it’s also highly adept at mining the sentiments and iconography of liberation struggles around the world, from the United States’ inner cities to the Global South, from the ancient past to the imaginary future.

Last April, I had a chance to reflect on these themes while visiting UCLA, my alma mater, on the day of a large counterprotest against the anti-war student encampment. I observed carefully how the two crowds looked, and the overall visual contrast between them. The pro-Palestinian group was predominantly young and multiracial, wearing surgical masks or kaffiyehs. The pro-Israel group were older, largely white, and maskless. They waved Israeli and US flags, and some that were a mix of both, suggesting a combined supernation. The MAGA vibes were strong. It looked like a well-to-do Westside crowd, with a normie aesthetic centered on polos, chinos, sunglasses, baseball hats, and conservative hairstyles.

There was, however, a notable subgroup leaning toward sports gear and street fashion, acting in a more confrontational way. Some of these people assaulted the camp a couple weeks later, in the middle of the night, committing by far the worst violence seen at any university during the protests.

This subgroup illuminated a larger duality in the pro-war mindset—one that could be observed across the spectrum. On the one hand, one witnessed a performance of “civilized” reasonableness such as one might expect from the old-school pundits on TV talk shows; on the other hand, there was Inglourious Basterds machismo, sexualized gun culture, and openly racist language, combined with enormous amounts of cultural appropriation. (In fact, Israel’s unofficial post–October 7 soundtrack mostly comprised locally made rap music, sometimes excruciatingly cringey but occasionally quite effective—particularly in the case of the Israeli chart-topper “Harbu Darbu,” which repurposed a drill beat and the genre’s rapid-fire delivery to create the defining song of the war. Ironically, “harbu darbu,” like “fauda,” is originally an Arabic expression.)

Hamas itself has been the object of both repulsion and imitation. Soon after Hamas propaganda videos started displaying a flashing red triangle indicating a target, the same icon (switched to blue) appeared in videos made by IDF soldiers. And now you can even shop online for “Israeli Kaffiyehs” (I’ll spare you that link).

It was hardly surprising, then, to see Douglas Murray’s cosplay recreation of Sinwar’s last picture—an implicit admission of its iconic power. Of course, Murray could only manage to look silly—especially while wearing the kind of flak jacket with “PRESS” printed on it that has made such an attractive target for the IDF.

The actual great “victory picture” will remain out of reach. The foreseeable future will likely bring more bloodshed and ethnic cleansing, including in the West Bank, but what is unlikely is that it will ever look like anything else. Perception management might have reached its outer limit. No “victory picture” could ever obscure the burning shape of Shaban al-Dalou, the young student displaced five times with his whole family before he was set on fire by an Israeli bomb. Or the voice of five-year-old Hind Rajab hiding in terror among the bodies of her uncle, auntie, cousins, and sister before an Israeli tank finished the job and took her life.

Genocide deniers will keep deploying all kinds of outlandish sophistry to downplay or justify Palestinian suffering. Their attempt to memory-hole the slaughter will produce an almost unimaginable amount of censorship. And yet, Palestinian blood will haunt them, because such is the “moral wound” of war—not what was done to you but what you did yourself. Golda Meir put her memorable spin on this when she famously said, “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.” It was always a troubling statement, steeped in moral narcissism and victim-blaming. But Gaza might reveal its deepest and darkest meaning: Palestinians cannot be forgiven for what their killers will have to see in the mirror.

In this persistent commitment to Palestinian dehumanization, the “Trump Gaza” video that recently went viral (after Trump reposted it on his social media platform) is perhaps the only victory picture possible: a delirious, dystopian fantasy of white supremacy, colonial plunder, and ruler cult that seems like a snapshot from the MAGA id. Though apparently intended as caustic satire, its intent was misunderstood by Trump himself: this is what “victory” actually looks like, in the exterminator’s dreams.

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Featured image: President Joe Biden meets with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (2023) is in the public domain. Image has been cropped.