The Negative Utopia of Media from Palestine: from Azoulay to Now

Leo Deng

12/8/23

Spaces and Mobilities Seminar

Professor Marian Aguiar

Introduction

The ongoing Israeli-Palestine conflict hit one of the definitive ruptures in its 75-year history on October 7th, 2023, through the counter-offensive Operation Al-Aqsa led by Sunni Islamist political organization Hamas, which currently governs the Gaza Strip of Palestine. Gaza has been one of the most contested territories ever since the Israeli occupation in 1948, being called the world’s largest “open-air prison” since the Israeli blockade of 2007 by the likes of American intellectual Noam Chomsky because of its wretched conditions that are subjugated on over 2 million Palestinians (over half of which are children under 18). Now, the Gaza strip (along with the West Bank, too, recently) is under constant attack by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), white phosphorous bombs,[1] and countless other forms of massacring civilians, children, journalists, and bombing hospitals, ambulances, refugee shelters, and schools.[2], [3], [4] With any ongoing war or violent conflict, the media coverage, images, and aesthetic products or instruments that emerge are constantly interacting with the masses of the 21st-century globe. Such aesthetics reveal simultaneously direct and extreme evocations of sympathy, guilt, and dread, while always having the implicit potentialities of the moment and what will come after. The combination of both is what I shall deem the “Negative Utopia” of the image. Directly drawing from Adornian aesthetic theory, the Negative Utopia is the revolutionary kernel of resistance against oppression that is drawn out from an image of suffering or injustice. The concept emphatically asserts that any possibility of a better future is always-already connected to its origin of resistance—the ultimate motivating factor for socio-political change. Through an evaluation of images in Ariella Azoulay’s From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947-1950, and connecting its analysis with images emerging during the war today, the imperialist world order—represented by the Zionist Israeli state in this small but pertinent moment—reveals the Negative Utopia contained in every image of Palestinian suffering.

[1] “Israel: White Phosphorus Used in Gaza, Lebanon | Human Rights Watch,” October 12, 2023, https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/10/12/israel-white-phosphorus-used-gaza-lebanon.

[2] redstreamnet, “Red. (@redstreamnet) Post,” October 16, 2023, https://www.instagram.com/p/CydcMznILgG/. See, also, their official website: https://thered.stream/

[3] Abed Abu Riash and Federica Marsi, “Gaza Medics Say Israel Targeting Ambulances, Health Facilities | Gaza News | Al Jazeera,” accessed October 27, 2023, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/12/war-crime-gaza-medics-say-israel-targeting-ambulances-health-facilities.

[4] Matthew Loh, “A UN Group Said Its School Shelter Was Bombed during Israeli Airstrikes, Even after It Gave Everyone the Facility’s Coordinates,” Business Insider, accessed October 27, 2023, https://www.businessinsider.com/unrwa-gaza-shelter-school-israel-bombed-coordinates-2023-10.

Adorno and Negative Utopia

            Negative Utopia comes from an original quotation by Paul Gilroy of Theodor Adorno in his essay “The Black Atlantic as a Counterculture of Modernity.”

Art’s Utopia, the counter-factual yet-to-come, is draped in black. It goes on being a recollection of the possible with a critical edge against the real; it is a kind of imaginary restitution of that catastrophe, which is world history; it is a freedom which did not pass under the spell of necessity and which may well not come to pass ever at all.[1]

I interpreted this quote in accordance with the main aesthetic example of Gilroy’s essay—J. M. W. Turner’s 1840 painting Slave Ship. In Turner’s painting, the Utopia is clearly a negative one—the revolutionary kernel of abolition is contained within the opposite of the painting’s reality, which must be realized through the reality of the painting’s opposite (an emancipated world). Effectively, the kernel can be seen as the provocative effect of shame in whatever white European at the 1840 exhibit of this painting who had the capacity to feel such a way—Marx and Che Guevara’s shared dictum resonates loudly: ‘shame is a revolutionary feeling.’[2] Thus, the necessarily negatively, oppositionally conceived Utopia that is this painting—which is always-already mimetic in Adorno’s philosophy—is the authoritative “counter-factual”[3] that should not be seen as mere myth. The “counter-factual” is the beauty of subjectivity that has been thwarted by enlightenment objectivity that is repressive and totalitarian;[4] not only that, this is a subjectivity that is authoritative and powerful in its own right as it is aware of the fact that objectivity[5] makes its existence and vice versa—this is the Negative Dialectics of Adorno that is always reflecting the “mimetic impulse” of Art.[6] Therefore, Turner’s painting is the perfect example of Negative Utopia that precisely is ‘the possible with a critical edge against the real.’ The revolutionary legacy to come after the historical rupture this painting is to represent—a rupture that is even more Adornian than Marxist in that it is the absolute limit of human acceptability by way of somatic suffering, in contrast to the ‘last instance’ of the dialectic being economic—is the overcoming of the real (conditions in 1840) that is Gilroy's concept of the Black Atlantic, which becomes a positive force that emerges from this specific dialectical conflict. This last instance of the determination of revolutionary motivation is somatic suffering—it is when the particularized forms of material and physical violence are forced upon those subject to colonialist, capitalist, and (or) imperialist aggressions. As this specific Negative Utopia of Slave Ship projects the motives and movements to come of abolitionism, racial civil rights, and so on, so do Azoulay’s photos do the same for Palestinian resistance. Of course, the historical differences between Negative Utopias will always be immense, but the common denominator of resistance always being present is the point of this Adornian framework.

[1] Paul Gilroy, “The Black Atlantic as a Counterculture of Modernity,” 1993, 73-4. Gilroy’s citation: T. W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: Routledge, 1984), p. 196).

[2] This is more of an ambiguous cultural term by the masses in remembrance of the figures but cannot be sourced to a specific piece of writing, although they are quoted that way by notable people. One possible source is when Marx says, “shame is a revolution in itself” in a letter: Karl Marx, “Letter from Marx to Arnold Ruge,” 1843, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_03-alt.htm.

[3] Underlined to refer to original block quote.

[4] See Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment.

[5] This is the general Adornian notion that subjectivity is the perception of objects and objectivity is the certainty of subjectivity. Jay Lampert, “Adorno on Freedom: Negative Dialectics Pages 221-265 Lecture and Lecture Notes” (Lecture, Adorno Seminar, Duquesne University, October 23, 2023).

[6] Mimetic impulse is elaborated best here: “Part I, Chapter 7: Sentences and Mimesis,” in Late Marxism: Adorno, Or, The Persistence of the Dialectic, by Fredric Jameson, 1st Edition (London ; New York: Verso, 1990), 63–73. The phrase appears first on page 65.

Palestine, Azoulay, and the Photos of Nakba

            From the outset of Azoulay’s analysis of the archival photos from 1947-1950 (stored in Israeli archives for over half a century until she published this work), her commentary clearly posits my notion of Negative Utopia in her own words: “Using the war as a prism through which the past is read allows us not only to read the past differently, but also to imagine a different, civil future. This book proposes to extract such potentialities from the rubble created by the nation-state’s machinery of war.”[1] For her, this becomes ‘civil imagination,’ which is necessary in probing the questions that are inextricably tied to the photos themselves that is always-already being manipulated as ideology of the hegemon—the Israeli state in this instance.[2] Thus, Azoulay’s work becomes all the more pertinent in so far as it traces the ongoing conflict to its very origin to truly reveal the kernel of revolutionary (or resistive) history that has been the 75 years of occupation. This implicitly genealogical method perfectly allows for the juxtaposition of the original Negative Utopia evoked by the images and the current Negative Utopia of media coming out of Palestine (as a rupture of its revolutionary lineage or a true end, in which the possibility of unfortunate dystopia looms). In the Azoulay, I will specifically hone in on certain photographs from Chapter 1 (“Military Governmentality”) and Chapter 5 (“Borders, Strategies of Uprooting, and Preventing Return”) as they best help reveal the spatial and mobility-related attributes of this original Negative Utopia.

Before looking directly at the photos, Azoulay gives great historical context to the Israeli settlement of Palestine, especially in relation to the linguistic use of ‘war.’ The word ‘war’ immediately conjures an entire milieu of historical context that Azoulay thoughtfully presents in the Introduction. This war is what Palestinians call the ‘nakba’ (“catastrophe”) where, by the end of all the military violence and intervention, 700,000 of the prewar population either were expelled forcefully by the Israeli military or fled.[3] Azoulay poignantly points out that the very term ‘nakba’ has undergone extreme ideological manipulation in so far as the Israeli social common sense of the term is that it is purely “how the Palestinians refer to what happened to them in ’48.”[4] Such an ideological mask is buttressed by the very fact that Israel can even consider this a “war” at all, which assumes “two hostile sides which fought one another, and mistakenly identifies the violence carried out by the army with wartime ‘battles.’”[5] The necessity for such an ideological mask points to how easily entitled the Israeli state was to this land and its intervention, which can directly be traced to the former colonizers of the British mandate of Palestine from 1920 up until the Israeli occupation of 1948. The British mandate was a clear suppression of the Arab revolt against them and the Ottoman Empire during WWI, which ultimately shows why Palestine was so accessible for the Israeli military to occupy.[6] Most ironic is that the original handover to the Israeli state used the term “liberation” “that camouflaged the colonization of Palestine by the state of Israel,”[7] an ultimate attribute of the ideological mask that immerses us into the first images, where the ‘cultural property’ of the mosque is taken away from the Palestinians, and it is tauntingly made as their last gasp of ‘home’ in the form of a detention camp before the utter state of precarity to come in the next 75 years.

From the very outset of Azoulay’s journey into describing all these photos in her own chronology, the reader is plunged into a world of utter estrangement, of the primary shock of being displaced so forcefully that there is not much time to contemplate resistance. The first photo of Chapter 1 places the reader right into the seminal location of the mosque, showing how in-process and disorientating displacement is, which forces the very change of the place’s function into a contradictory one. The religious (and always-already cultural) haven has been made into its aborted opposite—a “detention camp” (as Azoulay states) where the only people seen ‘free,’ roaming outside are the Israeli soldiers sent to execute the displacement of all Palestinians from “Bir al-Sabi'e/Beersheba," so 3,000 Jewish settlers could move in. [8]

Figure 1 – “Photographer: Hugo Mendelson, Government Press Office, October 22, 1948”

[1] Ariella Azoulay, From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947-1950, trans. Charles S. Kamen (London: Pluto Press, 2011), 8.

[2] Azoulay, From Palestine to Israel, 10.

[3] Joseph Krauss, “Israel’s Recent Call for Mass Evacuation Echoes Catastrophic 1948 Palestinian Exodus,” PBS NewsHour, October 13, 2023, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/in-israels-call-for-mass-evacuation-palestinians-hear-echoes-of-their-original-catastrophic-exodus.

[4] Azoulay, From Palestine to Israel, 10.

[5] Azoulay, From Palestine to Israel, 7.

[6] Matthew Hughes, ed., Allenby in Palestine: The Middle East Correspondence of Field Marshal Viscount Allenby June 1917 – October 1919, vol. 22, Army Records Society (Phoenix Mill, Thrupp, Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing Ltd, n.d.).

[7] Azoulay, From Palestine to Israel, 7.

[8] Azoulay, From Palestine to Israel, 22-23.

Figure 2 – “Photographer: Hugo Mendelson, Government Press Office, October 22, 1948”

Moreover, what is once seen as a permanent haven becomes violently transitory as these former inhabitants become mere objects to get rid of (an obstacle) for Israeli settlers: “they’ll soon be transferred to a different prisoner of war camp in Israel.”[1] The mosque as first image also hints at the fallacious dichotomy between Jewish and Muslim sides to choose—as if it even is close to a ‘partisan’ issue, which it is not.

            Such an ideological dichotomy, which is still used today as a colonizer-defending talking point through false charges of antisemitism,[2] presents the danger of estranging the masses (especially the surprisingly apolitical one of the USA)[3] by representing the authority of religious-ethnic allegiances as the primary determining factor of what side someone chooses in supporting. This fallacious partisanship can never account for the reality of the complexity and multiplicity of factionalisms and the nuances that make up Palestine’s resistance. However, the Israeli side of the issue is much clearer and more explicit in that the ruling class has more ideological predominance through Zionism and thus, Jewish religious-ethnic attributes are secondary when they appear to be primary. Azoulay talks a lot about the “Jewishness” of this specific war for Israel and its desires to have a nation-state, but with a keener analysis of Zionism itself, it is clear that the nationalist ideology wields the religion for its nationalist interests of conquest—from its outset Zionism advocated for ethnic cleansing of Arabs[4] far before the Holocaust (which I only insert here as it can be used as poor apologia for the creation of the nation-state after WW2). This logic of nationalist conquering reinserts back into Azoulay’s commentary on the initial mass displacement project of Nakba. The nationalist logic on the macro-scale also manifested in the micro-scale as “the policy of ‘divide and conquer’ reflected in this photograph is emblematic of how the military government operates."[5]

[1] Azoulay, From Palestine to Israel, 22.

[2] Look no short of Right-wing political commentator Ben Shapiro’s recent videos. One specific video where he mentions antisemitism as Zionist apologia is here: Why I’m Showing You Hamas’ Atrocities, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SE5QG_BDUks.

[3] Here I refer to the phenomenon in which Americans recognize the chaos and social unrest yet are passive and feel helpless in doing anything except for voting. Even for voting, Americans have a shockingly low retention rate for the citizens of the political global hegemon because of general mistrust of our political system. For many groups, almost a majority do not vote. See the data graphs here: Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux, Jasmine Mithani, and Laura Bronner, “Why Millions Of Americans Don’t Vote,” FiveThirtyEight, October 26, 2020, https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/non-voters-poll-2020-election/.

[4] Israel’s Goal Was Always Ethnic Cleansing, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhNGimPNygs.

[5] Azoulay, From Palestine to Israel, 45.

Figure 3 – “Photographer: David Eldan, Government Press Office, May 10, 1949”

Here, we have jumped towards the end of a refugee displacement as reported by the military government by the end of June. After a series of photos that ranged from false savior-complex Israelis feeding Palestinian children through a fence to biologically racist measuring of refugees to flat-out imprisonment, this photo shows an interesting dynamic of varying reactions to the rare confidential talk between an Israeli officer and one of the refugees. Azoulay describes it perfectly: “Military rule always divides the population into collaborators and those who don’t collaborate, into desirable local residents and internal refugees who are a burden and a threat, into those who stayed and those who ‘infiltrated.’”[1] This can be seen as a moment of quietism or opportunism, which are always possibilities within the ebbs and flows of a revolutionary history and thus, a unique contradiction before the settlement of the Zionist state that was soon to come. Just like any contradiction, this moment can be one of many aporias to be deconstructed for renewed revolutionary purposes; in the same vein of Negative Utopia, we must always remember that quietism and opportunism are also shaped and defined by their negatives or opposites—of progressive revolution and self-determination. The kernel of these positives can be seen in, perhaps what would be called, Positive Utopias of initial socio-political protest, which is displayed by this strike called by the Supreme Arab Council in response to the UN approving the Partition Plan that would essentially make the Palestinians “stateless persons.”[2]

[1] Azoulay, From Palestine to Israel, 45.

[2] Azoulay, From Palestine to Israel, 12.

Figure 4 – “Photographer not identified, Central Zionist Archives, 1947”

The imagery of this initial procession—from the Palestinian flags to similar clothes current Palestinians wear—resounds even more loudly in how they have been reproduced differently today. The flags are reproduced adamantly in the globe’s progressive and anti-colonial movements through protest and symbol for the legitimacy of the Palestinian nation. In an opposite manner unfortunately, the fact that the clothes do not seem to be from almost a century ago speaks to the utter economic stagnation Palestine has been subjected to ever since its occupation, i.e., the media coming from Gaza today does not look all that different. The current reproduction of the subtly abject surroundings and old clothing in the image is one of banality that shows Israel’s only care for Palestinians to be at or below the means of subsistence.[1] This is because they do not need the Palestinians at all, let alone as potential laborers—they are merely obstacles to be rid of for property, which is a necessary condition for any settler-colonialist, capitalist nation’s creation. Here, a summary of the Partition Plan will contextualize the Palestinians' initial attitudes towards it, helping us understand better the resistive propensities that would emerge from the Negative Utopias congealed in the images of somatic suffering in Chapter 5.

[1] This intentionality has only become more explicit in recent years of Israel’s control of Palestinians' caloric intake to be the bare minimum to not die from hunger—far below any normal measure of subsistence. IMEU, “Putting Palestinians ‘On a Diet’: Israel’s Siege & Blockade of Gaza | IMEU,” August 14, 2014, https://imeu.org/article/putting-palestinians-on-a-diet-israels-siege-blockade-of-gaza.

Execution of Partition Plan and Malfeasant Imperialist Antinomies

            The Partition Plan prematurely neglected Palestinian insight because the Palestinians felt—by default—against any plan at all as they saw the Israeli state and its collaboration with the UN as nothing but what they materially were: intruders. Thus, as Azoulay puts it aptly, the problem was the very plan itself as it asserted a false assumption that there was a compromise to be made between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples, which was false as my discussion of Figure 1 showed just a minute fraction of the immense settlement projects the Zionist state intended to keep pursuing for the Nakba and much beyond.[1] The evidence of what happened is presented as follows:

The United Nations partition decision of 29 November 1947 was adopted in complete opposition to the desires of at least 70 percent of the country’s Arab inhabitants. A not-insignificant number of Jews also opposed the decision. From the moment that the UN decided, the Zionist leadership counted the country’s inhabitants along to the line dividing Jews from Arabs. The position of the Zionist leadership in support of partition and its unconditional justification of using violence to establish the Jewish regime were presented as the Jewish position. Ultra-orthodox Jews, communists, pacifists and those who supported the creation of civil society had no place in the public discourse, and almost no information is available about their struggle.[2]

Not only was this division [(the partition plan)] fortified by the violence attending its creation and by a political declaration; henceforth, borders and fences were required to preserve for the future the achievements of the Jewish national movement that had been imposed on the Palestinians. The destruction and rebuilding by the Jews was intended to extend their hold on the land, and turned the Palestinians into homeless, exiled refugees and internal displaced persons. Those who remained inside the new country’s borders were not allowed to return to their homes, which were either demolished or survived as isolated ruins whose surroundings had been wiped clean.[3] 

Thus, the photos of Chapter 5 will be perfect sites of study for how the course of action of this partition plan, and its material execution occurred. Palestine specifically is one of the origins of the refugee crisis of the Middle East (and has spread to and includes many South and Southeast Asian countries now) that is one of the clearest malignant symptoms of 20th-century Imperialism’s contradictions—that has inevitably spread to the 21st-century in even more concentrated forms. Ai Weiwei’s award-winning film Human Flow attempts to represent the solidarity between all refugee crises from Libyans to the Burmese to Syrians and, of course, to the Palestinians.[4] Thus, it must be emphasized that all these struggles are interconnected, that Imperialist re-division of the already completely colonized world by primitive accumulation[5] has caused the mass displacement of civilians and the subaltern by nation-states fighting for profitable gain. Of course, that is only the root cause, and the multiplicity of complex reasons for displacement (creation of refugees) manifests after Imperialist aggression as forms of civil war (usually following a Western assassination of a progressive leader or force), Western-backed puppet regimes or dictators, and so on.[6] So, as the genealogical methods of Nietzsche and Foucault have shown, the tracing back to the (or an) origin of a phenomenon can show its essential qualities and determining factors—the affirmation of the origin of Palestine for the refugee crisis is shown by the very academic use of the term “settler colonialism” emerging from studies of Palestine’s occupation.[7] Thus, we return to the origin of displacement through the execution of the partition plan, in which the very making of the first modern refugees takes place.

[1] Azoulay, From Palestine to Israel, 175.

[2] Azoulay, From Palestine to Israel, 11-12.

[3] Azoulay, From Palestine to Israel, 175.

[4] Human Flow, Documentary (Amazon Studios, 2017), https://www.amazon.com/Human-Flow-Chin-Chin-Yap/dp/B08J8K5SYR/ref=sr_1_2?crid=5X6LRULGDJM4&keywords=ai+weiwei+human+flow&qid=1699325937&sprefix=ai+weiwei+human+flow%2Caps%2C91&sr=8-2.

[5] Of course, seeing the world as completely colonized is only from the Western Imperialists perspective as if the global South, Africa, and the Middle East are mere objects of property for their conquest and domination—thus, the connection with rhetoric of posing the indigenous inhabitants of those places as ‘sub-human’ or even ‘animal.’ That initial conquest is what Marx deemed primitive accumulation as the necessary accumulation of natural resources for capital to prosper, but that same incessant drive turned into that for profit drove the world to war with all in its ‘redivision’ as Lenin called it. See: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, “Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism,” in Imperialism in the 21st Century | Updating Lenin’s Theory a Century Later (San Francisco: Liberation Media, 2015).

[6] Party for Socialism and Liberation, “The Unipolar Era of Imperialism and Its Potential Undoing,” in Imperialism in the 21st Century | Updating Lenin’s Theory a Century Later (San Francisco: Liberation Media, 2015), 45–67.

[7] See endnote 7 of: J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, “‘A Structure, Not an Event’: Settler Colonialism and Enduring Indigeneity,” Lateral | Journal of the Cultural Studies Association 5, no. 1 (2016), https://doi.org/10.25158/L5.1.7.

Chapter 5 confronts the reader with the beginnings of the completely heteronomous material conditions of Palestinian refugees: tents replacing homes, darkened faces by dust showing an abject precarity, and the lack of buildings or civilization as they became ‘constantly-on-the-move.'

Figure 5 - “Photographer: Ali Zaarour, with the compliments of Zaki Zaarour, 1948”

According to Azoulay, this image is “a rare view of the first days that expellees from villages spent on their journey into exile,” setting up camp under trees for this particular instance of temporary shelter on the long 100+ kilometer journey to the refugee camps in West Bank or Jordan.[1] The ironic mobility-centered word ‘journey’ that is connotated with conquest, adventure, or freedom in the privileged Westerner’s ears reveals a double-meaning predicated on class. Adorno’s negative dialectics applies here, too: the journey of the oppressor is freedom, and the ‘journey’ of the oppressed is unfreedom. The masses of belongings in the photo that trump that of persons either show that many are not in frame (setting up other types of safety precautions for the night or the like) or the naked fact that they are forced to move their entire lives (in their life belongings) somewhere else. The long impending journey combined with the (what looks like) child and mother sitting in the shade in the bottom-left and two children with hands perpendicular to their brows in the middle-right of the photo—which indicate the conditions of scorching sun in the Middle East—only make the somatic suffering these original refugees will experience all the worse. Furthermore, the reality of their destiny will only add to the last instance of suffering in which the kernel of Negative Utopia can be drawn out as the camps would transform them into “people at the mercy of others, objects of humanitarian intervention.”[2]

[1] Azoulay, From Palestine to Israel, 190.

[2] Azoulay, From Palestine to Israel, 191.

Lastly, a photo of a UNICEF water distribution site culminates this discussion of Azoulay’s photos in a bittersweet manner as an ironic image of bourgeois philanthropy.

Figure 6 – “Photographer not identified. The Monastery and School of “Jesus Adolescent” (Don Bosco), Nazareth, January 1949

This image is after the establishment of a refugee camp, which at least lets these Palestinians live, but at the cost of being completely dependent beings on external aid in a stateless community. They are forced by circumstance to mobilize towards and huddle around a small site for water, becoming a ritualistic practice for survival while being essentially ‘unproductive’ persons. These refugees are so subaltern (in the Spivakian sense) that they are not even needed for labor, but they still have a clear role for the capitalist, settler-colonialist class as obstacles to be exterminated for the other most important asset of capitalism: land. In this way, Palestinians have a similar relationship to settler Israelis as the First Nations did with the settler Americans, which Asian-American settler-colonialist theorist Iyko Day poignantly showed was the relationship of ‘elimination’ for land as the First Nations did not need to be used as a labor force (cattle slavery of Africans served that purpose, completing the two-fold reality of America’s extremely hostile primitive accumulation).[1] Thus, the fact that UNICEF had a station already at the very outset of the Zionist project is so ironic because the very purpose of philanthropy in a global capitalist order serves nothing but to put measly bandages on the unforgiving wounds of capital. I am not trying to demean any genuine volunteer work of organizations like UNICEF, especially the workers who devote their lives to saving others; I am just acknowledging the very illusion of empathic productivity in philanthropy that can only emerge in a capitalist accumulation of wealth from a system that is inherently exploitative—the symptom and the “cure” come from the same source.

[1] Iyko Day, Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Durham London: Duke University Press Books, 2016), 25-31.

Current Media: From Suffering to Reactionary Absurdity

As the relentless march of capital makes its rounds across the globe, the Palestinians are experiencing a definitive stroke of immense violence that may determine their existence at all on this planet. The absolutely horrific destruction of human life and infrastructure that is needed to sustain it should be condemned far more than Hamas’s October 7th attack, which is wielded by Western media as a justification for this brutal genocide. Worse of all, the perpetrators of the violence on Palestinians are a legitimate government, which is usually thought of as a formation that would have at least some moral or legal restrictions on such matters of “war,” while Hamas is a “terrorist organization” that ‘should be’ doing such actions in this neoliberal logic. This only unveils the reality that “legitimacy” in human organizational contexts can mean little to the standards they hold their actions to; on the contrary, it means they can hide in their “legitimacy” to conduct even more heinous crimes. [1]

Figure 7 – “Civilians conduct a search-and-rescue operation Tuesday under the debris of destroyed building after Israeli attacks on the Nuseirat Camp in Deir al Balah, Gaza.” Photographer: Mustafa Hassona.

[1] This only further supports the position that nation-states are still in a Hobbesian ‘state of nature’—a world before a social contract that keeps society safe as nation-states can still cause war at will and ignore the already superfluous international laws.

Figure 8 – “Over 2,700 people, including over 700 children, have been killed in Israel's bombing campaign in Gaza”

Unfortunately, the positive projection of the Negative Utopias in these images of a destroyed Palestine (or what even remains of it) comes from the absolute lowest ‘last instance’—the death and suffering of children project that things must get better if the worst is already occurring.

Figure 9 – “An injured Palestinian child is taken to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital as Israeli attacks continue in Deir al-Balah.” Photographer: Ali Jadallah/Anadolu

Furthermore, media emerging from the reactionary side of the genocide pushes the boundaries far beyond that of mere apologia but to the point of perverse worldviews and even sadistic pleasure. Two succinct examples include an artwork that is supposed to show the current sides of ‘good and evil’ in the world conflicts, and the other is of a recent TikTok trend of Israelis mocking Palestinian suffering with makeup.

Figure 10 – Artist Unknown (2023)

Dr. Eli David reacts to the original pairing of the caption with the artwork, showing a Hamas militant using a cleaver to divide the globe, representing themselves as the aggressor—their side as the evil one. The dangerously reductionist grouping of Hezbollah, China (as a disgustingly orientalist depiction of a dragon), Putin, and the United Nations with the final pairing of a toddler next to the Hamas militant shows the utter absurdity of the reactionary worldview.

Figure 11 – Reactionary Israeli TikTok influencers mocking Palestinian suffering, appearance, and situation (2023)

The absurdity pushes into sadistic pleasure as the horrifying normalization of anti-Palestinian hatred in reactionary Israelis culminates in a trend of costuming as the Palestinians who are experiencing genocide. Here, Israeli influencers are dressing in fake hijabs, keffiyehs, wound and dust makeup, and even drawn-on unibrows and moles to mock the suffering, appearance, and situation of Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims. They are smiling at the beginning or end of the videos to show that they find the death or brutal injury of Palestinians as jokes to laugh at. Combining this with the fact that Israeli Zionists (and even Zionists outside of Israel) have been seen affirmatively celebrating and calling for the death of more children and Palestinians makes the phenomenon all the more abhorrent because of its widespread normalization.[1] Many of these videos are shared by pro-Palestinian outlets as a self-evident criticism of how honest the Zionist reactionaries truly are, which is against the Western media guise of the victimization of Israel in the face of ‘terrorism’ by Hamas. Thus, it becomes a unique strain of Negative Utopia as self-admission of executing mass murder and the adamant desire of it reveals its own absurdity to audiences who are fed liberal propaganda (western media) or those who are already pro-Palestine. As mentioned at the beginning of the essay, the revolutionary kernel of shame evoked by the Negative Utopia of Slave Ship parallels what here would be the anger felt by Palestine sympathizers to this absurd media.

Conclusion

            As the world watches a genocide unfold before their eyes with death tolls exceeding 17,000 civilians as I write this sentence,[2] the Negative Utopia projecting towards a different future is immanent and in-process in an inherently ‘invisible’ fashion. Of course, visible positive forces can be seen in the Western countries organizing protests against their governments funding genocide or even risking their bodies to stop the shipment of weapons to Israel.[3] Nevertheless, the concrete material forces that would create the future must be the Palestinian masses led by Hamas, which is the unfortunate reality that can only be the fault of Netanyahu and the Israeli state for funding Hamas to hurt the legitimate Palestinian Authority.[4] Like many Negative Utopias, the movements to come after are protracted, arduous, and contain a plethora of unexpected, contingent elements and thus, the organizational occurrences are ‘invisible’ right now. However, in light of the Pro-Palestinian orthodox Jews around the world that protest against this genocide from the perspective of a people who have experienced it in the Holocaust, Adorno’s categorical imperative only rings more truly: “A new categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen.”[5] As an absolute maxim that transcends all moral principles (categorical imperative), the arrangement of society henceforth from Adorno’s quote should never allow anything ‘similar’ to happen again, i.e., genocide, especially a fascist one. The fascist elements of the right-wing Israeli government and its recent actions on December 7th in rounding up and stripping non-militant Palestinian men for execution,[6] combined with the long-term displacement of Palestinians into one of the most densely populated places on earth in the form of an ‘open-air prison,’ only contribute to the Palestinians people’s pertinence to Adorno’s categorical imperative. “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”[7]

[1] Euro News, “All Posts • Instagram,” accessed December 7, 2023, https://www.instagram.com/p/CzExwEYNVBn/. There are even more disgusting videos such as this one where a Zionist lady tells pro-Palestinian orthodox jews and rabbis that they should have been killed in the gas chambers of the Holocaust: https://www.instagram.com/p/CzLn29XtWbq/. There is also Obama’s former adviser Stuart Seldowitz saying killing 4,000 kids was not enough: https://www.instagram.com/p/Cz_FqYttw5V/. There is also someone from the march for Israel on Washington DC telling a pro-Palestine protester that they should be raped alive: https://www.instagram.com/p/CzsDrZ1C_nu/. The list of these instances only continue…

[2] NBC News, “Israel-Hamas War Live Updates: U.S. Criticizes Civilian Death Toll in Gaza Assault,” NBC News, December 8, 2023, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/live-blog/israel-hamas-war-live-updates-rcna128682.

[3] “Hundreds of pro-Palestine organizers block a ship in Oakland carrying weapons for the Israeli military. Some have even climbed aboard the ship and occupied it.” https://www.instagram.com/p/CzMs0Lju19v/

[4] Tal Schneider, “For Years, Netanyahu Propped up Hamas. Now It’s Blown up in Our Faces,” October 8, 2023, https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/.

[5] Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton, Reprint edition (New York: Continuum, 1987), 365.

[6] letstalkpalestine, “Israel Is Rounding up and Executing Palestinian Men in Gaza,” Instagram, accessed December 8, 2023, https://www.instagram.com/p/C0kkXwrtoTn/.

[7] CMU Students For Palestine (@cmustudentsforpalestine) • Instagram, “CMU Students for Palestine’s Statement in Response to CMU President Jahanian’s (@cmufarnam ) Email on November 10, 2023,” November 22, 2023, https://www.instagram.com/p/Cz-Hn1ROK-M/?img_index=1.

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