A boy, Mohammed, is crying to the camera as if seeking comfort from it, as if the lens is his mother’s face.

“For five days we were besieged in our home without any food or water … They barged in our house. We told them that we are civilians.” Here, the boy holds up both hands, palms outward. Surrender. “They started barbarically bombing and shooting around the house … They told us to come out one by one naked.”

I think of my friends and former colleagues in Gaza. One friend signs off a message as if it were his last: “If we were not able to hold on anymore, please remember us as human beings.” He lists each family member by name.

*

The reel cuts, begins again: Mohammed’s trauma packaged as social media content playing on loop, sandwiched between targeted advertising and friends’ holiday pics. Mohammed and thousands of other eyewitnesses and survivors have told their stories with intimate candour to the camera, which are then beamed around the world and watched by the rest of us with a smartphone, on demand, as we go about our days. We’re on the bus as a missile drops through an apartment building full of sleeping families, we watch the building crumple like a concertina wheezing out the last breaths of every soul inside. We’re making dinner for our children and as the oven heats up, here in our palm is a girl with a bow in her hair, tears streaming, waving goodbye to her father’s body.

These are among countless images that may be examined by the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC). The ICC has issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant over what may amount to legal responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity. What are the rest of us to do with these children? In her book-length essay “Regarding the Pain of Others,” Susan Sontag writes:

Let the atrocious images haunt us … The images say: This is what human beings are capable of doing – may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, self-righteously. Don’t forget.

But is there any moral value to all this witnessing? Is it enough that we weep for Mohammed, for every child killed? That we hold our own children and feel in our arms the weight of all those shrouded children, held for the last time by their parents and grandparents?

When we open our phones and look at suffering, when we see what other humans are capable of and particularly when those actions are done in our name or with the acquiescence of our governments, a notion of a shared humanity would seem to demand an active contract between us and these images and their subjects. A collective responsibly to engage beyond feeling to action. The intimacy and sense of responsibility is strengthened by the fact that Palestinian journalists in Gaza are telling their own stories. We know some by their first names – Motaz, Plestia, Bisan, Hind – and they have brought us into unbearable intimacies. We watch as they weep over friends and colleagues killed, talking to us as we hear bombs and shouts around them.

These astonishing journalists are documenting a genocide in real time. Theirs is not only the work of recording the truth for posterity (though indeed they are doing this, too). They are forcing the world to pay attention; to bear witness and to act. They are making an appeal for survival. Motaz Azaiza posted to his 18.2 million Instagram followers on 12 December 2023: “I am asking all the humans around the world, even animals to go and protest to stop the killing of us.” Plestia Alaqad pleaded on 10 January 2024: “Don’t stop talking about Palestine. Don’t stop asking for ceasefire.” On 7 Jan 2024, after more than three months of bombardment, Gazan journalist Anas el-Najar took off his press vest and posted: “This is where my press coverage ends.” He later wrote: “The world is silent and we are tired.” On 17 July 2024, Bisan Owda posted to X: “It’s too exhausting to stay alive.” Bisan continues to post updates from Gaza in her series for AJ+, “It’s Bisan from Gaza and I’m still alive.” Reporting more than a year of relentless attacks won Bisan a Peabody and an Emmy nomination, but not a ceasefire.

In the same way the Genocide Convention is not just for punishment but for prevention, these images and their instantaneous transmission to our screens perform various functions – they say not only: this happened but this is happening and more importantly: we implore you to stop it.

Sontag observed that compassion is an unstable emotion: “It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.” We have witnessed an endless factory-line of suffering, including the attacks by Hamas and the unthinkable pain of the Israeli hostages and their families. If we don’t use the compassion generated by these images as a power source for action, then we risk being deadened by them and failing the basic promise of shared humanity. Similarly, if we are overwhelmed by distressing images while failing to organise around an antidote, how can we make the imaginative leap that conjures an alternative present?

Rebecca Solnit reminds us: “politics arises out of the spread of ideas and the shaping of imaginations.” If we see the world as it is and decide it must be changed, then we need to be able to imagine the change first. Too many in the global north suffer from a fundamental failure of imagination – they can’t imagine let alone hope for a radical future of freedom and justice. But as Palestinian writer, campaigner and community organiser Noura Mansour points out:

Hope is a choice we make when we refuse to be desensitised to the suffering of others. Hope is a choice we make every time we show up on Sunday, every time we speak up for Palestine.

*

A friend in Gaza writes to me: “we envy those who died in the beginning of the war and didn’t see what we see.” A grandfather weeping as tiny socks are pulled onto his grandchild’s feet, so he will not feel the cold when he is buried. A father pressing a packet of biscuits into the hand of his son, killed while his father was at the shop buying them. Family members of Israeli hostages, clutching pictures of their loved ones. The stories are fractured – what happens to the Palestinian mothers who hold the too-small, bloodied shrouds? To the mother who refuses to wash the blood of her dead child off her hands? To the hostages and their families who for fourteen months have borne the impossible pain of not knowing?

Watching these horrors on our phones, we experience a deep grief that is both an intimate, specific pain for the individual lives lost, and a more generalized torment at the scale and brutality of the suffering our humanity can abide. The grief we feel is shot through with shame at what we have failed to stop. We see the smiling faces of an extended family of siblings and cousins and aunties and uncles and parents and grandparents enjoying a family gathering and we know they are all dead, and we are ashamed. But through our grief and shame we keep showing up at rallies, posting and sharing and witnessing, calling and emailing our representatives, building communities and solidarity across the world. We keep holding our governments accountable to truth and justice, because if we don’t, they win.

*

When Time magazine selected his photograph of a girl trapped under rubble as one of its ten best images of 2023, Motaz posted: “I just wish it’s a picture of the beauty of Gaza not a painful picture from Gaza.” The before/after montages of Gaza are deeply painful. Gaza in pictures today is a world gone grey: “Gaza is now a different color from space. It’s a different texture,” said Corey Scher of the CUNY Graduate centre, expert in mapping damage during wartime. Hospitals, homes, religious monuments, schools and universities have all been erased, history and culture decimated, familiar shopfronts and street corners which held memories and love, where children met their neighbours and friends – obliterated, all.

On my last visit to Gaza four years ago, a family took me for lunch at a strawberry farm. I was pregnant with my second son and when the sugar rush of the strawberry juice hit him, he kicked inside me. It was a clear blue winter day, and we all smiled for photos among the soft green leaves and bright red berries. Another afternoon, my friend Laila made a photoshoot of my pregnant belly by the Mediterranean Sea in the south of Gaza. We pressed our faces together toward the technicolour sunset glow and took selfies with another friend, Asmaa.

These are the images I associate with Gaza. I hold them up like talismans against the onslaught of excruciating pain — icons of a world that is possible: these simple joys on peaceful afternoons, this natural beauty, these brilliant, generous people.

Susan Sontag observed in 2004:

photographs have laid down the tracks of how important conflicts are judged and remembered. The Western memory museum is now mostly a visual one. Photographs have an insuperable power to determine what we recall of events.

She wrote that people’s defining association with the Iraq war would likely be the photographs of the torture of Iraqi prisoners by Americans in Abu Ghraib. When the revelations of the use of torture came to light, the Bush administration was quick to distance itself by claiming that the perpetrators were an unrepresentative abomination. “I do not like it one little bit,” said the then American president, “That’s not the way we do things.” His denunciation was illustrative of the gap between abstract rights protections and principles and actual state practice — a gap that is even more stark today as the claims of political leaders regarding minimising civilian deaths appear in our feeds between images of dead and maimed children.

Bush’s comments also reflected the hypocrisy of an administration which established and maintained policies allowing for crimes (specifically, torture) in apparent open contradiction with the rhetoric and principles of the American state. Following September 11, the White House issued a series of memoranda, now commonly known as the “torture memos”, stating that “enhanced interrogation techniques” – generally regarded as torture – might be permissible. Together with other official communications authorising interrogation tactics amounting to torture, the memos were evidence of an institutional framework providing for the commission of war crimes. Publics in the US and its allied countries, including ours, looked at the Abu Ghraib images and read about the torture but were told by the President that what they were seeing did not reflect the actual truth: “…people who have seen those pictures don’t understand the true nature and heart of America … Their actions do not represent America’s values.”

As comedian Rob Corddry observed at the time:

We shouldn’t be judged on actions. It’s our principles that matter, our inspiring, abstract notions. Remember: just because torturing prisoners is something we did, doesn’t mean it’s something we would do.

Three years after the Abu Ghraib torture images were reproduced in media outlets globally, the first iPhone came on the market in 2007, followed a year later by the first Android. Today there are 6.94 billion smartphones in a world of 8 billion people.

The Western memory museum Sontag observed during the Iraq war is now even more overrun with countless images and film of human suffering, never released with such relentless force as the scenes coming out of Gaza daily. Ukraine is a recent comparable example of social media playing an active role in a conflict of global ramifications. With Gaza, however, there is a key difference: if Western publics were able to shift our governments — if we could instrumentalise the compassion elicited by the proliferation of images, the evidence of unacceptable human suffering — the genocide could end tomorrow.

The images coming out of Gaza have helped to mobilise the biggest anti-war protests globally since the Iraq war, including reports of up to two million people in a single protest in Indonesia, student-led encampments and mass protests on college campuses, and many millions on the streets in capitals. And in stark contrast to their Western counterparts, many governments of the Global South have shown support and solidarity with Palestine.

The proliferation of information and images gives us the sense that we now carry the world in our pocket, but each of us is orbiting in our separate solar systems of personalised content, curated by a mix of opaque algorithms and even overt censorship by the unseen powerful. This includes systemic censorship by Meta of voices supporting Palestine. Not that mainstream media is immune from manipulation and distortions, of course. Israeli journalist Gideon Levy says Israel’s domestic media is mainly focused on its own soldiers and the families of hostages, largely ignoring the Palestinians being killed: “The Israeli average viewer doesn’t see Gaza at all. They are betraying our first mission: to tell the full story.” This underscores that the way each of us will remembers this period in history will depend on many factors including: who we are, where we live, and who we follow on social media.

*

Announcing the first allied strikes on Afghanistan, in 2001, President Bush said: “We’re a peaceful nation.” Many argued at the time we knew enough to expose the lie of this statement, but two decades on, with the ubiquity and instantaneity of information and images and their distribution we can never again claim ignorance of what is being done in our name or by our nation’s allies with little protest from our governments. As journalist Kellie Tranter points out:

no bombs could be dropped on Gaza by an F-35 without parts manufactured by Melbourne company, Rosebank Engineering (RUAG Australia). The company is the sole global producer of the F-35’s ‘uplock actuators’ – the doors that open to drop the bombs.

As we spectate the gruesome impact of those devices, the impact of cutting-edge technology on yielding flesh, what are we to think about who we are as Australians?

Twenty years ago, President Bush sought to convince the world that the US should not be equated with the torture it had evidently carried out but rather with the values it professed to hold. We can ask the same question today: at what point do we cease being aligned with the values we claim and instead become the actions in which we’re complicit, particularly now that we can see it all in real time?

Referencing street opposition movements but with observations pertinent to Gaza today, Professor Kari Andén-Papadopoulos has argued:

the camera-phone permits entirely new performative rituals of bearing witness, such as dissenting bodies en masse recording their own repression and … effectively mobilizing this footage as graphic testimony in a bid to produce feelings of political solidarity.

Noting the exponential increase in the number and mobility of images across different media-scapes, Andén-Papadopoulos notes expansion of the “image wars” of the twenty-first century and an appreciation of images as more than just illustrative but bearing the power to “enact and perform”

the ever-increasing power of images and their circulation to shape the collective imaginary of global populations and structure relations of geopolitical power.

When we witness our actions in a foreign land, reflected to us as images of human suffering in our personalised feeds, what is the extent of our participation as citizens in democracies? When the images we see are us — the geopolitical power of our governments and corporations in action — what are we called to do about it?

Images can represent a splice of reality from the other side of the world, mirror truths about ourselves and our collective humanity we can hardly bear to face. But we can also use them to recognise the patterns of dehumanisation that have manifested throughout history, and prevent their awful conclusions in the present. To rewrite in real time our most shameful histories before they are re-made on the world stage and in our social media feeds.

*

During the Iraq war, Rebecca Solnit wrote:

Imagine the world as a theatre. The acts of the powerful and the official occupy centre stage. The traditional versions of history, the conventional sources of news encourage us to fix our gaze on that stage.

On 21 November 2023, one such stage was my local council meeting, where Councillors were voting on a motion for a ceasefire. Councillors sat in a “U” formation up front, separated by rope from the audience of local constituents in rows. There were no journalists present, no cameras. Some of us in the audience wore keffiyehs, some carried signs bearing the names and ages of children killed. We shed tears listening to local Palestinian and Jewish speakers, imploring Councillors to take a strong stance for an immediate ceasefire. The testimonies were devastating. But something strange was happening – the Councillors of the ruling party were cold and unmoved. From the audience we chanted ceasefire now! ceasefire now! but the ruling party’s Councillors could barely look at us. It was as if they couldn’t hear us, even as our shouts became deafening, even as they tried to call the room to order but couldn’t hear themselves speak and were forced to shut down the meeting. Finally, they voted against the motion urging a ceasefire. We were shocked – hadn’t they seen what we’d seen, heard the same testimonies from local Palestinian and Jewish community members we’d just heard? In the following days the Council put out a press release saying that the Council “resolved support for a ceasefire in Gaza”. We knew this to be gaslighting of the highest order – pure political theatre – weasel words from a ruling party that had taken a position at odds with its constituents and was in damage control.

Writing about the fraught period after September 11, Arundhati Roy pointed out “a brighter side to the amount of energy and money the mainstream media pours into the business of “managing” public opinion. It suggests a very real fear of public opinion.” This was the idea that, if people can properly understand what is going on, “they might act on this knowledge.”

Solnit entreats us to not be blinded by the limelight focused on the stage, to learn to see in the dark:

Pay attention to the inventive arenas that exert political power outside that stage or change the content of the drama onstage. From the places that you have been instructed to ignore or rendered unable to see, come the stories that change the world, and it is here that culture has the power to shape politics and ordinary people have the power to change the world.

What might happen if we, the audience, though our eyes are drawn to the stage lights, instead bring up the lights on each other?

Ten months into the attacks on Gaza and two months after the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court applied for arrest warrants against Hamas leaders along with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes, chilling images were broadcast globally of Netanyahu addressing the US Congress to thundering applause and standing ovations. But set against this shocking display was another powerful image: a lone protestor in the audience, silent and defiant, the first Palestinian American woman to serve in the US Congress, Rashida Tlaib. Keffiyeh draped around her shoulders, Tlaib held a small sign which said “War Criminal” on one side, “Guilty of Genocide” on the other. Outside, thousands protested for an end to the war.

Never has the theatre of the political and the powerful been so sharply divided from the rest of us, our leaders making statements that are utterly divorced from the reality we see and know in our bones to be true. As our shouts from the dark grow stronger, we are beginning to make out the faces of our fellow audience members, not only from across the room but across continents. Palestinian journalist Bisan Owda dedicated her Peabody award to those protesting globally:

Right now, we are destroying one of the occupation’s strongest tools by standing with each other worldwide.

A few weeks after they voted against the motion for a ceasefire, amid sustained pressure from the community, my local Council quietly passed a motion finally supporting a ceasefire. It felt like the lights slowly coming up.

*

Solnit’s conception of the world as a theatre is instructive both as a means of understanding the world and why it is so hard to change it. The play has already been written. The actors worked hard to be cast in these roles, they have been rehearsing off stage for years before they made it to this performance. They know the precarity of their positions: any off-script move and they will be replaced by one of the countless understudies willing to recite the lines. Their job is not to rewrite the play, it’s to perform it.

On the stage, we still have the military might of the Western world arming wars against captive populations while, here in the shadows, we continue to shout our truths to the actors on stage, trying to change the narrative they are faithfully playing out. If they hear us, they give little clue. Nonetheless, two decades after Solnit conceived of this stage, the lights are slowly coming up in the audience. In many cases, those who may appear to be polarised against us are fellow audience-members, each of us victims of our own curated livestream bubble, and in fact we share a struggle to see in the dark, a demand for light. We should use this struggle for truth to bind us together. We are sharing stories globally, we are gathering in our hundreds and thousands and millions, we are organising in loud and quiet ways to imagine an alternate present and a liberated future. We know that change is incremental, too slow, and not always linear, but if we learn to see it, we will find it.

*

January 2024: South Africa’s testimony before the International Court of Justice was not broadcast by any western mainstream media outlet. I accessed Al-Jazeera on my phone and cast it to the TV. Projected onto the wall of the Peace Palace of the ICJ were some of the images we’d been sharing for months, only now they were watched by the world’s arbiters. In her closing remarks for South Africa, accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza, Irish lawyer Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh spoke for many of us and especially in solidarity with the Gazan journalists who continue to risk their lives to show us what is happening:

Despite the horror of the genocide against the Palestinian people, being livestreamed from Gaza to our mobile phones, computers, and television screens, the first genocide in history where its victims are broadcasting their own destruction in real time in the desperate, so far vain hope that the world might do something.

We could hardly believe our eyes and ears — players on the stage of the powerful were finally saying what we knew to be true. We shared reels of the descendants of an apartheid state, straight-backed and proud in their nation’s bright colours before the world court of justice, fighting for the survival of Palestine. Certain of their place in the arc of history, determined to bend it toward justice.

Amid the impossible grief, the monumental failures and gaslighting by political leaders, we must be led by the strength and moral compass of Palestinians. Those like Wizard Bisan, who in November 2024, after more than a year of surviving and reporting a genocide against her own people, posted images of herself amid a crowd of delighted children:

I am Palestinian from Gaza, still in Gaza, helping my people in these horrific times, still alive and watching this sunset! How charming is Gaza! Do you believe me when I tell you that sometimes I feel safe? Even under the drones and aircrafts, I feel safe, this is the magic of Gaza and Gazans!

Image by the author