HANDS UP

October 26, 2024, Tel Aviv

For about a week now, in this fourth week of October 2024, the War feels as though it's been 'on hold' for many of us (until last night, but more on that in a moment) here in Tel Aviv. Rockets launched from Gaza are still being intercepted down South, but less and less so as this engagement with no end in sight keeps producing an increase in the number of killed and maimed Israeli soldiers. These casualties are always reported in 'handfuls'—five here, seven there—and these numbers keep adding up because Hamas is fighting a guerrilla war now, with most of their batallions wiped out.... Whether 'Hamas has been truly defanged', 'wiped out finally (especially since the death of Sinwar),' or even 'obliterated' has not happened yet. Primarily this is because Hamas is still holding onto 101 living and dead hostages (including bodies to be returned) so that the War really can't be considered 'over' by a long shot. And the bad news is that there is no sense of when it will really end: this could take years, due to the impossibility of rescuing hostages with guns pressed to their heads, down in some tunnel somewhere—combined with a bitter, near-defeated, nihilistic Hamas that will never give up until the last of them all are dead—terrorists or hostages.

On top of that Gordian knot is the complexity of implementing 'Day after' considerations for a peaceful version of Gaza to emerge from the rubble: one that Israel (and the world) can live with. And troubling that development are things like the daily reports of right-wingers in Netanyahu's government aggravating to settle Gaza themselves, a process which is code for what would literally be the beginning of an ethnic cleansing of the Strip of millions of Palestinians... And yet all of this is just meaningless posturing: Netanyahu would never allow Israeli settlement of Gaza because he would not allow anything to jeopardize a Saudi-Israel peace pact. And without some kind of rehabilitation plan for Gaza (i.e. sans any ethnic cleansing nor Israeli settlement), the Saudis won't make peace—even though they (the Saudis) are dying to do just that, with Israel. MJB must save face and be seen by the Arab street as 'the one who helped the Palestinians finally get a state'.

As for Israel's "Northern Front" with Hezbollah in Lebanon, it seems that— following an unfathomable string of intelligence successes (the death of Nasrallah along with most of Hezbollah's command structure; the mass-walkie-talkie explosions, etc.)—there now seems to have been tossed into the war game salad up there an oddly unpredicable (and deadly) new kind of drone, one that can slow down and even elude radar, SIRENS and shoot-downs, so Israeli civilian and soldier casualties and injuries are also increasing there as well. And if that weren't enough, all the great art in Israel (the Magrittes and the Rembrandts et al) have all been moved to a hidden underground site, just in case Iran retaliates after last night's Israeli sortie with 100 jets boldly flying over Iran's primary missile-building sites.

The US election (Harris vs. Trump) had a lot to do with what happened yesterday, as Netanyahu huddled with his generals and did the calculus on which would be worse: a perception that Israel had tipped the scales for Harris, or had done so for Trump. In the end, Israel opted last night for a precise, not-too-damaging military and depot strike—as opposed to an Iranian gas refinery/nuclear wipe out. This allowed Iran some room for not retaliating, due to Israel's demonstration of self-restraint—lowering worldwide perception that the Jewish state wanted to take the world into a WW III scenario.

At any rate, a future 'quiet' retaliation on Tehran's part of this nature does bring to mind the ultimate failure of the Iranian 'Ring of Fire' and the Hamas-niks protesting around the world about 'genocidal Israel.' In fact, it's starting to feel like Israel WILL SURVIVE the last 12 months of war. Yes, MOODY's and STANDARD & POOR'S downgrading of the Israeli economy may now rebound more quickly that anticipated, and while it might take an extra year or more, "START-UP NATION" will probably rise once again in the Jewish state. It's too early to say that Israel has won this horrible war, or (god forbid) that the attack of October 7 had any beneficial effect (some will say it 'will never have been worth it'), but if the Iranian grip on the region will have been eliminated, and more normalization between the Sunni nations and Israel will have been achieved, then decades from now "October 7" may historically acquire a kind of before-and-after aura that will not be viewed from an entirely negative point of view. This won't be true for all, unfortunately: there are just too many ghosts this time, and poor devils with less than 4 limbs.

What will linger on, inevitably, is a negative perception of Israel, the Jews, Zionism, and the false and laughingly moronic hurling of the G word (genocide) at the Israeli military for the universal act of defending itself. But far more disturbing will still, and forever, be the lingering taint of the pro-Hamas contingent's social media vilification of all things "Jewish State." 

But: it's not like it's stopping the Israelis. Lately I've never seen so many near-to-term pregnant women â flaneur around Tel Aviv in my life: as if the horror of October 7 took everyone 3 months to absorb the shock... and by the start of spring half the young population decided to immediately start having children, getting down to the business of repopulating the state—the one which, as it happens, may be the only true haven on the planet for Jews for the foreseeable future.

But as for the 'lingering taint:' it's getting harder to avoid seeing different iterations of the old 'Jews-as-bad-guys' trope, as articulated by our pro-Hamas demonstrating friends outside of Israel: words or images that—in astonishingly repulsive ways—seem to be 'improving' on Goebbels work in the 1930s in a ghastly way. The frequency with which words and imagery evincing the 'exterminability' or worthlessness of Jewish life seem to be popping up in the oddest places these days: in articles in Arab papers; on a TV show on Netflix.... 

Four days ago on the Al-Jazeera Network out of Qatar, one Osama Hamdan of the Hamas political bureau stated that "No one has ever seen pictures of the Holocaust, nor what happened at Auschwitz. Whereas, in contrast, everyone can see what the Zionist neo-Nazis are doing in northern Gaza on live TV.... What is happening in the northern Gaza Strip is a crime unseen in the history of Mankind." [Uh... no comment?]

Furthermore, the second episode of the first season of Killing Eve, currently on Netflix, written by the brilliant Phoebe Waller-Bridge (of Fleabag fame) starts with a cinematic quote of the now-infamous photograph of a Palestinian holding his blood-soaked hands up against a window, after his having killed Israeli soldiers in Ramallah. The terrorist is ecstatically showing his friends outside that he's just partaken in the murder of two soldiers (who are on the floor behind him), and what's so bone-chilling about the photo (and probably why it lives in infamy) is the look of pure joy on the killer's face, with his bloody palms held up as though in victory.

17 years later, in this second episode from season one of Killing Eve (written and produced by the, again, extraordinary Phoebe Waller-Bridge), a bored Bulgarian bus passenger is looking up from her phone at a glass-walled skyscraper, as a terrified man is trying to tell anyone in the street who might be looking up, that he's being murdered right now—in this case, by the killer known as Villanelle, played by Jodie Comer. The dying man is slapping both his blood-stained palms against the glass several times (he's 8 or 9 stories up) as Villanelle looms behind him, and the poor victim is shouting down at the bus passenger for HELP of some kind... but the bored passenger doesn't register that the victim is signifying mortal distress: she just looks back down at her phone and mutters something mundane to her mother on the other end of the line. 

Now, I love this television show with a passion, and I love its first 2 seasons especially. But in hindsight, to be accidentally seeing this cold-blooded, black comedy murder on TV while writing this 'reflection on the October 7 Israeli war'—and realizing that, at some point 17 years after Ramallah and 6 years before the Palestinian protests on campus last year, that the writer/director's choice unconscious choice here was to employ an echo of one of the most horrible images in this century's public history of murder (the bloody hands from Ramallah)—it made my mind spin with the strangeness of the association. While the Killing Eve sequence was shot with the same dead-pan irony that made the TV show so famous (especially in its assassination scenes, which were often framed by dry, French chansons on the soundtrack), the oh-so ironic TV murder struck me with the same dread as the documentary photo in real life. Why would that be? Was it because a fictional version of the "bloody palm-on-glass" image (with its now-forever associations with the killing of Israeli soldiers) had been 'borrowed for TV' with the same je ne sais quoi with which the "bloody palm" was, these days, appearing in real-life? Both in Ramallah, and on the placards used on Ivy League campuses and throughout the 'protest' world of 2024?                                                                                       

It scared me, as a Jew, to piece this all together in my mind, even for just half a second. Obviously there was no connection between Ramallah, a British film set in 2017, and campus/European demonstrations in 2024. Nevertheless, the bloody-palm symbol had become—with ZERO IRONY—an image of terror in the most dehumanizing way. It had, let's face it, become superior to the use of the swastika in the same image above (bookending, as you can see, either side of the Star of David, with the backwards swastika inside the Star)....

Why was this use of the bloody-hands image on posters bothering me in quite the way that it was bothering me?

Was it its status as a perfect example of what GEORGE ORWELL famously called DOUBLESPEAK in his novel 1984: i.e. taking one 'thing', and making it mean its opposite?

Our pro-Hamas friends may, in fact, have been exploiting the most terrifyingly evil example of Orwellian DOUBLESPEAK in modern times, with their free-of-guilt, unthinking use of swastikas and bloody palms—a completely inappropriate borrowing of the imagery of terror, as casually relocated and repurposed perhaps, as the word "genocide" is when applied to Gaza. One might say "How dare they?" if one weren't cognizant of the fact that we all know they're getting away with it—that no one's calling them on it, not the press, not the magazines, not the publishers: the protesters are all just putting it out there on posters, and we're all just accepting it as a form of truthful image-wielding WITHOUT COMMENT about its DOUBLESPEAK outrageousness. 

Indeed, the impressionable among us might just sit there, flummoxed, forced to admit that there's some twisted genius at work in this worldwide web of Hamas-created lies: that all of them—given the witches' brew that IS contemporary social media—may ACTUALLY BE IMPROVING ON GOEBBELS by borrowing so freely from the collective unconscious of anti-semitism itself—only to reprocess it back at us as if we weren't the victims of the horror in the first place!

It was accidental—my seeing this unusual murder fictionalized on Killing Eve—and yet the unconscious 'filmic' technique used still hit me like a ton of bricks: the filmmaker was contrasting the greatest horror you can think of (the image of blood-stained hands on a window), with a too-bored-to-really-care approach to a killing... which in fact really makes the murder twice as horrible, because the killer doesn't care. Personally, I've never seen a murdered person's blood-stained palms on a window, whether in a documentary or a fictional context (except for the original, horrifying photo from Ramallah from the year 2000). But if what was originally an image of a Hamas murder is now being 'repurposed' in social media as the very image of Israeli murder, then this mind-boggling hypocrisy is doing more than just 'taking a page from the Goebbels playbook'—it's flipping the meaning of the image here to call the victims 'the killers' (similar to calling Israel's neverending need to defend itself 'genocide'). Unlike early 20th century depictions of the Jew-as-greedy-rodent—as vermin—the Jew no longer has to APPEAR in the propaganda anymore. The flipped meaning of the symbol is all that's needed to do the trick, so that all that remains of his murderous ways is the visual echo of his bloody deeds. In one quick PR stroke, a step has been skipped in the depiction of dehumanization: the 'lipstick traces' of the crime is all we now ever get to see. In short,  a bloody palm can now mean whatever you want it to mean, as long as you draw it brazenly enough in a new context.

[I do need to reiterate what a big fan I am of Phoebe Waller-Bridge: the second season of Fleabag (on Amazon) alone is possibly the best comic television series written by anyone in the current century. And though Google just told me that Ms. Waller-Bridge posted at least 3 pro-ceasefire memes on social media last November (arguing that it was more important that Israel not defend itself from its Hamas persecutors, despite Hamas' hiding behind human shields), I don't suspect her of consciously mocking the terror which the old 2000 Ramallah photo struck in the heats of people (and Israelis) everywhere in the world. She was just being a typical, liberal Brit, "let's stop the killing" and all that foofaraw we've had to endure from well-meaning celebrities for a year. I just—again, accidentally—saw the bloody-palms image while watching the TV—but I have no insider's knowledge of how or why she chose to depict one particular murder in one particular show in the manner in which she did.... I will venture to offer the following: "the frantic, bloody-palms-image-on a window" is now forever in the photo-library of our memory in this new century—there to be 'sampled' forever—and what it now 'connotes', if anything, is unfortunately a new icon of helpless, unspeakable murder on the part of a killer who just doesn't give a shit who they're killing.

But unlike the symbols used by pro-Hamas protestors and demonstrators today, images of the Nazi Holocaust are reproduced by newspaper and television editors with a bit more delicacy in the public sphere of the 2020s. Why? Because they don't really work as memes, nor does their reproduction/republication signify anything but an act of real dehumanization and human violence. But excerpted from their origin, removed and minimized down like Munch's painting of "The Scream," they become a new 'symbol for our time,' and come to mean, well, something else....

Take your pick: the boy with his hands in the air being arrested at the climax of the Warsaw Ghetto's defeat in 1943 (still a photo that's impossible to look at for very long) VERSUS the mere outline of a red hand—actually, it only works when it's two hands, doesn't it—abstractly slapped on a flag, approximating some vague, cry to arms? .... Now why does it work like that? Why do the two red hands induce fear, pending death, enduring victimhood? Is it because of its appropriation of a 24 year-old nightmare of a memory? Is it the blind sinisterness embodied by its being retargeted back onto its original victims? Is it the hard-knuckled, inhuman inaccuracy in its attempt to depict what it thinks it's depicting? ... Is it possible that Goebbels could help us with this one?