Third Text
Genocide is the Temporality of Photography
13 October 2025
Since October 2023, the genocide in Palestine has been at the centre of a growing anti-imperial and anticolonial movement calling to stop the genocide and to liberate Palestine. The genocide revealed the fabricated foundations of the Euro-American-Zionist narrative regarding the creation of the state of Israel, which figures Israel as the redemption of the ‘Jewish people’ after the Holocaust. And it broadened the number of people who see in the liberation of Palestine a liberation from the political horizons the architects of this narrative imposed on the world. In a conversation with a Jewish interlocutor, the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish explained why Palestine and not Sudan, for example, is capable of generating such a global response:
… because you [the Jews] are our enemy. The interest in us stems from the interest in the Jewish question. For sure, the concern is with you not with me. So, we have the misfortune of having Israel as our enemy because she has strong allies, too many to count in the world; and we have the good fortune of having Israel as our enemy because Jews are the center of world attention. That’s why you’ve brought us defeat and made us famous. [1]
The genocide in Palestine is executed by Israel and supported by those who Darwish mentions: imperial allies who continue to fund it (the US alone has sent over 21 billion dollars) against the voices of a growing number of their citizens who protest against and oppose it in many ways. This gap between governments and citizens testifies to a struggle between two opposing factions: those who seek to normalise the genocide, erstwhile normalising the perpetuation of genocidal regimes often known by their peers as democracies; and those who call to stop the genocide and bring an end to the settler colonial regimes that inflict genocidal violence for their survival.
This massive and synchronised real-time collective witnessing to the destruction of Palestine exposes the genocidal essence of worlds imperially created, whilst simultaneously forming a collective rehearsal for their anticipated demise.
Bisan Owda’s call for action from Gaza, screenshots from her Instagram feed, July 2025
It would not be an exaggeration to say that the fate of the world hangs on the balance of the genocide in Palestine. Imagining the liberation of Palestine and decolonisation on a global scale requires, among other things, a refusal to accept as a given this interest in the ‘Jewish question’ mentioned by Darwish, as well as the ‘Jewish question’ altogether, and to ask how, at the end of the Second World War, were ‘the Jews’ – once one of the several major racialised and hated groups in the West – elected by the West to become its allies and serve as its mercenaries.
Can photography be of help?
The answer is yes.
Against the Temporality of the Single Image
Those who supported the Palestinian struggle for liberation prior to the genocide, and those who have recognised and opposed the genocidal nature of the violence Israel has been using since October 2023 (and before), did not rely on evocative photographs such as those of starving Palestinian children to suddenly understand the entanglement between the Israeli regime and the genocide in Gaza. Proactively looking for ways to bear witness to genocide, or to genocidal violence, cannot be predicated (only) on individual photographs that circulate in mainstream media as ‘news’, and are exceptions to otherwise benign reports on Israel as a democracy with a ‘problem’. Centring photographs alone in a time of genocide is typical of imperial ethics, which are exercised and expressed by actors who run, develop, sustain or support genocidal regimes. Those same actors benefit from the way other imperial actors before them shaped the temporality of photography as instantaneous, synchronised with the temporality of a news media that highlights exceptional moments and obscures the mechanics of settler colonial regimes. Thus, they could camouflage decades of genocidal violence and become horrified (almost two years after the beginning of the genocide!) when bodies, which have continuously been targeted, are not instantly eliminated but, rather, persist with indelible signs of calculated genocidal violence.
When facing this type of image of extreme violence undeniably inscribed in the body of the victim, some of those who have denied the genocide for a long time lose their ground, as it is clear that mass starvation does not erupt in one day. It is, rather, the outcome of a policy of systematic destruction targeting most sources of living, a policy that requires months and years to effect. Those who chose to recalibrate their approach to the genocide by focusing on the signs of genocidal violence as inscribed upon the body of the victims are taken by and contribute to the deception genocidal violence generates; they continue to be blind to the regime that systematically creates these victims, and squander the necessity to stop it and dismantle it. One of the manifestations of this deception is the belief that US–Israel, responsible for this genocide, can be trusted to provide ‘solutions’ to the suffering of victims in the form of humanitarian aid. This deception is disrupted episodically in the media when genocidal humanitarian violence is reported in discrete and named episodes – such as the ‘flour massacre’ (February 2024), the ‘floating pier’ (April 2024), and the ‘Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’ (‘created’ by a Boston consulting group), or the lethal airdrop of humanitarian aid.
Proactive collective witnessing means choosing to listen to Palestinian voices and rejecting the meanings created in their absence. Since October 2023, Palestinians on the ground have been reporting on the systematic attack on the infrastructure of food production, water supply, greenhouses and crop fields, and they have been circulating alarming photos that reflect the deliberate preparations made for a campaign of starvation.
The scale of agricultural destruction in Gaza: satellite images from the north of Gaza in November 2023 (left) and in May 2024 (right), SkySat imagery © 2025/Planet Labs PBC
Different expert groups inside and outside of Gaza were warning about the upcoming famine months before the UN confirmed it in mid-August 2025. [2] Those around the world who choose not to be in community with Gazan voices, and are surprised by the images of starving Palestinians, could continue to believe that the Israeli–French–Belgium propaganda campaign to transit donkeys from Gaza in order to provide them with better care was a ‘rescue’ mission. They also fail to see how it was connected to, if not forming an element of, the organised and calculated programme of genocidal starvation. Those donkeys are themselves among the survivors of the systematic attack on the infrastructure of food production and cultivation in Gaza. 14,550 cows, 58,200 sheep, 9,700 goats and 18,800 donkeys and horses have been murdered, alongside the destruction of 90 per cent of farmland and 80 per cent of water infrastructure in Gaza (numbers from Sahat – Palestine Unfiltered media platform). Unlearning single images of rescued donkeys in peaceful European farms and understanding that this rescue campaign is beyond simple theft, requires us to remember the presence of donkeys in many photographs of resilience as the reliable (non-humanitarian) aid that have provided companionship, transportation, agricultural support, and a food supply to Palestinians since the beginning of the genocide.
In the time of genocide, images should not be read only for what they intended to capture – their subject – and alongside others to track down the infrastructure of genocidal violence and the victims’ resistance and resilience. Photographs taken under these conditions are, rather, samples of genocide and can be helpful in figuring out its texture, patterns and processes. They should be viewed outside of imperial temporality, which reduces what they sample to discrete moments. And the photographed persons should be recognised not as situated only at the time when the photograph was taken, but as actors who struggle to survive genocide by making its truth heard. When dozens or hundreds of Palestinians are executed almost every day, the appearance of Palestinians in Gaza in each and any photograph should serve as a testament that the genocide seeks to render them, and everything Palestinian, exterminable. [3]
Forbidden Meanings
This truth is what the genocide seeks to repress, since it is, at the same time, the truth of the Israeli regime and the allies’ interests in its perpetuation. The genocide has ordained that rather than seeking after the truth and asking questions about the industrial production of dozens of thousands of Palestinian corpses, and of vast areas of scorched earth in Gaza (a hotbed for plagues and famine), the media’s job is to safeguard the Euro-American-Israeli narrative that suggests Israeli is engaged in a legitimate campaign of self-defence. The role of this narrative is to rule out the idea that this and all the previous campaigns of violence since 1948 – all of which have been promoted as ‘self-defence’ – are manifestations of a regime whose right to exist should be questioned.
I propose to return to a series of images taken by Palestinians on 7 October 2023, when they took control of the Beit Hanoun crossing, which years earlier (albeit still under Israeli occupation) they would cross to enter Palestine. These images, where the fences are opened and a group of joyful Palestinians, mostly unarmed, are seen crossing into Palestine, without Israelis overseeing them or punishing them for not recognising that this is Israel, are images of liberation. These images do not depict the armed struggle, but in themselves are samples of the act of liberation from the regime that puts Palestinians, and especially those in Gaza, under continuous terror, dooms them to the status of pariah and severs their modes of contact with other parts of the world. The news about the outcome of the armed struggle turned the circulation of these images into a sort of taboo and their meaning of liberation had to be foreclosed. The pressure imposed by art institutions, universities, workplaces and courts upon those who circulated them to delete them from social media accounts was huge, and testified to what Darwish described as the misfortune of Palestinians of having Israel and its many allies as their enemies. [4]
A bulldozer breaks the Israeli-built fence around Gaza on 7 October 2023, image in the public domain,
courtesy of Reuters/Mohammed Fayq Abu Mostafa
Given that the nature of Israel as a settler colonial state continues to be denied, with the complicity of the global media outlets who have turned their backs on Palestinians in Gaza – a population which has lived under siege for decades – the right of Palestinians to resist the extreme violence they have been subjected to for many years, and to bring their liberation dream forward, is denied to them. On 7 October, the status quo of Israel’s exercise of colonialism, with almost no price for the settlers, was interrupted, and Israelis paid a heavy price for refusing to recognise what they had been doing to Palestinians for a long time. The photographs from the early hours of 7 October were different from the many earlier photos taken over the years where Palestinians can be seen breaking fences. Such photos exhibited life under colonisation without anticipating its end, and affirmed how Palestinians found ways of coping with the constraints that colonialism poses on their lives. The images taken on 7 October, however, are in themselves the manifestation of Palestinians’ refusal to remain under this colonial siege, which prevents them from actively shaping their lives and from telling the truth of what they go through and live with. Part of what armed resistance seeks to achieve – as Algerians taught the French and the world – is to call the world’s attention to the condition of those who resist, including with arms. What Israel’s Hasbara campaign sought to achieve in vilifying all who shared or celebrated these images was to categorically block the uncontrolled eruption of the liberatory meaning of this moment before Israelis were framed as the sole subjects of unjustified violence, as they paid the price for their colonial genocidal regime. [5] The possibility that the meaning of these images would circulate outside of the Hasbara’s control and unleash an open-ended exchange initiated by Palestinians in which their narratives circulate unfiltered, is what the genocide aims to destroy. Photographically speaking, it is not so much the photographs but more the event of photography – that is, what is not contained in what is captured in images – which can evolve in unexpected directions and will liberate Palestinians from their fate as exterminable. Indeed, within two or three days, parsing the meaning enshrined in this series of photographs was forbidden.
Meanings are not given; rather, they are always being generated when people interact with each other. To forbid the emergence of certain meanings, Israel doesn’t have to censor images in which the results of its crimes are captured. In the same vein, Israel doesn’t execute Palestinian journalists because of the content of the images they are taking. There were already more than enough images to incriminate Israel after one month of genocide – or, to put it crudely, further back in 1948. In executing Palestinian journalists, Israel strives to foreclose the coming together of people who interact with them, and with the photographed persons (Palestinians), outside of the imperial temporality, spatiality and narratives. It is less the content that Israel doesn’t and cannot hide, as part of the genocide is speaking about its operations overtly and garnering inter-imperial states’ support for them, and more the speaking position in international arenas inhabited by Palestinians who are recognised by many as the truthtellers. Within an imperial temporality and spatiality, Palestinians are rendered a threat to an already-existing state whose existence is undisputed and unquestioned. Those who recognise in these images moments of a liberation struggle proactively refuse the imperial temporality that turned the state of Israel into a fait accompli, a state untainted by the violence it constantly exercises against Palestinians in order to continue to exist on their, the Palestinians, lands.
Photography and the Last Colony in the Middle East
Israel is not a fait accompli, but a settler colonial state in which the West’s post-‘final solution’ for the ‘Jewish question’ materialised. Unlike Darwish’s immutable image of the Jews at the centre of the West’s attention, the genocide exposes the longstanding interests of Western actors in the preservation of this last colony that they have managed to keep in the Middle East by turning its Jewish inhabitants into its guardians, into mercenaries who they keep armed and busy. The intensive shipment of arms to Israel since October 2023 is the overt expression of those interests, as well as a sign that the genocide would cease if Israel were not provided with the insane amount of arms and money which have, over the past two years, enabled it to systematically destroy Gaza and unleash long-term catastrophic effects on all who manage to survive. Those interests go hand-in-hand with the role these actors have played since the end of the Second World War as the great saviours of ‘the Jewish people’, a role which has enabled them to camouflage their own antisemitism – a good Jew can only be a Zionist, ie mercenary, and a Zionist is good for the West – by purportedly leading a fight against any attempt to break this axiom about the Jews, a fight they define as one against antisemitism.
In a similar way, Israel itself could not have come into being as a settler colonial state, predicated on the proclamation that its indigenous population is exterminable, if those Western actors had not decided on it and provided the means to make it happen. Western actors have been responsible for normalising the state’s existence against the livelihoods of the region’s local populations and for sustaining the narrative that doing so was a necessary part of the redemption of Jewish life after the Second World War. The creation of the state of Israel camouflaged the fact that thousands of Jewish communities around the world were destroyed not only by the Nazis but by Euro-American-Zionist propaganda.
These communities’ histories and memories were substituted with new ones, and their members were provided the new history-free status of Olim (a term coined in Hebrew to define immigrants to Israel as ‘those who ascend’). The creation of this state as a (post-final solution) ‘solution’ for ‘the Jews’, who were amalgamated into a unified category through the use of violence, forecloses the obvious: Palestine should not have been colonised and destroyed in order to attend to the Jewish survivors of the European holocaust.
Unknown photographer, Salbit, Palestine, April 1948, image in the public domain (posted on the Palestine Remembered website: www.palestineremembered.com)
Rina Castelnuovo, Jenin, 2002, reproduced courtesy of Rina Castelnuovo
Viewed alongside the images produced by Palestinians over the last two years, the meaning of these images of destruction and the extermination of Palestinian life that have circulated episodically over the years, with captions serving to isolate them as discrete events rather than the systematic outcome of the genocidal regime, can no longer now be seen without the screams of those who call to free Palestine from this regime. The decolonisation of Palestine, meaning the dismantling of the genocidal state apparatuses called Israel, cannot be postponed forever. Jews ought to be liberated from their role in the Western/Zionism’s phantasmagoric construction of the ‘Jewish people’, a people with one destiny to be manifest at the expense of diverse Jewish communities.
Heidi Levine, Aerial View of Destroyed Gaza, July 2025,
image in the public domain, courtesy of Heidi Levine and The Washington Post
What was photography during the years following the Second World War, when the leaders of a marginal movement in the life of Jews worldwide were recognised as representatives of the Jews and mandated to destroy Palestine? What was photography when Jewish survivors of the Holocaust were not permitted to return to what was left – or not – of their communities in Europe? When they were prevented from restoring and reviving them, and were left in displaced persons camps in Europe for four years while leaders of the Zionist movement were encouraged and empowered by the Allies to enlist them to their guerilla army and fight in a faraway land against an unknown people who were not their enemy. Photography provided the portraits whose voices were silenced and replaced by those of different actors who spoke in their names while erasing their own traumatic life experiences and suturing them into an abstract national subject. An example of such erasure can be found in Irwin Shaw’s essay published in 1949 in The New Yorker (and shortly after as a book). [6] Like a voiceover accompanying Robert Capa’s photos taken in Palestine, Shaw’s text participates in Palestine’s erasure by calling it ‘Israel’: ‘a few days before this picture was taken, they were hustled off the immigrant boats at Haifa harbor, sketchily armed and trained, packed into the buses of Tel Aviv and sent to lift the siege on Jerusalem’. The fact that the immigrants of which he speaks were traumatised victims of Europe’s genocide, and that they were given prosthetic enemies – Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims – to fight against in the Euro-American new world order, had to be completely erased in order to shield Europe from being confronted with the mass of surviving Jews who were not Zionists and could speak for themselves about what Europe did to them. Here is the Western Zionist deal of reparations in the words of Konrad Adenauer, the chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany from 1949–1963, who succinctly said that Israel spared Europe of its undesired Jews: ‘the federal government is prepared together with representative of world Jewry and the state of Israel, which has taken in so many homeless Jewish refugees, to bring about a solution of the material compensation problem’.
Left: Robert Capa, Immigrants (‘Olim’), 1950; right: Haifa Port, 1949; published in Irwin Shaw and Robert Capa’s Report on Israel (Simon & Schuster, 1950)
Why did photography not yield counter-narratives? How could the endless photographic albums summarising the twentieth century make record of thriving Palestinian communities, whose members refused to collaborate with the West as they crafted multiple partition plans to destroy their livelihood, disappear? And how could the record of the diverse Jewish communities in what used to be the Jewish Muslim world (before its members were forced to become Jewish bodies to sustain this antisemitic project of creating a state for the Jews) have also disappeared?
We have to remind ourselves that since its inception, the social nature of the practice of photography, which involves different people interacting with each other, was repressed. Photography was shaped, rather, as a productive practice whose outcome – the photographs – were left in the hands of imperial actors and institutions who used them to supplant the event of photography, time spent in the presence of a camera or the photograph during which people interacted with each other. Touting the photograph over and against the social forces from which it was composed thus validated the capture and the frame as the essence of photography. Racial capitalist and imperialist infrastructures were laid down for the production of itemised images. Photography, though, as an imperial and colonial technology of extraction whose accumulated visual wealth was used to fortify Western power against the people whose images were seized, often without their consent and words, was well prepared at the end of the Second World War to sustain the Euro-American-Zionist narrative. The violent imposition of the ‘new world order’ by the Allies immediately after the War, targeted many other possible visions of the world, such as those of communists, socialists, anarchists, collectivists or non-nationalists – visions in which the people could have preserved more of their power and shares in the world. The Allies benefitted from and reinvigorated the silence of the people whose images were grabbed by global media workers. Such workers were sent to take photos of universal misery and national Independence celebrations from places across the world in which people suffered from different types of colonial and imperial violence and its long-lived consequences. This infrastructure of colonial violence itself, however, was left out of the frames, unless it was inscribed on the bodies of the victims. Such images were then circulated with attached meaning, affixed with imperial archival tags and captions, which played an important role in sustaining the twentieth century timelines where events begin and end. This imperial mode of image-making made it possible for the imperial proclamation of an end to Palestine and a beginning for Israel to circulate as truth and materialise in books such as the Shaw/Capa one.
Under these imperial ethics, once the principal actors of the imperial regimes decide to end one of their genocidal campaigns, images – like those of Palestinians being starved to death that circulated briefly on the front pages of some newspapers – will be used with the complicity of the media as visual markers of the ‘beginnings’ and ‘endings’ of those imperial narratives, with a chant of glory to the single photograph that provoked the end of the genocide. But genocides do not end, unless the regimes and technologies used to generate them are dismantled. We have not yet seen this moment arrive, even while many photographs have been produced and used to announce the end of dark regimes in different places and the beginning of liberatory (democratic) ones in the same places.
Genocide in Plain Sight: Dismantling Global Genocidal Infrastructures
The photographic memory of the twentieth century, composed of single and discrete photographs of delineated events, contributed to the invisibilisation of the infrastructure of genocidal violence, which cannot be captured in the single frame. Photographs centring the bodies of victims of this violence – the central object of the genre called ‘humanistic photography’ or ‘concerned photography’ – bifurcate ‘human suffering’ experienced in different places so that it will appear severed from the imperial state apparatuses that have perpetuated it and the global infrastructures of genocidal violence which undergird them.
Gaza, however, did not become an object of humanistic photography where international photographers visit, take photographs and circulate them in Western media. It has been turned, by the Israeli state, into a photographic ghetto in what seemed, at the beginning, as an effort to facilitate the perpetration of its crimes without the presence of external eyes. Very quickly, after the bombing of the first hospital in Gaza, the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital – during an attack that exterminated 471 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry – external eyes proved not to pose a problem for the continuation of the extermination in plain sight. It could persist so long as imperial actors and global media outlets have continued to deny that this violence is genocidal, and that the genocide is not an event with a beginning and an end but is constitutive of the regime which inflicts it.
As said, the imperial condition of photography was shaped to cut off the voice of people, to allow others to speak for them, behind their backs, at their expenses, and to bury their voices. With the interdiction of foreign reporters in Gaza, and with the extermination of Palestinian media workers at a rate of one almost every other day in the first year after October 2023, photojournalism has been reshaped in Gaza. [7]
Musab Al-Sharif (right) the nephew of Anas Al-Sharif, killed by Israel on 10 August 2025, screenshot from the ‘Women for Palestine’ Instagram feed, 12 August 2025
A growing number of Palestinians have joined the profession – in itself an expression of resilience/resistance. In utilising the familiar tasks of the tool of the profession within this photographic ghetto, they have contributed to the reshaping of journalism and photojournalism into a collaborative and community practice, a tool of communal self-expression and an instrument in the struggle. It has thus become a practice of its own, independent of the constraints of the imperial and the norms imposed by global media bodies.
Anas Al-Sharif as a 12-year-old child looking up to the man in the blue vest, Gaza, 2008, screenshot from the ‘savesheikhjarrahnow’ Instagram feed, 11 August 2025
Under the genocidal violence Gaza has suffered from over the years, Palestinian children have been indirectly trained by Palestinian media workers to become truthtellers. The imperial origins of the global media define its commitment not to the truth but to the perpetuation of imperial narratives, in which the existence of the state of Israel – the whitewash of Western genocidal colonialism – plays a key role. Israel makes this commitment to the negationist propaganda whose aim is to camouflage the genocide, a task easily achieved by its special unit that provides allegations against Palestinian journalists of affiliation with Hamas. [8] Shamelessly, media outlets repeat almost verbatim Israel’s debriefings and participate in this work of the delegitimising of journalists, which draws on the prior delegitimisation of Hamas, a project in which Western states and institutions already partook. [9] These journalists are targeted as their work unsettles imperial foundations and shows that the commitment of the colonised to their communities and to truthtelling is not a contradiction. The testimonies of some were collected in 2024 in a book that was totally ignored by the media: Bearing Witness Alone. [10] These journalists and photojournalists are not becoming the holders of fixed truth but maintain a community of truthtellers, or as Tareq S Hajja, a journalist for Mondoweiss, wrote about Anas Al-Sharif’s cousin, Muhammad Al-Sharif: ‘he was my eyes inside Kamal Adwan hospital’. [11] The work of Gaza’s media workers and the handful of media outlets that do testify to the genocide in interaction with them, is committed to truthtelling not as a process of transmitting fixed content but as an anti-imperial condition to be generated with others. Such a condition holds that truth be generated in a community where genocidal violence is not denied, the voices of the victims are not excluded, and that of (longtime) witnesses is not repressed. Palestinians are not sent by their journal, newspaper or broadcasting organisation as foreigners who come and go. When they take photos, they do not do so in relation to an interiorised dialogue with a Western media photo editor, who has his own ideas of what would be a ‘good photo’. Using their cameras is part of their daily emergency routine of telling the truth under the threat of being exterminated for doing so. Their photos are not systematically singled out to be featured in the global media under the imperial system of humanistic photography and captioning, but, rather, they circulate with Palestinian voices, ie Palestinian screams and calls to stop the genocide. Their images address their spectators to call them to act and command their viewers to refuse to accept a world in which their extermination is promoted as something else.
That this genocide in Palestine continues, despite the unprecedented growth in the recognition of the truth about Palestine and Israel, is not a sign that Palestinians’ screams are not being heard; it is a sign that the millions who hear their voices and amplify them are not being listened to by their governments. These governments are principal actors in the preservation of lethal technological infrastructures of surveillance and armaments who generate genocides with no need for the consent of their people. These governments are those who are committed to the perpetuation of the Zionist solution for the ‘Jewish question’ they are responsible for creating. For decades, this reduction of photography to the photographs per se, tokens in the circuit of visual capital, bereft of the communities in which they participate in truthtelling, succeeded in preventing counter-national collective witnessing – as seen in response to the genocide in Gaza. Such a project of witnessing is not anchored in single photographs, or in single genocides, and it is not mediated through corporate museums or hegemonic media platforms.
Against common imperial conceptions of time and of photography, which approach photography as an entity dissociated from the world in which it exists as if it had its own future or its own history, photography’s true temporality must be recognised (like the temporality of many other things accepted as ‘normal’): that of genocide. Chronologically speaking, photography came into the world in the 1830s, when the French who colonised Algeria defined its indigenous population (Muslims and Jews alike) and their worlds as exterminable. Many other groups have embodied this damnation on earth – Armenians, Kurds, the Herero and Nama peoples, Sinti and Roma, Congolese, European Jews… the list goes on. They were targeted by those same technologies that were not dismantled when any of these genocides’ ‘endings’ were declared.
Photography has been institutionalised by colonisers and enslavers, and in consequence was wielded against the people under their rule, who were nonetheless necessarily part of its practice – at least as photographed persons – and its proliferation worldwide. The way it was shaped by these actors made it instrumental to the negationist approach to the common infrastructure of these different genocides, which were tagged, classified and preserved through archives, museums, private collections, auctions and media as belonging to unrelated places and times. These allegedly benign institutions were created to sustain the imperial premise of photography – the rarity of photographs. This rarity was fabricated as an ideology, a fact, a capital, a practice, a construct, an object of desire, a mark of distinction for a connoisseur, a criterion for excellency in the arts and academia, a destination for intellectual quests, and more. The construction of rarity defines photographs and what they make available to the gaze as the essence of photography. Rarifying the subject of the photograph thus trains people to ignore the photographic substance – the photographic substance of photographs of vast flattened regions for example, is also of planned starvation – as irreducible to the subject of the frame, or what was-not-taken in those photographs, what stayed external to those frames, that which was not shaped as an object of the gaze. The ideal of rarity subsumes photographic substance – that which was subject to the presence of cameras, even if it was not necessarily translated into images; that which photography understood as the language of people and not the dubbing of states and their apparatuses; and that which photographs could tell us about genocides. In other words, rehearsing an anticolonial approach to photography requires replacing photography’s imperial temporality with the axiom: genocide is the temporality of photography. In this light, photography’s outcome – the photograph – should not be read for what its captions tell, but as a sample, a metonym of genocidal infrastructures that ought to be dismantled, sabotaged and refused, including those that appear to be benign in form and formations. When genocide is acknowledged as photography’s temporality, the question of the number of photographs taken – or not – in sites where a genocide is being perpetrated becomes secondary to the obligation to bear witness to and recognise it with and alongside its victims, despite all the means used by its perpetrators and their accomplices to deny it.
Genocide is a genocide is a genocide. Despite differences between one case and another, they are all defined by this power to determine who and what are exterminable. In the context of Palestine, it should be repeated, Palestinians and Palestinian things were thus defined since the second half of the 1940s. Under the hegemony of Euro-American-Zionist narratives, their voices were targeted for extermination for many years. Ghassan Kanafani (assassinated by a bomb planted in his car by the Mossad in 1972) or Sherine Abou-Akleh (shot by the IDF in 2022), like all the more than 240 journalists in Gaza, were not murdered only for what they said but for their perseverance despite the orders Israel gave them to shut down and because of the ways they served their communities, providing a voice which told the truth of their people, of many other people who were victims of the same violence. When photography within the photographic ghetto that was made of Gaza started to become a life-sustaining practice, like that of doctors and nurses or community workers, journalists began being targeted directly like those in other sectors. These journalists are aware of the risks they take by doing their work, and they do it since, like other members of their communities, they do what they have to do in order to resist collective extermination.
Here are the words Anas Al-Sharif wrote, knowing he will be exterminated; they were published as his will: ‘This is my will and my final message. If these words reach you, know that Israel has succeeded in killing me and silencing my voice… I urge you not to let chains silence you, nor borders restrain you. Be bridges toward the liberation of the land and its people, until the sun of dignity and freedom rises over our stolen homeland.’
Photographs are not the emblems; rather, the way photography has been enacted as a political medium, where millions around the world reject the infrastructure of the New World Order of which Israel is a part, is what is essential. This enactment of photography can help us foresee that, despite the fact that millions who oppose the genocide are failing to stop it, the genocide in Gaza may be the last one the West could enact without the consent of its constituents.
In 1945, photographs of the victims of the Nazi-led extermination campaigns in Europe were shown to German civilians. They were accompanied by a narrative created by the main actors of the new world order, the Allies, who exceptionalised the Nazis as the ultimate evil as a way of legitimising their own continual use of such forms of genocidal violence in the many colonies they held, and in the one they were in the process of legitimising as a benign state called Israel. Unlike other genocides, where the victims’ voices were best heard after the genocide was said to be over, in the case of Gaza millions of people are hearing Palestinians’ voices despite the concomitant campaign to repress them. It is thus impossible to deny the simple truth that genocide’s end must mean the end of a world in which genocide is possible.
Germans compelled by the US army to visit death camps and see photographs, May 1945, image in the public domain, photographer unknown
Ending such a world also means ending the world in which photography can continue to be exhibited, commissioned, circulated, printed and discussed in museums, media outlets or universities situated in the places from where genocides are inflicted – Israel and its imperial allies – without taking a clear position about the extermination of almost 250 media workers and many of their families who are at the forefront of maintaining the condition for truthtelling that the many genocides inflicted by the West imperil.
Gaza, Palestinian photojournalists – ‘I’m the target because I reveal the real target’, screenshots from the ‘souloffilasteen’ Instagram feed, 30 July 2025
When Palestinian photojournalists respond to their death verdicts with photos accompanied by their words, ‘I am the target because I reveal the real target’, photography ceases to be merely about the single photograph they may or may not take, but a mode of participating in the collective anti-imperial practice of truthtelling as the way out of this imperially-crafted world.
[1] The conversation is part of Jean-Luc Godard’s film Notre Musique (2004) and the journalist is played by the actor Sarah Adler
[2] See Lina Eklund, He Yin and Jamon Van Den Hoek, ‘Gaza: we analysed a year of satellite images to map the scale of agricultural destruction’, The Conversation, 6 February 2025, accessed 9 October 2025
[3] For numbers, see Marium Ali, Alia Chughtai and Muhammet Okur, ‘Two years of Israel’s genocide in Gaza: By the numbers’, Al Jazeera, 7 October 2025, accessed 9 October 2025
[4] Here are two examples of such pressure: Rhea Nayyar, ‘Berlin Court Convicts Curator Over Instagram Posts About Hamas Attack’, Hyperallergic, 19 November 2024; and David Walsh, ‘Palestinian artists under attack’, World Socialist Web Site, 1 November 2023, accessed 9 October 2025
[5] Hasbara is the Israeli term for propagating ‘the truth’ according to the state and countering any discourse that contradicts its propaganda. Numerous institutions and individuals in Israel and abroad are invested in this campaign; see Itamar Benzaquen and The Seventh Eye, ‘The new hasbara campaign Israel doesn’t want you to know about’, +972 Magazine, 25 January 2022; accessed 9 October 2025
[6] See Irwin Shaw and Robert Capa, Report on Israel, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1950
[7] Between 1939–1945, sixty-nine journalists were killed; during the Vietnam War (1955–1975), sixty-three were killed. In Gaza, between October 2023 and today (October 2025), the figure is 242.
[8] One such example was published in the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, depicting photographer Anas Zayed Fteiha as staging Hamas propaganda while seen taking photographs of children with empty pots; see Nikolai Antoniadis, Susanne Koelbl and Dunja Ramadan, ‘A Palestinian Journalist Finds Himself at the Center of Controversy’, Spiegel International, 8 August 2025, accessed 9 October 2025
[9] See Yuval Abraham, ‘“Legitimization Cell”: Israeli unit tasked with linking Gaza journalists to Hamas’, +972 Magazine, 14 August 2025, accessed 9 October 2025
[10] Bearing Witness Alone: Journalists Testimonies from Gaza and the West Bank, was published by the Al Jazeera Media Institute in 2024 and is available to download as a PDF
[11] See Tareq S Hajjaj, ‘Palestine Letter: “Without us, everyone would die in silence”’, Mondoweiss, 13 August 2025, accessed 9 October 2025
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay is a film essayist, curator, theorist of photography and a political theorist, working from an anti-imperialist perspective. Her books include The Jewelers of the Ummah – A Potential History of the Jewish Muslim World (Verso, 2024); Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (2019), Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography (2012, revised edition 2024), The Civil Contract of Photography (2008), and From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947–1950 (2011). Her films include Un-documented: Unlearning Imperial Plunder (2019) and Civil Alliance, Palestine, 47–48 (2012). She is a Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Comparative Literature at Brown University.