The English-language media has spent a lot of time debating whether Israeli babies were beheaded. An Israeli newscaster had reported that a soldier found decapitated children at the scene of an attack on Kfar Aza by the Palestinian group Hamas. The story made it to front pages around the world. Other journalists began to scrutinize the claim and heard different accounts from different officials in the Israeli government. U.S. President Joe Biden implied that he had seen photos of the beheadings, then the White House backtracked.
All this debate around beheadings seemed to miss a more fundamental point: that children were killed. The existence of a massacre should be enough to shock and horrify. Hamas killed or took hostage hundreds of Israelis. (Clearly frustrated with media skepticism, the Israeli government posted pictures of burned Israeli children to social media.) The Israeli military has killed hundreds of Palestinians with bombs in retaliation. The intense focus on one gruesome detail amid a pile of dead and maimed bodies shows there is something fundamentally wrong with the way American society approaches war in foreign countries.
On one hand, Americans are not confronted with the horror that “normal” weapons of war—bullets, bombs, and hunger—inflict on a human body. On the other hand, American media likes to fixate on specific atrocity stories, repeating the most ugly details as if the news were a carnival of horror. Neither approach helps Americans appreciate the tragedy of war nor gives the dead the dignity they deserve. Their main accomplishment is to normalize the idea of endless conflict.
The dead are still being counted in Israel and Palestine, and an all-out ground war is likely. If that comes to pass, many more innocent people will die. Americans have little framework for understanding the horror that is about to unfold.
Israeli officials have said that they will not allow food, water, or electricity into the Palestinian enclave of Gaza until Israeli hostages are released, even as Palestinian hospitals run low on supplies. British-Palestinian doctor Ghassan Abu-Sittah described a 14-year-old girl with burns all over her body from an airstrike. Burn treatment is already an excruciating process, and because doctors ran out of antiseptic, they had to clean her wounds with regular soap.
A similar story is playing out a few hundred miles north, in a separate conflict. After Kurdish guerillas attacked the Turkish parliament, NATO member Turkey launched a massive bombing campaign to wipe out electrical and water infrastructure in Kurdish cities. The results are horrifying in all the same ways.
“Most Americans can imagine armed people on the ground as a threat but are so fundamentally unable to imagine what high-tech military equipment does to a place without air defenses that they can’t even make themselves afraid of it,” an expert who works on the Kurdish issue told me, referring to both military campaigns. “The stuff about destroying infrastructure and cutting electricity and water too. People seem to not be able to conceptualize what that does.”
Palestinian critics often complain that American media is much quicker to accept Israeli allegations about Palestinian crimes than Palestinian allegations about Israeli crimes. American critic Noam Chomsky made the same point about Cold War conflicts, including the Turkish-Kurdish conflict, in the book Manufacturing Consent.
Journalists tend to describe crime against “worthy victims” in all their horrid detail, and are crystal clear about the malice of the perpetrators, according to Chomsky’s book. The media describes “unworthy victims” in a more abstract language, Chomsky argued, and tends to hem and haw about who was responsible for the suffering.
But even the way “worthy victims” are covered can be insulting to their dignity.
“I am begging people to not engage in debates about specific gory details of how people died on [the] Israeli side. It is not useful or necessary to talk about it and it is incredibly jarring that many in [the] West do not care about real desperation, panic, fear we are going through,” an Israeli user wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. She said she could not speak for Palestinians, “but for Israeli Jews (and non-Jews that always suffer equally as unintended targets) it is emotionally disturbing to hear ourselves described as defiled corpses.”
If this voyeurism serves anyone, it is hawkish politicians. War hawks need to stoke paranoia about the world in general and bloodlust against specific enemies. Asked if there was a way to defeat Hamas without endangering Palestinian civilians, Sen. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.) enumerated a list of Hamas war crimes and claimed that there is no “off-ramp” in a conflict with “savages.” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) stated that the world is in a “religious war” and called for bombing Iran even if there is no evidence of Iranian involvement in the Hamas attack.
And that voyeurism has to be selective for it to work. The more unique the crime, the better. Drawing attention to the suffering that bullets, bombs, and hunger cause—even the suffering that Hamas bullets cause for Israelis—might raise uncomfortable questions about the things American weapons do abroad. The image of war as an alien, savage act is much more comforting for the people who do not have to live through it.
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