What will the defining images of the genocide in Gaza be? A young girl is blown apart, hanging from the side of a building; hospitals and schools are bombed to ruins; Israeli soldiers pose with the lingerie of the displaced and dead; a man is bulldozed, his head flat and wet like crushed fruit; bodies are stacked, they are tied in white wrapping. Some images—a white kite—are conjured by poets1; more are photographed by trained journalists who have become household names (not to mention Israeli targets), or else by ordinary Palestinians capturing the waking nightmares in real time. There are so many harrowing images they blur, we can’t possibly remember each dead child, each destroyed family home. This documentation will become history, will be studied, but now it is ongoing, now it is garnering international attention, and action from those who find the slaughter and destruction intolerable.
At this point in history, we take for granted that visual documentation shapes American public understanding of crises—how could it not? Soon after filming became possible, its propagandistic utility was employed: during WWII, American press needed military-issued credentials to report, and the government was able to censor the coverage.2 Film updates from the war were screened in cinemas, intended to boost morale with cheery narration and no footage from combat zones. By the Vietnam War, mass media had changed: this was the first war to be widely televised in America, with gruesome documentation screening in living rooms. In 1967, Michael J. Arlen wrote in The New Yorker of watching Walter Cronkite’s “Vietnam Weekly Review”:
Suddenly men were running here and there in front of the camera, the small-arms fire became louder and more intense, and once again—in our living room, or was it at the Yale Club bar, or lying on the deck of the grand yacht Fatima with a Sony portable TV upon our belly?—we were watching, a bit numbly perhaps (we have watched it so often), real men get shot at, real men (our surrogates, in fact) get killed and wounded.
Arlen’s disaffection appears almost farcical, spaces of leisure and decadence interrupted by sounds and images of young American soldiers, some screaming in pain (the limits of his sympathy are clear—the suffering of any Vietnamese soldiers or civilians doesn’t seem to merit mention). It’s as if he’s quickly acclimated to the regularity of extremely violent images punctuating American life; already at that time, he writes, “Vietnam is often referred to as ‘television’s war.’”
The war was still far away, but the ignorance of distance had partially collapsed, as had the government’s ability to control public opinion through filtered coverage. “Regular exposure to the ugly realities of battle is thought to have turned the public against the war,” writes Michael Mandelbaum, the director of Foreign Policy at John Hopkins, and this outcry, including one of the largest protest movements in American history, is credited with “forcing the withdrawal of American troops.”3
But it’s not just images of intense violence which hold immense power in the field of public opinion. During the Vietnam War, mass media functioned as the bridge between the carnage abroad and the American public, but also between protesters and other Americans. Many national and local outlets covered, and perhaps helped to cultivate or impede, the developing anti-war movement. Of course, during the Vietnam War and in the decades since, activist groups have also had their own media teams, which have utilized developing technology, from leaflets or zines, to video coverage, blogs, and more, to broadcast messaging on their own terms. Still, the reach was limited—the broader representation of their efforts still largely shaped by mainstream media.
Half a century after the Vietnam War, Occupy Wall Street marked a new era of American protest coverage, when organizers could record, curate, and transmit information on a previously unimaginable scale: in 2011, livestream.com had about 80 channels broadcasting from Occupy Wall Street, which garnered a collective 11 million unique viewers.4 Paolo Gerbaurdo, the director of digital culture at King’s College, explains that “practices such as live streaming and live tweeting contribute to the activist representation of protest camps, complementing and competing with the representation conducted through mainstream news media,” and these streams additionally “facilitate connections with the diverse and diffuse support base of these movements, including the ‘internet occupiers,’ people who never attended protests physically, yet strongly identified with the movement.”5 In the years since, of course, social media has dramatically expanded this capability for activists to transmit their own messaging, and for distant observers to support and connect, with Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter becoming integral news sites and organizational grounds. Think of Black Lives Matter: in 2020, the video of George Floyd’s murder spread rapidly on these platforms, followed by innumerable posts both promoting and documenting protests, alongside infographics, short texts offering context and perspective, and even online-based actions, like the controversial #blackouttuesday mass posting of black squares.
Now, images reach the United States from the ruins of cities in Northern Gaza, al-Shifa hospital, refugee camps in Rafah. But the defining images of Israel’s genocide in Gaza will stem both from within Palestine and from the rise of an international protest movement: tens of thousands of people filling streets in countries around the world, many in keffiyehs; rows of tents on college lawns, and students being violently arrested by police in riot gear or on horseback; American landmarks crowded with Jewish protesters in black t-shirts emblazoned with “NOT IN OUR NAME.” Some of these images will be organic, others will be consciously crafted by artists and organizers. Amidst an inundation of coverage, how are organizers designing messaging to cut through the noise? What lineages might be most instructive?
In considering the iconography of protests, there is a tangle of traditions beyond mass media: protest art, the agitprop, documentary photography, performance art, political theater. Agitprops—the etymology is a blend of agitation and propaganda dating back to the Russian Revolution of 1917—are visual, sometimes text-based works with legible messaging meant to be cheaply and widely disseminated. A 2015-2016 Brooklyn Museum show, “Agitprop!,” included Jenny Holzer’s Inflammatory Essays, paragraph-length writings presented in all caps on brightly colored paper, and the work of Gran Fury, an art collective that made work confronting the AIDS crisis: “Women don’t get AIDS,” reads a poster from before cis women could be officially diagnosed, “they just die from it.”6 In his recent book on the collective, Gran Fury member Avram Finkelstein writes that their work is “didactic to the point of flat-footedness, and it pilfers advertising vernaculars to the point of the declarative”—stripped of distractions or nuance, the images were efficient, easily comprehensible as they passed viewers on protest signs or bus advertisement panels.7 They are art and unapologetic propaganda at once.
Since October 7th, activists organizing in solidarity with Gaza aren’t just aware of this lineage, but are consciously revisiting earlier projects. Writers Against the War On Gaza’s The New York War Crimes, a newsprint tabloid with nearly identical layout and typeface to The New York Times, criticizes the bias of and omissions from the paper of record in its reporting on the violence in Gaza; it also fills these gaps with its own articles. The project is derivative of Gran Fury’s The New York Crimes, a similar publication created in 1988 to condemn The New York Times’s coverage, or lack thereof, of the AIDS crisis. Finkelstein, in a recent interview published in WAWOG’s new incarnation, remembers: “We researched when the delivery trucks came and removed yesterday’s papers and put the new papers into each kiosk throughout the city… So people would go get their paper and wouldn’t know it was our version.”8 This model of physical replacement doesn’t translate to a screen-based age, but on March 14th WAWOG did mirror another of Gran Fury’s earlier actions: blocking delivery trucks at the paper’s printing plant in Queens. More than a hundred activists were later arrested that morning in the lobby of The New York Times’s Manhattan headquarters.9
Another such recreation was a quilt unveiled on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on March 24th. This project wasn’t an agitprop, as comprehending its messaging would require more than a fleeting glance; rather, it visually melded fiber arts and protest signs, accomplishing a work that was explicitly collective and political. The quilt, created by the Hope in the Art World collective, was thirty by fifty feet, with panels hand painted by sixty-eight international artists. The quilt was inspired by the AIDS Memorial Quilt, which was first displayed at The National Mall in 1987—there were then nearly two thousand 3’ by 6’ panels,10 collectively larger than a football field; still expanding to this day, the quilt now comprises more than 50,000 panels.11 Each contribution eulogizes someone lost to AIDS. Hope in the Art World’s 2024 rendition isn’t exactly a memorial project; it mourns some of the dead, like the poet Refaat Alareer, but it is also forward-looking: officially titled the From Occupation to Liberation Quilt, it features panels reading, “Let Gaza live,” “The right to resist / the right to flourish / the right to return,” and “Palestine will live forever!”12 Like the AIDS Memorial Quilt, the From Occupation to Liberation Quilt will continue to expand with more panels.
In the case of both The New York War Crimes and the From Occupation to Liberation Quilt, the props or artworks are the central visuals intended to circulate. The power is in the visual mimicry—a zine with the same articles that didn’t intentionally resemble The New York Times would not be nearly so provocative, and would not gain the same traction. Because the aesthetic mischievously draws attention, the New York War Crimes can educate readers; it can agitate the paper of record. Meanwhile, the quilt is filled with familiar Palestinian iconography: watermelons, olive trees, the nation’s flag. Its accompanying materials condemn specific donors and leaders of the Metropolitan Museum of Art—one trustee stands accused of profiting from arms sales to Israel13—but it is the quilt’s beauty, and the ceremony of its public exhibition, that uniquely pulls attention to this information. Both projects have been covered in major outlets, featuring photos of the materials.
At other actions, organizers create striking visuals out of the crowds, coordinating mass actions with the eventual documentation in mind. This kind of orchestration certainly draws from theatrical traditions—“Political action is a form of theater enhanced through consideration for its stage,” Jay Saper, an organizer at Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), told me. JVP is perhaps the most interesting case study for contemporary protest visuals, as the group routinely executes meticulously choreographed actions, utilizing staging, props, coordinated dress, some predetermined speeches or chanting, and cues rehearsed among the participants. There are even roles, with protestors deciding ahead of time if they’ll take on what are known as green, yellow, or red roles, which represent the risk of arrest. An action is performative, but it can’t be rigidly scripted, and participation is much more porous. “Be like water!” organizers will often yell at marches, urging crowds to fill in spaces to prevent officers from singling out individuals for arrests. Perhaps the key distinction between conventional theater and political demonstrations is that organizers cannot rely on the fixed attention of a captive audience. Like Gran Fury’s on-the-nose campaigns—designed to be understood in the time it takes for a bus to pass by—contemporary protest coverage has to be impactful in the time it takes to scroll through a newsfeed or, ideally, urgently compelling enough to cause a viewer to stop scrolling midstream. Eliza Klein, who co-leads JVP’s social media and press operations with Saper, told me that “gorgeous and compelling visuals” can help capture this attention, and communicate efficiently, even if the viewer won’t read the accompanying caption or article. Perhaps even more importantly, the visual messaging can be relatively controlled. In a post-Occupy era, many of these demonstrations are live streamed by their organizers, but they will also be covered by all kinds of media outlets, from The New York Times to Fox News. By utilizing visual shorthands or catchy accompanying language, activists are able to disseminate their own messaging through the images that accompany potential articles. Eli Harrison, another organizer with JVP’s New York chapter, told me, “Even when we know that the banners we’ve painstakingly painted for hours might get ripped away from our hands by cops in a matter of minutes, there’s a shared sense of camaraderie in this too—we know that with the help of our media team, we’ll get the shot that will make our message loud and clear, and the cops and newspapers won’t be able to silence our visual cohesiveness and clarity.”
Images on the ground in Gaza are documentation: they should move their viewers, and they might even be intentionally utilized to move us, but they are not dreamt up for this purpose. The conscious creation of protest images are something else, something closer to a photographic agitprop: they might also come to define this moment in history, but they will hopefully activate broader dissent in the meantime. Cohesive imagery makes actions appear “bigger and more powerful,” Klein said, “It makes the actions iconic: there is a particular iconography with the banners, shirts, and choreography of the sit-in that people can recognize and that build on each other for each action.” The cohesion also captures the power of the organization—that the protest movement organizing in solidarity with Gaza is large and organized. Harrison described as much: “We can pull off big visuals in the way we can pull off big actions: because of the strength of our relationships, the depth of our moral clarity, and the unity of our demands.”
JVP’s action at The Statue of Liberty on November 6th, 2023, is a prime example of an image-driven demonstration. The number of on-the-ground witnesses of the action itself was limited to just the tourists and workers who happened to be there. Singing and speeches might have been meaningful to those observers, as well as to the participants, but the organizers had always aimed to reach a much larger audience. And they succeeded in creating an image worth circulating: photographs spread widely on social media and were broadcast by major outlets, including The New York Times. In the paper’s photo, hanging over the staircases beneath the statue are five carefully positioned banners, their bottom left corners lifting up in the wind. Two banners call for a ceasefire, the others read: “Palestinians should be free,” “the whole world is watching,” and—highlighting the group’s Jewishness—“Never again for anyone.” Lining the stairs and pooled below are hundreds of protesters in matching t-shirts. The image, with the beacon of liberty towering above protesters advocating for Palestinian freedom, borders on corny—it is also direct and bold. According to Harrison, the coverage was exactly what they’d hoped for, with one notable exception: two forty-foot banners, meant to be hung from the statue’s feet, were confiscated by police prior to the action. They are still, Harrison told me, languishing in police custody.
It is easy to criticize JVP for their manicured actions: they don’t use the language of “From the river to the sea,” avoiding easy fodder for the opposition (a capitulation?); protesters are trained not to resist but to follow the instructions of their arresting officers; the use of the Statue of Liberty is, as noted, a bit trite. The image of Jewish elders chaining themselves to the White House, the centering of Holocaust survivors and their descendants, the placement of rabbis praying before their arrests in a Washington, DC rotunda—all of these visuals center Jewish resistance to Israel, in a moment when Jewish comfort and authority are prioritized dramatically over the safety and dignity of Palestinians, both in the occupied territories and here in the U.S. That said, the images are tactical and incredibly efficient. Wording like “not in our name” and “never again for anyone”—ubiquitous on posters and t-shirts at JVP demonstrations—captures Jewish dissent, succinctly upending a widely accepted conflation of anti-zionism and anti-semitism. This matters deeply in changing mainstream narratives and pressuring elected officials towards an end to Israel’s murderous campaign in Gaza.
If “the television war” entered the living rooms of Americans, then awareness of this genocide has entered every room of every house, always within arm’s reach. Our phones constantly remind us of the families sleeping in tents or crushed by rubble, of new ways for bodies to be broken, or the ashen and jaundiced and blood red colors of death. For months, a steady stream of essays and articles have questioned what this kind of exposure might lead to, what an individual and distanced witness owes and risks, what kinds of collective response might garner actual leverage. The proliferation of such images certainly omits the possibility of any kind of feigned ignorance; we know exactly what brutality is ongoing in Gaza, with American support. Our government can’t feign ignorance either, nor can our elected officials ignore, in an election year, the hugely visible protest movement. The evolving iconography—of physical agitprops and artwork, of visually rich actions—is a new installment in a longstanding lineage. Utilizing a myriad of artistic and activist legacies, organizers disseminate profound dissent. “Biden, Biden, you can’t hide,” chant crowds flooding streets across the country, magnified across hundreds of thousands of television, computer, and phone speakers, “We charge you with genocide.”
Notes
- “If I Must Die” by Refaat Alareer, World Literature Today, 2023.
- “Vietnam: The First Television War” by Jessie Kratz, U.S. National Archives, 2018.
- “Vietnam: The Television War” by Michael Mandelbaum, Daedalus, 1982.
- “Coverage Of OWS Protests Puts Site In Tough Spot” by Nina Porzucki, NPR, 2011.
- “Feeds from the Square: Live Streaming, Live Tweeting and the Self-Representation of Protest Camps” by Paulo Gerbaudo, from Protest camps in international context: Spaces, infrastructures and media of resistance, eds. Gavin Brown, et al., Bristol University Press, 2017.
- “Agitprop!”, Brooklyn Museum, 2015.
- “Introduction: AIDS 2.0” from After Silence: A History of AIDS through Its Images by Avram Finkelstein, University of California Press, 2018.
- “Having meetings and issuing threats: Avram Finkelstein discusses the crimes of The Times, ACT UP and how to steal the voice of authority”, New York War Crimes, 2024.
- “How the New York Times fights America’s wars” by Writers Against the War on Gaza, Mondoweiss, 2024.
- “How to Make a Panel for the Quilt”, National AIDS Memorial.
- “The History of the Quilt”, National AIDS Memorial.
- “From Occupation to Liberation Quilt”, Hope in the Art World.
- “Pro-Palestine Activists Take Over the Met, British Museum” by Jo Lawson-Tancred, artnet, 2024.