Haunting Images from Israel

Maybe I’m still too human. I resist viewing the many available web pictures of death in Lebanon and Israel in the recent carnage – even as my head tells me I must. As noted here before, the American viewing public had a profoundly sanitized version of the Israeli pounding of Lebanon, while the rest of the world witnessed a steady horrific stream of Lebanese civilian corpses, like the 3 dozen or so children who perished (again) at Qana.
My hesitance stems from analytical awareness of the power of such images to change thinking, unfairly at times, if we do not know the context of a sensational picture. Inevitably, images can be powerful tools, for good or ill, shaping international opinion of a given event. Contrary to Tony Cordesman, that’s why “smart” combatants today energetically endeavor to promote, repress, or sugar coat horrific images to suit their side’s agenda.
Never mind the cerebral level, the pictures from the past six weeks in Lebanon remain – a testament powerfully tugging at the heart and soul, for those with the courage to look. Such a waste!
Yet it wasn’t images of carnage that awoke me last night – like Jefferson’s “firebell in the night.” Instead, I am especially haunted by the memory of very different type of photo that I first saw here and then here.
No, they are not of dead children soaked in blood or caked in chemical ash, and they’re not the images of the broken “ragdoll” bodies of someone’s now departed, beloved child.
The pictures that eat at me even worse than the sight of death are of otherwise cherubic Israeli children writing messages and drawing images on Israeli shells bound for Lebanon.
One side of me still wanted to believe that there has to be an explanation, that these have to be doctored, or even fabricated, or explained away. I wish.
From the checking I’ve done, the photos are indeed legitimate, and different versions of the same scene apparently were taken by different photo services (AP, AFP, Ha’aretz, etc.) on July 17th.
While I am far better at searching for texts and documents via venerable tools like Nexus and Dow, I have a hunch that the original publisher/owners of these photos are shy, at best, about these photos, as I’ve encountered several no longer functioning photo links. Yet I am also learning that several reputable photo web site blogs have featured the photos and now store them in “permanent” links, such as via “Flikr.” See here, here, and here.
I’ve read claims that these photos have been the focus of scores (or more) of blog write-ups. However, it is my sense that the US mainstream media, TV and print, has generally ignored the photos. (Readers please chime in if you have any examples to the contrary.)
Responding to an internet buzz about the photos, no less than the Jerusalem Post (on-line only) on July 23rd sourced Israeli officials to confirm that the “graffitti incident” really did occur, that the photos were of an actual event. Indeed, the Associated Press photos were apparently taken by an Israeli photojournalist, Sebastian Scheiner.
According to the Jerusalem Post, the Israeli army did not condone the children’s shell decorating session. Then again, they obviously did not stop it. The Post cited an un-named official close to Israel’s public relations campaign who said that there was “no way” to frame the incident in a positive light. “Some people are simply irresponsible,” said the official.
That hasn’t stopped some from trying to “spin” it.

One Israeli blogger, Lisa Goldman, put the “best face” I have yet read about what “really” had happened:

“The little girls shown drawing with felt markers on the tank missiles are residents of Kiryat Shmona, which is right on the border with Lebanon… On the day that photo was taken, the girls had emerged from the underground bomb shelters for the first time in five days. A new army unit had just arrived in the town and was preparing to shell the area across the border. The unit attracted the attention of twelve photojournalists – Israeli and foreign. The girls and their families gathered around to check out the big attraction in the small town – foreigners.”

Goldman then claims that it was the parents who first wrote messages on the shells.

‘To Nasrallah with love,’ they wrote to the man whose name was for them a devilish image on television…. The photograpers gathered around. Twelve of them…. The parents handed the markers to the kids and they drew little Israeli flags on the shells.”

Ah, so its Nasrallah “in his turban” who should be blamed for inspiring their bad taste.
Or is it somebody else?

“Photographers look for striking images, and what is more striking than pretty, innocent little girls contrasted with the ugliness of war? The camera shutters clicked away, and I guess those kids must have felt like stars, especially since the diversion came after they’d been alternately bored and terrified as they waited out the shelling in their bomb shelters.”

Again, the accused are really the darling victims – of those paparatzi who goaded them.
Goldman’s excuses continue:

“None of those people was detached or wise enough to think: “Hang on, tank shell equals death of human beings.” They were thinking, tank shell equals stopping the missiles that land on my house.”

Besides, its the fault of Israeli television:

“none of those children had seen images of dead people – either Israeli or Lebanese. Israeli television doesn’t broadcast them, nor do the newspapers print them…. It is just in bad taste to use suffering for propaganda purposes.”

Really now…. Maybe they should.
Instead, these poor kids knew nothing of what their actions might signify. They had only

“seen news footage of destroyed buildings and infrastructure, but not of the human toll…. How many small children would be able to make the connection between tank shells and dead people on their own? How many human beings are able to detach from their own suffering and emotional stress and think about that of the other side? Not many, I suspect.”

Golly, maybe more should. And just what do children anywhere think “tank” shells do? Who do they think lives in those buildings the shells destroy on TV?
And while I’m at it, how about the repeated assertion that they were merely using “felt” pens on the shells; makes is all seem “softer,” doesn’t it?
Goldman oh so gently concedes that “the parents were not wise when they encouraged their children to doodle on the tank shells.” Doodling!? But hey, “they were letting off a little steam after being cooped up,” and golly, “Sometimes people do silly things when they are under emotional stress.”
Goldman then flips the issue around to “worry about the climate of hate that would lead people to look at it and automatically assume the absolute worst – and then use the photo to dehumanize and victimize.”
Again, I gather that these photos did receive considerable attention in the blogosphere, even as, contrary to some claims, I have not yet found much record of attention in the mainstream print and TV media, at least in the USA.
One exception of note was Tribune columnist Robert Koehler who linked the horror of youthful Israeli girls decorating missiles with Secretary Rice’s infamous “birth pangs of a new Middle East” characterization of the Lebanon carnage. “God help us,” Koehler worries, “the devil baby that crawls out of the wreckage will be one that makes even her boss pause mid-swagger…. The reckless cynics are in control.”

“Birth pangs. Maybe the bombs that destroyed the home of the 8-year-old girl in the southern Lebanon village of Ayta Chaeb, quoted by an AP reporter from her hospital bed in Tyre, were autographed by little Israeli girls. Maybe they were decorated with hearts and Stars of David. Maybe they said “from Israel with love.”

Koehler does deem the Israeli children in the pictures as victims, “More collateral damage: the corruption, the militarization, of the young….This is the collective obscenity of militarized hatred. It’s not just a game that adults play. We pull the children into it. We extract their blessing, and far too often their blood as well.”
Koehler finds such “cynicism and ugliness — the evil — on all sides, in this war and every war. Hezbollah and Hamas target civilians and irreparably demean their cause; they are every bit the equal of the Israeli right in cynical calculation, if pathetically their inferior in kill power.”
Koehler movingly concludes:

“Welcome to the gates of hell and madness. We can no longer afford to militarize our irrational streak. When we do — when we play “let’s be enemies” and perform what I call ritual soulectomy on a nation or people, when we sanction their murder — we light a fuse of hatred that is ultimately connected to a nuclear bomb.”
“Who are the enemies of the human race? Those who rev the engines of war and feed the children into its maw, and pretend they’re doing it for the future.”

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Oddly enough, this profoundly depressing story has me desperate for some stirring music. Yet funny thing, I’m left thinking of rather laconic lyrics from my favorite band of late, the Dixie Chicks, in their politically tinged blockbuster hit, “Not Ready to Make Nice:”
It’s a sad sad story when a mother will teach her
Daughter that she ought to hate a perfect stranger
I know; a stretch. :-} “Free Natalie!” But that’s another story… For my friends around the world who are clueless, you can hear it here, or view their video (and vote for it) here via VH1.