The Gaza War…Is Not Taking Place?

How does French sociologist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s intellectual ‘stir’ about the 1991 Gulf War capture the horrors of high-tech violence unleashed by Israel on a blockaded and densely populated city in the Gaza war?

Postmodernist forms of representation are not only about constructing existence (of a reality), but also tackling head on, and honestly, what actually exists when war kills human beings on a large scale. In Gaza, a war is taking place and its victims are real, not fictitious. Baudrillard’s 1991 ‘puzzle’ raises critical awareness that narratives of war are fundamentally problematic. The instruments of information that animate modern life (such as the media) not only invade reality, but also create it. The same goes for the constructs that represent the international system with its laws, ethics, rules of engagement and masters. The United Nations or the so-called rules-based international system may be no more than dramatised representations of unfulfilled virtues of legality and civilised democracy.

Colonizing Palestine

Critical exploration of Baudrillard’s thesis warrants referencing here given the comparable sites of deployment of high-tech warfare against two Arab peoples – the Iraqis (1991) and the Palestinians (2023-24). Like the United States in Iraq, in terms of use of high-tech warfare, the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) has for nearly eleven months conducted war that approximates a one-sided ‘spectacle’. This spectacle has been propagated to maintain Israeli image of super-prowess in the Middle East. Israel has no stomach for negative exposure of its onslaught, which has sowed death indiscriminately. Yet, Israel does not spurn admiration of its status as a ‘regional power’ – with ‘iron fist’ capabilities, and with a ‘long arm’ air force. Civilians are the biggest victims -- not a comparably systemic army or Hamas, which is yet to be defeated (1) -of Israel’s war machine. In seeking to coerce Hamas into submission, Israel’s IDF killed more civilians in Gaza than in the combined wars fought with Arab states since its founding in 1948. It is this reality check that dictates against total deferral to Baudrillard’s postmodernist sensibility that war – as in the case of Gaza – may be an imaginary construct.

War is war. It reveals how colonised space is a place of violence. The binary is the same: coloniser and colonised. Colonizing Palestine (2) has one notable difference. The discrepancy in lifestyle and secure living between free Israelis and occupied Palestinians is drastic. A tale of two cities comes to mind, when comparing Gaza with Tel Aviv. The latter is a city of growth and power, with an appetite for more wealth and Palestinian land. The former is a city living miserably, under a 16-year-old embargo of which the last eleven months have been under the onslaught of the IDF’s state-of-the art lethality. The Greek adage about misery being ‘the parent of revolution’ speaks to dystopian existence in Gaza. The Israeli colonisers did not erect French or British-like monuments that celebrate the Europeans’ putatively ‘civilising’ ways. They built no cafes, libraries, schools, manicured gardens or fountains, railroads or administration in the Palestinian Occupied Territories (POT). Instead, Israel’s colonial stranglehold over the POT is manifest through ‘insidious systems of control’ (to paraphrase Foucault’s Discipline and Punish),(3) incarceration, territorial settlements and displacement of Palestinians. Inclusive in these systems of control are the words, the images and the footage that create the world contested by Israelis and Palestinians. The Palestinian ‘other’ is today constructed through images and stereotypes along the lines of ‘Jew-hating’, ‘unruly’ and ‘terrorist’. These negative representations are instrumental in the reproduction of colonial domination and use of force against a people under Israeli occupation, i.e. theoretically owed, under international law, an obligation of protection. The ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P) is little more than ink on paper. (4) Definitely, this legal device is not extended to Palestinians, as Kristian Alexander, Senior Fellow and the Director of International Security & Terrorism Program at TRENDS Research and Advisory, correctly notes. (5)

War…a la Baudrillard

There is much resonance of Baudrillard’s critical reflection on modern warfare in the Gaza war. It has been 30 years since the first Gulf War in 1991. Many wars, including in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Sudan and Gaza separate the war currently raging from that conflict. There is much to be written about war-making in the Middle East. Whereas previous Arab-Israeli wars were ‘events’, with a beginning, a middle and an end-point in time, the Gaza war is a series of wars, of which the current one is the fifth. Past wars were always authored with a time lag –with little or no media scrutiny, shrouded in secrecy and even faked with narratives of victory (the 1967 war being a case in point). (6) The Gaza war has features of a war that has partly morphed into a media ‘spectacle’. This aligns with Baudrillard’s take.

In his 1991 Libération trilogy (three articles) on the Gulf war, he popularised the conception of war as a spectacle – not an event. The crux of his intellectual provocation is found in the third essay, which he penned at the end of February 1991, soon after the decimation of Saddam’s forces with US overkill force. He indelibly stamped it with a postmodernist dosage of paradox, parody almost, and unrealism. His thesis questions the whole notion of ‘war’, ‘victory’, ‘ethics’ and ‘truth’. His title ,“The Gulf War Did Not Take Place”, says it all. It appears less far-fetched when applied today to the Gaza War. The lethality of Israel’s use of artificial intelligence (AI), quadcopters, (7) cyber surveillance, high-tech spyware, drones, ‘sensor-to-shooter systems’ (8) “Smash Dragon” and “Thor” devices, (9) all render the reality of what is ‘human’ and what is ‘machine’ ambiguous. Only a dosage of seemingly ‘far-fetched’ postmodernist scepticism, a la Baudrillard, may be the only antidote to the equally not long ago fictitious but today less far-fetched digital lethality in modern wars – from Ukraine to Gaza.

What was during the first Gulf War a bit of a stretch of the technological and philosophical imagination, is today less fanciful. The glare of “hyper-reality” of digital warfare once simulated in video games is mind-boggling, played out in real-time over the screens of military shooters and those of TV, tablet and smart phone onlookers. The militaristic and the (social) mediatic are two faces of the single coin of the visualisation of war -- as in Gaza. In Gaza, the gaze is so instantaneous – by soldier and journalist. Such a gaze has tended to denude Palestinians of their dignity – and humanity.

Seeing and Unseeing Gaza at War: The Orientalist Gaze

The narration of the war in Gaza seems to be engrossed in ‘hard power’. It is shrouded in darkness that inveigles the mind into seeing the spectacle of ‘war games’ by the two protagonists, the Palestinian Islamist Hamas militia and the IDF. This paper seeks to lure the reader away from being ensnared by this intellectual ‘vision-tunnelling’. There is an untold story of ideational/ideological hubris that media superficiality has made hidden from the gaze of wide-ranging publics and avid consumers of all news ‘Middle Eastern’.

The ‘Orientalist gaze’ may be used here in reference to epistemic mis-representation of ‘reality’. In it, the Orientalist gaze zooms in selectively on the mechanics that reproduce power relations of domination. It intervenes to dis-embody human objects, divesting them of humanity (de-humanized), worthy being (racialized) and equal knowing (un-civilized). It is in this context, that the “stupidity” Baudrillard imputes to modern warfare commands relevance. Seeing war through all kinds of media has abstracted its victims, the Palestinian entities that the big press and media conglomerates view from the comfort of distance (geographical, cultural, religious, linguistic). Their existence cannot be more than a ‘(pre)text’, a ‘story’ or an ‘image’, captured from outside by outsiders for the outside world, the necessity of which spells life and death (not of the Palestinian ‘object’) (but) of the news item or ‘scoop’. This brand of news-making, be it by CNN or Fox News, produces an Orientalist gaze with a scrutiny that patterns the world into all kinds of categories of humanity, involving a comfortable distance between the reporter and the ‘reportee’, and between the dominant (sophisticated, modern, Western, ruly) and the dominated (primitive, traditional, Oriental, unruly). These non-nuanced ‘boxes’ implicate all kinds of intellectual generalisation (10) and/or reductionism. This includes reducing war to a kind of ‘James Bond-type’ operations that celebrate sophistication of Israel’s warring artistry and weaponry, involving AI-led lethality – as showcased by IDF-instigated killings in Gaza. (11) This use of AI in the Gaza carnage simulates the conduct of futuristic wars, which very much relates Baudrillard’s idea of war as a ‘virtual’ enterprise.

It is within a matrix of power relations animated by mostly neoliberal modalities that promote and demote agency that the war in Gaza is seen. That is, through a narrow lens that cuts up the world into good and bad citizens, into secular and religious verities, and into friends and foes (of democracy and markets). Thus, the war on a generalised Hamas-led ‘Gaza strip’ is penned, text-ed and video-ed by ‘historians’ who tend to commit a ‘lump’ of Palestinian ‘no-bodies’ to a wording written through a dictionary of power. In such a dictionary, Gaza is virtually morphed into a ‘terra nullius”. An empty land is always ripe for settling and selling, fostering neoliberal spatial planning and design (including in Palestine). (12) The attempts to displace Gazans into neighbouring countries are not just rumours. The rumours must be understood as a symptom of global capitalist machineries lined up to possess and carve Gaza, perhaps as a new Mediterranean city, without Gazans.

A combination of neoliberalisation of the region coupled with “urban colonialism” seems to be at works. This adds a new layer of complication to the dominant settler colonialism specific to Palestine, (13) given its consequence of erasure of heritage, identity and indigeneity. (14) Jared Kushner sees waterfront properties, not Gazans with a right to land rights in their own territory. (15) This twist in the harrowing war in Gaza may be a feature of the “new imperialism” critically probed by British-American academic David Harvey (16) about the production of space via displacement and dispossession. Israel has lobbied Egypt for the transfer of Palestinians to the Sinai, with relocation of Palestinians from their land being very much on the radar of the Jewish state’s strategists. (17) Those building their own version of ‘smart cities’ – not democratic cities – in the Arab region (18) may have resigned themselves to unseeing the ‘sacred’ in Palestinian lands, seeing it in terms of real estate value.

Palestinians in Gaza have become ‘no-bodies’ who do not seem to count, when alive, and seem, conversely, to be countable bodies, when ‘eliminated’. This is neatly framed without sharing in the agony of death of the departed and in the sorrow of those left behind. Nothing can be more deceitful than the condensing of life and death into compact soundbites, digitally and visually news-worthy. As if the dead never lived, and the living are quasi-walking dead. In such media antics, lost are the semantics of the sacredness of humanity in its separate realms, in life and in death. The visualisation and digitisation of the ‘seen’ carnages in Gaza blur the complexities of life and death and the real and the virtual. A gun shot that kill a Palestinian and a news camera shot of it are made into one compact process, not two separate acts. The irony is that the Gaza conflict has cost the lives of more than 100 journalists.

The Gaza war, to an extent, is represented as if the Palestinian no-bodies (ordinary Gazans, ‘Hamsawis’, Islamists, terrorists) have no historians of their own to eulogise their stand, qua human fodder for the angels of death riding smart bombs, indiscriminately slaughtering Palestinians in the thousands. The war’s cartographers have drawn the battle lines and the world’s powers-that-be have mapped the rights and wrongs of the conflict. The IDF is lionised and the historians’ scorn seems to be reserved for Hamas, designated terrorist by many states. Writing in 1991 about the first Gulf War, Baudrillard seeks to deconstruct the misrepresentation of war. It is a tall order, past and present, to represent wars scrupulously, much less ‘objectively’. But in wars, pitting coloniser and colonised, glorifying the coloniser should be assumed to be problematic – unless ‘colonialism’ is taken out of the equation of meaning and sign-making. Baudrillard’s text “The Gulf War did not Take Place” (19) critiques the obsession of the scene/seen (i.e. war as a media event). Here lies the significance of his contribution as one method for enabling an intellectual activity to see the unseen. That is, critically deciphering the signs and meaning systems which, more or less, banalise war, rendering it almost entertainment and news.

The unseen in the ongoing war matters. The fact that the enterprise to think reflexively about all that is not an on-screen image, text, story or news item is made invisible invites a gaze in reverse to disrupt historical knowledge practices that leave out from the equation fragments of information useful for alternative interpretations of the conflict. Baudrillard deconstructed the war spectacle by pointing out the focus on prowess (of the United States) in the lead-up to the war and the exaggeration of the Iraqi threat. The Gaza war, especially with its new dimension of a looming Iranian-Israeli ‘duel’, seems to be more about maintaining the image of a militarily superior Israel. The exaggeration of Hamas’s capabilities makes the ‘threat’ almost existential to an Israel that has carried the tag of an invincible regional power, since its creation in 1948. As in the case of Iraq in 2003, Hamas’s power is over-stated, setting out a test for Israel to pass, and to renew its martial ‘baptism of fire’, so to speak. Unlike the Gulf war, which saw limited fighting between Iraqis and Americans, the Gaza War has been one of intense fighting. (20)

The Gaza War Is Taking Place

Like the Gulf war, there is colossal loss of life, Palestinian civilians killed in airstrikes by US-made warplanes and munitions in addition to AI-generated mapping of assassinations. Whether one leans towards or dismisses Baudrillard’s thesis of the bloody conflict as a media spectacle, the cameras have intervened into Palestinian lives. The news bulletins and the social media displayed visuals of Palestinian homes, children, mutilated bodies, grief, tears, bloodied school yards, ruined homes and buildings, burnt cars, and torn cities. The homes, clothes, scarves, personal effects that were once relegated to an exclusive domain of horma (respected ‘homely’ and private space), have all become exhibits in a frenzy of media voyeurism that denuded Palestinians of all dignity. This ‘visualisation’ of the Palestinians renders them less than or equals to either Israelis or the distant onlookers whose lenses and tape records sought a ‘piece’ of fallen human beings in Gaza. What the Harem literature’s voyeurism began in the 19th century as curious ‘penetration’ of the Oriental exotic and perhaps abnormal lives and homes, modern wars of the Middle East have taken to unprecedented extremes. In the case of Gaza, the private clothing of women in homes raided by the IDF seemed to strike a psycho-violent chord in soldiers desecrating once forbidden realms of ‘horma’, in acts that have become a metaphor for defiling not only Palestine, but also the very idea of Palestine. What awaits the world is the shock of the graveyard of death and rubble that will be uncovered once a ceasefire is reached.

Democratic civilisation will be faced with a moment of truth reminiscent of the stench of death encountered in Poland and elsewhere following the collapse of the Nazis. Arabs will have to face the bitter reality that the buildings, mosques, hospitals, and schools that once stood in Gaza were once occupied by human beings that are already dead. Until their last breath, they believed the Arab peoples would not abandon them in their hour of need. The US political class will have to rethink its moral leadership. The US is at once the main supplier of arms to Israel and the mediator of the much-vaunted ceasefire. Other democratic states share the responsibility of letting Palestinians be killed as if to fulfil Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant’s labelling them as “human animals”. (21) Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson thought the idea of stopping arms to Israel to be “insane”. (22) Thousands of Western public servants begged to differ – like Mark Smith (UK) (23) and Josh Paul (US) (24) – and resigned from successful diplomatic careers.

Two uprisings (1987-1993; 2000-2005) and five wars (2008-2009; 2012; 2014; 2021; 2023-2024) punctuate the conflictual elan of Palestinian-Israeli relations. The latest war is the deadliest and without a doubt the one with record systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure and the killing of non-combatant civilians – not to mention harrowing stories of abuse of Palestinian detainees. “Welcome to Hell”, a report (by the Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories) on torture camps for Palestinian prisoners sets the record of such abuse straight. (25) The number of amputees amongst children is staggering. (26) The war has not only maimed innocent children, but also has killed, as put succinctly by a UNICEF report, “children’s dreams”. (27) The sense of loss and trauma are indescribable. A journalist writing for The New Yorker tells the story of a Palestinian girl, Ghazal, who lost a leg. Ghazal captures this sense of loss in a drawing caption (in Arabic), which reads: “The war is destroying Gaza. My father is martyred. My grandfather is martyred. My grandmother is martyred. My uncle is martyred. My cousin is martyred.” (28)

Since March 2024, when Francesca Albanese, (29) the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian, produced her “Anatomy of a Genocide” about Israeli conduct of war in ways that contravene international humanitarian laws and conventions in Gaza, Palestinian deaths and injuries have risen to inordinate numbers. The UN and its Security Council are toothless in spite of mounting evidence of the starvation faced by Gaza (30) and of “collective punishment” – as noted by the body’s Secretary General. (31) Prior to the five Gaza wars, there was the Oslo Accords, I and II, interim peace engagements that did not bring the Palestinians any closer to statehood. The second Palestinian intifada, more or less, forced an Israeli unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005.

The ‘Real’ and the ‘Fictitious’

Writing, reporting or filming the Gaza war is inflected by positionality, history, politics and ideology. The Baudrillardian lens problematises how we look at how reality is represented and ordered for purposes of exercising and maintaining power or subverting it. It makes sense, therefore, to see then unsee the interplay of reality and fiction in the consumption of news, texts, truths, laws and moralities that structure conventional systems.

The systems we live in make war and are made by war – a pernicious ‘reality’ (and some would say ‘necessity’). The realities of the Israelis and the Palestinians tied by a terrifying conflict are malleable. Baudrillard’s take on the 1991 Gulf war is one way of showing how his postmodernist reading of warfare serves as a nemesis of linear thinking about technological advancement’s transformation of lethality to quasi-fictious levels. However, even if this distortion renders the line between reality and fiction thin, war still kills: The case of the Gaza war illustrates the point. Even if technology deforms war, calling for discursive deconstruction of media and social media accounts of it, the stench of death that pervades people’s lives in Gaza demands additional questioning. Questioning that contests the politics, ideology and even whole knowledge practices implicit in war-making and, more seriously, passive acceptance of disproportionate use of violence, exclusion, hubris and hatred.

In addition to statements by policymakers, expressions inciting hatred of what may be classified as ‘genocidal intent’ have also been broadcast by some voices in Israeli society. Hosts of a recent podcast have grabbed headlines by speaking of pressing a “button to erase all of Gaza.” (32) These opinions have been so offensive as to prompt the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Muslim civil rights group in the US, to ask YouTube and Apple to drop the show. “There must not be a 'no genocide, except for Palestinians' exception” to social media regulations, they declared in a press statement. (33) The ideas voiced in the podcast may not be isolated opinions. In one Pew poll conducted in Israel a few months into the war, 39% of Israelis viewed their country's military response as “about right,” while 34% thought it had “not gone far enough.” Only 19% of respondents in that survey considered Israel to have “gone too far.” (34)

The onslaught in Gaza is, unfortunately, passively accepted by Arab states as it is by the self-proclaimed brokers of human rights values and democracy in our world.

Moreover, the Gaza war has shown the League of Arab States to be on its last leg: a defunct body. Gazans realise today the bitter truth that Arab inertia and silence amount to some kind of wish for Palestine to become extinct. There is today a real chasm between the rulers and the ruled in the Arab region. By neglecting fellow Arabs in their hour of need, Arab regimes, in some instances, will be hastening their own demise. The resulting cultural trauma felt by many Arabs when their states cannot do the minimum to protect starving Gazans will gather momentum in ways reminiscent of the loss of Jerusalem in 1967. The Gaza war has deepened feelings of betrayal by Palestinians and Arabs alike by their rulers and the international system. A new wave of religious observation could ensue, and with it, perhaps, a new wave of Arab Spring-like protests that will imperil autocrats. (35)

When the UN fails to stop war or the US ceases to be a vociferous defender of its professed rules-based international system, there is irreparable damage to reputations and constructs of power. In the Gaza war, existing systems, including the Arab sub-system, have courted failure by finding themselves subversive actors, willingly or otherwise, guilty of distortion of myriad realities founded on constructs of order, human rights, rights to protection, pan-Arabism, Arab solidarity, peace, freedom, global security and good governance. There is wide concurrence amongst transnational publics that the extermination of a blockaded, starved, bombed, and daily displaced population in Gaza is a death knell, marking the impending demise of pan-Arab regionalism and solidarity, the rhetoric of UN-led multilateralism, (36) and the “liberal international order”. (37) This order is written by the powerful and for the powerful, namely the US. It is more about ‘power’ and less about ‘order’: “In their more candid moments, senior US officials recognised that the RBIO [rules-based International Order] was never about the rules themselves. It was about preserving the capacity of the US to shape the rules on its own terms. As Obama stated in 2016, “America should write the rules. America should call the shots. Other countries should play by the rules that America and our partners set, and not the other way around.” (38) As Jerome Roos, a fellow in international political economy at the London School of Economics, puts it, this order does not exist and worse, it is harming international law.

It is perhaps in this vein, that the US Department of Justice, for example, has charged six Hamas leaders including Yahya Sinwar with “terrorism, murder conspiracy, and sanctions-evasion” for planning and executing the 7 October attacks. Specifically, charges span an alleged “decades-long campaign to murder American citizens and endanger the national security of the United States.” (39) By virtue of terrorism charges, this is a war that did take place. Contrast this with cases of Palestinian Americans killed by the IDF in the West Bank--including high-profile journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in 2022, and two 17-year-old boys killed in the course of the ongoing war, the investigations of whose deaths US officials have deferred to Israel itself. (40) This, of course, is in addition to the more than 40,000 Palestinian casualties in Gaza. Beneath the veneer of legality and justice, the US has hounded the international judicial system investigating a case brought by South Africa in December 2023 against Israel’s alleged violation of the genocide convention. (41) Congress hosted Benjamin Natanyahu to address a joint sitting of both parties in July, to the dismay of many US lawmakers such as Bernie Sanders. (42) His protest in June 2024 was loud and clear: “Israel does not have the right to kill more than 34,000 civilians and wound over 80,000 – 5% of the population of Gaza. It does not have the right to orphan 19,000 children. It does not have the right to displace 75% of the people of Gaza from their homes…It does not have the right to annihilate Gaza’s health care system, knocking 26 hospitals out of service and killing more than 400 health care workers…It does not have the right to bomb all 12 of Gaza’s universities and 56 of its schools, or deny 625,000 children in Gaza the opportunity for an education.”

A badly needed dosage of moral flame to brighten the darkness enveloping Gaza…and its incessant killing fields.