Technology sanitizes cowardly war between Israel and Hamas – 03/23/2024 – Marcelo Leite

I watched the video on social media X in which several men were killed by shots from a drone. One of them already lying on the ground. It’s stomach-churning.

Everything indicates that this is an Israeli attack on Palestinian civilians, but it is worth taking the images with a truck of salt. Gone are the days when seeing was believing. It turns out that this is another fictional film generated by artificial intelligence.

The scenes are reminiscent of similar, but much cruder, sequences from the TV series “Fauda”. The fiction about an elite Israeli unit that infiltrates Palestinians aroused interest due to its reduced level of Manichaeism, but today, under the long darkness projected from Gaza, it seems impossible to revisit it.

There is no way to defend the massacre perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, nor to avoid classifying it as terrorist. Nor can we accept as fair the genocidal impetus of the collective punishment applied by the Netanyahu government to Gaza, which is disproportionate and inhumane in every way.

Such inhumanity does not stand out qualitatively, perhaps only quantitatively, from that of other wars, such as the one triggered by Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. Both sides resort to drone distancing technology, still used by the imperial American government for assassinations in any corner of the planet.

Video X, on the other hand, projects itself against moral conscience with its excessive pictorial quality, highlighting the cowardice of this form of warfare. There is more technology and murderous precision in it than in the no less cowardly rockets fired from Gaza or Lebanon at Israeli civilians.

The operator, miles away from the men walking along the sandy road, moves the joystick back and forth, zooms in and out. He pursues in color and high resolution those who escaped the first shots. The cold, mechanical meticulousness of a well-trained player in front of the screen.

The person who drew attention to the piece of warrior pornography on the network was sociologist Serge Katz. I don’t always agree with him, but that was the case when he wrote:

“The drone assassination program is one of the greatest barbarities ever invented by the military industry. It changes the perspective and meaning of war. The military itself behind the control of the drone is no longer even aware of what life and death mean. It is gaming.”

The definition of the image is not enough to see blood, but it is there. Pieces of people too. Whatever was visible of the carnage disappeared under the blurred blur of the TV channel, jealous of the sensitivity of spectators or obeying censorship rules regarding the graphic horror of war.

It could be a sampling bias imposed by my bubble delimiting algorithm, but at the beginning of the war in Ukraine there were more of these, gory images. The television news repeated exhaustively two dozen corpses dotting the streets of Bucha after the April 2022 massacre, for example.

It is estimated, or underestimated, that 32,000 people have already died in Gaza, up to 70% of them children and women. Where are their corpses? If they cannot be seen, will at most a few rows of white shrouds in a row disappear from consciousness?

It may be that photo reporters and cameramen are facing unusual restrictions in Gaza. Or it could be that TV and photo agency editors are committed to sanitizing the image of the incessant massacre perpetrated there.

We are all in the position of the drone pilot who chooses, anonymously and from the safety of an armchair, who is fair to kill. The screens make it clear that someone, somewhere, decided that Palestinians are more killable than Israelis.

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