Asks this article in the guardian. It's a very long read, but raises some points that I haven't really seen the media raise before. I'm not sure if my copy paste worked, so might be best to click on the link.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2024/oct/05/israel-gaza-october-7-memorials
A slick, high-priced television production. Speeches from top officials. A live audience of thousands. A unified show In Israel’s case, there was a near instant move to graphically re-create the events of 7 October as mediated experiences, sometimes with the goal of countering false claims that deny any atrocities occurred, but often with the explicit goal of reducing sympathy for Palestinians and generating support for Israel’s rapidly expanding wars. Before the one-year mark, there was already an off-Broadway “verbatim play”, called October 7, drawn from witness testimony; several art exhibitions, and at least two 7 October-themed fashion shows, one of which saw models who had survived the attacks or lost loved ones adorn themselves with prosthetic wounds, fake blood and dresses made of shell casings. A model whose fiance was killed in the attack, for instance, “wore a white wedding dress with a ‘bullet hole’ in her heart”, reported the Jewish News. “Israel’s back in fashion,” read a dissonant headline about the show in the Jewish Chronicle.
Then there are the 7 October films, already an emerging subgenre. First came the Israeli military’s Bearing Witness, which compiled the most graphic and horrific moments captured on video that day. Within weeks of the attacks, it was being screened to curated audiences of politicians, business leaders and journalists everywhere from Davos to the Museum of Tolerance in LA. This was followed by a slew of more professional documentaries, including Screams Before Silence, about sexual violence, fronted by the former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg; #Nova, which uses phone and body-camera video to create a “minute-by-minute” account of the “bone-chilling atrocities”; and the BBC’s Surviving October 7: We Will Dance Again, which does much the same. “America’s most-watched faith network”, TBN, aired a four-part special about the attacks that was seven hours in total.
Dramatic treatments take a little more time, but there are several in the works, including October 7, a feature film from the creators of Fauda, as well as the scripted series One Day in October, developed by Fox, slated to air this month.
Most unusual is the decision by the Israeli director Alon Daniel to make a realistic film entirely out of miniatures. His team spent months painstakingly re-creating a dollhouse of horrors: everything from the barbed-wire fence that Hamas breached, to the burned-out cars and bullet-riddled portable toilets at the Nova music festival. A member of the production told Haaretz: “We printed these little stall models in 3D and painted them, and initially it was fun to see it. But it was equally horrifying. There was such a dissonance here between the cute and the horrific.”
Because ours is a world riven by violence and injustice, there is a huge body of literature about the ethics of memorializing real-world atrocity. How do you evoke horror without exploiting it? How do you avoid reinscribing the idea that some kinds of bodies are destined for violence, and thereby make it more likely? How do you avoid asking survivors to relive their worst traumas over and over again? How do you prevent a traumatic response in the viewer, who may have a history of facing violence themselves? Is there an accompanying process for reparation and healing? Relatedly, how do you avoid evoking dangerous emotions, like hate and revenge, which can only lead to more tragedy and more trauma?
Amy Sodaro, a sociologist and author of Exhibiting Atrocity: Memorial Museums and the Politics of Past Violence, told me: “These are questions that people who are engaged in memorial work are constantly engaging with. It’s deeply political work.”
During the weeks I spent researching the sprawling memory culture that emerged post-7 October – the bloody wedding dresses, the tiny burned-out cars and the looping final voicemails – I searched in vain for evidence that these questions have been wrestled with at all. Nor did I find any reckoning with the reality that many facts are still unknown, which is why so many victim families are demanding an independent investigation.
With very few exceptions, the primary goal of these diverse works seems to be the transference of trauma to the audience: re-creating terrifying events with such vividness and intimacy that a viewer or visitor experiences a kind of identity merger, as if they themselves have been violated.
A New Yorker who watched the “verbatim play” October 7 reported: “I felt I was actually living the experience … I felt there and [the play was] able to transfer to me the feeling.” The producers were so pleased by the reaction they shared it on social media. A screening of the Israeli military’s 7 October compilation “left the audience in shambles. People walked out of the room in silence, either crying or simply shellshocked,” the Anti-Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt told the New York Times – and that, too, was a compliment.
All efforts at commemoration aim to touch the hearts of people who were not there. But there is a difference between inspiring an emotional connection and deliberately putting people into a shellshocked, traumatized state. Achieving the latter result is why so much 7 October memorialization boasts that it is “immersive” – offering viewers and participants the chance to crawl inside the pain of others, based on a guiding assumption that the more people there are who experience the trauma of 7 October as if it was their own, the better off the world will be. Or rather, the better off Israel will be.
Nowhere is the trauma transference goal more explicit than in Israel’s booming “dark tourism” sector. For months, synagogues and Jewish federations from around the world have been sponsoring trips that take their supporters on “solidarity missions” to southern Israel. Their tour buses line the edges of the site of the Nova festival, which is now filled with memorials to the hundreds of people who were killed and kidnapped there. And, much to the consternation of some locals, they also step over the rubble to crowd into the still ravaged kibbutzim.
Last February, the reporter Maya Rosen shadowed several of these tours for an extensive Jewish Currents article on the eerie phenomenon. She saw decimated homes preserved like mausoleums, including one of a 23-year-old couple killed in the attack. The tours wander through its rooms where “screenshots of [Sivan] Elkabetz’s last, frantic WhatsApp conversations with her parents had been printed out and tacked to the walls, alongside letters that her mother had written to her after her death.”
This goes beyond a drive to “touch ‘the real’”, a term used by the Queen’s University Belfast scholar Debbie Lisle to describe the crush of tourists who flocked to Ground Zero after the September 11 attacks. Because of the extraordinary volume of intensely personal communications now preserved through voice and text messages (and many in these communities texted and called continuously for many hours, waiting for help that never arrived), combined with access to physical locations where blood and signs of struggle have been left untouched, the participants on these missions almost feel like they have themselves been through the interminable attack.
“An American rabbi who led a trip for her community told me about hearing story after story of people who were killed,” Rosen writes. They learned everything, “‘step by step, where it happened, how it happened, how many hours people were locked in their safe rooms, when people were shot through their window or taken out of their house’. These images gave her nightmares for the next five nights, she said.”
There are other such embodied experiences on offer, including in Tel Aviv’s “Hostages Square”, where tourists a dark, 30-meter-long concrete “immersive mock Hamas tunnel”. To simulate the experience of a hostage, the structure was equipped with the sound of ambient explosions from fighting overhead.
It is hard to believe, given the volume already available, but far more 7 October memorializing is still to come. Despite a worsening economic crisis, last month, the Israeli cabinet approved a proposal from Netanyahu to spend $86m on future memorialization projects related to 7 October and the multi-front military campaigns that have raged since. The money will be spent on the preservation of “heritage infrastructure” (AKA damaged buildings); the creation of a new commemorative site, the establishment of an annual national holiday, and much else.
In the meantime, for those not able to make the trip to Israel, there are VR experiences available – including the VR “Gaza Envelope 360 tour”, a 35-minute video, offered in English and Hebrew, that guides viewers around Israeli communities that came under attack on 7 October. In a portion of the tour posted online, the brother of one of the victims leads the camera around the house where the attack occurred and points to blood still on the floor. This, too, is a 7 October subgenre: one “immersive storytelling platform” invites visitors on a selection of 3D tours of homes. As you navigate from one debris-strewn room to another, audio plays terrified messages sent to relatives from safe rooms.
There are also more tactile traumatic experiences travelling the world. Most prominent (and controversial) among them is the Nova Exhibition. The vast, dimly lit installation is designed to re-create the music festival down to the sand, camping tents and the burned cars – and to transmit the bodily feeling of having that trippy experience suddenly interrupted by horrific violence. The show, which is still touring, and includes real objects collected at the site, attracted more than 100,000 visitors in New York alone, including several politicians.
This, once again, is a departure from the way recent traumatic events – from mass shootings to climate disasters – are generally memorialized by artists. Usually, the work is far more elliptical, mindful of re-traumatizing families, terrifying visitors and disrespecting the dead. For instance, memorialists do not tend to bring spectators en masse into darkened high school hallways strewn with fake blood and the sounds of weapon fire and children’s desperate cries in order to motivate action about gun violence.
One review, for the art site Filthy Dreams, compared the Nova exhibition to a bizarre cross between a campfire singalong and one of those evangelical Hell Houses, designed to scare teens about the dangers of premarital sex. “Do we really need to stand on victims’ yoga mats to feel the horrors of people at a music festival being butchered?” asked the art critic Emily Colucci. “Is straddling an upturned lawn chair while gawking at blurred-out bodies truly the best way to remember the dead? And why is it so goddamn dark in here?! I understood October 7th was bad without doing this.”
There is a difference between understanding an event, which preserves the mind’s analytic capacity as well as one’s sense of self, and feeling like you are personally living through it. The latter produces not understanding but what Sodaro has called a “prosthetic trauma”, which, she writes, is highly conducive to “a simplistic dualism between good and evil that has important political implications”.
Consumers of these experiences are encouraged to feel a distilled bond with the victims, who are the essence of good, and a distilled hatred for their aggressors, who are the essence of evil. The traumatized state is pure feeling, pure reaction. Vision is narrowed, tunneled.
In this state, we do not ask what isn’t included in the frame of the immersive experience. And in the case of the deluge of immersive art being produced to commemorate 7 October, what is not included is Palestine, specifically Gaza. Not the decades of strangled conditions of life on the other side of the wall that led up to the attacks – and not the tens of thousands of Palestinian people, including wrenching numbers of infants and children, whom Israel has killed and maimed since 7 October.
And that is precisely the point.
When Jewish tourists from New York or Montreal attempt to merge with the trauma at the Nova festival site, or at a destroyed kibbutz, they are close enough to Gaza to hear the explosions from the Israeli bombs in Jabaliya and Khan Younis – to see the smoke, and on particularly heavy days, feel the vibrations in their bodies. But as Maya Rosen reported, despite this intensity, it is as if they cannot hear, or cannot register what it is that they are hearing. A staff member working on these trips observed that participants are “deep within their own trauma, and that trauma is crowding out the suffering the war is causing”.
These tourists, like the consumers of so many of these gory, immersive (if highly selective) experiences, say they are there to “bear witness”, the mantra of modern memorialization. But it is unclear exactly what they mean. When experts in mass atrocities speak of the importance of “bearing witness”, they are referring to a specific way of seeing. This kind of witnessing, often of crimes that have been long denied or suppressed by powerful states, is an act of refusal – a refusal of that denial. It is also a way to honour the dead, both by keeping their stories alive, and by enlisting their spirits in a project of justice-seeking to prevent a repeat of similar atrocities in the future.
But not all witnessing is done in this spirit. Sometimes witnessing is itself a form of denial, marshalled by savvy states to form the justification for other, far greater atrocities. Narrow and hyper-directed at one’s own in-group, it becomes a way to avoid looking at the harsh realities of those atrocities, or of actively justifying them. This witnessing is more like hiding, and at its most extreme, it can provide rationalizations for genocide.
It is in this context that some of the most fraught debates this past year in the anti-war camp have been over the politics of mourning, producing a novel and painful lexicon of grief. While many (including me) openly grieved the Israeli civilians killed in the 7 October attacks, many also pointed out that Palestinian lives are systematically treated as “ungrievable” (invoking a phrase from Judith Butler). In contrast, Israeli lives are, in the words of the historian Gabriel Winant, “pre-grieved”, because “an apparatus is already in place to take their deaths and give them not just any meaning, but specifically the meaning that they find in the bombs falling on Gaza.”
And that is precisely the point.
When Jewish tourists from New York or Montreal attempt to merge with the trauma at the Nova festival site, or at a destroyed kibbutz, they are close enough to Gaza to hear the explosions from the Israeli bombs in Jabaliya and Khan Younis – to see the smoke, and on particularly heavy days, feel the vibrations in their bodies. But as Maya Rosen reported, despite this intensity, it is as if they cannot hear, or cannot register what it is that they are hearing. A staff member working on these trips observed that participants are “deep within their own trauma, and that trauma is crowding out the suffering the war is causing”.
These tourists, like the consumers of so many of these gory, immersive (if highly selective) experiences, say they are there to “bear witness”, the mantra of modern memorialization. But it is unclear exactly what they mean. When experts in mass atrocities speak of the importance of “bearing witness”, they are referring to a specific way of seeing. This kind of witnessing, often of crimes that have been long denied or suppressed by powerful states, is an act of refusal – a refusal of that denial. It is also a way to honour the dead, both by keeping their stories alive, and by enlisting their spirits in a project of justice-seeking to prevent a repeat of similar atrocities in the future.
But not all witnessing is done in this spirit. Sometimes witnessing is itself a form of denial, marshalled by savvy states to form the justification for other, far greater atrocities. Narrow and hyper-directed at one’s own in-group, it becomes a way to avoid looking at the harsh realities of those atrocities, or of actively justifying them. This witnessing is more like hiding, and at its most extreme, it can provide rationalizations for genocide.
It is in this context that some of the most fraught debates this past year in the anti-war camp have been over the politics of mourning, producing a novel and painful lexicon of grief. While many (including me) openly grieved the Israeli civilians killed in the 7 October attacks, many also pointed out that Palestinian lives are systematically treated as “ungrievable” (invoking a phrase from Judith Butler). In contrast, Israeli lives are, in the words of the historian Gabriel Winant, “pre-grieved”, because “an apparatus is already in place to take their deaths and give them not just any meaning, but specifically the meaning that they find in the bombs falling on Gaza.”