On War (in Gaza and beyond)
Image, exhibition, and how art conflates with conflict
Hamas has “won” the war against Israel.
This is because their Trojan horse like action of October 7th created an unforgettable image, like scenes from Virgil’s Aeneid. I have visited this particular story, both directly and indirectly, in various stages of my academic journey. To mark the comparison, note, the sack of Troy is recounted as a series of calculated atrocities that unfold after the Greeks emerge from the wooden horse under cover of night. King Priam is slaughtered at the altar of Zeus by Neoptolemus, despite his age and pleas for mercy. Hector’s infant son, Astyanax, is thrown from the city walls to erase any future threat from Troy’s royal line. Cassandra, daughter of Priam and a priestess of Apollo, is raped by Ajax the Lesser within the sacred space of Athena’s temple. Andromache, Hector’s widow, is taken as a concubine by Neoptolemus, and Queen Hecuba is enslaved. Polyxena is dragged to Achilles’ tomb and sacrificed in a final act of ritual brutality. Temples are desecrated, fires consume the city, and civilians are massacred or taken as spoils. These acts, described with harrowing vividness in Aeneas’s retelling, marking the destruction of Troy not only as a military conquest but as a total erasure of lineage, of sanctity, and of memory. While Hamas did not achieve the total victory or claim the high profile victims the Trojans did, it did establish a day of similar atrocities as an “image” to be recalled to similar effect. Israel’s only retaliatory action that has the potential in myth to rival it is the pager attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon in the months after the retaliation began. The “just” war being waged now in Gaza cannot compete in terms of image and is reflected as such, back to the world as “artless”. In this way, no matter the outcome, even the total erasure of Hamas, Israel has lost.
To be clear, I do not want any of this to be “real” in any sense. I support Israel’s right and duty to respond. How could it not? But the show of it is embedded in more than just military dominance and victory, the battle is for the image, spectacle, and infamy, as much as safety and prosperity for those who want to live. Or better, live in peace.
I see social media posts every day from friends and colleagues claiming moral superiority for a range of political stances and issues, often claiming a position without evidence or depth. These are often academic elites and leaders posting angry rants, infographics, or image, to attack a politician or policy. I’ve also done the same, though less so lately, and this contradiction bothers me. It shows more about the power of an image, or image formation, whether a viral graphic or the outrage it sparks, to shape thought. My thinking on this began, in part, in auditing Jessica Lieberman’s Traumatic Images class at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where she explored how images, monuments, social media, war photographs (both fact and fiction), and videos, among other media, drive emotional and political responses and form culture. A former neighbor pushed me further, challenging my previous Latent Views piece that tied rising suicide rates to a crisis in faith and meaning, not a decline in social justice over the same time period, which he favored. That disagreement led me to consider war, its selective attention, and why some conflicts dominate our screens while others, just as brutal, stay invisible. Dring this same recent time, I was watching at night, more as background in the short thirty minutes or so before sleep, the Ken Burns documentary on the life of Leonardo DaVinci where in last night’s episode was explored the The Battle of Anghiari, commissioned circa 1440, as a fresco for the Palazzo della Signoria (Pallazzo Vecchio) in Florence, Italy. The work was never finished and was destroyed some years later, though documentation of the cartoons of the work, along with accounts of their mastery, and subsequent copies by master’s remain - a notable one by Peter Paul Rubens I include here (below). The gore and violence and “image” of the scene, and our intrigue of it from descriptions, remains to this day. We are drawn to see violence, process it, and glorify it. Of course, what is depicted and what we remember, individually, matters, in the survivability of the image. We Catholics have the Crucifix for example. This very reality of forming an image has become a tactic of war in the modern era, formed and cemented from previous eras, especially of those whose actions are against an exponentially more powerful enemy or state. Through art and the concept of “exhibition” and “image”, I explore how both of these, both seen and felt, fuel war’s theater, and how I see war now. Who wins in the long arc of time, from 9/11 to Gaza’s current horrors and the ancillary attacks like Lebanon’s pager attacks, are embedded in the collective conscious as our contemporary, technological, mural.
9/11: Performance Art and Academic Study
On September 11, 2001, the Twin Towers fell in a spectacle that some scholars equated to “performance art”. There are a number of articles framing this as a phenomenon, especially in the realm of theater and performance. Chosen from a few I had reviewed I will include Elise Christine Silva’s, "Terror as Theater: Unraveling Spectacle in Post‑9/11 Literatures." Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, (vol. 11, no. 5, Nov. 2015, pp. 1–22), to illustrate this point (and because it is available and not behind a paywall). Here, starting with comparisons to the scrrenplay structure for “The Avengers”, events, such as 9/11, is described as a “public performance of terror,” planned to use media and plant an image of Western weakness in global minds.
Universities teach this idea. New York University’s “Performance and the City: 9/11 and After” studies how “9/11 as a performative event shaped public art, memorials, and protest performances” (NYU Tisch). The University of California, Berkeley’s “Performance Studies 126” has a module, “9/11 as Spectacle,” asking, “How do we understand 9/11 as a performance of power, and what does this reveal about media and memory?” (UC Berkeley). Brown University’s “Theater and War” looks at how “performative acts of violence, like 9/11, shape cultural narratives through media and art” (Brown University). These courses, like Lieberman’s at RIT, examine how 9/11’s images, seen and remembered, drive discussion, discourse, and generate culture, as much as I question social media’s shallow claims.
October 7: Gaza as Troy
On October 7, 2023, Hamas attacked Israel, turning Gaza into a modern Troy, its invasion a staged spectacle like the one we remember from the cunning of Odysseus’s Trojan Horse. Visible images, gunmen in communities, hostages taken, bodies shown, spread fast on social media, a grim performance recalling the spectacle of the fall of Troy. The war machine used this theater, with Telegram and X sharing raw videos. Mohamad Hamas Elmasry’s study of Western media’s Instagram posts found Israeli pain highlighted, Palestinian losses downplayed, much like Greek heroes overshadowing Trojan sorrow.
The remembered image of October 7, a savage attack, gave Hamas a brief media win, similar to 9/11’s symbolic power. But the focus changed. Israel’s bombing of Gaza, killing over 32,000 Palestinians by April 2024, lost the clear drama of the first strike (CSIS). Images shifted to rubble and refugees, planting a story of pain. October 7’s spectacle dimmed amid Gaza’s ruin, yet the war machine moved on, fed by rival images of loss and blame, though, in the theater, the day “October 7th” will live on in infamy. No day orchestrated by Israel since could claim the same effect.
Hezbollah’s Pagers in Lebanon
In September 2024, pagers exploded in Lebanon, targeting Hezbollah leaders, a bold move blamed on Israel. This turned ordinary tools into weapons, its visible image grabbing attention. Unlike Gaza’s long destruction, the pager attack was sharp, its remembered image one of clever control. The war machine seized this theater, painting Israel as a brilliant actor in the arena of war.
But the remembered image divides: a win for Israel. The pager attack’s newness, a media hit, upholds its power of theater. Like da Vinci’s fighting horses, the explosions make war a visual story, planting victory in minds while death waits offstage.
Theater
The war machine runs on theater, a fact clear in art and history. In my generation, X, there is one image embedded from the numerous retellings of the Vietnam War of Willem Defoe, playing Sargeant Elias, in his final moments on the battlefield in Vietnam, from Oliver Stone’s “Platoon”. It’s the horrific image of the individual, literally being done in by enemy fire, while struggling for escape, reaching for the sky in hope of redemption. I was terrified of this scene as a youth, not the least of which because my friend’s father, a Vietnam war veteran, where we first saw the film, had to leave the room in tears before we started it.
The art world often chases activism, leaning on weak claims or borrowed images. I haven’t seen in many years now, an image from the artworld that summarizes a movement or experience that supersedes the actual war theater, now supplying, by design, its own.
Now, the struggle itself, from Gaza to Ukraine, forms the lasting image, and art must catch it or falter, replaying old protests. I wrestle with aesthetics now, not conclusions, holding these thoughts, as I work through the Latent Views.
I would like to know your thoughts, on any of the ideas presented here. DM or in the comments.
Works Cited
Brooking, Emerson T., et al. “Distortion by Design: How Social Media Platforms Shaped Our Initial Understanding of the Israel-Hamas Conflict.” Atlantic Council, 21 Dec. 2023, www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/report/distortion-by-design/. Accessed 2 July 2025.
Brown University. “Theater and War.” Brown University Course Catalog, 2024, www.brown.edu/academics/theatre-arts-performance-studies/courses. Accessed 2 July 2025.
CSIS. “Gaza Through Whose Lens?” CSIS Journalism Bootcamp: Student Perspectives, 24 Apr. 2024, features.csis.org/Journalism-Bootcamp-2024/Israel-Hamas-War/. Accessed 2 July 2025.
Elmasry, Mohamad Hamas. “Images of the Israel-Gaza War on Instagram: A Content Analysis of Western Broadcast News Posts.” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, vol. 101, no. 3, 2024, pp. 369–391, doi:10.1177/10776990241234567. Accessed 2 July 2025.
Epic of Gilgamesh. Translated by Andrew George, Penguin Classics, 2003.
Foer, Franklin. “The Atlantic’s Coverage of 9/11: A Retrospective.” The Atlantic, 11 Sept. 2021, www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/09/atlantic-911-coverage/620029/. Accessed 2 July 2025.
Leonardo da Vinci. Directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon, PBS, 2024, www.pbs.org/kenburns/leonardo-da-vinci. Accessed 2 July 2025.
NYU Tisch. “Performance and the City: 9/11 and After.” Tisch School of the Arts Course Catalog, 2024, tisch.nyu.edu/drama/courses. Accessed 2 July 2025.
O’Loughlin, Ben. “Images as Weapons of War: Representation, Mediation and Interpretation.” Review of International Studies, vol. 37, no. 1, 2011, pp. 71–91, doi:10.1017/S0260210510000811. Accessed 2 July 2025.
Platoon. Directed by Oliver Stone, Orion Pictures, 1986.
Prier, Jarred. “Commanding the Trend: Social Media as Information Warfare.” Strategic Studies Quarterly, vol. 11, no. 4, 2017, pp. 50–85, www.jstor.org/stable/26271634. Accessed 2 July 2025.
Rubens, Peter Paul. Copy of Leonardo’s Battle of the Standard (from the Battle of Anghiari). 1603, Louvre Museum, Paris, www.louvre.fr/en/explore/the-collections/artworks/battle-of-the-standard. Accessed 2 July 2025.
Silva, Elise Christine. “Terror as Theater: Unraveling Spectacle in Post-9/11 Literatures.” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, vol. 11, no. 5, Nov. 2015, pp. 1–22, liminalities.net/11-5/terror.pdf. Accessed 2 July 2025.
Stiles, Kristine. “Uncorrupted Joy: International Art Actions.” Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949–1979, edited by Paul Schimmel, Thames & Hudson, 1998, pp. 226–229.
UC Berkeley. “Performance Studies 126: Performance Theory.” UC Berkeley Course Catalog, 2024, guide.berkeley.edu/courses/theater/. Accessed 2 July 2025.
Virgil. The Aeneid. Translated by Robert Fagles, Penguin Classics, 2006.
Topics
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