Incendiary Kites

It was my friend Muhannad who sent me the video. I believe it was the day after the pager attacks in Lebanon, although every day bleeds together at this point, each twenty-four hour window a new low. Muhannad was in Beirut; they told me that they were “front and center for the show.” Every day they write about something they’ve seen. “Today I saw a scorched and mangled corpse glued to the top of a car”; “Today I saw an eyeless man.”

There are so many images from the past year that ricochet across my mind, many of them instant-canon, functioning as “proof” collected for a sort of private Hague trial: an Israeli soldier smiling stupidly in front of a leveled Gaza City, hoisting a Pride flag; doctors assembled behind a lectern, surrounded by bodies shrouded in white; a crater in coastal al-Mawasi, a smoldering absence swarmed by flashlights, a thirty-foot deep divot carved into sand upon which tents for the displaced had once stood.

But the video that Muhannad sent me was different. In it, a boy of indeterminate age floats in a field of bright blue. With his back turned to the camera, he wrestles with a kite that has wrapped itself around an invisible utility wire. He’s flying! I cannot help but think, even though I can see the utility pole to his left and the faint trace of the wire he’s clutching onto. With his left arm he holds himself in the air and with his right he loops the kite once, twice, six times as it hangs there, its tail still stuck until he yanks it and holds it aloft before it breaks free and trails off to the right. Once the kite is out of the frame, he does a 180, turning to his left before ascending an invisible staircase, the video ending just before he steps onto the utility pole, keeping him up there, forever, in the bright blue sky. They “were flying kites near the Egyptian border in Gaza,” Muhannad tells me, and then I remind myself of the ground below; I remind myself of the siege and the blockade and the partition wall just out of view.

It started from a place of panic and rage, my image-collecting. From a desire to clock and categorize the colonizer’s intensifying acts of murder and destruction. And after an entire year of carnage in Gaza, Israel is now running the same playbook with reckless abandon in Lebanon. “There is no difference between Hezbollah and Lebanon,” is how minister of education Yoav Kisch put it in September, in a statement that almost exactly echoed the patently hollow Zionist pretense for leveling Gaza in the name of rooting out Hamas. Why have images not been enough to stop a genocide? It is a question that an expansive yet self-selecting audience has been asking for months as we drown in evidence.

In recent weeks, I have seen pagers exploding in marketplaces and hospitals and city streets, bombs as bright as sunrises, smoke over Khiam, smoke over Tyre, smoke over Nabatieh, a volley of missiles arcing over the Iron Dome, throngs of cars heading north out of Sidon, bombs over Dahieh, bombs over Beirut, and the remains of a journalist inside a shoe box. All these images pursued me just as much as I pursued them, flooding my feeds on Instagram, on X, on Telegram, and beyond. It has become a daily act, my screenshotting; a simple, habitual gesture.

Every day I assemble my counter-archive, my trove of photographs and grainy videos, foolishly trying to organize everything even as I surrender to disorder. In September, I saw a video of Joe Biden tottering toward a C-SPAN camera in a near-empty parking lot. “Any comment on the strikes in Yemen, Mr. President?” a reporter asks. “I’ve spoken to both sides,” Biden announces, mid-stride. “They gotta settle the strike. I’m supporting the collective bargaining effort. I think they’ll settle the strike.”

I amassed much of the most ludicrous, brain-breaking imagery during the Student Intifada last spring, when college administrators were forced to address the two subjects they so desperately wanted to avoid: divestment from the Zionist project and Palestinian liberation. There was Minouche Shafik, still president of Columbia University, standing in front of a manicured hedge, claiming that “parallel realities and parallel conversations have walled us off from other perspectives.” There was NYPD deputy operations commissioner Kaz Daughtry looking bug-eyed on cable news as he clutched a photo of the book Terrorism: A Short Introduction and announced that “there is somebody behind this,” an unseen “mastermind behind the scenes.” There was Annelise Orleck, a Dartmouth history professor, getting thrown to the ground by cops in riot gear. There was New York mayor Eric Adams intoning “Death to America” as he read aloud from a Xeroxed zine allegedly retrieved from a student encampment.

Every so often, however, an image is produced inside the empire that cuts cleanly through the absurdity, idiocy, obfuscation, and propaganda. I remember the day that Aaron Bushnell self-immolated—or rather, the day after, a Monday in February, when the freeze frame from his livestream spread across my feed, snapping into focus as one, then two, then three people posted it in a row. “This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal,” were his next to last words before he began shouting, “Free Palestine.” I remember thinking, as I studied him standing there, with his arms outspread slightly, with his leg and back and left shoulder already consumed by lapping, curling, orange flames, that self-immolation surely made more sense than outright denial.

All this looking has changed us, has changed me—that I can say for sure—even as the Western press salivates for more of the same, for season two in Lebanon. Everywhere I turn, everything reminds me of Gaza, everything fuels my desperation: when a friend pulls up Google Maps in satellite view, I see a devastated Khan Younis or Rafah or Gaza City; when I look at footage of any beach, I think of the Mediterranean Sea, I think of Palestinian fishermen facing fire from occupation forces, I think of black tentacular aid packages falling into white-capped waves, I think of sons swimming toward those aid packages in order to forage food to feed their families. When I examine images of the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore, I see the neglect for American infrastructure, the death of migrant laborers whose lives were deemed expendable, and the echo of Gaza in the likeness of the offending container ship, which itself suggests the transfer of weapons from various ports and all the photographs of ships that the Yemeni Houthis have intercepted in the Red Sea in the past year. 

When I first pitched this essay, I wanted to write about images that were more oblique than obvious (a Brat flag on fire outside the Democratic National Convention; a raver dressed up as Abu Obaida, replete with red keffiyeh and green headband). When I started writing it, I became obsessed with images that manufactured or even minted consent (bombs over Gaza begetting bombs over Beirut; Israeli soldiers raiding and shuttering the West Bank bureau of Al Jazeera). When I started editing it, I began chasing images that might capture the collapse of the colonizer (incendiary balloons floating out of Gaza and over the border wall on westerly winds; a doctored photo of a couple celebrating their wedding anniversary by posing in front of Iranian missiles descending upon Tel Aviv).

But the ground never stopped shifting. The images kept coming at lightning speed; time doubled back on itself, everything got worse and worse, and durational, daily remembrance felt like the only way I could try to stay sane. Last month, I saw some of the most terrible images yet: a nineteen-year-old burned alive in his bed outside of al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, his arm still tethered to an IV. It is as if the legacy of the Holocaust has been turned into a despicable prompt, a permanent pretext to imagine and enact holocaust upon holocaust.

There’s a version of this essay where I fixate on the drones, on the idea of surveillance and aerial overheads, on the billions spent on F-16s and bunker busters and self-propelled howitzers, on the failure of the image, on what “all eyes on Gaza” does or doesn’t mean. The truth is that “seeing” has not been universal; it has often been constrained, limited. While placing “all eyes on Gaza” has not stopped a genocide, this axiom feels like an incomplete thought, a hollow slogan that implies that sight alone can be sufficient. The abundance of proof—that international humanitarian laws have not just been violated but shattered—is not only visible in Gaza but in everyday American life, whether in the form of rising Lockheed shares or the cheerleading media apparatus. 

The shameless propagandists of the West would have you believe that history started that morning last October, when the bulldozer tore through the $1.1 billion barbed wire border wall, when resistance fighters took control of the Beit Hanoun crossing and flooded into occupied territory, reaching, many for the first time in their lives, the land of their ancestors. And while history did not start with al-Aqsa Flood, an undeniable rupture did occur that morning, one brought about by the chokehold of an illegal blockade and by seventy-six years of violent occupation.

In an April essay, the editors of n+1 wrote about the Zionist obsession with the victory image, or “snapshot of military triumph,” which became a point of fixation in the aftermath of the war of 1967, when occupation forces took control of the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights, as well as the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The editors wrote about how these photographs—which were published as albums—led to outsize expectations. As time has passed, this compulsion has almost become more important than victory itself, in large part because it presents the illusion that the Zionist project is one worth investing in. Soldiers may be banned from cell phone usage on the battlefield, but that hasn’t “discouraged their attempts to capture — or fabricate — victory images themselves.”

In October, I saw an image on X of Israeli soldiers raising a flag in what they claimed was Maroun al-Ras in southern Lebanon. Except it was all a photo op: a simple Google Maps search revealed that the scene was staged in a public park overlooking the border from occupied Palestine. The upkeep of the triumphant Zionist facade requires both destruction and construction. The destruction is all-too-familiar, involving, among other things, the systematic murder of Palestinian journalists, the leveling of cities, and campaign spending targeted at critics of Israel. The construction is a bit harder to place. Its goal is rooted in unreality, a colonizer’s fantasia, in photo-ops that can easily be debunked or decoded.

I recently came across video of a soldier attempting to add to his “victory album” from atop a Merkava tank—he had his iPhone aloft as he tried to find the perfect angle for his selfie. But the video I watched was shot and published by al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, and so the camera zeroed in on the tank and the soldier, an inverted red arrow flashed rapidly above his head, and then the warhead left the barrel of the RPG and the soldier’s selfie ended in his instant death.

No image of genocidal murder can constitute any sort of Zionist victory nor affirm the occupation’s guaranteed longevity. Even the recent killings of Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah and Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar were nothing more than pyrrhic PR stunts meant to temporarily assuage the paranoid Zionist mind. Martyrdom has only further reified their respective images and ideas and movements.

Sinwar’s death was happenstance, an accident; it presented, briefly, the illusion that the occupation forces have spent the last year in pursuit of any clear military objectives. Sinwar died in Rafah—above ground quite notably—while facing down a settler’s drone. In the United States, discussion of legitimate armed resistance is effectively forbidden, which then leads to an omission of material details: despite the bombs raining down on southern Lebanon, Israel has failed to gain ground on Hezbollah at the border; despite any claims to the contrary, the resistance has not been defeated, not even close, and the same goes for Hamas in Gaza. This elision is intentional, part of an extensive and destructive censorship campaign.

Unlike most resistance footage, which you usually have to seek out yourself on Telegram or on certain parts of X, the video of Sinwar’s final moments found people without their trying. And while it was shot by a Zionist drone, the footage functions as an inverted victory image, one that blows up in the photographer’s face. Sinwar’s immortal stare and his defiant gesture—hurtling a stick sidelong at an offending gnat—sealed his fate as shaheed, martyr, witness. In his gaze we see something valiant and unflinching; it is not some passive gesture, as so many have now seen for themselves. Four days after his passing, I saw a photograph of several children playing amid a sandy tent city. They had their heads wrapped in keffiyehs and they were carrying sticks, and it was then that I realized that image-making had created a model for adamant resistance, for fighting until your dying breath.

“They are not a weapon, they are a message,” is how Sinwar put it during the Great March of Return in 2018, when Palestinian protesters began launching incendiary kites toward occupied territory after their non-violent demonstrations were met with fire from Zionist snipers. “They are just twine and paper and an oil-soaked rag, while each battery of the Iron Dome costs $100 million. Those kites say: you are immensely more powerful. But you will never win.” No single image was ever going to free Palestine unto itself; only action can achieve such seismic reclamation. But it is right there in front of us, wherever we look: we can tell who is from the land and who is catastrophically anxious about their claim upon it.

Tomorrow morning, when the sun inevitably rises over this blighted country, I will look again at the images. I will look at the flames falling from above, and I will think of everything terrible that has happened offscreen, and I will think also, as I often do, of the boy in the sky with his kite. I will think of him moving without fear, I will think of his simple gesture, and I will think of him looking down at the earth beneath him.