Gaza Nina Berman

Violating Intimacies: Israeli Soldiers Flaunt Photos with Lingerie of Palestinian Women They’ve Killed or Displaced

Israeli soldiers have photographed themselves posing with the lingerie of Palestinian women they have displaced or killed in Gaza. They join a long line of conquest images, from Abu Ghraib images to the spectacle of Jim Crow-era lynchings.
ISRAELI SOLDIERS PHOTOGRAPHED WITH LINGERIE OF PALESTINIAN WOMEN IN GAZA. (PHOTO: SOCIAL MEDIA)

By Nina Berman / Mondoweiss

It was the tongue that stopped me cold. The tongue and the savage, shit-eating grin on the soldier’s face as he and his buddy mug for the camera. Look at us! Look what we found. It’s a bra, a woman’s bra, a Palestinian woman’s bra left in a home she was forced to flee. And now it’s ours, and we’re going to play with it because we can, and we’re going to take it on the street and pose with it and show the world who we are, frat boys pumped for genocide. 

There is something unspeakably vile and infantile about the images of Israeli troops circulating on social media showing them posing for pictures with intimate apparel pilfered from the bedrooms of Gazan women. Amid the daily onslaught of murder, deprivation, and forced starvation, not to mention images of mutilated Palestinian children, here are Israeli soldiers beside themselves with self-congratulatory glee, gallivanting around snatching bras and ogling panties.

How could they? But of course, they could. Of course, they would. While most militaries strive to present at least a public veneer of discipline and self-control, the IDF is charting a new course in the socially grotesque, delighted to revel in the foulest behavior aimed at total disregard for Palestinian life.

ISRAELI SOLDIERS PHOTOGRAPHED WITH LINGERIE OF PALESTINIAN WOMEN IN GAZA. (PHOTO: SOCIAL MEDIA)

But these images, showing soldiers playing amidst their dirty work, shook me more than others. The video of women IDF soldiers dancing awkwardly with Gaza crumbling in the background was more pathetic than painful. The soldiers blowing up a building for their IG livestreams was brazen cynicism. The soldier who made a how-to video showing how he defecates in a plastic bag because there is no water in Gaza toilets, and then throwing that bag casually amid the rubble, was just plain disgusting.  

These pictures enter a different realm where one’s most intimate relations and private thoughts, feelings, and desires have been penetrated, looted, picked apart, and turned into jokes. 

These images are performances of masculinity based on humiliation, which day in and day out, is the fuel powering the occupation.

ISRAELI SOLDIER POSES WITH LINGERIE OF PALESTINIAN WOMAN IN GAZA. (PHOTO: SCREENSHOT)

What do we do with pictures like these that burrow in the brain? 

They join a long line of conquest images, some more brutal and explicitly violent than others.

I’m thinking of the spectacle lynching images from the Jim Crow American South, where crowds assembled to publicly celebrate and photograph the torture and murder of black men.

I’m thinking of the Abu Ghraib images where American soldiers posed laughing with Iraqi prisoners who they tied up and stripped naked and then forced into the camera’s frame as an additional humiliation.

While these images of IDF soldiers do not explicitly show murder and torture, they implicitly speak to the missing women and their missing men who loved and touched and cared for each other and shared private moments and pleasures. For that space to be violated makes the pictures unbearable.

How do we take the power of these images away from the image makers?

We do that by looking past the uniformed buffoons who are the direct subjects of the pictures and instead dwell on the women not seen but who once lived in these homes and wore the garments, who were mothers and sisters and daughters and lovers with dreams and ideas and concerns.  

We do that by insisting on both imagining and preserving in our minds their full beings and refusing the narrative that attempts to sully and flatten them, which is how misogyny operates.  

There is another picture circulating. It shows an IDF soldier with a box of new white jeweled dress high heels, which he’s looted from a Palestinian woman. He’s going to bring them home and give them as a present to his woman instead. A souvenir from a genocide.

My mind focuses on the texture of the shoes, the intricate design, and the dimensions of the box. I travel to a place where I can see the woman who bought those shoes. Maybe she was planning to wear them for the wedding of a son or a daughter, or maybe she was going to celebrate her own anniversary or wanted something special for an upcoming family gathering. I eliminate the soldier from the frame and instead hold her close in my thoughts away from his prying hands.

By Zehra Imam / Mondoweiss

As Palestinians are slaughtered by the thousands in Gaza and violently attacked during night prayers in the al-Aqsa Mosque by Israel, the West Bank endures massacres that at times go unnoticed during this holy month. I have spent my Ramadan in conversation with a friend from Jenin. 

Much has changed since I visited Aseel (not her real name) in August 2023. There are things I saw in Jenin that no longer exist. One of them is my friend’s smile and her spark.

Usually, they say Jenin is a small Gaza. During Ramadan, because the attacks generally happen at night, people are an easy target because they are on the streets late at night. In the past, it was rare for the IOF to enter during the day. Now, they attack during the day; their special forces enter, and after people discover them, their soldiers come within minutes. 

Every 2-3 days, there is a new attack in Jenin. In our minds, there is a constant ringing that the IOF may come. We don’t know at what time we will be targeted or when they will enter. There is no stability in our lives.

Even when we plan for something, we hedge it with our inshallahs and laugh. There are a lot of ifs. If they don’t enter the camp. If there are no martyrs. If there is no strike.

On the second day of Ramadan, they attacked my neighborhood again. We thought it was a bombing because it started with an explosion, but the house was shaking. We were praying fajr, and everyone was screaming outside. The sound of the drone was in our ears. “No, these are missiles,” we realized.

There was panic in the streets. Women fainted. People had been walking back from praying at the mosque, and some were still in the street. Alhamdulillah, no one was hurt, we say.

The balcony to the room at my uncle’s house where we slept had fallen. It no longer had any glass, and a bullet entered my uncle’s bedroom and reached the kitchen. The drone hit the trees in front of our house. The missiles destroyed the ceiling, and the rockets reached my neighbor’s house on the first floor, exactly in front of our house.

Since October 7, Jenin has become a target. There is a clear escalation in the camp and the city. The IOF has used many different weapons to kill us here. They have even been aggressive toward the infrastructure, as though every inch of our city was resisting them.

They destroyed much of the camp, and there is no entrance now. The arch is gone, and there is no sign reminding us that Jenin refugee camp is a temporary place. There is no horse. Only the street is left. You have the photographs. You were lucky. They changed the shape of the camp, and everything has been destroyed.”Aseel

The first time Aseel and I met in person was in Nablus at the Martyrs Roundabout. As we caught up, we ate a delicious concoction of ice cream, milk, nuts, and fresh fruit that was a perfect balm to the heat. She took me to some of her favorite places nestled within the old city of Nablus. A 150-year-old barber’s shop that felt like you had entered an antique store where plants reached the ceiling and where the barber was a massive fan of Angelina Jolie. A centuries-old house now called Tree House Cafe looked like a hobbit home from Lord of the Rings, where we hid away as she sipped her coffee and I drank a mint lemonade. We visited one of the oldest soap factories in the world with ingredients such as goat’s milk and olive oil, jasmine and pomegranates, even dates and Dead Sea mud.

We happened to chance upon a Sufi zawiya as we walked through a beautiful archway decorated with lanterns, light bulbs, and an assortment of potted plants, after which we saw a cobalt blue door on our left and an azul blue door with symmetrical red designs, and Quranic ayat like incantations on our right as doors upon doors greeted us.

DOOR OF A SUFI ZAWIYA IN NABLUS. (PHOTO COURTESY OF AUTHOR)

The air was welcoming yet mingled with the memory of martyrs whose memorials took over the landscape, sometimes in the form of larger-than-life portraits surrounded by complex four-leafed magenta-white flowers; posters above a water spout next to a heart-shaped leaf; a melted motorcycle that, too, was targeted in the neighborhood that hosted the Lions’ Den. We stopped to pray at a masjid, quiet and carpeted.

After a bus ride from Nablus to Jenin, on our walk before entering Jenin camp, Aseel showed me the hospital right outside the camp. She pointed out the barricades created to keep the occupation forces from entering specific streets. This is the same hospital that the occupation forces blocked during the July 2023 attack, which now seems like a lifetime ago. 

What caught my eyes again and again were the two Keys of Return on top of the entrance of Jenin Camp that symbolized so much for Palestinians.

“This is a temporary station,” Aseel read out loud to me. “That’s what it says. We are supposed to return to our homes.”

“Netanyahu said he is planning another big attack, so the resistance fighters are preparing because it can happen any day,” she had told me that evening as we shared Jenin-style knafeh, baked to perfection. Then she stopped, looked at the sky, and said humorously, “Ya Allah, hopefully not today!” And we both laughed because of its potential reality. 

Dinner on the terrace at her uncle’s home was a delicious spread of hummus, laban, fries, cucumbers pickled by her aunt, and arayes — fried bread stuffed with meat. Then we moved the furniture to sleep on mattresses in a room that extended to the rooftop terrace with a breeze, overlooking Jenin Camp and the rest of Jenin City. We could hear gunshots in the distance. The drones were commonplace, and the heat did not relent. Temperatures soared, and the electricity was out when we woke up at 5 a.m. I heard her pray, and later, as we sipped on coffee and had wafters in the early morning at her home, my eyes went to a piece of tatreez, or embroidery, of a bird in flight framed on the wall. Her eyes followed mine and when I said I loved it.

“It used to be my grandfather’s,” she told me. “Of course it’s beautiful — the bird is free.” 

Unexpectedly, Aseel’s mother gifted me a Sprite bottle full of olive oil beholding the sweet hues of its intact health, which I would later ship secretly from Bethlehem all the way to Boston. And then Aseel came to me with a gift, too: a necklace that spoke succinctly about the right to return and live on this earth. Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry was held together with intricate calligraphy carved in the shape of Palestine’s landscape, and I was completely overwhelmed. 

“You are in Palestine, my dear,” she had smiled. “And you are now my family. This is your country, this is your second home, really.”

When I ask her about what brings her hope these days, Aseel tells me about her eight-year-old nephew.

He wanted to eat two meals. I told him that in Gaza they don’t have food. He was complaining about the food, and I told him, they don’t have water. And he heard me because he said, “today, we will only have one meal.” 

I’m amazed at how mature he is. He even said, “We won’t make a special cake on Eid because of the Gazans.” For me, this is a lesson to be learned. He is only eight years old, but he knows. 

We have lost a lot of people in Gaza, but here in the West Bank, we are succeeding because our new generation knows a lot. Ben Gurion would not be happy. He said of Palestinians, “the old will die and the young will forget.” No, the young ask even more questions. The new generation brings us hope. Hope is the new generation.

/sp


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Nina Berman

Nina Berman is a photographer, filmmaker and Professor of Journalism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. She has written on ethics in photography and is a contributing author to The Cunning Of Gender Violence, Duke University Press (2023) where she writes about war and sexual violence.

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