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.
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.