Ethics of Online Video/Photo Sharing
Case Study: The Israeli Assault on Gaza
Rasha El-Ibiary, Assistant Professor
(Adjunct Faculty)
rousha@aucegpt.edu
The American University in Cairo
(Do Not Quote Without the Consent of Author)
Abstract
In the wake of the Israeli assault on Gaza, pictures and videos of death, pain,
agony and destruction flooded the Internet in a possibly unprecedented
fashion. Not just the quantity of those moving and still images, but even
more significant was their appalling nature, featuring dead bodies of
children, women, and elderly, piles of dead bodies abandoned in the street,
burned bodies, dismantled bodies and cut out human parts. This daily
bloody visual dosage that piled the internet during 25 consecutive days,
and widely circulated through social networking sites, especially Facebook,
empowered with sharing options, played a most significant role in turning
the international public opinion, by-and-large in favor of the Palestinian
cause and against the Israeli massacre and decisive cleansing committed
against innocent civilians under-siege from air, land and sea.
This research aims to closely inspect, analyze and theorize how ethics are
being reconfigured through the digital, rearticulated through online
politics, creating news social and mobile propaganda and digital ethics,
breaking the boundaries between the global and the local, the personal,
the shared and the collective, ushering new value system and setting new
collective agenda for a new ‘global’ online audience.
I-Image Ethics, Sharing and Popular
Geopolitics
1- Briefing:
This research discusses the ethical dimension of the
circulation of pictures of death, pain, agony and
destruction, especially in the age of the internet
and the proliferation of social networking websites
like Facebook and the like, and the global
repercussions of this.
Conducting visual content analysis on 50
photographs and 10 videos, as well as an online
survey amongst 100 users and members of
Facebook groups who normally share affective
pictures for a variety of reasons, was the tool to test
the ethical dimension of video/photo sharing.
I-Image Ethics, Sharing and Popular
Geopolitics
2- Web 2.0 and Popular Geopolitics
The internet as a tool of globalization is at the same
time a double ended sword. As much as it is
perceived that Web 2.0 and social networking
websites provide users with unlimited freedom of
communication, thereby empowering citizens vis a
vis their governments, the limits of such freedom
are still questionable, opening up the way for
governments to exercise unlimited control and
surveillance.
As a highly appealing form of entertainment,
especially amongst its users and addicts, Web 2.0, I
argue, it plays a central role as a form of popular
geopolitics, whereby citizens of the entire globe
use it “to make sense of their events and in their
own locale, country, region and the wider world”
(Claus Dodds).
I-Image Ethics, Sharing and Popular
Geopolitics
3- Problematizing Image Ethics:
The ethics of the mediatization of affective imagery
in conventional media has been approached by
many authors leaving us with multiple/sometimes
contradictory viewpoints.
Some argue the abundant supply of affective imagery
via mass media has dulled our senses and led us to
what Susan Moeller describes as ‘compassion
fatigue’
While other authors, like David Campbell and Anna
Gibbs, argue that affective imagery when used
responsibly can make a difference in the lives of
featured subjects.
I-Image Ethics, Sharing and Popular
Geopolitics
The inherent inability a traumatic image to
communicate pain raises many ethical question
about the unlimited online circulation of such
imagery, whose interests it is serving? And
whether this harms or benefits the featured
victims best interests, and those who survived the
harm??
Since images can only convey a visual expression of
pain, they inevitably fall into a politics of
representation that simply ‘flattens the experience
of pain’ and turns it into ‘an iconography of
symbols,’ (Dauphinee, 2007). In this way images
turn out to become symbolic of special events,
starving children, hooded prisoners, bleeding war
victims, and so on.
I-Image Ethics, Sharing and Popular
Geopolitics
In the processes of imaging and visualizing pain and
trauma, the experience/existence of pain is totally
excluded. By its nature, pain is a ‘uniquely
inexpressible experience,’ according to Scarry, it is
‘somewhat less visible… so nearly impossible to
express, so flatly invisible,’ (cited by Dauphinee,
2007).
Painful images are, thus, nominally perceived with
‘radical uncertainty’ and ‘doubt,’ since their
‘presence or absence cannot be objectively verified,’
says Dauphinee. The ambiguity of traumatic
images opens up the way for suspecting their
originality, and thus, eases the process of turning
them into politicized icons of specific events.
I-Image Ethics, Sharing and Popular
Geopolitics
Affective imagery is often circulated in conventional
media to meet political ends: to show off power, to
illustrate the brutality of an enemy, or to gain
support on policies which would not be otherwise
approved.
Using common metaphors, crisis images depend on
logical stereotypes, ‘the heroic doctor, the brutal
tyrant, the sympathetic aid worker, the barbaric
mercenaries, the innocent orphans, the conniving
politicians, and so on. The images induce the
public to fit these models into the current crisis.’
(Susan Moeller)
I-Image Ethics, Sharing and Popular
Geopolitics
The politics leading to the Western media’s
abstention from displaying affective images of
death and human corpses not only reflect
cultural/governmental sensitivities, but also point
to a refrain from taking responsibility for the
existence of such images/occurrences.
‘The perpetrators of the traumas imposed upon
ethnic, racial and religious minorities would prefer
to forget about the past and to pretend that the
atrocities did not occur,’ (Nytagodien and Neal,
2004).
The disappearance of such dreadful imagery, as well
as the proliferation of ‘sanitized’ coverage, is aimed
at avoiding taking ‘ethical’ responsibility for such
crimes, as well as dehumanizing the victims of
tragic events by negligence and disremembrance.
I-Image Ethics, Sharing and Popular
Geopolitics
After 30 years of Foucault, Derrida and Braudillard
anyone can confidently claim that photographs lie,
manipulate, and oppress. They reveal their own
prejudices never objective reality. Yet upon those
mysterious, morally stained documents we rely—get
our news of the world, to form our ethical and political
consciousness, and even sometimes to take actions.
According to Anna Gibbs, ‘The image is inevitably
partial in both senses of the word: not only does it tell
what we might call a situated truth, it can never tell the
whole truth.’
Photographs of pain fail to offer a coherent explicated
knowledge because they are photographs, which is to
say, they are isolated fragments of a larger truth.
Photographs surely show us something, but just as
surely they tell us nothing, they are inherently lacking
narrative powers. According to Sontag, they are
“invitations to deduction, speculation and fantasy.”
I-Image Ethics, Sharing and Popular
Geopolitics
4-Ethics of Online Video/Photo Sharing
A photograph’s ability to convey truth is limited, and
can never be fixed. The photopraph of suffering
inform us that people all over the world need
emergency, donations, food medicine and
blankets, but societies not the sustained chance to
create based on democracy, equality and freedom
of choice.
This raises a number of imminent ethical questions:
- Who is sharing the photos?
- What is the nature/content of shared photos?
- Who is the perpetual audience of shared images?
- What effect does those images spark, if any?
I-Image Ethics, Sharing and Popular
Geopolitics
5- Hypothesis
The central argument in this research is that the
unlimited exposure and circulation of the pain of
others is no more than a form of relieving the guilt
for “not doing anything” for them, it gives the user
the illusion that they are “doing something” for
them—exposing the Israeli crimes against
humanity committed against innocent civilians—
and indirectly harms the victims by showing the
images in a context of hopelessness, suggesting a
situation is irresolvable and hopeless.
II- Case Study: The Israeli Assault on
Gaza
1- Background
More than 1,300 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip were
killed during 25 days of Israeli shelling from sea,
air and land. Palestinians in Gaza had nowhere to
flee from Israel's onslaught as the border has been
closed for two years, with disastrous consequences
for the 1.5 million in habitants of Gaza -- the
majority of them children and refugees.
On 27 December, Israel began its bombardment on
Gaza and then on 3 January began its ground
offensive.
II- Case Study: The Israeli Assault on
Gaza
Israel claims that it was targeting Hamas armed
fighters and infrastructure, ostensibly in response
to the firing of homemade rockets from Gaza into
Israel. However, field investigations by the Gazabased human rights organization Al Mezan show
that United Nations-administered schools,
mosques, universities, emergency medical crews,
private homes and other civilian objects have all
been in Israel's sights.
Among those killed on the first day of bombing, when
more than 100 tons of bombs were dropped on the
tiny coastal enclave, included police officers who were
attending a graduation ceremony, school children
heading home after a day of study, and other Gazans
killed without warning as they were conducting their
normal business.
II- Case Study: The Israeli Assault on
Gaza
Entire familiies have been wiped out during the air
strikes and shelling, including that of Hamas
leader Nizar Rayyan who was extra-judicially
executed along with his family in their home in a
Gaza refugee camp. More than 40 were killed on 6
January when Israeli forces shelled the United
Nations-administered Fakhoura school in the
Jabalia refugee camp, where families who had been
displaced by the bombing were seeking shelter.
The UN has demanded an independent investigation
and its spokespersons assert that GPS coordinates
of all UN locations were given to Israel to prevent
such an atrocity. Israel recanted its claim that
resistance fighters released fire on Israeli soldiers
from the school, which has been categorically
denied by UN officials.
II- Case Study: The Israeli Assault on
Gaza
The International Committee of the Red Cross protested
Israeli forces preventing them from evacuating casualties.
Some victims died because Gaza's hospitals — already
chronically short of medicines and supplies due to the
Israeli siege — were unable to cope with the scale of the
catastrophe. Medical workers faced grave danger as they
responded to the sites of Israeli strikes; according to the
World Health Organization, as of 8 January, 21 medical
workers had been killed and more than 30 injured since
27 December.
The assault was met with loud calls for a boycott of Israel,
including a boycott appeal from by the Palestinian
Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National
Committee, which stated on the day of the massacres:
“Israel seems intent to mark the end of its 60th year of
existence the same way it has established itself —
perpetrating massacres against the Palestinian people.”
II- Case Study: The Israeli Assault on
Gaza
The devastating attack on Gaza was described as
"willful killing" by leading Palestinian human
rights and civil society organizations, and
therefore constitute “a war crime.”
The organizations stated: “Both the time and
location of these attacks also indicate a malicious
intent to inflict as many casualties as possible with
many of the police stations located in civilian
population centers and the time of the attacks
coinciding with the end of the school day resulting
in the deaths of numerous children.”
II- Case Study: The Israeli Assault on
Gaza
2- Pictures from Gaza
During the massacre on Gaza, there has been an
extraordinary commitment of a handful of
Palestinian photographers living along the Gaza
Strip, whose photographs, according to Stuart
Franklin, moved the whole world at the end of
2008 and during January 2009, and whose
pictures, glued to placards, were held up in the
streets of Amman, Cairo, London, Paris and Tokyo
in a multitude of demonstrations against the war.”
Those pictures were circulated online as photo
exhibitions on facebook shared by people who
cared about the events taking place there, and on
YouTube as videos with background music or
poems read outloud or famous patriotic songs in
the Arab world, for Fairuz.
II- Case Study: The Israeli Assault on
Gaza
What those pictures showed us, Franklin says, “is not
simply photojournalism at its most urgent, but
photojournalism as a function of resistance to a
nation’s obliteration – as a ‘weapon of the weak’.”
So we can say that such photographs and their
online circulation are sites of resistance to their
absence in conventional media.
Through those pictures, the world watched another
terrible and disproportionate attack on the
Palestinians. Several incidents during the recent
Gaza conflict were described by Israel’s own
soldiers, as – simply - “cold-blooded murder”.
II- Case Study: The Israeli Assault on
Gaza
When the Israelis excluded all foreign journalists
from entering Gaza to report on the war, the
role of witnesses to the conflict was placed
entirely on local journalists, photographers
and television crews. No easy task. Three weeks
of attacks left five reporters dead and many
more came close. (Franklin, 2009)
II- Case Study: The Israeli Assault on
Gaza
3- Visual Analysis
Following are the results of visually analyzing
the content of imagery coming from Gaza:
 Dead children: including children in coffins, a
dead girls’s face coming out of the rubble of her
destructed house, parents/adults carrying
bleeding/dead children, children carrying pictures
of their loved ones who died, children
crying/sitting down in the middle of the rubble.
Children represented nearly 48% of the analyzed
pictures.
 Piles of dead bodies in the middle of the streets,
about 17%
 Demolished and wiped out houses and people
searching for the dead in the middle of the rubble
7%, Old women and men crying/grieving their
II- Case Study: The Israeli Assault on
Gaza
2- Online Survey
The survey questions mainly addressed the
following angles:
 Why they shared the pictures from Gaza?
 Which pictures were most effective in
mobilizing the world public in favor of the
Palestinian cause?
 How this might benefit/harm the featured
subjects?
 What repercussions they think would this have
on world politics?
II- Case Study: The Israeli Assault on
Gaza
On the questions addressing “Why?”
Most respondents thought they are this way
‘doing something’ rather than feeling helpless
and doing nothing.
 Others said this is the ‘least thing they can do’
 Some said that it is the Palestinians’ right to
have the scale of violence committed against
them exposed to the whole world
 Most respondent felt satisfied with the sharing
options.

II- Case Study: The Israeli Assault on
Gaza
On the benefit/harm questions?
Most respondents admitted that they thought
the exposure of those pictures is certainly
beneficial to the Palestinians’ cause.
 Some said that it would encourage people
around the globe to donate and support the
Palestinians.
 Some even thought that people through
demonstrations would force their
governments, especially in the US and the UK,
to support the Palestinians and not the Israelis.

II- Case Study: The Israeli Assault on
Gaza
On the most effective pictures that would
mobilize people


Most respondents indicated that the affective
nature of children’s pictures makes them the
most likely to arouse sympathy amongst their
viewers
Some said the pictures of elderly and the
abundant images of dead, whether adults or
children, would also spark sympathy for the
suffering of the Palestinianpeople.
II- Case Study: The Israeli Assault on
Gaza
On the repercussions on world politics?

Most respondents admitted that there are
no serious repercussions on world politics
as the sharing is in the best interests of
the involved subjects.
III- Conclusion and Analysis:
The Internet, in the age of conventional media’s
abstention from displaying traumatic images of death,
pain and suffering, represent a site of resistance to
common practices. This site of resistance indirectly
helps governments by giving users the illusion of ‘doing
something’ while in fact they are ‘doing nothing’.
Sharing would not change world politics, would not lead
citizens of democratic countries to demonstrate against
their own governments, nor would it dramatically make
the Palestinians’s lives any better.
Accordingly, I recommend a more responsible usage of
affective imagery by exercising pressure on governments
supporting Israel to refrain from this support, via
pressure groups, relief agents or demonstrators.
Conclusion and Analysis
I mainly concluded from this research that the Internet
and especially social networking websites, especially
Facebook has provided users with an illusion of power.
This both serves, for both users and governments, as a
substitution for doing something.
Psychologically users started to feel that they doing
something rather than doing nothing, which eventually
is more of a psychological fulfillment to relieve the guilt,
and falls in the best interests of governments who would
not want their citizens to revolt or demonstrate against
them.
Pictures must be shared responsibly in a positive context
that inspires hope and optimism for the future, rather
than helplessness and fatigue.