The viral graphic, which has been shared over 48 million times now, is an aerial view of a supposed camp in Rafah. (Photo: Instagram)
It was Wednesday morning. A mostly uneventful day in people’s lives when Sunday is just as far as it is close, recession looms larger than the Everest, and Palestine is being laid to waste. But my Instagram feed decided that May 29 was no ordinary Wednesday morning. “All Eyes on Rafah” was the birdsong I woke up to as all my acquaintances, colleagues, padosis and even Bollywood celebrities, flocked to Instagram to post a clean-cut AI-generated image of the now-ravaged city.
The viral graphic, which has been shared over 48 million times now, is an aerial view of a supposed camp in Rafah. Meticulously organised neat rows of tents lie against a clear blue sky with cotton candy clouds, surrounding snow-capped peaks. Rafah’s charcoal-grey, smouldering reality lay far away on another planet, smattered with unidentifiable debris. No human can be seen in this image of the 64-square-kilometre-big city, currently housing an estimated 1.4 million people — half of Gaza’s displaced 2.3 million-strong population.
The social media outrage seemed to be stemming in response to the death of at least 47 people from Israeli bombardment in a displacement camp at Rafah, the city previously deemed a “safe zone” by Israel. But where is the real Palestine in this sanitised version of Rafah, which burns as I write this? Israel dropped seven 900-kg bombs on the displacement camp, according to the Gaza Government Media Office. Where is the violence and bloodshed that has been an inextricable part of the Palestinian way of life for decades?
Even if we ignore the violence before October 7, there has been a steady trickle of harrowing images from Palestine via social media in these seven months. According to the Gazan Health Ministry, over 36,000 civilians have been killed so far. A total of at least 107 journalists and media workers have been killed while reporting this — the deadliest period, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, which began gathering data in 1992. Yet, an AI-generated, dehumanised version of Palestine, free of severed limbs and bloodied faces, is the one that over 48 million of us felt most comfortable sharing. In what is performative activism at best and apathy at worst, we have reduced the lives of those 36,000 people to an Instagram story. Only viewable for 24 hours, mind you.
Even those who have never spoken on the issue — or any, for that matter — seemed to participate in this pageantry. The AI-generated image in itself is a vortex of, well, absolutely nothing. Shorn of context, the picture could pass off as an army camp in the middle of a desert. Not to mention, there were no links to funds, places one can donate to, or even any information on why they were sharing the graphic in the first place. No way to actively make even your most minuscule contribution to real, tangible change.
As we learnt from our darkened grids during the peak of the Black Lives Matter movement, armchair activism to show “solidarity” can quickly devolve into mere spectacle, eclipsing any real facts and information about the matter at hand. It would be tragic if Palestine and the voices supporting it lose their hard-won real estate on social media to something that only amounts to a gesture.
rishika.singh@indianexpress.com
