The Fallen, the Code, and the Jewish State
How the simulation of victimhood becomes power through the image
By the time the dead appear before us, they have already been delivered from death into circulation, detached from the smallness of the person who has vanished and reissued as sign, proof, accusation, and permission. War does not just kill; it produces the visible dead, the dead who can be transmitted, captioned, enlarged, invoked. The body disappears as an image. What remains is more useful than the body, because the image can travel where the body cannot.
The obscene beauty of war begins when the corpse ceases to be singular and becomes clear only as a public sign. It is wrapped in a flag, placed beneath a chant, carried through the national gaze, and converted into a form of purity. The dead are innocent because they cannot answer back. They do not revise the slogans placed above them, nor do they interrupt the revenge prepared in their name. Their silence becomes the most eloquent speech available to power.
Every confronting army enters this system of the dead by first presenting its wound before its weapon. Its violence must pass through the image of injury, so that killing returns as necessity rather than desire. The dead confer moral credit, while their absence is made to guarantee the legitimacy of future force. Once filtered through mourning, retaliation no longer appears as retaliation but becomes the continuation of grief by other means.
Here, Israel occupies a particularly painful place, since its society is repeatedly asked to bury its own. Its moral claim rests partly on the visibility of Jewish vulnerability, and partly on the insistence that such vulnerability can no longer remain defenseless. The contradiction lies there: Israel must kill in order not to be killed, yet every act of killing enters the same spectacle through which its own dead are made sacred.
The enemy’s dead are received by another code, entering the sacred image only with difficulty, if they enter it at all. They are explained, contextualized, and absorbed into the operational language of consequence. Our dead become signs; theirs become data. The body may be the same in its helplessness, but the system does not receive it equally. Death remains universal only before it is photographed.
Modern war perfects this simulation because the image now reaches the world before mourning has had time to form. Before the family has understood the absence, the screen has already assigned it a function. The dead are made to circulate, accuse, and prove that one side has suffered in the correct moral form, so that its violence may appear reluctant, innocent. The real person is lost twice: first to death, then to the usefulness of death. Within this order, victimhood becomes a code through which suffering is made usable. The wound is real, but its public life is manufactured. Because the victim is gone while the image remains, the image becomes stronger than the person it represents. It can be repeated and placed beside weapons, speeches, children, and borders.
Death in war acquires beauty through symbolic arrangement, through grief made legible, and through loss made usable. War cleans itself in the reflection of its own dead, looking at the body it has lost and seeing there a justification for the bodies it will produce.
Advocacy for Israel begins inside this discomfort: its right to defend its people must be held apart from turning its dead into instruments of justification. To compete with its enemies by mirroring their simulation efforts to win public opinion will eventually end in moral liability. If Israel’s dead are to remain human, they must not be turned into instruments of justification, nor should memory or danger be degraded into spectacle.
The fallen of the Jewish state should remain in the sanctuary of human tenderness, where the face is still a face and the name still breathes. Once sorrow is raised into a shrine, every stone begins to ask the living for sacrifice.
