Abstract
The presentation and representation of death is a political matter, and it was always a means to establish and confirm power relations. This chapter reflects on the use of gruesome images for establishing hierarchies of belonging and utilising the visibility of death as a symbolic political weapon to give offence. The chapter explores the ambiguity of the offensiveness of gory images in Israeli mediated public sphere, and shows that the approach of news organisations to protect those who are dear to ‘us’ from the offensiveness of gruesome death images was gradually replaced by a non-journalistic approach that utilises such images in order to offend ‘the Other’. This contemporary practice challenges common perceptions about the offensiveness of death imagery and the ethics of its circulation.
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Notes
- 1.
See, for example, the case of the Jewish infant Shalhevet Pass (Barnea 2002, in Hebrew).
- 2.
The minister for information translates in Hebrew as the minister of Hasbarah, which means ‘explaining’, but is a euphemism for propaganda.
- 3.
The latter was endorsed by the Palestinians too. Intifada means ‘resistance’ in Arabic.
- 4.
According to a report on the use of internet in Israel by Israel’s main telephone company, in 2015, 42% of Israeli internet users self-reported to have been exposed to uncensored footage from terror-attack scenes, which contains explicit and graphic images of violence (Bezeq 2015).
- 5.
- 6.
All quotes from Eliasi’s Facebook profile are in Hebrew and were translated by the author.
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Morse, T. (2019). Gruesome Images in the Contemporary Israeli Mediated Public Sphere. In: Graefer, A. (eds) Media and the Politics of Offence. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17574-0_12
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