So Hamas and Israel both wanted war and each got their wish. The war was no surprise when it came and the outcomes are predictable as well. Israel will use its overwhelming military superiority to smash enemy infrastructure while also killing many civilians, which will allow Hamas, broken but not destroyed, to claim moral and political victory. The international community will broker another truce, the band-aid of humanitarian aid will be restored, rocket attacks on Israel will diminish for awhile, and the occupation policies that have turned the West Bank and Gaza into prisons will continue. A rejuvenated IDF will claim that it did indeed, as the Defense Minister promised, restore “peace and tranquility,” a phrase notable for not including the word “justice.” Then the rocket attacks or suicide attacks will resume, Israel will again be given the worthless admonition that it should allow itself only a proportionate response–which, technically, would be firing rockets at civilians–and so it goes. It is tempting to simply say, “a pox on both your houses.” But then there is this:

A child’s arm protrudes from the rubble of a building destroyed by an air strike. This is one death among many–500+ civilians and counting–including perhaps the woman whose half sandal also is in the picture. It is one picture among many, and one of of the least dramatic, but I can find no other that so eloquently communicates the crushing sorrow of war’s devastation. The mass of concrete crushing the child also completely crushes any hope. This is not a scene of rescuers digging frantically in a race against time. Instead, the several adults simply stand there, helpless. It’s as if they are granting the child a last moment of dignity before they have to tear the broken body out of one grave only to return it to another.

This is why we shouldn’t turn away or throw up our hands in disgust. Each death is a separate tragedy, not merely another datum to be aggregated into the geopolitical assessment. But it is not enough to mourn the individual loss of life if that does not also include a commitment to facing the deep causes of this war and the other wars now underway–most of them killing far more people than will die in Gaza. Precisely because each death is so wasteful, unnecessary, and immoral, it should be counted in another sense: as a measure of collective political failure.

Let me put it this way. What if God counts? (I realize that belief in God is rather difficult these days, but let’s at least consider the idea a useful fiction.) What if, that is, God judges not so much by weighing reasons but simply by how many are harmed? It makes sense, if you think about it. God (for example, in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, just to name a few religions) is supposed to see through our social identities, our many rankings and all the aggrievements they involve. God calls on us to transcend social ascription and avoid false pieties and idolatries, all on behalf of living in justice and compassion with one another. Nor has divine judgment ever given points for wealth or firepower, or for sacrificing children for one’s cause. The more I think about it, the more clear it seems: God would put great weight on how many were harmed, and what was done on all sides to prevent harm, while being much less concerned about who had the better rationale on any particular day.

Think about it: not what you intended, and not whether you were right, but simply how much damage you caused. Relentlessly counting while turning a deaf ear to our many arguments, no wonder God’s judgment is said to be so terrible.

In the short run, it would seem that God’s judgment should fall on Israel: a handful of deaths on one side and hundreds on the other, not to mention the continuing toll taken by the occupation. But that may be too simple. Surely God also follows the money, which goes back to the U.S. on one side and sources throughout the Arab world on the other side. And this is a small war by comparison with the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and even more so compared to the wars raging across central Africa. Again, war is a collective failure, and ultimately the judgment rests on us all.

Photograph by Mohammed Abed/AFP-Getty Images.

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The new year has started very much like the old year: renewed war in the Middle East, exceedingly uncivil civil wars in Africa, spasms of terrorism and counter-terrorism in Asia, drug wars in Latin America, and economic decline everywhere. That’s not the whole story, of course, but it is a continuing story.

Faced with another year of violence, journalists and citizens alike have to make choices about how to depict and understand what is happening, and how to do so without becoming cynical or otherwise numbed to the obligations and possibilities for change. One place to begin is by looking at this photograph.

Recently I got somewhat lyrical about two images of “Hands of Death.” Now we are looking at the foot of a suicide bomber in Afghanistan. Rather than speak about the photograph directly, let me ask you how it might be captioned.

That’s a real question. What are we to make of this awful, pathetic, powerful image? How should we label it to use it well–that is, to provide material for public thought?

I’ll suggest several captions that occurred to me, along with their implications for framing events to come. First, “Picking up the Pieces.” Cute, isn’t it? But that is what has to be done. After the dramatic cataclysm of the blast and perhaps heroic efforts to save the wounded, someone has to pick up the shards of material, bone, and flesh that remain. At the same time and for much longer, someone has to pick up the pieces of shattered families, broken communities, a damaged society. The violence that has occurred is still occurring, not only in the continuation of political struggles, cycles of violence, martial habits, and the arms trade, but because the harm already done lasts for decades among the living. Whatever will come to pass, surely one of the tasks facing governments and individuals today is to pick up the pieces still strewn about, the sorry fragments of past destructiveness that have to be gathered up and put to rest as part of moving forward.

I also thought of labeling the photograph as “The Human Remnant.” Although we don’t typically look at the soles of our feet, much less think of them as emblems of humanity, that foot now becomes expressive. It looks capable, vulnerable, well cared for, and generally a sign of how humans are a distinctive species. The top of the foot has been seared by the blast, leaving the soft, fleshy underside as the only trace of the human being who existed before ideology, socialization, self-immolation. Perhaps that foot could have walked down another path; indeed, isn’t that true of everyone? Thus, the image reminds us of how war wastes human potential. But let’s not get too sentimental. He killed three other people, and the soldiers, munitions makers, and strategists also are human, as are the torturers and those who authorize torture. It is not enough for humanity to endure.

Other captions include: “Putting Your Best Foot Forward” and “Adding Insult to Injury.” The first ranges from contempt to cynicism, while the second plays off of the cultural significance in the Middle East of showing the soles of one’s feet. I could go on, but you get the point. One question we face in the new year is how to represent, understand, and react to a world riven by violence. This is not an academic question.

Photograph by Ahmad Masood/Reuters via The Big Picture.

Update: Thanks to the double post at BAGnewsNotes, you can read additional comments there.

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Photojournalism is vexed by the problem of how to portray degradation and death without harming the dignity of those being photographed. The medium’s capacity for evoking emotional response and moral judgment cannot be separated from its ability to add insult to injury. With that problem in mind, one can appreciate why this photograph is not only striking but also an ethical achievement.

A Congolese government soldier lies dead in the road not long after having been shot in the head. He is one of many who have died or will die in the continuing violence in central Africa. It is easy to immediately think of him as a statistic. Another distant victim in yet another civil war, one about which the viewer probably has no interest, no knowledge, no connection. A war that becomes merely another example of the seemingly endless violence spreading through the jungles and across the deserts and up into the mountains around the globe as poor people are recruited to maim and kill one another for the benefit of unseen warlords.

Thus, it can be easy to dismiss him, except for that hand. There is something achingly beautiful about it. It seems so alive, or if we know otherwise, so etched with life. It is a particular hand, not the abstract symbol of labor, but the hand of an individual whose lifetime of experiences, however common, were encountered with all the particularity evident in each crease of skin, the line of each cuticle, the smudge of dirt. More than that, the image evokes all the skill of a hand, its capability for craft and communication. Caught in a last gesture, this hand seems to still want to communicate, to reach out or up, to plead, perhaps, or to touch and say goodbye.

We know that he is dead, however, and so the raindrops on the fingers become poignant. They course down his limb, set in rigor mortis, as they do on any other inanimate thing, and yet they still seem to signify life. As if he were still capable of bleeding, or of washing, as if he could perhaps be revived with cool water. But the point is not to keep hope alive. Rather, the hand offers mute testimony to the value of the life that has been lost. It presents him as an individual person but not merely because he had a name or a personality. And it records his death with dignity, suggesting how much has been lost without showing the devastation of the head wound.

Photojournalism can not be satisfied with avoiding habits of dehumanization, however, as it also has to confront and expose those practices in their worst forms, which are not done by shooting with a camera. This second photograph was in a number of slide shows recently, perhaps because it captures so well the gross destructiveness of war.

These are the hands of men executed near San Ignacio, Mexico. They are among the latest casualties in the border wars between Mexican drug cartels. (For a current report on the violence, see “Day of the Dead” in The Observer/The Guardian.) The photo documents the practice of tying up the victims, which in turn implies that this was a planned execution characteristic of high level gang warfare. It also captures the fact of murder without revealing the identities of the victims or the full violence done to their bodies.

These hands in this image accomplish something different from the work done in the first photograph. Where before dignity was salvaged from chronic violence, now the shameful nature of mass killing is exposed. These men were left this way to demean them, while the photograph exposes where the shame really lies–with those who kill, and with those could try to stop the killing but look the other way.

Equally important, now the implicit metonymy of hands signifying labor is rightfully in play. These men could have been productive laborers (and managers) had the work been available. Whatever bad choices they might have made, the narco-economy and its attendant carnage involves a terrible waste of human potential. The drug trade, like the arms trade, is a global business, and globalization can spread destructiveness just as easily as it can generate wealth. If hands could speak, these would beg to be given a second chance, one with real work that could lead to a better life.

The hands do speak. The question is, who is listening?

Photographs by Finbarr O’Reilly/Reuters (via The Big Picture) and the Associated Press.

Update: Thanks to Michael Shaw for the double post at BAGnewsNotes, where you can read additional comments by readers there.

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