My book To See In the Dark: Palestine and Visual Activism Since October 7th was published on January 20, 2025. It was simply the scheduled Pluto publishing slot, but the day marked a global turning point. The first full day of the “ceasefire” in Gaza was also the inauguration of Trump’s racial empire, even as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s holiday was ignored.
Far from a coincidence, this convergence was the result of all that has happened since October 7th. On January 20th, I had flashbacks to the mix of panic and shame I had felt as an anti-Zionist Jew on October 7th, knowing there would be terrible crimes carried out in my name. Not only had our anti-Zionist politics failed, our identities were being used to justify genocide.
I have four Jewish grandparents; relatives who died in and survived the Holocaust; and others who took up armed struggle for Zionism. No matter. Only Zionism now defined what it means to be a “Jew.” This “ontological terror” (to borrow from Black studies professor Calvin Warren) forced me to engage with both my personal and professional identities.
My book is the result of this struggle. As feminist activist and thinker Silvia Federici said at a packed New York City event in March 2024: “Palestine is the world.” She had said it before, but it landed very differently during the genocide, sending a wave of emotion around the room.
Palestine is the world because its population is exemplary of the global majority formed since 2008. Under 30 years old with access to the Internet and living in cities, this majority has made repeated claims for recognition from the Arab Spring to #metoo and Black Lives Matter.
70% of the 2.3 million who lived in Gaza in October 2023 were under 30. There was 95% Internet access, while the Strip is a single urban region. Israel’s devastation unleashed since October 7th was intended to ensure that the future does not belong to this majority.
Federici’s statement resonated especially with me because I wrote a book called How To See The World (2015). I followed it up with an online project called “How To See Palestine: An ABC of Occupation.” It was time to combine the two: today, to see Palestine is to see the world.
This seeing is always political. Settler colonialism sees from above through one eye. Its narrow perspectival gaze focuses on specific squares of land and erases everything within, creating what imperial law calls terra nullius, literally “nothing land.” A land where every life form, whether human or other-than-human has been eliminated, creating a new white reality known as “real estate.” I call this way of seeing “white sight.”
Today, white sight is deployed by drones. Drones distance colonizers from their targets by the use of screens. What is visualized on those screens is called the “kill box” by the military. It means what it says—anything seen by the drone in the kill box can be killed. Since October 7th, all Gaza has been a kill box.
The US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq centered around high-end Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles, like the Predator and its successor the Reaper. The occupation instead attacked Gaza with cheap quadcopters, starting with DJI consumer drones and working up to specially designed models, steered by 4K immersive video.
These now-ubiquitous machines have created a distributed form of white sight. It’s mobile CCTV, seeing through multiple automated viewpoints, all converging on the screen.
Despite its delusions of omnipotence, white sight only claims a narrow segment of the available visual field. To see in the dark is to activate the majority of the visible in the name of the majority of people.
Seeing in the dark creates a distributed resistance to drone vision. This “dark” is not literally dark, although the night has often been a resource for the colonized and the enslaved. It is a looking with both eyes, one in mourning, the other seeing clearly. Because it is not the sight of a single person but a collective and collaborative process, seeing in the dark is resistance, resilience, and love.
Unlike the abstraction of white sight, seeing in the dark has a material ground from which to see what has happened —rubble. In 2005, art critic John Berger pointed out that rubble was everywhere in Palestine. The destruction of 92% of all family dwellings since October 7th has created 40 million tons of rubble in Gaza. It will take an estimated fifteen years to clear, so we will be seeing in the dark for at least that long.
Despite all efforts by the platforms, seeing in the dark was a witnessing of what was happening in Gaza by viewing video on social media. Clicking away the “sensitive content” warnings, people in the global majority and their allies watched the genocide on their phones as it happened.
This intimate watching made people associate with that they saw. That association created the question: “what can I/we do?” It replaced the resigned “what can you do?” To see in the dark expresses what Berger called Palestine’s “undefeated despair.”
The result was the global intifada of April 2024, with its wave of Gaza solidarity encampments. That necessarily temporary commune was quickly dismantled by force, but its energy remains as a resource.
The resulting convivial knowledge is that we must slash the imperial screen, from paintings to iPhones and drones. The task is, as Palestinian poet Fady Joudah puts it:
To see
what isn’t hard to see
in a world that doesn’t.
From the dark, we can see that October 7th created January 20th. Both marked the overthrow of fifty-year-old paradigms. Israel’s 1967 occupation of Gaza and the West Bank has turned into the genocidal version of settler colonialism identified by historian Patrick Wolfe.
The US parallel is the 2024 triumph of a far-right white nationalism, once associated with defeated Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964, that came to digitally-mediated power on January 20th.
In 1967, Dr. King connected racism, militarism and extractive capitalism in his book Where Do We Go From Here? The task for those feeling revulsion at everything that has followed from October 7th is to create new forms of revolution, a turning away from militarized violence and surveillance toward convivial association.
What we’re looking for now is a commune for the world after October 7th and January 20th. The encampments were just the first sketch of that revolutionary turn, the refusal to consent to genocide. We must continue to assemble otherwise, in the rubble, seeing in the dark. Undefeated.
Among the founders of visual culture as a field, Nicholas Mirzoeff has also written extensively on Jewishness and Palestine. His books include To See In the Dark, How To See The World, The Right to Look and The Appearance of Black Lives Matter. He has written for the Guardian, Hyperallergic and The Nation. He lives in New York City.
