"The Map is not the Territory": On the Intersection of Image and Faith
The innermost confessions of a stranger seeking answers in imagery.
Of the innumerable thoughts humanity has conjured over its lifetime, perhaps one of the most enduring is the adage opining that “the pen is mightier than the sword”. Having survived for thousands of years, words that more or less express this sentiment have been attributed to the likes of Greek playwright Euripides1, military mastermind Napoleon Bonaparte2, and the prophet Mohammad3.
I tend to agree that words are often more effective than acts of violence in sparking true political and social change. That said, the minds that have recorded this viewpoint time and time again could not have possibly fathomed the dawn of the digital image (let alone the infrastructure in place that allows it to be transmitted to millions of eyes in a matter of seconds).
The poignancy of images has weighed heavily on my mind since October 7th, when I connected to the complementary WiFi in the immigration line at Humberto Delgado Airport on my way to celebrate my honeymoon. It was there that I learned war had been declared while I was soaring 40,000 feet above the Atlantic Ocean. In the days since, horrors4 from Gaza, Israel, and beyond have flooded my feeds and inboxes.
I know that I am not alone in feeling deeply disturbed. Nevertheless, I have found myself in a uniquely lonesome position during this time because I am currently seven months deep into the process of converting to Judaism.
Up until this point, choosing to become a Jew has been an easy and natural decision. Making a tradition of lighting candles, drinking wine, and shamelessly setting my phone to “Do Not Disturb” in recognition of Shabbat has been the best thing to happen to my mental health since receiving a Wellbutrin prescription. I’ve discovered that many of the aspects I love most about my husband – his generosity, his compassion and kindness, his thoughtfulness, even his gallows humor – are intrinsically tied to his identity as a Jew. My friendly neighborhood rabbi has graciously been teaching me how to read Hebrew and has invited me to celebrate holidays at his table alongside Jews of all ages from Tanzania, Venezuela, and the former Soviet Union. Their diversity in experience is beautiful, and it makes me feel a sense of community that I’ve never experienced before.
I have legally adopted the decidedly Jewish surname Cohen, and the Instagram algorithm has all but eliminated Christmas-themed advertisements in favor of “cottage core” menorahs5 for sale against cobalt backdrops. Technicalities of the title aside, I have been living life as a Jew, and at a glance, much of the world at large sees me as one.
But the last few weeks have exposed the heavy, ugly parts of adopting that title. And with troubling reports of everything from cataclysmic Israeli airstrikes to dramatic surges in Western antisemitism, I’m left at something of an impasse.
I was born an Irish/Quebecois Catholic - a patch of land at the junction of Asia and Africa isn’t something I can rightly claim any sort of indigenous ownership over. The Hebrew word for convert, ger/giyoret (גר), translates more directly to ‘stranger’. And that is how I feel as I parse together immeasurable trauma happening in real-time. I know so little about what it feels like to be an Israeli and even less about what it feels like to be a Palestinian.
But, as I prepare to become a Jew, I feel that I no longer have the luxury – the privilege, if ever there was one – of remaining ignorant or indifferent. Regardless of my personal feelings on Israeli policy or practice, regardless of whether I ever live to see the “Zion” I read of in Torah and prayers, I now find myself curiously tethered to Israel simply by virtue of my impending conversion. This feels like a reality that’s out of my control. But what is in my control is what I choose to do with this bizarre new connection. My voice is small and my power is limited, but I desperately yearn to become an agent of positive change and critical thought among both the Jews and Gentiles in my life. As a Jew, I want to do my part in making the entire world feel like a place that feels safe for all who wander.
The challenge that stands in my way at this moment is that of painting a clear picture of what, exactly, is going on so that I can decide on the course of action necessary to be the good Jew that I want to be.
Currently, I’m paralyzed by two facts that stand at odds with one another:
As someone living in the United States who does not understand Hebrew or Arabic, I am acutely aware that I am heavily reliant on visual media and the words of others in understanding the full history and scope of conflict between Israel and Palestine.
I am also acutely aware that separate from the physical carnage, an intangible war of information is raging. Each side is intent on swaying people like me who cannot know firsthand the full reality of what’s taking place, and neither side is above misleading or manipulating for the perceived greater good of their cause. In a such war, there is no greater weapon than the image.
Stuck in the muck of this conundrum, I can’t help but reflect on the following statement from Polish mathematician/philosopher Alfred Korzybski:
“A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.”
A college art history professor of mine used this phrase often to describe the simultaneous utility and fallibility of photography as a medium. At risk of stating the obvious, during the early days of photography, people mistook the camera’s incredible accuracy in capturing light as a certificate of authenticity. Free from the exaggerated colors and gestures and expressions of painting or sketch, the photograph’s perfect reproductions were understandably interpreted as an infallible source of reality. This sentiment largely still holds today, even though most of us are well aware of the trickery made possible by modern technology.
In truth, the practice of manipulating photographic images to convey a desired narrative is about as old as photography itself.
In 1855, a man by the name of Roger Fenton set out with a cart full of cumbersome, antiquated photographic equipment and took perhaps the first iconic wartime image, titled “The Valley of the Shadow of Death”. The scene is void of human subject matter – in those days, it took anywhere from 3-15 minutes to make a single exposure, ruling out the possibility of capturing any real action. Instead, it shows a littering of cannonballs piled in a trench and scattered across a dirt road. At the time of its exhibition, the somber image alluded to the heavy fire that British troops fighting on the frontlines of the Crimean War faced. Over 150 years later, another negative of Fenton’s nearly identical to “The Valley of the Shadow of Death” was discovered. The only difference? The supposedly leftover cannonballs in the road were absent.
It’s entirely possible that Fenton simply arranged the ammunition to create a more memorable composition. Perhaps he added the cannonballs to imply that the battlefield was more treacherous than it was in actuality. These are answers we’re unlikely to ever get. What is clear is that Fenton’s photo marked the beginning of a rich tradition of “fake” images in the name of military endeavor. Just a few years later, American photographer Alexander Gardner upped the journalistically unethical anty by configuring the corpses of dead Confederate soldiers in dramatic poses that made for a better story.
In the 20th century, journalists covering the Spanish Civil War were cordoned off from battlefields and frequently found themselves employing soldiers to feign combat. Robert Capa’s “Falling Soldier”, the most enduring image to come out of the conflict and said to capture the moment a bullet made contact with a libertarian socialist’s skull, is likely to be one such example. Although it is often considered one of the greatest war photographs of all time, most art historians agree that the image was captured about 30 miles away from the battlefield it claimed to originate from.
I could go on ad nauseam. There are staged images of Soviets raising their banner over the ruins of WWII Berlin, composed in a way that mirrored Jo Rosenthal’s iconic (and also staged) shot of American soldiers raising stars and stripes at Iwo Jima. In more recent years, Lebanon6, North Korea, and the United States have all been caught clumsily using Photoshop’s clone stamp tool to distort and exaggerate images portraying enemy destruction or illustrating military prowess.
As a former 11-year-old hopelessly addicted to the “Fauxtography” section of Snopes, learning about the deceptive history of war photography did not come as a particularly earth-shattering revelation. It probably doesn’t come as much of a shock to you, either.
But there’s a major difference in the climate surrounding the past conflicts that I’ve listed and what’s happening now, and it is that almost everyone7 has the tools and platform necessary to broadcast images en masse instantaneously. In the past, the blame for staged or altered images could squarely be placed on the shoulders of dishonest publications, rogue editors, and photographers eager to push personal agendas. Today, the ability to deceive has expanded from such direct sources to the hands of anonymous middlemen, all of whom can alter, reframe, and decontextualize content with as little as an ill-intentioned tweet8. Even compared to conflicts just a few years past, the global population’s ability to capture high-res videos and images and upload online has increased exponentially.
No longer is there a need to physically stage scenes or master Photoshop to create dubious and convincing imagery. Instead, your run-of-the-mill bad actor can use generative AI to spawn and circulate imaginary war zones. Conversely, there have been reports of AI image detectors incorrectly labeling unaltered images as fakes.
AI represents only the tip of the visual misinformation we all must sift through. Perhaps more insidious is the proliferation of “real” images completely divorced from their original context and contorted into false narratives. This tactic isn’t new – recently, the practice of recycling old conflict imagery with new, misleading captions has been utilized throughout the ongoing Russo-Ukranian War. However, the contentious nature of the Israel–Hamas War has made the application of this tactic more apparent now than ever before.
A seemingly tame example features a muted video of a small brown puppy shaking and cowering in a cardboard box. A good samaritan offers the animal some food, but the dog is too shaken to eat. On October 21st, a Twitter/X/whatever account called Times of Gaza shared the clip with the caption “Scared dog shakes and refuses to eat after an Israeli air strike on Gaza”. Superimposed onto the image is an Arabic caption that supports the Times of Gaza account, as well as a couple of Palestinian flags and an emoji on the brink of tears.
There’s no real reason to doubt the video’s authenticity. In the scope of warzone photography, it’s a fairly mundane snippet. There are indeed stray dogs in the Gaza Strip that look exactly like this pup, and common sense suggests that at least some of those dogs are traumatized by recent Israeli air strikes.
But a little bit of digging reveals that this short snippet may not be what it seems to be on the surface. As it turns out, the video of the puppy was originally posted four days earlier by a Vietnamese TikToker. The 4.3-million-follower account appears to aggregate short clips with viral potential from around the world, so that fact alone does not negate the possibility of the video originating from Gaza. However, the TikTok contains the clip’s original audio mixed with what may or may not be a Vietnamese song9 with a somewhat uplifting melody. Though we can’t be sure, it seems likely that the version of the puppy video published by Times of Gaza was muted because the audio did not fit the tone of the tweet. More suspiciously, background elements containing kanji were cropped out of the Times repost. Again, while we can’t be 100% sure of the puppy’s origin, these clues point to Japan or another East Asian country. The only evidence suggesting Palestine as the country of origin comes from the Arabic text and flag emojis superimposed onto what very much appears to be an altered repost.
Perhaps pointing this out comes off as nitpicking. After all, this scene is certainly within the realm of possibility. Furthermore, the Times of Gaza account has no journalistic obligation to be truthful because it’s not affiliated with an actual news or media company10. Hell, maybe whoever runs the Times of Gaza sincerely thought it was “real”. It’s extremely difficult, if not impossible, to know how many hands the clip passed through on its sojourn from Vietnamese TikTok to pro-Palestine Twitter.
As innocent as this type of lie seems to be, it has over time fueled an infinitely greater problem – conspiracy theories that all (or at least a large portion of) media claiming to come out of Palestine is manufactured for propagandizing purposes. And while there’s seemingly not much danger in doubting the authenticity of a puppy shivering in a box, such instances have led to largely incorrect accusations among certain parties that footage of the carnage currently taking place is performative or somehow doctored. We have reached the point where people are actively accusing corpses of being crisis actors.
This, of course, severely underplays the very real suffering hundreds of thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians are currently being subjected to. But it also fails to acknowledge that advocates of Israel are equally capable of similar deceit.
Over the last month, a viral video has made the rounds purportedly showing a Palestinian father encouraging his son to throw rocks at an IDF soldier (presumably so the soldier will shoot the boy in retaliation, and the man will capture the death on film for the purpose of creating propaganda). Instead, the boy and soldier share a high five in what appears to be a moment of wholesome humanity. While no readily available evidence proves the veracity of this footage one way or the other, what is often left out in the countless reposts is the crucial detail that the original clip has been floating around YouTube for at least seven years and is in no way indicative of current events. Unfortunately, there are many, many more children suffering as a consequence of IDF actions (justified or not) than there are receiving high fives.
In an attempt to escape the onslaught of morbidly arresting images that populate the screens we’re hardwired to, one might opt to log off of their social media source of choice and keep themselves informed through accredited news sources. But with the understandable human demand for 24/7 updates, horrific photographs and videos move much faster than fact-checked written testimony, leading to scenarios in which the images engineered to pull at one’s heartstrings become the news. The atmosphere of uncertainty surrounding these breaking images scooped from the web allows publishers to feed into their own preconceived biases without telling outright lies.
And so, we’ve all found ourselves in a horrible scenario that at times feels impossible to decipher. The internet has devolved into a hellhole of constant finger-pointing, rife with circuitous debate over who is or isn’t lying, and who is or isn’t the victim. The sheer persistence it takes to seek truth in such an environment is mentally and spiritually exhausting. And when you find yourself no closer to an answer after hours of searching, it becomes tempting to simply not believe in anything at all. Maybe this is the safest answer. It’s certainly the most comfortable.
But a blanket policy of disbelief is, of course, not an answer that is true or right.
Judaism, like any religion, requires some degree of faith. This doesn’t necessarily come in the form of blindly subscribing to hyperspecific religious dogma. Instead, many Jews simply have faith in themselves, and in their ability to persevere through hatred and trying times.
Conjuring faith is one of the aspects I struggle with most as a convert. My natural inclination is to critically analyze and seek proof in everything I choose to believe, which is by definition the antithesis of faith. I wrestle with situations that require listening to a heart that I know can be foolish and imperfect.
Sifting for the truth buried in images is an act of faith, as well. Unsurprisingly, this very roadblock – my hesitance to blindly trust the universe, to trust others, to trust myself – makes it difficult to make sense of the words and images I’m forced to grapple with. This is not helped by the fact that historical precedent shows that the truths and lies of a photograph have a pesky tendency to congeal into something seemingly homogenous, inseparable. Disseminating and evaluating over and over again where correct ends and incorrect begins is arduous, and sometimes, entirely fruitless.
But that doesn’t mean that there’s futility in the act of trying.
I hope someday to find a way to quell the bilateral skepticism that screams inside my head. Until then, I’ll pray for faith – not in the accuracy of the map, but that our imperfect interpretations of the territory might in time be enough to reveal our missteps and lead us toward something better.
“The tongue is mightier than the blade”
“Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets”
“There will be a tribulation that will wipe out the Arabs in which those killed on both sides are in the Hellfire. In that time the spoken word will be stronger than the sword”
And the horrors are far from limited to the wounded Palestinians buried beneath rubble at this very moment or the lifeless bodies of Israelis who were shot dead in their homes. The venom in the actions and voices of many in and outside the Middle East are far less gruesome to witness, but horrifying in the sense that it makes peaceful resolution feel like a pipe dream in a war between an unstoppable force and an immovable object.
I swear to you with every fiber of my being that Instagram really did try to sell me something marketed as a cottage-core menorah and that I don’t have the creative prowess to invent such a phrase.
This case is especially worth mentioning because the images in question were published by Reuters, often considered to be amongst the most accurate and least biased international news outlets available. The scandal is a sobering reminder that even the most highly acclaimed news sources may (intentionally or not) at times distribute “dishonest” information.
It’s estimated that 5.3 billion people (66% of Earth’s population) currently have internet access – of those 5.3 billion, about 4.9 billion utilize social media. There are roughly 7 billion people who have access to a mobile phone, of which a large (but surprisingly unclear) percentage are smartphones with photographic capabilities.
Or post – frankly I don’t know or care what they’re supposed to be called anymore. Sorry.
The music track listing simply reads “nhạc nền”, which translates to “soundtrack”.
Though Times of Gaza is listed as a “Media & News Company” under its professional category on Twitter/X, these categories are self-selected and “not assigned, verified, or endorsed by X”. The page banner suggests that Times of Gaza is linked to the “Palestinian News Network”, which doesn’t seem to exist. There is a Palestine News Network, but that seems to be affiliated with an entirely separate Twitter/X account.