'All Eyes on Rafah' Is Not Enough

It's allowing us to avert our eyes from the real, human horror on the ground.

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This week, as the horror of Israel’s war on Gaza reached yet another unthinkable new stage of atrocity, an AI-generated image spread like wildfire on social media urging “All Eyes On Rafah”—a reference to the southernmost city in Gaza, which was the site of an appalling Israeli massacre over the weekend.

The image, which seems to show refugee tents stretching endlessly toward snow-capped mountains (a landscape that looks nothing like Rafah), was shared using Instagram’s “Add yours” template and had been re-posted a staggering 44 million times as of Tuesday.

It’s impossible to find fault with the specific words in the image. “All Eyes On Rafah” is a rallying cry of resistance—a solemn exhortation not to avert our eyes from the catastrophe on the ground in Rafah, where Israel first herded more than 1.4 million people into what it claimed would be a “safe zone” and then, in what has become typical form, carried out repeated attacks on those same people, who have been living in tents on the verge of starvation and with nowhere else to go. This pattern culminated in the appalling bombings that have taken place this past week. Israel killed at least 45 people—some of whom were burned alive—on Sunday and another 21, 12 of which were women, on Tuesday, according to Al-Jazeera. Additional air attacks were reported on Wednesday morning, despite Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying on Monday that the killings were a “tragic mistake.”

The massacre has been yet another watershed moment for the world, save for the United States and Israel, who can’t look upon a world power armed by an even larger world power bombing the hell out of people displaced by war and see anything other than a genocide that is being allowed to continue indefinitely.

So, yes. All eyes on Rafah—absolutely, and forever: This is a moral stain we will never wash away. But there’s something about the exponential proliferation of this image, especially because it is generated by artificial intelligence, that’s left me cold.

Please don’t misunderstand me: It’s objectively good that, at least based on my own feed, the image is reaching people who had mostly been silent on the Gazan genocide (there’s much more I could say about that but won’t here), and that it’s seemingly given people who aren’t sure what to say a slogan to rally around.

But slogans can only take you so far. “All Eyes On Rafah” doesn’t make clear why our eyes are on Rafah—that it’s because Israel is bombing Rafah with weapons made and supplied by America. It’s not urging America to stop sending Israel weapons or urging Americans to make genocide our red line in the sand for re-electing President Joe Biden. All the image demands is our eyes, on Instagram, where we’re already a captive audience. It asks nothing of us but to voice some brand of toothless sympathy without stakes or any actionable implications.

It was also difficult not to notice that this AI art started cropping up everywhere at the same time that videos were posted of Rafah in flames, or of Palestinians clutching the rag doll bodies of children who were beheaded in the bombings. There were photos of charred bodies, of blood spilled. Here’s how a Palestinian journalist recounted the aftermath to The Washington Post:

Sadeq said he encountered horrific scenes in the aftermath of the strike, including charred corpses, blood-spattered bread and a man searching for his cousin’s head. He held a girl’s brain in one hand and a bag full of body parts in the other.

The smell of death was “everywhere,” he said.

So it feels more than vaguely dehumanizing that the image that’s gone most viral as a symbol of the attacks on Rafah—and, really, of the attacks on Gaza as a whole— doesn’t show humanity at all, save for a few ant-sized suggestions of people rendered by computer technology. Even now, nearly eight months into this slaughter, when Palestinians have been pleading with the world to see them as human beings, the “All Eyes On Rafah” AI erases them from the picture. It gives us something abstract to hide behind, something that obfuscates the true human cost of continuing to aid and abet this war.

When I first saw the meme going around, it took me a long time to tell what I was even looking at beyond the text: Were these supposed to be aid conveys not getting in? Tents? Shipping containers? Lines of cars waiting to get into Coachella? Alright, I was testily told, they’re tents, tents for the tent massacre by Israel’s military in Rafah. But then you have to process the bizarrely picturesque—and factually totally incorrect—view of snowy mountain peaks, tall enough to cast massive shadows, and the blue sky in the image’s horizon. That couldn’t be further from what’s actually happening, or what Palestine actually looks like. As Al-Jazeera succinctly puts it:

• Rafah looks nothing like that: Its skies are grey with smoke from Israeli bombs and there are no orderly rows of tents – many are smouldering after being bombed with their occupants still inside, and debris is scattered between them.

• Rafah is also far more crowded – with an estimated 1.4 million people seeking refuge there from Israel’s bombs in February, according to the United Nations.

• Al Jazeera’s Sanad fact-checking agency confirmed that the image was generated using an artificial intelligence (AI) tool.

• There are tell-tale signs of AI, including repetition, the symmetrical alignment of the tents, the lack of detail, and the absence of shadows. You can read more on how to spot AI-generated images here.

There’s also something disquieting about the idea that, even though this image must’ve been made by someone, it has that uncanny, untouched-by-human-hands feeling that all AI art has. Especially about an issue as personal, as human, as a genocide, we can’t afford to let AI lead the way when there’s so much on-the-ground reporting of images that, once you see them, will change you forever. The tech giants that regulate images shared on their platforms must also share the blame for this particular AI image gaining traction; it’s not unlikely that this is the only image addressing the Rafah massacre that wouldn’t have been censored or summarily taken down for its depiction of violence, however true or real.

And yet: This AI image is still making Zionists very, very mad, so much so that they’re putting out their own sorry attempts to sneer at it, and thus sneer at the devastation of Rafah itself. In the end, no matter how morally clunky or how shitty the AI art, that’s what they can’t stomach the most: That “All Eyes On Rafah” is a sentiment supported by millions, and it’s one that’s not going away. Posting was never going to stop this genocide, but what posting is able to do is make the powers that be completely aware of just how many people stand against them and how unpopular their policy of continuing to execute this war really is. So if you want to give “All Eyes On Rafah” credit for something, give it credit for that. But then we have to push beyond abstractions and train our eyes on Rafah as it really is.