A Bound Prisoner's Unbowed Humanity

Heroism vs. Martyrdom and other Humanistic Questions Raised by a Widely Circulated Image of an Israeli Soldier Standing Over a Bound Palestinian Man in Gaza

The viral image of an Israeli soldier standing over a bound, stripped, and injured Palestinian proves once more the power of imagery to engage our most elemental feelings and inspire the most urgent of questions concerning the human condition. In particular, the image challenges us to reconsider the meaning of heroism and martyrdom.

The image was posted to Instagram on February 2, 2024 by Yosee Gamzoo Letova, a member of the Israeli military. Asked about the widely circulated image, the U.S. State Department described it as “deeply troubling.” The Israeli military stated that it ended the reservist soldier's service and viewed the filming and publication of the detainee’s interrogation as a violation of the military’s “protocols and values.” According to The Times of Israel, the Israeli military claimed “the suspect was not hurt” and was released following “a short questioning.”

This image, its posting, and the Israeli military’s response presents us with pressing factual and ethical questions. Why was a “suspect”—one who we are told was ultimately released—subjected to the indignities of being stripped to his underwear and tied up during his “questioning”? Clearly this dehumanizing practice has been systematically instituted given previous reporting by major media outlets confirming that hundreds of Palestinian “detainees,” including non-adult boys, were stripped to their underwear. In fact, the soldier who posted the image of the bound and undressed Palestinian man is the very same soldier whose Christmas Eve 2023 video post of stripped Palestinians sparked global condemnation. And what are we to make of the fact that the Israeli military objects only to the publication of these degrading experiences inflicted upon Palestinians and not the practice of stripping suspects? Assuming the most favorable interpretation of this practice, why aren't the clothes immediately returned to the men and boys after verifying they possess no weapons?

“A still from a video appears to show Palestinian men and at least two children detained and stripped by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in a stadium in northern Gaza. Yosee Gamzoo Letova.” CNN

“A still from a video appears to show Palestinian women and men blindfolded with their hands tied behind their backs as they sit on the grass in front of a soccer goal in the stadium. Yosee Gamzoo Letova.” CNN

The Israeli military’s response to the viral image also prompts yet another question: What are we to make of the flagrant factual error contained in the military’s claim that the detained man “was not hurt”? Does this mean that those in positions of power in the Israeli military are unable to recognize blood oozing from Palestinian bodies? Is it that such wounds are so commonplace—during a total siege on a mostly civilian population that has resulted in the deaths of more than 27,000—that they are rendered invisible? Does the physical pain suffered by Palestinians register as little concern as the psychic pain they endure from being striped, bound, and sometimes blindfolded as though they were things?

What is perhaps most strange about the particular image in question is that it was shamelessly published by an Israeli soldier, likely the very person standing before the Palestinian. What are we to make of this fact? Deprived of all of the relevant context, wouldn't we be more likely to assume such an image would have been published by a muckraking investigative journalist seeking to expose the cruelties of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza?

The image is all the more interesting given that the soldier who published it, Letova, was more than an opportunistic picture-taker. He is a photographer who completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Art & Photography in 2003. What would motivate him to proudly share such an image on Instagram? Did he think of the image of a bound Palestinian sitting before a soldier was a work of art? Was he attempting to enhance his self-image as an artist, a man, a soldier—all three? Was he trying to symbolize the virility of his nation? If so, why would he think such an image would convey anything less than humane revulsion from his audience?

Perhaps we need to ask a different question: does the image reveal the soldier’s narcissism? This question must be asked since an objective observer recognizes a life-affirming humanity in the prisoner—a man the Israeli military said they released—and a comparable impotence of humanity in the soldier. The photo reveals inspiring dignity not in the person wearing fatigues, helmet, and armed with a gun, but in the resilient, unbowed, and defiant prisoner. His erect posture and firm, unbroken human gaze suggests a refusal to accept or even reciprocate the condescension and humiliation projected onto him by that most odious of human impulses, the violation of another’s autonomy through force.

Are we to surmise that this soldier's narcissism—a pathological incapacity to grasp the objective reality outside of his wishes or fantasies—represents a larger narcissism among others in his military community? This question, too, must be asked given Haaretz's February 4, 2024 expose, which confirmed that the Israeli military operated a Telegram channel called “72 Virgins — Uncensored” which described Palestinians as “roaches” and “rats,” glorified their killing, showed dead bodies of the killed, and depicted vehicles running over corpses.

What is clear is that such celebration of dehumanization, destruction, and killing—a pornography of violence—exemplifies what pioneering social theorist and Jewish thinker, Erich Fromm called “necrophilia”: the love of force, dominance, and defilement of life. In a word, the love of death. Those who embrace necrophiliac consciousness are lovers of force since, as Fromm put it in The Heart of Man (1964),

“All force is, in the last analysis, based on the power to kill. I may not kill a person but only deprive him of his freedom; I may want only to humiliate him or to take away his possessions—but whatever I do, behind all these actions stands my capacity to kill and my willingness to kill. The lover of death necessarily loves force. For him the greatest achievement of man is not to give life, but to destroy it...”

Perhaps the soldier's irrational pride in standing above the dignified prisoner is made possible by the internalization of patriarchal masculinity's distorted conception of human worth. Under patriarchy, the physically weak or subdued—those without power and control—are seen as pathetic and worth less, as “feminine,” whereas those exerting dominance over others are deemed worthy of respect, praise, and exaltation. To the extent that the love of force is ultimately a love of death we can say that necrophilia is at the heart of patriarchal consciousness. For the lover of death “there are only two 'sexes',” wrote Fromm, “the powerful and the powerless; The Killers and the killed. He is in love with the killers and despises those who are killed.” Such a warped conception of life not only betrays life for death; it turns upside down the reality that the capacities for love, reason, service, and sacrifice are the greatest expressions of humanity—of genuine human potency—while the resort to self-aggrandizing force and denigration of others tend to reveal inner impotence, an inability to create.

But we must go beyond asking questions of the individual soldier who shared the image. We must also ask what it means that the soldier recognized there was a wider audience that would approve of and congratulate his portrait of inhumanity—the same audience, we can presume, who found pleasure and excitement in viewing the content the Israeli militaries posted to Telegram.

A Window into the Experience of the Bound Man: The Detainment of a Palestinian Poet

We do not know what it felt like for the Palestinian man pictured in the viral image to be bound, interrogated, and videoed. Nor do we know anything in detail about the soldier. We can only guess at each man’s thoughts and feelings. However, the English-speaking Palestinian poet, Mosab Abu Toha’s telling of his own harrowing experience as a detainee of the Israeli military in Gaza provides a window into the silent image before us.

In November 2023, Toha and his wife made the heart-wrenching decision to leave their extended family and evacuate Gaza in order to bring their three young children to safety. The opportunity to leave was made possible by the fact their three-year-old son was an American citizen. On their journey by foot to the Rafah border crossing, Toha is randomly pulled out of the crowd by Israeli soldiers and forced to join “a long queue of young men on their knees.” A young man behind him inquires through tears as to why the soldiers has chosen him—a farmer—for interrogation. Still hopeful, Toha optimistically consoles him: “They will question and then release us.”

Toha is then inexplicably called out by name—this despite having not yet been prompted to provide his identification—and asked to state his identification number at the barrel of a gun. The indignities have only begun. He and the rest of the men are led to a clearing and ordered to remove all clothes, including underwear, at gunpoint. When permitted to put his clothes back, Toha is prevented from donning his jacket and then placed in plastic handcuffs. His deferential replies to soldiers’ questions are responded to with curses and insults. One soldier is displeased by his UNRWA employee card. Toha worked as a teacher at an UNRWA school. He is then blindfolded, given a numbered bracelet, shoved forward like sheep “on our way to be slaughtered.”

Arriving at some unknown destination, Toha is subjected to an inane ceremony of degradation: pushed onto his knees, then forced to stand and kneel again. He is asked questions he has already answered—what’s your name, what’s your identification number. Accused of being part of Hamas, he is slapped in the face for demanding evidence for this charge. He and the other men are once again relocated then forced to remove their footwear. Soldiers slap the blindfolded men’s necks and kick them in the back before forcing them into a truck. At yet another destination Toha is subjected to kicks in the nose, mouth, and stomach.

“Another man, maybe talking to himself, says quietly, ‘I need to be with my daughter and pregnant wife. Please.’ My eyes fill with tears. I imagine Maram and our kids on the other side of the checkpoint. They don’t have blankets or even enough clothes. I can hear female soldiers, chatting and laughing.”

Toha soon learns he has arrived at the Be’er Sheva detention center in Israel. He joins hundreds of other detainees who are subjected to bathrooms without running water and toilet paper, indifferent medical attention, and inhumane treatment at the hands of the soldiers. Toha witnesses a young man being beaten for crying out that he is innocent and needs to see his mother. Some Israeli soldiers reinforce the humiliating situation of the detainees by insisting they say “Baa” as the soldiers sing an Arabic children’s song, “Oh, my sheep!”

Eventually Toha, who earned my M.F.A. in creative writing from Syracuse University and had been published in the New Yorker, is able to speak to a soldier with authority. Toha explains that he has no ties to Hamas. And though he believes “Gaza has been devastated by the Israeli occupation” he “could not justify the atrocities committed against Israeli civilians. There is no reason to kill anyone like that.” The soldier says that if his story checks out, he will be released in the days to come. Toha is told to be patient. Inexplicably, Toha is released the next day. His jailers apologize for the mistake and identify him as “the writer.” When Toha reunites with his wife he discovers that she used his phone to reach out to people around the world including the U.S. where Toha has been published and developed professional relationships. In all likelihood, his notoriety has sparred him great suffering. He is lucky.

Martyrs, Heroes, and Judaism

Mosab Abu Toha’s experience and that of the unnamed bound man beckon us to reconsider our notions of heroism, martyrdom, and what it means to be human. We are called to ask to what extent we have embraced the virtues of the forceful hero over the principled martyr.

“Martyrs and Heroes” was the very title of a paper Erich Fromm authored for a Jewish audience in 1967, following the Six Day War. Viewed through the lens of Fromm’s work, the celebration of killing reflected in the Israeli military’s Telegram channel and the degradation of the “other” so clearly represented in the viral photo of the soldier standing over the bound man is not only a violation of the universal ethical injunction to love life; they are also violations of the most profound spiritual-ethical insights of Judaism.

Fromm was not just alarmed by the Six Day War, he was also concerned with the wider response to the war within the Jewish community. He had turned away from Zionism in the 1920s and remained a steadfast critic of the political project of creating an exclusively “Jewish” state in Palestine through the end of his life. He also argued Palestinians had a right to return to the homes they were forced out of by war since 1948.

In “Martyrs and Heroes” (1967), Fromm questioned the discourse among Jews following Israel’s resounding military victory over Arab countries. He was particularly concerned with the exuberance and newfound pride many felt in witnessing Jewish military prowess. Israel’s dominant military victory shattered the stereotype of Jewish physical weakness. Some felt the success reconnected the Jewish people to the heroism of their cultural heritage. For Fromm, a lifelong student of Judaism and its prophetic prescriptions for a life of love, truth and justice, the emphasis on heroism, characterized by the resort to force and violence and the celebration of fame, conquest, revenge, and glory, was a betrayal of the heart of Judaism, not its authentic embodiment.

“The Jewish tradition from Jeremiah to only a few decades ago chose the martyr as its ideal,” Fromm explained. Yet this tradition was being trampled upon by those who “falsified” Jewish history “as having had an admiration of heroes” and those writing off “2500 years” of history to claim the immoral conquest of Canaan as “the lost link of Jewish history which is immediately followed by the wars of 1948, 1956 and 1967.”

Fromm argued that it is the martyr and not the hero who “is the most admired figure in the Jewish tradition.” He cited the example of Rabbi Akiba, who defied the Roman decree to abandon studying and teaching the Torah and suffered the penalty of death as an exemplification of the spiritual-ethical center of Judaism. The martyr forsakes violence and conformity, prioritizing spiritual-ethical integrity over safety and even survival. Fromm wrote,

“The word ‘martyr’ means ‘witness’ in Greek and Latin, one who voluntarily suffers death as the penalty of refusing to desert one’s belief, or one of its tenets. He is a witness to the truth of his belief. The martyr does not fight, he does not avenge his death on those who condemn him; he does not try to use power; on the contrary, he is a witness that man can reach a height where truth is stronger than power. He affirms his identity as a man who is true to himself, even at the expense of dying.”

The martyr faces forces that cannot be physically overtaken. They cannot rely upon the strength of the body. Theirs is not a strength of power-over-other but an inner power to transcend their most basic animal strivings to allude pain and peril so as to prioritize ethical-spiritual commitments. The martyr refuses to live according to the inhuman injunction to survive at any cost including one’s integrity and highest values. The example of the Greek philosopher, Socrates, stands out as an iconic exemplar of such a vision of principled, nonviolent human excellence. As we read in Plato’s Apology, Socrates proclaimed that the “unexamined life is not worth living” (38a), and preferred to die before renouncing philosophical inquiry.

The concept of the martyr radically conflicts with dominant cultural beliefs that victory, survival, and self-interest should be sought after at all costs. These values are among the most cherished in American culture, a society in which the majority of people identify as Christian. The irony, as Fromm would point out in his last book, To Have or To Be? (1976), is that Christianity’s central figure—Jesus—remains one of the most iconic of all martyrs; and a clear repudiation of the traditional hero that so many idolize. Fromm wrote,

“The Christian hero was the martyr, for as in the Jewish tradition, the highest achievement was to give one’s life for God or for one’s fellow beings. The martyr is the exact opposite of the pagan hero personified in the Greek and Germanic heroes. The heroes’ aim was to conquer, to be victorious, to destroy, to rob; their fulfillment of life was pride, power, fame, and superior skill in killing….”

To the extent Jesus can be called a hero it must be acknowledged that his heroism was defined by martyrdom. “He was the hero of love, a hero without power, who did not use force, who did not want to rule, who did not want to have anything. He was a hero of being, of giving, of sharing.” The martyr, in the traditional sense, Fromm explained in “Martyrs and Heroes,” is defined against the soldier.

“He has not the advantage of the soldier in war of being with others and being praised by those at home for his courage. The martyr is usually alone; he is in the hands of enemies who sneer at him and make him feel that he is a fool.”

Fromm’s depiction of the martyr as a solitary person subjected to the sneering and humiliation of his enemy without the advantage of a supportive army reads as a description of the Palestinian prisoner sitting before his interrogator. Given Toha’s experience it is difficult not to imagine that the unknown man’s wounds have been caused by his self-righteous interrogator. Who cannot help but to see a martyr in the firm, dignified resilience of a man stripped of his clothes, treated as an object to be tied down, blood oozing from unrecognized and untreated wounds? A human being forced to sit before a captor clad in the symbols of patriarchal manhood and equipped with the weaponry of nationalism—weaponry capable of ending his existence with a quick pull of a trigger, and yet he sits unbowed in conviction of his humanity—of Palestinian humanity.

To be clear, the martyr is not someone who wishes to die or seeks out death. Such a conception of martyrdom would constitute necrophilia. The true martyr is a lover of life and does not dispense with life flippantly. As Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. remarked, during a February 10, 1966 Convocation at Illinois Wesleyan University, sensible people do not seek out imprisonment, abuse, or death. But the lover of life or the principled martyr refuses to evade harm at the cost of their most fundamental values, those which give existence—survival—its worth.

“Nobody with any sense loves to go to jail. But if he puts you in jail, you go in that jail and transform it from a dungeon of shame to a haven of freedom and human dignity. Even if he tries to kill you, you develop the inner conviction that there are some things so dear, some things so eternally true, some things so precious that they are worth dying for. And if a man has not discovered something that he will die for, in a sense he is not fit to live. And the nonviolent discipline says that there is power in this approach, precisely because it disarms the opponent and exposes his moral defenses.”¹

We do not know what transpired before or after the bound man was videoed. Yet it seems not too great a stretch to say that the bound man depicts that some things—like dignity—“are so precious that they are worth dying for.” Toha exemplified a similar commitment when he told the very military official capable of granting his release that the Israeli occupation of Gaza has been devastating and when he demanded his captors provide evidence for their accusation that he was a member of Hamas. And as we all bear witness to the humane responses to such indignities we cannot help but be moved to recognize the inhumanity in those wielding force against those wielding words, reason, and soul-gazing eyes to achieve their goals.

Fromm concluded his “Martyrs and Heroes” essay by acknowledging the right of Jews inside and outside of Israel to “now begin to admire heroes, military victories and preventive wars.” But he warned his audience that a turn to the hero at the expense of the martyr risked demeaning the most important, humanistic contributions of the Jewish tradition.

“…by disparaging the martyrs they disparage their greatest traditions, and not only theirs, but also those of the human race since the dawn of humanistic conscience, when values transcending the biological ones became the highest ones for men to reach.”

The martyr, as Fromm understood the experience, was one committed to principle, integrity, and love. To love ourselves and fully comprehend our own experience required recognizing the humanity in the other. Rabbi Akiba affirmed this common humanity, wrote Fromm, when he described the command to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18) as “the fundamental law of the Torah.” Similarly, when a non-Jewish man asked for an explanation of the essence of the Torah in as long as one could stand on one foot, the Jewish sage, Hillel, answered, “Do not do unto others what you would not want to be done unto you. This is the essence, and the rest is commentary; go and learn” (Shabbat 31a).²

As if to leave no ambiguity on the matter, the Jerusalem Talmud explains that God chose to begin humanity through a single person—Adam—in order to teach us to recognize the infinite worth of each person: “Whosoever destroys one soul, it is as though he had destroyed the entire world. And whosoever saves a life, it is as though he had saved the entire world” (Sanhedrin 4:9).

Those who, today, celebrate the humiliation, violation, and destruction of Palestinian humanity do not do so with the support of Prophetic Judaism. Theirs is a faith in force—in necrophilia—not the love of life or biophilia at the center of the Judaism of Hillel, the Judaism that inspired Erich Fromm’s prophetic teachings of love, reason, and humanity. Whatever our religious or ethical credo, we injure our very souls by tolerating, excusing, and numbing ourselves to the violation of human dignity. Let us speak with a clear and consistent voice for the value of each and every human life; let us muster the courage to inspirit our personal, professional, and political lives with an unwavering commitment to biophilia. And let us mindfully guard against being seduced by the “heroism” of force and domination.

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1. Listen to Rev. Dr. King’s speech here:

2. Erich Fromm, You Shall Be as Gods: A Radical Interpretation of the Old Testament and its Tradition. New York, Henry Holt and Company. 1966. Page 182, chapter VI.