"Short term, but long term" is an archive of over 300 images compiled, redacted, and appropriated via dating apps.
Heterosexual male combatants of the Israel Defence Forces took the photographs and shared them while they were operating in the Gaza Strip in 2024.
During the ongoing pulverization of Gaza conducted by the IDF in the wake of the attack of October 7, 2023, there has been a widespread online presence of videos and images recorded by members of the IDF documenting themselves, often committing various types of crimes.
Social media has changed how Western audiences perceive wars. There has been a movement from professional media operators towards more intimate raw footage captured and published by soldiers or civilians on the ground. This trend has been particularly notable in the Gaza Strip, where the Israeli army has not allowed access to international media and has systematically targeted Palestinian journalists. As a result, social media platforms have emerged as a new venue for war imagery.
The widespread trend by IDF male soldiers to publish war imagery on dating apps reflects, above all, a kind of cultural militarism within Israeli society and a process of erotic militarization. The images, often in the form of environmental portraits, have a sense of truth and immediacy. The male soldiers appear morally good and masculine. Sometimes, they frame their weaponry, and we see the result of their use in Gaza as a scorched-earth landscape. When they pose inside civilian homes, we see traces of what these houses used to be.
This narrative illustrates how IDF combatants wield violence to protect their homeland, with the symbolic importance of their bodies serving to legitimize to female viewers the violence they carry out. This dynamic appeals to a shared sense of identity and emotion, deepening the connection between the characters and their audience. Within this supremacist worldview, the glorification of some bodies depends on the destruction of others.
