Nicholas Mirzoeff is Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University and a theorist and practitioner of visual culture. In To See In the Dark: Palestine and Visual Activism Since October 7, he introduces himself by saying, ‘I’m Jewish and I’m anti-Zionist… To be an anti-Zionist Jew requires overcoming the combined efforts of the state of Israel, Zionism, and white supremacy to make this identity impossible. For the US magazine The Tablet, anti-Zionists like me are “un-Jews.”’
Mirzoeff explains the metaphor of ‘seeing in the dark’ as seeing outside the space dominated by the white-supremacist settler-colonial way of seeing. The IDF’s ‘white sight’ has defined all of Gaza as a kill box, whereas ‘To see in the dark is to see outside the kill box… Seeing in the dark is the practice of solidarity, the means by which to see how colonialism is practiced.’
Palestinians play an indispensable leading role in the visual activism that makes the genocide visible to the rest of the world, risking and all-too-often losing their lives to capture scenes of horror and cruelty but also the love and care with which survivors are searched for, rescued and treated by humanitarian and medical staff. For those who identify spontaneously with an anti-colonial struggle, these images immediately establish an emotional link with the victims. For colonisers and their descendants, especially Jews, identification is not so easy. Mirzoeff notes that ‘The intensity with which some Jews have identified with Israel is also part of their claim to be on the dominant side of racial hierarchy.’ Mirzoeff repudiated that impulse, his grandmother did not. On the boat to Palestine around 1923 she was a refugee, but by the time she stepped off she had metamorphosed into a settler, becoming a fighter in the Haganah, the Jewish militia that became the core of the IDF.
Anti-Zionist Jews have the unique ability to dismantle Zionism from the inside and to say things that non-Jews cannot say without being suspected of antisemitism. Mirzoeff can say that the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s definition of antisemitism is itself antisemitic; attack as ‘patently anti-Jewish’ the view that without Israeli state sovereignty Jews are necessarily weak; identify the feeling of being physically unsafe among Jewish New Yorkers and students after 7 October as emanating from their identification with the settler-colonial violence of the Israeli state; point out that the UN conclusion that sexual violence probably occurred during the 7 October attack was reached without any evidence; and say that Palestinian Jews and non-Jews lived together peacefully before Zionism and could do so after Zionism ends. Josh Dubnau agrees: ‘There were Jews thousands of years before Zionism and there will be Jews when Zionism is in the dustbin of history.’ Masha Gessen compares the genocide in Gaza to the Nazi liquidation of East European ghettos, and Gabor Maté compares it with Auschwitz. They all make an essential contribution to the struggle for a free Palestine.
(This review was part of the Palestine Book Forum published by Postmodern Culture on 5 September 2025 and available at https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/968576)