Now iconic images of hostages from the south of Israel taken by Hamas on October 7 appeared everywhere in the thousands. First in NYC, they are impossible not to see. The original paper flyers sported a red banner at the top of the page with the word KIDNAPPED in bold white letters, a family photograph of a hostage, and a white border on the bottom of page with Bring them Home NOW in red letters between a small black box containing bare biographical information and an appeal to join the global effort calling for their release, and a QR code. Paper flyers were later replaced by decals made of PET plastic paper, which are easier to apply and harder to remove. These had a slightly different formal arrangement but with the same red, white, and black framing of the portrait-photograph. They are the faces of babies, children, young men and women, parents, uncles and aunts, cousins, and grandparents. Where I live in NYC, they are situated up and down West End Ave, Broadway, Amsterdam Ave, and Riverside Drive, visual icons of “the Jewish experience,” lived and vicarious, after October 7.

The hostage-flyers were the creation of two Israeli artists living in New York City. Profiled here at the NYT, the artists say they wanted to do something, to say something, to leave a human impression after October 7. They reproduced the photographic images with permission from the families and started posting them all over New York City. They uploaded the images online and invited others to do the same. It was a wildly successful, ongoing public-art event.  You can find the website created by the artists here. It includes a digital copy of every flyer, which can be translated into multiple languages for the user to download and post.

The hostage-flyer project draws on the Conceptualist movement in contemporary art. Conceptualism privileges concept and process over a unique, original finished work of art. Intentionally obscuring the hand of the artist, Conceptualist art will often include instructions, which invites broad public participation in the manifestation of the work. Radically democratic, the do-it-yourself (DIY) aesthetic is evident at the hostage-flyer website. The artists who conceived the hostage-flyers appeal to the public with these instructions, “Please download & print as many copies as you can, in color or black and white, at home or at a local print store. Using tape or a staple gun, place as many posters as possible in the public space. Billboards, public transit stations, poles, or any other spots outside will do! Our goal is to create a widespread targeted effort to maximize awareness among the global community. Be safe – don’t provoke or instigate any conflicts with people or officials. Act quickly and stay alert.”

This kind of art is multiple and anonymous. Key to their affective power, the most important aspect of the hostage-flyers is their standard digital look and iconic production. [1] The hostage is transformed into an icon, the icon into a hostage. [2] The images of the face on a flyer is framed in a field that holds them. [3] The creators of the icon are anonymous, as are the people who print and post multiple copies. [4] There is no original image or prototype.  In serial form, each copy is a copy of a copy on digital file. The image production begins with a digital photograph, easy to reproduce. [5] The images proliferate, appearing everywhere.  [6] The icon shapes attention. The flyers are objects of care inviting the sympathy and aggression of iconodules and iconoclasts.

The simple snapshot format of the hostage-flyer crystalizes what is perhaps the stubborn essence of Jewishness and Israeliness –the intimate and familial social bond. In the NYT profile, the artists relate how after October 7 they were left feeling “useless and miserable” under an “unbearable” weight. Expressing not an iota of hate or revenge, the concern is simply for “these poor people,” for “home” and for “loved ones.” They are “our people,” “our family.” The snapshots recall an impression of innocence, the lives of ordinary people who were complete and whole before the disaster that struck them. Our people are the secular face of Israel. They are family from kibbutzim, development towns, all over the country, Thai and Tanzanian workers, and Bedouin citizens of Israel.

The artists knew the flyers would be physically attacked. Here at the New York Times, vandals justify the destruction of what they see as Zionist propaganda intended to rally support for a war that they believe is a genocide. Offended by the flyers and tearing them down, they impute intentional malice to the posting of the image, as if the flyers themselves were “making the conflict worse,” as if they were “anti-Islamic war propaganda.” One person interviewed insists that the people putting up the posters “don’t care about people’s lives,” complaining that the posters do not include information contextualizing the massacres of October 7 in relation to the history of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. “Why did this happen and what are the events that led to this happening?” He goes on to say, “I think they’re putting them up to bait people to take them down” “I think it’s disgusting how they’re trying to destroy people’s lives.” The article reports one bad faith argument that the placing of flyers intentionally targeted Palestinians in the neighborhood. There are video recordings of angry and, frankly, self-righteous people tearing them down. In some cases, they are confronted and challenged and their own image is uploaded and circulates online. There’s the blonde guy in the neighborhood who writes over the faces on a regular basis the numbers of the dead in Gaza as reported by Hamas run Health Ministry. There’s the people who affix “Occupier,” “Free Palestine,” “mass murder in my name,” “genocide” stickers over or directly on top of the image of the hostage, as if to impute guilt on them.

These hostile reactions end up forming part of the larger work, the act of tearing down the flyers creating its own negative after-impression that contributes physically to the hostage-flyer project. First, the paper flyers were ripped down leaving behind ripped up bits. The decals were harder to remove. You can see the remains of the decals, the images that are torn and cut with scissors and razors, leaving behind the shredded image of a face of a child or a young woman or old man or a young man. We know from the history of iconoclasm that a defaced image is itself an image; a different kind of image, perhaps more powerful than the original image. The intentional act of violating the physical image only highlights the violence suffered by these people and their families on October 7. The damage caused to the picture tears at the vital expression of the face, the nose, ears, especially the eyes and mouth. The vandals leave behind impressions of symbolic violence all over the neighborhood, stretching for blocks and blocks. These are the impressions made by physical strips of black, red, and white ink and torn photographic images made of paper, polyethylene (?), tape. And by the ugly scrawls overwriting the image in black and blue ink.

Defacing the image of a hostage from Israel is an honest and open act of hatred. There’s no other word for it. We can also call it anti-Semitic. Because these Israelis are mostly Jews, and because these are portrait-images of Jewish faces; and, yes, they sit along with the image of non-Jews whose lives were joined to Jews in the south of Israel and who share their fate. Because these Jews and non-Jews in Israel belong to a larger global community. The Jewish activists who join in attacking these images are the exception that proves the rule. For people who simply hate Israel, these lives don’t matter, they are settler-colonialists, not human beings whose suffering and dignity are caught up in the violence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The hostage-flyers are anti-Palestinian only if one thinks the very existence of Israel is irreducibly anti-Palestinian. The flyers are violent only if one thinks Jews in Israel are legitimate targets of “armed resistance.” In fact, the flyers do not call for revenge or for war. There is nothing on the flyers to indicate that beyond their mere being-there. There are no Zionist slogans or Israeli-state insignia attached to them. By way of contrast, compare them to the hostility of the “pro-Israel” flyers that say “Fuck Hamas” or “The West is Next” or to the “pro-Israel” people who write over or tear down “Free Gaza” and “Free Palestine” stickers and rip up Palestinian flag decals. Compare them also to the “pro-Palestine” flyers that accuse Israel of conducting genocide, feature fedayeen resistance fighters, call for the abolition of Israel, and the Intifada and red triangle tags that appear in the neighborhood. The hostage-flyers are nothing like that. Violent is the situation of massacre and war, and the abuse and killing of people in the south of Israel and in Gaza, not the simple photographs of Jews captured in the center of this vortex.

Where I live, the images and their remains are still everywhere, and continue to trigger. The neighborhood responds. Reactions vary. There are passerby and people in the neighborhood watching. Mostly the postering, the counter-postering, and the anti-counter-postering is anonymous. As soon as they are torn down, the flyers always come back. People in the neighborhood fix the faces on streetlamps, subway stairwells and station walls, utility boxes, pole mounted traffic control cabinets, scaffold poles, mailboxes. All of it weighing heavily, Israel and Palestine signal a distinct and kinetic zone of concern and contention in the urban fabric.

Actually, the hostages are not everywhere in NYC. They are not in midtown, Harlem, Soho, or Queens. The flyers and the symbolic violence and the hate they incite appear mostly along streets around universities and in “Jewish neighborhoods,” which is to say parts of Manhattan and gentrifying sections of Brooklyn where lots of Jews live. To feel it, you enter into the zone they create. The zone is an affective structure. The flyers pull together people who love Israel and the people who live there, and people in this country who hate Israel and the Jews who live there into a negative moral community.