This book is a critical forensic visual research project investigating the IDF dating-app culture reflected in profiles that potentially are connected to violations of international humanitarian law.

The individuals depicted have been censored for legal reasons and to ensure the author’s safety, following expert advice.

Short-term, but long-term, is an archive of over 300 images compiled, redacted, and appropriated via dating apps by Federico Vespignani.

Heterosexual male combatants of the Israel Defence Force (IDF) 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 degrees of crimes.

Social media has changed the way the Western audience perceives wars. There has been a movement from professional media operators towards more intimate raw footage captured and published by individual soldiers on the ground. This trend has enabled social media platforms to be a new venue for the image of war. Therefore, these visual narratives serve as legitimization tools for military practices.

In this context, combatants have always prioritized war reality over civilians. In popular belief, the military term "ground truths, " which refers to soldiers' experiences near violence, is the most truthful account of the realities of war.

The diffuse 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 among the debris.

This narrative illustrates how they wield violence to protect their homeland, with the symbolic importance of their bodies serving to legitimize this violence to female viewers. 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.

With an essay by Adam Broomberg & Ido Nahari

Originally published as a limited edition softcover by Debatable Publishing in 2024.

550BC