This post is about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Carles begins with a commercial image that plays on the sublation of racial difference. "Don’t u h8 when u think something is ‘beautiful’, then u find out that it it being used 2 sell u something?" he asks, adding that he thought the photograph "was a beautiful picture that was about ‘ending racism’, celebrating 2 beautiful people coming together as 1." Of course, this is the dream and the rhetorical tenor used by all the intercessionary agents who seek to resolve the conflict in the Middle East. A resolution to the territorial impasse is sold through the dream of peaceful coexistence, "beautiful" picture to be sure, but one that functions as a veneer pasted over an integuement of grievances. No wonder Carles feels "manipulated." A two-state solution may be the best hope, but if marketed as the equivalent of a harmonious interracial relationship rather than a tenuous balance, a rueful compromise, it seems doomed to remain forever unrealized. With tact and discretion, Carles leaves us to draw the inescapable conclusion from the mise-en-scene of the image itself: the light-skinned woman posed dolllike across the dark-skinned man's lap is a representation of the far-right Israeli view that it will be made a passive mannequin naked and vulnerable to ceaseless violation at the hands of an increasingly confident dark-skinned Other -- the far right's worst fears rendered as a seductive and sexually enticing tableau.
Carles combines this striking and foreboding image with a parable about the theft of property -- a coded fable about the plight of the Palestians. "In my digital art class, I actually made a symbol that looked like the ‘Nike Swoosh’ without even ever seeing it. I thought it was beautiful, but then my classmates accused me of ‘ripping off Nike’ and wondering ‘how could u have never seen the Nike logo b4?’" When Israel was first settled by Zionists, the plain fact of the presence of the Palestinians was sometimes as conveniently overlooked as the Nike swoosh (a potent symbol of American cultural ubiquity and global force) in Carles' anecdote. The beauty of the Zionist dream -- like Carles' ersatz swoosh -- could only be credited and flourish if what was in plain sight could somehow, through the force of sheer ideology, be overlooked. But the righteous honesty of Carles' classmates -- the global community? -- anchors him to reality and obviates his effort to illegal appropriate the intelectual property that has already been proven so valuable. Should Israel "just do it" and impose a unilateral solution? Carles would appear to have his doubts. He sarcastically points to an advertisement in Hebrew depicting Woody Allen costumed as a rabbi -- "But I did like the recent Am Appy custom Woody Allen campaign. Feel like it really went viral" -- to mock Israel's diplomatic efforts on the international scene. These attempts have had no traction, and stripped of their "American Apparel" -- the U.S. government's backing, propped by the lobbying efforts of AIPAC -- these naked claims would lie as lifeless as the woman in the opening image. Fittingly, Carles' final image shows an American soldier being disarmed by a child. "Does n e 1 know where I can get an advertising/marketing internship?" he asks, suggesting that if we put the children in charge of the media-messaging machine, American aggression could finally be allowed to recede and the MIddle Eastern conflict could be left in the hands of the next generation.
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