In the critically acclaimed Israeli co-production Waltz with Bashir (Vals Im Bashir, 2008), Zahava Solomon, a post-combat trauma expert, relates an anecdote about an Israeli soldier who survived the ordeal of the 1982 Lebanon War by looking at everything through an imaginary camera. ‘Wow! What great scenes,’ the soldier exclaimed. ‘Shooting, artillery, wounded people, screaming…’ With a series of still images, the film envisions the scene through his imaginary viewfinder that enabled him to experience the war like a movie or holiday snapshots, shielding him from its horrors. But, then, Solomon tells us, his camera ‘broke’, which the film renders with images of frames disrupted in a shutter gate, extending the metaphor of camera malfunction as previously still images become moving ones. Roving across the ruined landscape filled with wounded and slaughtered Arabian horses, the ‘camera’ finally rests on a close-up of a horse's eye, surrounded by flies, reflecting the soldier in its distended iris.

The film invites us to interpret the anecdote, as Solomon does, solely through the paradigm of trauma: the soldier's experience of war as ‘a series of dissociative events’. In this chapter, I argue that the trauma paradigm forms part of a dominant discourse that co-opts morality to its own ends and deflects attention from the wider ethical and political issues of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict. Seen beyond the trauma paradigm, the anecdote reflects the ‘derealization of military engagement’ (Virilio 1989: 1) – the Israeli soldiers’ ability to distance themselves from the consequences of military actions which they themselves are orchestrating. The ‘abstractification’ of reality through its representation in a frame is a way of alleviating moral anxiety about those actions. This abstractification persists even after the proverbial camera breaks, as testified by the image of Arabian horses rather than Arabs.

Like the imaginary viewfinder, Western news media construct perceptions of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict that usually do not provoke any moral problems. While Al-Jazeera and some other news networks provide alternative viewpoints, Western journalists tend to avoid areas perceived as controversial, such as alluding to colonial history as the basis of violence. In a survey of the UK public, the Glasgow University Media Group revealed ‘little understanding of the reasons for the conflict and its origins’, due to reliance on primetime TV news (Philo et al. 2003: 134).