In 1975, film theorist Laura Mulvey coined the term “male gaze” to describe how women are portrayed on screen. The camera does not simply show reality — it frames women for a heterosexual male viewer. Women become visual objects, defined by how they serve the viewer’s pleasure, not by their own full humanity.

The concept applies far beyond film. A “gaze” is any dominant perspective that controls how another group is seen. The one doing the looking holds power; the one being looked at is flattened, reduced, and judged. The colonial gaze. The white gaze. The antisemitic gaze. In each, the subject is stripped of complexity and placed in a role that makes sense to the audience, not to themselves.

Israel is caught in such a gaze. Call it the “Israel Gaze.”

In the Israel Gaze, the Jewish state is the object, never the subject. It is to be observed, graded, managed — but rarely allowed to speak or act on its own terms. Its security concerns are minimized; its legitimacy treated as conditional.

Like the male gaze that zooms in on a woman’s body while ignoring the rest of her life, the Israel Gaze focuses on narrow, selective snapshots. Cameras linger on a checkpoint — but not the suicide bombings that created the need for it. They magnify airstrikes — but crop out the rockets that triggered them.

The framing serves the outside viewer, often a Western political elite, who want a morality play: powerful oppressor vs. powerless victim. Israel is assigned the role of aggressor. No matter the reality on the ground, the narrative is cast before the curtain rises.

And just as the male gaze reduces women to archetypes — seductress, mother, damsel — the Israel Gaze flattens Israel into “occupier,” “aggressor,” “settler state.” The country’s remarkable complexity — the ultimate decolonization project, a refuge for a persecuted people, a diverse democracy, a hub of innovation, a nation under constant threat — disappears from view.

This gaze is not neutral. It is a tool of power. In film, it props up patriarchy. In global politics, it reinforces the idea that Israel’s right to exist, defend itself, or define its own future depends on approval from outsiders who claim the right to judge.

Mulvey noted in her analysis that “her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation.” So it is in global politics, with the viewer solely transfixed on Israel’s supposed evils that the actual storyline – and path to peace – is lost out of sight.

Both the male gaze and the Israel Gaze deny the subject the dignity of being whole. Both reduce identity to an image crafted for someone else’s satisfaction. And both sustain an imbalance in which the viewer’s comfort matters more than the subject’s survival.

Israel faces two battles at once: the immediate fight for security and the deeper fight to be seen truthfully. Until the gaze changes, the story will never be told honestly — and the verdict will be written before the trial even begins.