The message of the images – The attack on October 7 and violence as an image

Haindorf-Lecture 2026

Prof. Dr. Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann

The lecture addresses the question of what role images play in conveying and escalating extreme anti-Semitic violence and how they are deliberately used as political and ideological messages. The focus is on the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, and the mass distribution of photos and videos that not only documented the violence but were themselves part of its perpetration and escalation. Particular attention is paid to the thesis that the visual staging of violence deliberately activated historical memories in order to generate a specific form of collective fear. The images were intended to evoke references to earlier pogroms and the Shoah – not as a historical repetition, but as a deliberately deployed weapon. Using documents and image strategies, media scholar Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann shows that the attack on October 7 was a new type of mass crime broadcast live, using modern visual media to communicate genocidal messages. Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann is Professor of Visual Culture, Media Studies, and German Memory and Cultural History in the Communication and Media Studies program and at the European Forum at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of the book “Gewalt als Bild: Die Bilder vom 7. Oktober im Spiegel der visuellen Erinnerung an die Shoah” (Violence as Image: The Images of October 7 in the Mirror of Visual Memory of the Shoah), recently published by Neofelis Verlag in Berlin.

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