Comic: Israel, Palestine, Titanic

I used ChatGPT 4.0/Dall-E 3.0 to create this image back in March 2024. My god. The idea was simple enough… make Israel look like an iceburg that the titanic was running into. Damned if I could get Dall-E to do it. Usually the map of Israel was way off, or the titanic was pointed the wrong way, or there was weird text added in the wrong places. I don’t even fully remember what the idea I had in my head was, but this wasn’t it, it’s a compromise. I needed to upload a map of israel to ChatGPT to get anything like an accurate Israel iceberg. I think the Titanic is supposed to represent the gaping flaw in the original establishment of Israel – the Palestinians were already there. Eventually I got this image which I massaged in gimp and added the text to. I don’t love the end result. As usual there were tantalizing early results that gave me enough false hope to keep trying.

What happening in Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and now Yemen and Iran is awful and incredibly dangerous. Nuclear war, genocide, intergenerational trauma dangerous. I have no solutions. There is enough blame and pity to go around to everyone.

The quote about the Titanic, “Made by the Irish, sunk by an Englishman” is another thing I got from The Rest Is History podcast. Back in the day Belfast in northern Ireland was the big shipbuilding center for the U.K. It’s a fun quote, and you can feel free to interpret how it applies to the Palestinians and the Israelis, I can think of a couple.

I felt at the time and still feel that forgiveness is the only way out of this conflict. It’s obvious that won’t happen, and I don’t see how it could happen. There was a time when a two-state solution seemed possible, but in 1995 Yitzak Rabin was assassinated. As a former hardliner who had seen the light, he was uniquely suited to solving the conflict. An Israeli extremist assassin was able to change history for the worse, a very depressing thought that is very relevant today. At least that’s how it looks to me, no expert in this complicated history.

Here are some other decent attempts I got from Dall-E. Maybe better than the image I went with. I really wanted the Titanic to be coming forom the left and about to hit the iceberg of Israel! But it was always going in the wrong direction, or had already hit… which of course it has.