It took the world by surprise, but as it turns out, the infamous “Trump Gaza” video with its golden statues of the President of the United States, Gazan children happily playing among dollar bills on the beach while Trump and Netanyahu sunbathe with cocktails in hand, was not, it appears, a crass vision of a Dubai-style future for the devastated Strip ordered by Donald himself.
No, it was a satirical version of the Trump “Riviera of the Middle East”, created by Solo Avital, an LA-based film-maker. He meant it as a play on Trump’s “megalomaniac idea”.
According to Avital, the whole video took him eight hours of work, playing with the tools of Arcana AI, a free image generator (well done, Arcana!) and Trump’s declaration of his vision on the future of Gaza.
Avital is a US citizen born in Israel, and he runs EyeMix, a visual company, with his business partner, Ariel Vromen (director of the 2012 film The Iceman, starring Michael Shannon, Winona Ryder and Chris Evans). The Trump video was created in early February as a joke and Vromen put it on Instagram but took it down after a few hours because Avital, as he tells The Guardian, feared “it might be a little insensitive and we don’t want to take sides”.
Indeed. On 26 February, Trump posted it on its Truth Social without any explanation. To Avital, the whole story is a cautionary tale: “We are storytellers, we’re not provocateurs. This is the duality of the satire: it depends what context you bring to it to make the punchline or the joke. Here there was no context and it was posted without our consent or knowledge”.
How did Trump find the video? Avital says he had shared the clip with some friends and an early version of it with actor Mel Gibson, whom Trump named as a special ambassador to Hollywood in January, and who has previously collaborated with EyeMix and Arcana. Gibson however, denied passing it on to the White House.
Avital woke up on February 27 to find “thousands” of messages from friends alerting him to Trump’s post. “If it was the skit for Saturday Night Live” he says “the whole perception of this in the media would be the opposite – look how wild this president is and his ideas, everyone would think it’s a joke.” This is, he says, “how fake news spreads when every network takes what they want and shoves it down their viewers with their narratives attached”.
Context, as always, is all. The Trump Gaza video however, will stay in our collective memory – and not as a joke.
