The problem is not that Celine Ghandour, the Lebanese performer who posts videos of herself speaking about being displaced by the war, strolls through the rows of tents stretching across Beirut. The problem is that the camera offers a more honest account than her words do. It does not capture the broader experience of displacement; instead, it reveals a carefully staged scene centered on her. Both she and her camera fail to move beyond her own image. 

Ghandour’s real skill lies in the layered performance she constructs: placing her acting and rhetoric precisely where they are most likely to capture the attention of a familiar audience. What is, in reality, a deeply human and painful experience becomes visually compelling once it is absorbed into a system of images and anticipation. The fear we once encountered in news bulletins and field reports has been transformed into content about a place she has effortlessly entered and appropriated.

Yet what the camera is capable of revealing, Ghandour edits out and trims away, reshaping it into an experience from which she paradoxically excludes herself, even as she denies the reality and hardship of displacement. Through her lens, we do not see displacement and its complexities; we see her details within it. She becomes more important than the place she is filming. That is the paradox: the very camera intended to construct a narrative ends up exposing its artificiality and deceit.

Some of the photos and videos she shares feature others she refers to as her companions and neighbors in the tents: a young woman peeling potatoes, the voices of young men speaking to her, passing faces that never quite settle into the frame. Yet these fleeting glimpses are not enough to convey the experience of displacement. There is a clear effort to keep Ghandour alone at the center of the scene, speaking either to people we never see or filming herself in conversations with individuals who remain outside the frame.

The videos do not operate on their own. They work in tandem with a gaze that seeks to render displacement as a particular kind of image: orderly, visually appealing, and easily consumed. It is a version of displacement carefully arranged to be watched, believed, and, ultimately, to attract attention.

Since the war on Gaza, self-documentation and personal visual diaries have become increasingly prominent. Displaced people turned their daily lives into ongoing visual narratives that audiences followed and awaited, driven by an inability to comprehend how human beings could continue living under genocide. In Gaza, these images carried the shock of witnessing people whose entire worlds were being destroyed around them, fleeing a campaign of extermination that relentlessly pursued them. Their daily routines became a vital connection to the outside world.

There, the surrender of visual control was not a choice but a necessity. The randomness of life seeped into the frame: worn shoes, improvised cooking methods, the voices of mothers, the uncertainty of young men, cramped spaces, constant flight, the buzz of drones overhead, and water that needed to be purified before it could be consumed. Details that might otherwise seem insignificant entered our daily consciousness, allowing us to understand the suffering of others: how they cooked, waited for aid deliveries, and devised fragile ways of sustaining life amid devastation.

These forced visual diaries left little room for turning hardship into spectacle. Those documenting their lives were often less able to exploit their circumstances precisely because they could not escape them. They remained bound by the conditions they were trying to survive.

With Ghandour, however, the footage appears to be about her first and foremost. She presents herself as one of them, as part of their tragedy, without experiencing it as a total uprooting, and with a certain ease toward conditions that others were forced into by war. She showcases her ability to endure life in a tent with composure and elegance, wearing carefully crafted makeup and advancing a personal narrative about dignity, steadfastness, and attachment to the land.

The self she has constructed occupies the center of every frame, while everything left outside it is ultimately more significant: family, loss, uncertainty, fear, and time suspended in limbo.

When her actions were challenged by someone who was genuinely displaced, Ghandour reframed her presence in the Biel tents as a family conflict, turning it into yet another story about a self-determined person living on its own terms. Rather than distinguishing between the tragedy of displacement and her personal narrative, she lashed out at those who questioned her account and turned her daily posts into a new episode in a long-running series centered on her displacement.

The issue is not the presence of a beautiful image inside a tent. It is a struggle over the image itself: who has the authority to define what displacement means? The displaced person who has lost their home, or the individual who enters the tent armed with a camera and the ability to turn a place of suffering into an ongoing sequence of episodes?

The harm does not stem from directly contradicting the narratives of displaced people. Rather, it lies in determining the form through which the experience is presented and in compelling viewers to perceive displacement solely through the camera’s frame and limitations. Everything that falls outside the frame is erased: the displaced community itself, the details of sleeping, cooking, running, reminiscing about the village, the solidarity of bodies gathered together, and the fear that cannot find words.

What makes Ghandour’s portrayal troubling is that it renders catastrophe into something easily possessed, as though it were an experience that could be neatly arranged, directed, and explained away in a matter of moments.

Catastrophe does not unfold in neatly arranged episodes. It does not lend itself to a ready-made meaning, nor does it quickly transform into a lesson in endurance. There is always something about catastrophe that remains beyond crafted language, beyond the image, and beyond the ability to fully articulate it. Displacement, when it is a genuine uprooting, does not reveal itself all at once, nor does it allow those living through it to turn it into a coherent narrative so quickly.

That is why the issue runs deeper than the tent itself. The tent is pulled from a space marked by silence, loss, confusion, and fear, and relocated into a space of public display, where everything becomes available for presentation and more orderly than it ought to be.

What we learned from the displaced people of southern Lebanon is that catastrophe alters the conditions of dwelling, the way people relate to place, and ultimately their bodies and sense of self. Authentic videos leave the witness unsettled, at a loss for words, unable to transform what has happened into a complete and polished scene. With Ghandour, however, the image is self-assured. It knows where to stand, where to place the face, where to position the tent, and where to raise the slogan. Displacement becomes something that can be staged, while pain acquires its own lighting, angle, rhythm, and method.

What is unsettling is that catastrophe does not appear as something that shatters language. Instead, it becomes something that helps the person behind the image command the audience’s attention and draw it toward herself.

What we know of Ghandour’s experience amounts to a visible presence in the tents and, by her own account, movement from one tent to another. Displacement, as the loss of a home and the suspension of ordinary life, appears only as a symbolic backdrop. Even at the level of performance, certain details invite scrutiny: the careful arrangement of the scenes, the cleanliness of her hands and face, her ability to appear, leave, and move freely, her presence in elevators, on the street, and across her personal platforms. All of this serves as a reminder that the tent is neither her only world nor her final reality. She can enter it and leave it at will, while genuinely displaced people do not enjoy that privilege.

The problem with this kind of narrative is that it renders displacement manageable precisely because it is not experienced as total uprooting. Memory, family, home, and meaning are condensed into moments that can be filmed and consumed. Displacement ceases to be a full social catastrophe and instead becomes a performative form: something that can be staged, endured, photographed, and transformed into an uplifting personal story about strength and perseverance. A public figure enters a space of suffering, organizes her relationship to it, emerges with an even more polished image, and leaves those who bear the actual pain outside the story’s center.

Ghandour attempts to manufacture meaning by dividing life into episodes: food, the tent, sleep, defending the tent, and eventually political commentary. A sequence of installments that makes displacement easy to follow, but not necessarily to understand. The children, teenagers, and young people of Gaza did not use tents to make themselves more likable. They were trying to survive amid devastation they had no means of escaping. Ghandour, by contrast, uses the confinement of the tent and the camera’s focus on her to produce a ready-made image: that of someone capable of turning temporary life among displaced people into a personal narrative of endurance.

Ghandour is not necessarily malicious or dishonest, and we have not investigated her personally. Yet harm sometimes lies in the way attention and perception are directed. There are situations we do not wish to confront in their entirety. Instead, we take from them only what allows us to produce a swift and reassuring human meaning, leaving aside everything that resists arrangement or narrative order. Her political views matter little here because her positioning within the tent functions less as a political statement than as a mode of self-presentation. The tent is not used to say something about displaced people; it is used to create a place for the image-maker within suffering that is ultimately not her own. Her sympathy appears compromised because what we see is her face, rather than a deeper engagement with those she claims to represent.

The problem is that the image separates an act from its layers of meaning. The tent ceases to be a place with its own history, inhabitants, homes, fears, losses, and suspended time experienced by families and children. Once meaning is detached from those to whom it belongs, pain itself becomes transferable, passing from one person to another, from one face to the next. The question then is no longer: What happened to these people? Instead, it becomes: How did this woman appear within what happened to them?

That shift is the heart of the problem. Displacement cannot be understood through the appearance of a tent alone, nor through the words of someone who enters it. It can only be understood through the web of relationships that surrounds it: those who remain outside the frame, those who lost their homes, those who cannot return, those who cannot leave, and those who are forced to watch their suffering displayed through a face that does not resemble their own.

Violence is not limited to physical assault, bombardment, or being forced from one’s home. It also begins when people are excluded from politics, stripped of the ability to speak, deprived of agency, and denied control over the conditions of their own lives. There is a more contemporary form of violence as well: replacing the image of those who suffer with one that is more comfortable, more dramatic, and framed through a tone of superiority. This is the more distant, subtle dimension of politics.

We are confronted with a system of annihilation that pushes people outside politics itself, outside decision-making, and outside the ability to organize their lives except within the constraints imposed upon them. Displacement, therefore, is not merely an experience of poverty or hardship. It is an experience of dispossession: not owning your home, your time, your body, your silence, or even the image through which your story will be told.

This is where the ethical ambiguity begins. The problem is not that the tent is a place of suffering. The problem lies in transforming a place of suffering into one that appears livable on camera. Pain is no longer presented as rupture or devastation, but as something manageable, orderly, and capable of granting visibility and meaning to the person at the center of the image. It is as though what happened to people could be endured, if only we knew how to smile within it, cook within it, sleep within it, and turn it into a daily story.

This is perhaps the most troubling aspect of the image Ghandour presents: not that it denies suffering, but that it renders suffering consumable, while positioning herself as a distorted reflection of it.

The issue is not solidarity with displaced people. The issue arises when solidarity becomes a stage for the self. When the message is no longer, “Look at the displaced,” but rather, “Look at me living among them.” At that point, the tent ceases to bear witness to the uprooting of people from their homes and instead becomes an ethical backdrop for constructing a new and compelling public persona.

In this way, the emotions of the marginalized become raw material for the production of visibility and acclaim: through them, over them, and at their expense.