How IDF TikTok Videos Aestheticize War into Entertainment after October 7, 2023

This chapter presents a visual and semiotic analysis of TikTok videos featuring male and female Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF's) soldiers and their portrayals of war in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023, attack. Drawing on a curated selection of three short-form videos chosen from an initial corpus of six, the study includes screenshots of key scenes to illustrate the most significant visual patterns. It investigates how the conflict is represented as lighthearted, aestheticized, and even entertaining—often stripped of its emotional and moral gravity. The study shows that TikTok facilitates a new form of military-entertainment complex in which aesthetics and irony obscure violence. While the Military-Entertainment Complex has long been present in traditional media such as news, photography, or Facebook posts, TikTok appears to be a platform that amplifies this type of content. The ethical implications of such representations—particularly the normalization of power imbalances and the erasure of suffering—are examined as part of a broader critique of how digital platforms shape our perception of war.