Social media and the Israel-Palestinian conflict
Some in Conn. say it shows the true nature; others say it’s ‘fueling the fury’
The Israel-Palestinian conflict is far away from the United States and southern Connecticut, some 5,000 miles, and the most recent outbreak that ended with a ceasefire last week was fought with a mix of missiles and air strikes, killing hundreds of non-combatants.
Turn on a laptop or open an Instagram account, and the conflict was brought home with heart-pounding urgency.
And as a means of shaping American public opinion, the images found easily on social media have become another digital sector of the Israel-Palestinian struggle. On almost any social media platform, a viewer can watch horrifying images of the pain and suffering of war, typically framed in such a way as to blame the Israeli military, or Hamas militants, for the carnage.
In Connecticut, some on the pro-Palestinian side seems to applaud and appreciate social media, while others in the proIsrael camp say it distorts the facts.
Still, both sides have created internet infographics to reshape the terms used to describe the conflict, or to provide a historical narrative favorable to one cause or the other, notes a professor of Middle East Studies at the University of Connecticut.
As part of an effort to influence public opinion, Jeremy Pressman said, “Palestinians and Israelis push out videos, photos, commentary, etc, as they have done since the rise of social media.”
To pro-Palestinian activists, such as a high-school student from Newtown and a graduate student at Yale University, social media is a crucial means to bring what they say is the true nature of the conflict and the longtime suffering of the Palestinian people to the attention of the world.
“Social media has such an impact,” said Mariam Azeez, a Newtown teenager who took part in a recent pro-Palestinian rally in Stamford, and who shares feeds from Palestine on social media.
Yale graduate student Dina Omar said she believes social media accounts and raw footage from Gaza have created a better picture of the conflict. “The U.S. mainstream media, its discourse, its language, often acts like a shield that obscures and confuses who is the aggressor and who is the victim,” she wrote in an email.
But to pro-Israel activists, like Diane Sloyer of Stamford, the social-media campaign is deceptive and dangerous, spurring anti-Semitism and skewing the debate to minimize terrorism. Jewish advocacy groups say the surge of engagement around the recent Israel-Palestinian conflict has also led to a raft of anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. and Europe, and that anti-Semitism is also growing online, with some 17,000 posts on Twitter promoting hatred against Jews in one week alone.
As Sloyer sees it, young people who consume news and information about the conflict from social media are being fed misinformation and disinformation.
“The view that — because Israel protects its citizens, and uses incredible technology to defend its skies — the ‘imbalance of death’ means that Israel is immoral is an obscene, perverse view that basically expects more Israelis to die so that the conflict will be more ‘even-handed.’ This view is prevalent on television and social media,” said Sloyer, CEO of the United Jewish Federation of Greater Stamford, New Canaan and Darien. She believes social media, as well as mainstream media, are spreading false and harmful attitudes and messages about the conflict.
The chairman of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, said: “We are tracking acts of harassment, vandalism and violence as well as a torrent of online abuse. It’s happening around the world — from London to Los Angeles, from France to Florida, in big cities like New York and in small towns, and across every social media platform.”
At one the most visible sites for the pro-Palestinian cause, the @eye.on.palestine Instagram site, videos of the destruction caused by Israeli airstrikes received hundreds of thousands of views. Meanwhile, at the Israel Defense Forces Instagram site, a visitor can see images of a young Israeli father taking shelter on the side of the road with a small infant during a recent rocket attack by Hamas, the the Islamic political organization and militant group which has used bombings to target civilians. YouTube is another site where the conflict has become front and center: a monologue by television host and comedian John Oliver, comparing the Israeli treatment
of Palestinians to the apartheid-era treatment of Black people in South Africa, went viral on social media this month — and drew its own video responses on YouTube from an Israeli comedian.
The conflict on social media has been termed “hashtag activism,” by media scholars, and it is a front line that is deepening divisions across the U.S. and the wider world. It is part of the battle for “hearts and minds,” a term that described the efforts to win support during the Vietnam era.
Pressman, associate professor of political science at the University of Connecticut, said shaping public opinion has been a feature of Israeli foreign policy for decades. The term “Hasbara” was coined to describe Israel’s use of public diplomacy, typically with the assistance of volunteer activists, to shape popular attitudes and belief. The term means “explanation” in Hebrew, but it can carry a negative connotation as “propaganda” or “spin,” as well.
“It is the explanation Israeli officials offer for Israel’s conduct,” said Pressman.
Social media activism had changed the rules of “explanation,” for both sides. Pressman, author of “The Sword is Not Enough” on the Arab-Israeli conflict and director of Middle East Studies at UConn, said the goal on both sides was to influence decision-makers in Washington — especially given the large audience which closely follows the news
from the region, from conventional sources or social media.
“Israel-Palestine makes a good media story, which means it gets a lot of coverage. The average viewer or reader probably sees and reads more about it than many other conflicts,” the professor said. “The U.S. gives Israel almost $4 billion a year in military aid. The U.S. is right in the middle of this.”
All of those factors make public opinion in the U.S. an important factor, Pressman said.
In many ways, efforts to massage public opinion and American policy-makers is an old story, as old as propaganda itself. The British intelligence services ran an extensive covert campaign across the American media in the days before the U.S. entered World War II on the side of the Allies in late 1941, aiming to plant pro-British and anti-Nazi stories in the American press, from an office in Rockefeller Center in midtown Manhattan. The Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939 also saw an extensive public-opinion campaign in the U.S. and Europe to provide support to the Loyalist forces in the conflict, featuring rallies, essays, films, public art with a strong political agenda and posters. The conflict in northern Ireland generated activism and militancy in the U.S. for decades.
Now, in the 21st century, anyone with a Twitter account or a handful of Facebook followers can get into the propaganda game or provide moral support for one side of a conflict or another. And that
carries inherent risks in how information — or disinformation — can get spread, notes an expert on the Middle East and counterterrorism.
“The thing about social media — everybody, me included, has a love-hate relationship with it,” said Hagar Chemali, a commentator and analyst from Greenwich who was the spokesperson for the United States Mission to the United Nations. “It can be an amazing place to be able to engage the broader public, or be published, or showcase work. The problem is, when you have a situation this complicated, technically the conflict has been going on since 1948, it is so complicated, so nuanced, and so many different chapters that have got us to today. Without knowing that history, it’s hard to make a judgment call based on the videos you’re seeing. They evoke emotion — they’re meant to evoke a quick reaction.”
Chemali said skepticism is a useful tool to navigate the internet.
“I look at every post that has a photo or video with skepticism and try to find a way to independently verify before trusting it . ... When you have a complicated situation, social media does not help in explaining, and this is too complicated a situation” for quick hits on Tik-Tok or Instagram, Chemali said.“And fueling the fury is not healthy or conducive to actually getting to a solution, at all.”