It's always complicated
As with everything else, social media greatly oversimplifies the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
We can set the “days since Damian nuked his Twitter account” sign back to zero. When I was out for a drive with my son on an absolutely stunning early summer Saturday, through some of the beautiful countryside surrounding Halifax, all I could think about was how I was going to own some people whom I’ve never met and have never followed, but who responded to some of my tweets about the latest Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
I finally had to ask myself, what am I doing with my life? There has to be something better I can do with my time than arguing with total strangers (and very possibly bots) about events happening on the other side of the world.
And then I was up past midnight arguing about it on Reddit. In the Formula One racing subreddit. (They locked the thread before I could respond to the guy who said the Balfour Declaration was issued because Britain owed money to the Rothschilds.)
According to many social media memes, there’s nothing to discuss anyway. This conflict which has roots going back to before the birth of Christ isn’t at all complicated. Israel is the bad guy and the Palestinians are helpless victims, full stop.
Batya Ungar-Sargon of Newsweek has noticed that American racial-justice politics, and a black-and-white worldview which divides people into oppressed and oppressors without any shades of gray, dominates discussion of the conflict on social media:
If you've been paying attention to social media over the past week, you will have seen this same attempt to redefine the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a racial power dynamic, casting Israel as infinitely powerful and Palestinians as completely without agency. And as in America, where antiracism has redefined racism and relocated the problem to a place where it costs little for white liberal elites to "do the work" combatting it, so has this happened in the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where real and urgent civil rights abuses against the Palestinians have been obscured by a binary, maximalist view of the situation that's now fully mainstream.
Here's what's actually happening on the ground in the Middle East: An ongoing round of fighting began in response to police brutality in Israel against Palestinians and a dispute in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in Jerusalem over a number of Palestinian families facing eviction. These two issues, combined with several other events—viral Tik Tok videos of young Palestinian boys beating up Orthodox Jews, a racist march of far-right Jewish nationalists in Jerusalem, Jewish and Arab mobs hunting members of the opposite ethnicity to brutalize them—created a situation in which tensions were soaring. These tensions blew up when Jerusalem Day, which commemorates Israel's recapturing of Jerusalem from the Jordanians in 1967, coincided with the holiday of Laylat al-Qadr, the holiest day of Ramadan. When Israeli police clashed with worshipers at Al-Aqsa Mosque, some armed with rocks, Hamas began lobbing rockets into Israel's civilian population centers, and Israel retaliated with airstrikes. Many people have since tragically lost their lives—83 in Gaza and seven in Israel. Meanwhile, in several Israeli cities, bands of Jewish and Arab hoodlums have been attacking each other in the streets.
That's the situation on the ground right now. But I suppose "national conflict between two groups that has been ongoing for decades, both of which can inflict huge amounts of suffering on each other, though not, to be sure, in equal measure" doesn't generate the right kinds of headlines.
It certainly makes for worse Instagram posts. "Israelis are the OPPRESSORS and Palestinians are the OPPRESSED," one viral Instagram post reads. "There is no 'fighting', there is only Israeli colonisation, ethnic cleansing, military occupation, and apartheid." This rhetoric is hardly new to the conflict, but it's become absolutely ubiquitous thanks to the binary of wokeness at play here: There is no "fighting" happening because one side, the Palestinian side, is subsumed by its victim status at the hands of Israeli "colonization." No weapon in the hands of a Palestinian is thus ever real—even, apparently, rockets that have killed Israelis—because Palestinians are the OPPRESSED in the situation, as the drawing would have it, and oppressed people cannot fight, apparently. It's wokeness 101: The oppressor has all the power, all the agency, and the Israelis are the oppressors. Case closed.
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Trevor Noah of the Daily Show summed up the situation with a single question: "If you are in a fight where the other person cannot beat you, how much should you retaliate when they try to hurt you?" Of course, he's right that there is no comparing Israel's military to Hamas. But seven Israelis have been killed. Per Noah's logic, because Hamas can't win in a military battle, those deaths don't count and the Jewish state should just bear them quiescently. And that's not a flaw in his logic; it's the logical endpoint of judging the value of human life based on whether the person who stole it has enough "power."
Why has this morally specious distortion gone mainstream? Just as the overreach of the antiracism movement in the summer of 2020 was enforced on social media with ruthless dog-piling and public smearing and shaming, people whose statements have been insufficiently woke—who have failed to cast Palestinians as pure victims and Israelis as pure aggressors—have been subjected to shocking amounts of abuse online. Climate change darling Greta Thunberg, actress Gal Gadot, New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Yang, and Senator Elizabeth Warren were all named and shamed as malefactors. Yang even submitted to a struggle session with his own employees for failing to mention Palestinian suffering in a tweet about this latest round of fighting.
Palestinian suffering is real. Too many have been killed in Gaza. Too many have been brutalized by the police. For too long, Palestinians living under military occupation in the West Bank have been deprived of basic civil rights, like the right to vote for the government that exercises state power against them and freedom of movement. For too long, Gaza has been forgotten and left to languish under an unnecessarily brutal blockade, its young people and children deprived of any future. Israel has all too often penalized nonviolent resistance instead of bolstering civil society and supporting a new generation of Palestinian leadership. These all fall squarely on Israel's shoulders, and all nonviolent means of pressuring Israel to solve these problems are legitimate.
But as with racism in America, the discourse that's been proliferating on the far Left for years and which is now part of the American mainstream rebrands these problems in ways antithetical to solving them. Just as no one is going to abolish the police, Israel is not going to cease to exist just because a viral Instagram post says it doesn't exist, or because hundreds of thousands of Twitter accounts say it doesn't have a right to exist.
Shany Mor, in the excellent online publication UnHerd, looks at the eviction dispute that poured gasoline onto the already smoldering fire. Frankly, it is far too complicated to excerpt here, but it involves Palestinians being evicted from property Jewish Zionists purchased in 1875, lost after the creation of Israel and got back after that neighborhood in Jerusalem was annexed by the Jewish state following the Six Day War. And even that greatly oversimplifies the dispute, and doesn’t take into account the issues Palestinians have with recovering property they lost after Israel’s founding.
Where do I stand on all of this? I think Israel has the right to exist peacefully as a Jewish state, and that the Palestinians deserve a viable state of their own, and that expansion of Israeli settlements is an impediment to peace, and that the Palestinians have been marinating in rabidly antisemitic rejectionist hatred for decades, and that the US giving wealthy Israel billions of dollars in military aid is questionable, and that aid to the Palestinians mostly ends up buying rockets to be launched at civilian neighborhoods, and that the Palestinians have been cynically fucked over by their "Arab “allies” for generations, and that many supporters of Israel do so because of radical end-times religious beliefs and hatred of Muslims, and that many supporters of Palestinians do so as a cover for their deep-seated hatred of Jews, and that getting your history from social media memes is a really bad idea.
I also believe most Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs just want to live in peace with their neighbors. And I hope and pray they are the ones who win.