Part
2
The
2014 war between Israel and Palestinian factions in the Gaza Strip
was perhaps the first war in which social media was successfully
employed as a radical levelling force by the weaker party. In
previous wars between Israel and the Palestinians, the Israeli
government’s ability to manage access to the battlefield allowed it
to help shape the narrative of the war, portraying it the way that it
preferred — as a fight against terrorism. But with the
proliferation of smartphones and social media accounts in Gaza over
the past several years, this conflict wound up being viewed very
differently by a variety of observers.
As
bombs rained down on Gaza neighborhoods, following a pattern that
included the killing and maiming of many ordinary people,
Palestinians rushed to social media to share their own narrative of
the war. Young men and women living in the Strip shared photos of
apparent atrocities committed against civilians, alongside often
emotional updates about their own experiences trying to survive the
Israeli military onslaught. In previous conflicts most of these
voices would never have been heard. Broadcast directly onto the
global public spheres of Twitter and Facebook, however, accounts of
Palestinian suffering and resistance became impossible for the world
to ignore.
Writing
in Middle East Eye on social media’s role in the conflict, Yousef
al-Helou reflected:
Even
when the power was out, citizen journalists managed to post pictures
of dead bodies, destroyed neighborhoods and injured people to the
outside world. Photography has always been a powerful force, but the
Gaza conflict was one of the first wars to be photographed mainly by
amateurs and social media platforms, allowing those images to spread
far and wide at the click of a button, helping the people of Gaza win
hearts and minds, and subsequently causing unprecedented outrage
against Israel. In demonstrations around the world, such photos were
enlarged and carried by demonstrators, demanding that their
respective governments take action to halt Israel’s onslaught.
As the public outcry over the
war grew, even establishment media outlets in the U.S. were forced to
take note of the Palestinian experience of the conflict. In response
to the growing public relations disaster caused by images of dead
Gazan civilians, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused
the Hamas government in the territory of using “telegenically dead
Palestinians for their cause” — a statement that did little to
quell rising international outrage over the civilian deaths.
In military terms, there was
no real parity between the two sides. By the time the conflict ended,
more than 2,100 Palestinians had been killed, compared with just 66
Israelis. The physical infrastructure of the besieged territory
suffered devastating damage, with Israeli attacks crippling water and
power sources to Gaza residents. Despite their advantage in brute
strength, the lopsided death toll, and destruction of only one
party’s territory, it’s not clear that the Israelis won the
conflict. In the battle over the narrative of the war — vitally
important in a conflict whose power dynamics are strongly impacted by
outside actors — the Palestinians managed to win significant
traction for their cause.
Instead of another case of the
Israeli military attacking an amorphous group of Islamist terrorists,
a counter-narrative of the conflict spread globally. In this version
of events, Israel was not a democratic state waging a war of
self-defense against terrorists, but a U.S.-backed military behemoth
pummeling the people of an impoverished territory. The death toll
seemingly proved to the world that disproportionate force was being
inflicted on a weak and isolated territory.
“During Protective Edge”
— the name the Israeli military gave to the campaign — “the
people who suffered most were Palestinians, under siege from Israel’s
superior military force,” Patrikarikos writes in his book.
“This is the democratization of the wartime narrative in action,
and it benefitted only one side: the Palestinians.”
During the war, no one was
more emblematic of the changing power dynamics than Farah Baker, a
16-year-old Palestinian girl who came to international attention for
her social media updates about life in Gaza. Baker was not tied to
any political group and her perspective on the war was a personal
one. Yet her social media presence catapulted her to global attention
and told the Palestinian story to the world in a way that resonated
emotionally. It also empowered Baker as a political actor, something
that she had never expected and that could never have occurred in any
previous conflict.
Normally, a young teenage girl
living under aerial bombardment would have been considered a
bystander, at best, or a victim, at worst. But thanks to her Twitter
feed, where she shared both her fears as well as her attempts to
maintain a normal life amid the war, Farah became an important part
of the Palestinian effort to sway global opinion on the conflict.
“At only sixteen, Farah
understood, even if only instinctively, the importance of social
media in wartime, especially to a perpetual underdog like the
Palestinians,” Patrikarikos wrote. “She understood the
power that it gave to a single individual and to networks of
individuals, power that previously would have been impossible.”
In Gaza, like in Syria and
Ukraine, there have been instances of alleged faked suffering and
atrocity spread for propaganda purposes. Here, too, social media has
changed the way the conflict is perceived. Through social media’s
ability to give accounts from multiple separate sources on the
ground, to verify information, and to share evidence, outside
observers can better evaluate the credibility of reports from the
ground.
During the Gaza conflict, the
Israeli Defense Forces attempted to rebut the onslaught of
Palestinian citizen journalism with their own information war,
disseminating infographics and videos intended to show the Israeli
side of the story. Ultimately, the Israelis were at a disadvantage.
The personal authenticity of Gaza’s tech-savvy young people
resonated more naturally with observing audiences than the official
statements and flashy messaging released by Israeli military
officials, messages that were indelibly stamped with the alienating
face of a bureaucracy.
The impact of this disparity
was notable. In a column in Foreign Policy following the war,
entitled “On Israel’s Defeat in Gaza,” international relations
scholar David Rothkopf reflected on the global impact of the scenes
of mayhem that had ensued in Gaza, including images of young children
being killed on a beach by Israeli military forces. “There is no
Iron Dome” — a sophisticated and expensive Israeli missile
defense system — “that can undo the images of suffering and
destruction burned into our memories or justify away the damage to
Israel’s legitimacy that comes from such wanton slaughter,”
Rothkopf wrote.
While Barack Obama’s
presidential administration stood by Israel during the conflict,
calling for restraint from both sides, two years later, as he
prepared to leave office, the U.S. took the significant step of
distancing itself from Israel at the United Nations by allowing an
anti-settlement resolution to pass — a rare instance of the U.S.
acceding to public censure of Israeli actions. While far from a
sea-change in America’s stance on the conflict, the move reflected
growing dissatisfaction with Israeli actions in the United States,
which, though not shared by the Trump administration, continue to be
echoed by high-ranking former officials.
In her own small way, with her
tweets and updates during the war, Farah Baker had played a role in
shifting the narrative and forcing the world to grapple with the
Palestinian narrative of the conflict.
“I don’t have the
ability to carry a weapon and I would never kill anyone, so my only
weapon was to broadcast the truth and to let people know what was
happening here,” Baker told Patrikarakos in an interview at her
Gaza home. “I was more effective than I ever imagined, because
of the amount of followers I got and because so many people told me I
had changed their minds [about the war] and opened their eyes.”
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