weighing in
Hi all,
I am normally pretty reluctant to publicly comment on anything political or controversial, let alone my limited understanding of what’s going on in Israel.
This is partially because I feel extremely underqualified to speak on most subjects with anything resembling authority, but mostly out of a fear of being “cut off” by anyone in my life who might have previously held a favorable opinion of me until they learned I hold opinions they disagree with.
Like that old saying goes, “Better to keep one’s mouth shut and be thought a Zionist, than to open your mouth and leave no doubt”.
^ Having this fear sucks, by the way. Good-faith debate can offer an opportunity to consider ideas you otherwise wouldn’t have, while still maintaining a level of respect.
Disagreement should spark discourse, not a visceral anger that brews in your core.
But a few people have reached out to ask me for my thoughts on what’s going on right now, and I’m arrogant enough to think that reading my well-spaced blocks of text in your inbox – rather than everyone else’s poorly-spaced blocks of text on their Instagram stories – might strike a chord, and allow others to feel seen / heard.1
A Few Disclaimers:
My thoughts do not reflect the thoughts of all Jewish people, much in the same way that my thoughts do not reflect the thoughts of all left-handed people, nor all people with albinism, nor all people who are frustrated with Zach Lavine’s shot selection.
My thoughts are also fluid, constantly evolving, and subject to change at any given moment when presented with new information. But rather than sharing those thoughts with you outright, I’ve opted to take a slightly more cowardly approach, and instead use this as an opportunity to highlight and call out some of the ‘spin’ I’m seeing online by several outlets, ranging all over the political spectrum.
As more and more people are getting their information from media sources where the most successful posts are deliberately designed to make your blood boil, it’s important to be mindful of why certain posts go viral, while others do not.
For example, here’s an Instagram reel I saw in a ton of people’s stories last Sunday:
The cynical social media analyst in me immediately notices the words dripped out one at a time to build suspense and anxiety in the viewer. The musical score punctuated by a ticking clock and gunshots. The framing of the aggressor/responder in the conflict in one of the earlier lines, “what seemed like a usual attack from Gaza…became every citizen’s worst nightmare”. Who is doing the voiceover?, you may wonder. Why was this edited like a Michael Bay movie trailer?, you might ask. And why was it posted by Madonna?
The purpose of this video, which has 8.3 million views, 336K likes, 28.2K comments, and 52.5K shares, seems to be either to infuriate or scare the living shit out of everyone who watches it. To some, implying that any colonial settlers can be labeled a “citizen” of Israel is enough to angrily share this post with your friends who share such incredulity. To others, the emotional response from imagining your own children being kidnapped, brutalized, or murdered supersedes any potential for nuance.
But a 50-page essay, or two hour documentary just isn’t going to get 8.3 million views.
If you are a well-intentioned American liberal, this video might make you roll your eyes. You might dismiss it as propaganda, and gravitate to the opposition. While over there, here are some of the glib framing aphorisms you might encounter:
“Israel is an apartheid state”
“Gaza is an open-air prison”
“Anti-zionism is not anti-semitism”
“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”
Israelis are colonizers, the Palestinians are the true indigenous people to the land
You’ll see infographics that tell you the dread Israelis are feeling right now is merely a sliver of what Palestinians have been feeling on a daily basis under the decades-long military regime in the West Bank, and under the siege and repeated assaults on Gaza. You’ll read about the Nakba, and how the decades of suffocating occupation, apartheid, and Israel’s undermining of any peaceful resolution have led to this week’s tragedy. How Israel intentionally bombs the Gaza water supply that they control. How Israel sprays Palestinian farmland with herbicides. How Israel blocks trade between Palestinian cities, or prevents Palestinian students from receiving higher education, or withholds Palestinian tax revenue as a negotiating tactic.
You’ll see eye-popping charts like this one from the New York Times:
Or an ostensibly neutral page sharing information you’d never learned about before:
You’ll suddenly hear about the @JewishVoiceforPeace and local contingent @jvpny:
You might see public figures you follow, or your elected officials, or your trusted newspaper, or the girl you like, or the “good guys” from 2020 all chiming in:
Contrast all this with some of the glib framing aphorisms you might encounter on the staunchly Pro-Israel side:
“If Hamas put down their weapons, there would be no war. If Israel put down their weapons, there would be no Israel”
“Israel uses rockets to protect its civilians, Hamas uses civilians to protect its rockets”
“Free Palestine from Hamas”
You’ll see evocative images like this:
or this:
You’ll hear about how Israel is the only Jewish state in the world, and how every other region that borders it is very much not, and wants it wiped off the map.
How there is a different terrorist group in every cardinal direction whose raison d'être is “exterminate the jews”.
How you’ve seen this with your own eyes when you went to the Israel-Lebanon border, and the other side of the blockade was filled to the brim with armed guards. And you recall how your passport wasn’t stamped when you arrived in Israel, because they wanted you to still be able to visit other countries where jews aren’t welcome.
You’ll hear about how Israel can’t be an apartheid state, because Arabs hold positions of power and make up 20% of the population of Israel. How there are multiple Arab political parties within the Israeli government that make up a third of the Knesset. How Hamas is funded by Iran. And how their founding documents call for the evisceration of all jews. How Hamas does not support any of the progressive ideals that American liberals have with respect to women's rights, the LGBTQ+ community, etc. How Mahmoud Abbas assumed office in 2005 as the President of Palestine and has remained in that position to this day. How Hamas allows the Associated Press to operate in their geographical bounds, exchanging unfettered access for favorable press. How Hamas bombs Israel from hospitals, schools, and mosques so that when Israel retaliates, it looks bad on the news. You’re sent videos of Israel calling innocent civilians in advance, warning them to evacuate, air dropping pamphlets with this information. Only Hamas urges the Gaza citizens to ignore the IDF’s messages, so they can be used as human shields to skew the death total, despite Israel sending literal “warning bombs” that only shake the roofs of houses. So that the body count goes up disproportionately in graphics like the one the New York Times posted.
But then you’ll look at how this is all playing out on your social media feed. And you become similarly disgusted by the fear-mongering peddled year round by accounts like @IDF, or @stand_with_us. Accounts you’ve already followed and unfollowed in the past, because you just couldn’t take it. The divisive rhetoric, the false dichotomies, the red text and capitalized words designed to alarm the body’s sympathetic nervous system:
All created by some random sect of underpaid 24 year olds who have an outsized influence on the world’s most contentious regional conflict, as they professionally disrupt the sleep cycle of everyone you care about, day after day:
You’ll observe how this is being covered in not only the New York Times, but The Times of Israel. You might listen to a recent episode of The Daily Wire after reading a presser from Al Jazeera, followed by an op-ed in the Free Press. Not because any one of these outlets is your single source of truth, but because you believe that The Truth must lie (boringly) somewhere in the gradient between these two bounds. Surely, one of these sides isn’t completely fabricating lies, and just talking out of their ass. But then you’re told how actually, this isn’t complicated at all. How your own silence is complicity, and how it is your responsibility as a (reformed) (agnostic) (uninformed) Jew to be brave and loudly denounce anti-semitism (be unabashedly Pro-Israel).
You might find yourself awake at 3 AM, considering the irony of how so many predominantly jewish summer camps are named after Native American tribes.
Or you might find yourself thinking about how nobody seems to care about the phenomenon of stolen land anywhere else in the world the way they do Israel.
You think about the plight of the Native Americans, or the aboriginal people in Australia, or the indigenous people of Canada. You think about how this email is being written while situated on the lands of the Lenni Lenape people. And how most of the people reading this are also living on stolen land. You’re told this is all just "whatabout-ism". But that somehow, all the posts shared above, all posted in the wake of last week’s attack isn’t “whatabout-ism”. And that makes your head spin a bit.
You try your best to stay rational, gather credible information, develop your thoughts. Because you actually read the posts that other people are sharing. And then you look into those accounts, who runs them, and ask yourself – what are their incentives?
For instance, that post earlier from @an.argument:
Instagram Bio: “Exposing the illegal occupation of Palestine with legal, economic and political arguments. All posts have sources. Please research to learn more.”
The sources in their post I shared include the UN and The Washington Post. The same UN who has yet to unilaterally condemn Hamas’ attacks last week? The same Washington Post that wrote a sympathy piece last week lamenting how “some people in the United States and around the world have lost their jobs, or have faced discipline or backlash, for their criticism of Israel”? Should that matter?
You’ll take a closer look at that graph posted by The New York Times:
How at first glance, this chart looks pretty damning for Israel. You’re meant to see a disproportionate amount of red, and several years where the amount of Palestinian deaths appear to be 10x the amount of Israeli deaths. But the cynical data analyst in you immediately starts examining the raw data values, the X and Y axis labels, the interval distance, the sources, and all other basic inputs to determine if any vested interest might be manipulating the data to serve an alternative purpose2. Basically, all the stuff you’d be questioned on during the Science section of the ACT.
For instance, why does the timeline only start in 2008? What happened in 2007? Or 1948-2007? Or pre-1948? What is a “conflict-related death”? How is that tracked?
The Sources section includes the Israeli foreign ministry, the Gaza Health Ministry, and the “U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs”. As in the same U.N. who has yet to recognize Hamas as a terrorist group? Should that matter?
And then you take that analysis a step further. Have Hamas not spent the last twenty years firing tens of thousands of rockets into Israel? Haven’t there been 5,500+ fired in the past week alone? But because the US and Israel invested billions of dollars into an air defense system that intercepts 90%+ of these attempted attacks, it is now somehow a bad thing that more Israelis haven’t been killed, so as to ‘level the playing field’?
Looking at the actual chart itself, most of these years have well below 500 deaths on either side. The two main outliers are 20143 and 2023, where the red bars go outside the bounds of the graph. Doesn’t this alone violate one of the ethics of data visualization you learned about in a data analytics course in college?
I understand that most people are not reading this much into a single data chart.
They simply see red >>> blue, and so Israel = bad.
And so amidst a flurry of bad faith analogies, and a competition to see which side can invoke The Holocaust first, or which side can declare the other a genocidal threat, this whole week has made you consider for the first time that maybe not every American in 1945 was in support of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after Pearl Harbor. We were simply told in our textbooks that this is what had to be done.
You start to become really proud of this comparison, actually. You begin to consider that all the pacifists in your social media feed probably wouldn’t have supported those bombings, either. Or maybe they would have. It’s really hard to know. But then you remember the bombings were 4 years after Pearl Harbor. And how it was a completely different time in terms of who had a public voice. Women had only been given the right to vote 25 years prior, the Civil Rights movement was still 20 years away. And nobody had the potential for global reach from a digital megaphone in their pocket.
So maybe it’s not a good analogy at all. It’s just another glib framing aphorism.
And so your response is silence.
That sort of resonance is what compels me to make anything, really. Pretty much every song I write, or newsletter blast I send out, or TikTok I make, has an underlying current of “Hey, uhh, does anyone else feel this way right now??”.
see: all of 2020
Re: 2014, The chart mentions as an aside that more than 2,000 Palestinians were killed in a 50-day war. Here’s the Wikipedia page for “2014 Gaza War”:
Now, obviously, you should not be getting your information from Wikipedia, but I just wanted to note how this page summarizes the 2014 Gaza War as an operation “launched by Israel” despite it “following the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers”. I’m also partial to the vagaries of “Hamas subsequently fired a greater number of rockets into Israel” (the greater number of rockets is 4,005, for the record)