20 May 2021 – I normally live in a world seemingly corralled by algorithms (as do many of my readers), so when I travel to the Middle East, or watch the current escalation of violence, I must bring to my soul an element of chaos to a culture that continually plays its deadly, dystopic sameness.
I have been fortunate in that I’ve been able to visit the Middle East three times over the last 6 years, trips usually bracketed by a tech conference in Tel Aviv and a tech conference in Amman. But I have always extended these trips purely as fact-finding adventures of my own, in keeping with a personal agenda plus e-discovery work I am doing for the UN. There is an Italian phrase that describes the people (Arabs, Greeks, Italians, etc.) who populate the Mediterranean … “una faccia, una razza” (one face, one race) … that is far too simple an expression but meant to capture a similar set of values, religions, customs, food, etc. across the region. I have spent much of my time in and around the Med but I had not spent enough time in the core of the Middle East and it was my intent to “get educated”.
I have traveled across Israel and all through the West Bank, eating/shopping/talking with people in Ashkelon, Haifa, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, etc. but also Hebron, Jericho, Nablus and Ramallah. Journalists, political pundits and just the “everyday” people I encountered who seemed to be careless of hardship and risk and invited me into their homes. They wanted to air out the brutal geopolitics and the powerful regional and international forces at play. And if ever there was a place where language has dictated events, this is it. Forces have transformed “Palestine” from a homeland to a slogan. Much like everybody knows where America is, but nobody has ever been there, Palestine has become that quintessential illusion. Oh, “reality”: what are you?
Language dictates. The world’s politicians are in full: “Don’t dare criticize Israel lest you be wrongly smeared as an anti-semite mode”. The Israelis find they are no longer the victims but the perpetrators of the current crisis. Yes, Hamas are dreadful hate-filled killers and woe to Israel if they had the wherewithal to carry out their intentions. But the fact remains that it is Israel which has the tanks, bombers, artillery, nuclear warheads and missile defenses of Goliath, while ordinary Gazans had nothing a week ago and even less today, as even hospitals and schools were bombed. These are dreadful tactics.
Ordinarily, this moment would be accompanied by a cascade of international opprobrium from Palestinian supporters, demands for restraint, and perhaps calls from Israel’s own allies to rein in its forces. Yet even as the death toll in Gaza grows from the Israeli campaign there has been relative quiet about the battle. Hamas continues to fires its rockets, hundreds of them, deeper into Israeli territory than ever before, but the normally raucous international chorus has barely made a peep so far.
The international community seems disinterested. Why? In a chat I had today with an Israeli journalist he told me “this is a war-wrecked region. Officials and diplomats are exhausted, spread thin, and focused on seemingly bigger problems, as Syria’s civil war grinds on and COVID continues marauding across the world”.
But this time it is truly different. My good friend Shira Ovide (technology writer for the New York Times) along with her colleague Sheera Frenkel have been running a series on the unique perspective on what happens when the modern mechanics of the internet combine with an old conflict. Sheera has reported from the Middle East for years, and now she has been assessing the influence of technology on the recent escalation of violence between Israelis and Palestinian citizens of Israel. She has reported on Israeli extremists organizing mob attacks on WhatsApp in novel and scary ways, and she wrote about false online claims and conspiracies that inflamed tensions. But the same social media and communications tools that some people have used as weapons are also giving people caught up in the violence a voice to share their experiences.
Shira recently interviewed Sheera on the latest Israeli-Palestinian conflict and how it encapsulates the best and worst of digital life, and the complexities at play. Here are a few bits from that interview:
Shira: What did you find unusual about the WhatsApp groups of Israeli extremists organizing violence against Palestinians?
Sheera: I was caught by surprise at just how explicit people were. They were doing things like setting a time and place to smash windows of Palestinian-owned businesses and coordinating to make sure they weren’t targeting Israeli businesses by mistake.
Explicitly calling for violence against individuals tends to be a red line for Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, and other technology companies. They make a distinction between posting something general like “death to all men” and openly directing attacks against certain people.
How does this compare to other extremist violence online?
What I saw in the Israeli WhatsApp groups was a notch different from what we’ve seen in India or Myanmar or at the Capitol riot in January where people spread hate or misinformation online, but it wasn’t targeted at individuals or businesses. I and people who study misinformation had never seen organized violence on social media or communications apps in quite this way.
Did you find extremist Palestinians using WhatsApp to organize their attacks, too?
There has been Palestinian violence against Israelis, but we didn’t find online mobilization in the same way. One Israeli official told me, in dark humor, that there is so much surveillance of Palestinians by the Israeli police and security forces that WhatsApp mobs would be found before they had a single member.
Who deserves blame? Are tech companies responsible for WhatsApp mobs and for false online claims that inflamed tensions between Israelis and Palestinians? Or are humans at fault?
Renée DiResta, a misinformation researcher, talks about human bias or fallacy as a foundation for false online narratives. While technology companies facilitate this, misinformation about this conflict and others take hold because people in positions of power on both sides share, endorse and accelerate ideas that denigrate people.
Many of my Palestinian and Israeli friends have been shocked by the violence that’s happening among friends and neighbors. But humans are responsible for the hatred, and so are politicians who fail to effectively stop extremists from carrying out violence.
I expected you to blame Facebook and other tech companies more.
I mostly agree with tech companies’ statements that technology is agnostic. It’s not created to hurt people. And I’ll give WhatsApp credit for taking measures like restricting how many times messages can be forwarded. That’s a first step to keep misinformation and mob violence from spreading further and faster.
I feel like there’s a “but” coming.
There is. Researchers and journalists find that we wind up being free research arms for Facebook and other rich companies. We find misinformation, hate speech and violent mobs organizing on their services. The company could have gone out and proactively looked for and found these extremist WhatsApp mobs, the way that I did.
Compared with the prior violence that you’ve covered in the region, does it feel like social media is helping the world witness and understand what’s happening?
At its best, social media gives us a window on the lives of other people and in their own voices. I saw that in Gaza in 2014 and again during the last two weeks with posts and videos that make you feel what it’s like to be a Palestinian or an Israeli hiding from airstrikes or rockets.
It is helping the world understand, but I wonder if these people posting on social are sometimes speaking past one another. Palestinians mostly aren’t making videos that are intended to show Israelis what their lives are like, and the same for Israelis. These people in close geographic proximity to each other largely aren’t watching each other’s lives.