If you told me that my Instagram post about the worst terrorist attack on Jews since the Holocaust would reach hundreds of millions of people, be translated into dozens of languages, and be shared by some of the biggest celebrities on the planet, I would. said: “Maybe?”
Not because of me – because now this is our world.
I think this post connected with people—high school friends, complete strangers, Gal Gadot—because it acknowledged our common complicity in dulling our compassion. For better or worse, we turn to social media for solidarity and education. This is a modern newsstand that will give your roommate as much shelf space as Time magazine, Wall Street Magazine, USA todayand all your cousins.
But this democratization has its costs. Precision takes a back seat to emotion because that’s what makes you watch the ad. Nuances are not in trend. And while emotion-friendly algorithms can help create enjoyable content, they are also a boon for evangelists.
As I wrote, the goal of propaganda is dehumanization. It ignites our instincts. It deprives others and us of empathy. Social media propaganda may be new, but propaganda itself is very, very old. Because it works.
So, rather than delving into the history of propaganda, I decided to discuss the three most common types I’ve encountered over the past few days. Let’s call them distortion, false comparison, and omission.
The distortion is obvious: it publishes a video of children sitting in chicken cages and pretending that they are trapped by Hamas. The present video was filmed several days before the attack by a man taunting his relatives. Or this fake White House press release announcing Biden’s authorization of $8 billion in new military aid to Israel. Armchair journalists have little incentive to fact-check because inflammatory content attracts followers (and sometimes I’m slow to fact-check myself). There are many, a lot of examples of distortions. It really is everywhere.
The second is a false comparison. Americans have little understanding of Middle Eastern history and find it difficult to educate themselves. Thus, simple design is attractive, especially when it is familiar. This gives us the illusion of being informed.
For example, in a vacuum, the relationships between American police and black civilians, and between IDF soldiers and Palestinian civilians, are similar. But beyond this vacuum lies a stunning wealth of context: different peoples, countries, histories, religions and dynamics. Even applying the phrase “Black Lives Matter” to the Middle East conflict falls short, as does the claim that “all lives matter” condemns the deaths of Israelis and Palestinians equally.
Americans know that the slogan “All Lives Matter” is intended to deny the power imbalance highlighted by the slogan “Black Lives Matter.” However, there is note the power imbalance between Israeli and Palestinian babies. So when you condemn the equally horrific killing of babies – by Hamas terrorists or Israeli government bombs – and so-called activists respond by declaring that you “all lives matter” – these people are at best confused, and at best deliberate worst. Justifying the murder of babies as “liberation” does not make you an activist: it makes you a distributor or deceiver of propaganda.
The third type is omission, and it is personal. My mother is Ashkenazi and her great-aunt Netia Loucks is one of the “missing millions” of Jews who were killed but disappeared during the Holocaust. I grew up hearing about Stry, the Polish village where she and my great-grandfather grew up, whose Jewish population was exterminated by the Nazis. As a child, I attended synagogue, Hebrew school, and Sunday school; I was bar mitzvahed and confirmed (an optional reform event) while still a teenager; and I, as an adult, went on sponsored trips to Israel through Taglit Birthright and the Shusterman Foundation’s REALITY Israel.
But it wasn’t until I visited Ramallah as part of Shusterman’s trip—an experience that prompted me to do more research and talk with Palestinian friends—that I began to fully understand the scale of the 1948 Palestinian displacement, or Nakba. (“catastrophe”).
American Jews are taught that Israel came into existence with overwhelming support from the UN, which is true, and that the Arab countries opposed it and fought back, which is also true. But the details of what happened – that Palestinians were forcibly displaced, their homes destroyed and thousands of people brutally killed – were unknown. note coated. And while I believe with all my heart that Israel has a right to exist, I can support it. And opposed violence from its very inception.
Of course, American Jews today are not responsible for those events, but we are responsible for knowing this real and terrible history. And as I read and watched American Jewish posts on social media over the past few days, it became clear to me that many of them have the same knowledge gaps that I do (and most likely others that I still have There is).
Contributing to these gaps is that, in an effort to keep us on platforms longer, social media is putting us all in information silos. This makes it imperative to seek out people with different backgrounds and perspectives. In Ramallah, I met a young Palestinian DJ who described the hopelessness he and his friends experience daily. In his words, he told me that the “brutal” Israeli government doesn’t care about him, the “corrupt” Palestinian Authority (in the West Bank) doesn’t care about him, the “mad” Hamas terrorists (in the Gaza Strip) don’t care about him. I don’t care about him and that ultimately the countries funding this proxy war – America, Iran and others – are making it impossible to bring about real change.
It was one of the most real things I’ve ever heard and I wish it could be seen and shared by millions of people.
It is this kind of honesty that propaganda clouds when it tries to convince us that Israelis and Palestinians are not indigenous peoples. That they don’t deserve equal rights. What any killing children is justified.
We humans cannot afford to give in to this. We’re faced with more misinformation than ever, but also more quality sources. We must be diligent and careful when educating yourself. I know it takes time. But honestly, it’s the least we can do.