Following eight days of rocket exchanges, hundreds of deaths, and thousands of injuries, Israel and Hamas agreed to a cease-fire last Wednesday. The thousand-year-old conflict and ongoing political and religious tension over the land known today as Israel is a primary cause of the eruption of violence—but an external element, new to warfare, helped propel it.
Twitter is known for its featured celebrity commentary and its youth appeal—the most-followed twitter accounts include those of pop stars Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber. But of the 170 million Twitter accounts in active use, two belong to Hamas’ al-Qasssam Brigades (AQ) and Israel’s Israel Defense Forces (IDF). The AQ and the IDF are military organizations on the Eastern Mediterranean coast unable to compromise the opposing beliefs—political, religious, and otherwise—which tie them to the same land. So when each staked claims on new ground—the Twittersphere—war was inevitable. They posted attack updates, successful hits, death tolls, as well as videos and pictures of explosions, wreckage, and the civilians on the ground. Each also tweeted threats against its enemy. While the internet today acts like a natural extension to our physical world, in many ways, it distorts and trivializes what is real. The images, videos, and words we see on our screens inevitably contain bias.
War invaded western living rooms in the ’60s through household television sets, forever changing the way North Americans at home viewed military conflict. Smartphones and laptops have allowed the portable web to keep us informed wherever we take it: war is with us on the bus ride to campus, it accompanies us to a boring lecture, and might even keep us up in bed late at night. One could argue that war is closer and more real to us than ever before— but is it really?
The images and videos shared via the AQ and IDF Twitter accounts are emotionally captivating, and in turn, quite persuasive. But at the same time that a rocket hits Jerusalem in a Youtube video posted by the IDF, Hamas could be reporting a brand-new list of deaths in the Gaza Strip. The accounts are heavily biased, and neither one is tweeting all of the facts. They aren’t intended for their own civilians, either, but serve more as propaganda machines than news sources. Each has English language accounts, and post links to French and Spanish versions. The images of strong and serious Hamas soldiers and of Israeli children’s bedrooms destroyed by rockets are posted specifically for the rest of the world to see, and one can easily be persuaded one way or the other. The tragedies of a war occurring across an ocean cannot be accurately expressed in the palm of a western spectator’s hand. Rocket sirens coupled with constant, imminent danger—not buzzes or notification beeps—are keeping those under attack on both sides up at night. Foreign support is each army’s objective, but the domain in which propaganda is presented hurts their cause.
Because we are accustomed to frivolous 140-character blurbs on our Twitter feeds, the combination of 140-character threats and death tolls just doesn’t feel right. But when they do find their way there, they blend into the mass of all other blurbs, and become a part of Twitter’s trivial landscape. By waging war on Twitter, Hamas and Israel may be unintentionally trivializing their own battles—and war in general—for their foreign followers. In fact, the opposing governments interact over the Internet, replying to and re-tweeting each other. While they geographically rest side by side, the two have never been able to communicate directly in the real world; Twitter has created a space for them to safely interact. But how safe is it when thousands of people read every update? Because of social media’s instantaneous and democratic nature, many Twitter users—youth, politicians, and celebrities alike—are subject to the impulses of irrational tweeting. When battling armies enter the cyberspace, they are just as likely to make irrational, impulsive statements. When thousands of people read them, these statements could possibly have great consequences which could spill over into the ‘real world.’
War has taken on a new, questionable form. It may distort our very definitions of conflict.
