Since the start of the Gaza genocide in October 2023, Israeli occupation soldiers have taken to social media to brag about their crimes against Palestinians — happily documenting their plunder and destruction of homes. But it wasn’t just the soldiers.
As anyone familiar with Israeli content on social platforms knows, digital militarism is a common currency for Israeli civilians, as well. These individuals, many of them otherwise garden-variety influencers, happily juxtapose images of, say, starving Palestinian children with a video snippet of them drinking water. One Israeli on TikTok took to literally dancing in the rain to mock Palestinians in Gaza living in tents and suffering from flooding.
The rejoicing in brutality over one’s victims is common for oppressors, for it underlines the unequal power dynamics. In fact, Israeli digital militarism is akin to the postcards of lynched Blacks that white Southerners used to mail to friends and family [Warning: Graphic image].
This is merely the 21st century’s technology employed to celebrate the subjugation and murder of innocent people. There is no shame in either case: These people are proud to boast about their oppression of other people. When individuals are so thoroughly dehumanized — Blacks and Palestinians — their deaths become something to celebrate, whether they are lynched or bombed.
The irony of the unabashed Israeli digital militarism — including outright support for mass extermination — is that for years, the Israeli state claimed that it was Palestinians who engaged in online incitement to violence.
But as Duke University’s Rebecca Stein, who co-wrote the 2015 book “Digital Militarism: Israel’s Occupation in the Social Media Age,” has noted, the notion of Palestinian online incitement is “a highly selective narrative, one that points to Palestinian online ‘incitement’ while ignoring the import of social media for right-wing and often militant Israeli publics,” and one that obscures the root causes of Palestinian violence (i.e., the Israeli occupation).
For instance, during the 2014 war in Gaza, an Israeli hateful campaign went viral on Facebook with young Israelis holding signs proclaiming “Hating Arabs is not racism, it’s [national] values.”
Stein documented how “ordinary social media practices of Israelis are being employed to support and sustain the military occupation of the Palestinian territories.”
For instance, back in 2010, Israeli soldier Eden Abergil posted selfies with detained Palestinians. So insured are most Israelis to cruelty that Eden was baffled that anyone would to take offense at her vulgar photographs.
So Israeli digital militarism is now new (the above photo, from ABC News, was posted on Instagram by an Israeli soldier in 2013): it just dramatically escalated alongside the Gaza genocide.
.jpg){kind=link}