A Rumor of War*

In a ghastly confluence of political intransigence, ancient religious enmity and colliding cultures and ideologies, the Middle East is once again embroiled in bloody conflict and is currently choking messily on that hoary old (contradictory and counter-intuitive) chestnut of ‘fighting for peace’ in the Gaza Strip.

In a concerted effort to gain valuable ground in the virtual battlefield, both sides have eagerly grasped emergent social media technology in an attempt to broadcast their particular versions of the truth to a potential worldwide audience of billions; cyber-warriors (or ‘hacktivists’) on both sides are resolutely reinforcing the righteousness of their respective causes in a dogged attempt to manage the information (cyber)space, gain sympathetic media coverage and, ultimately, win the media war.

The founding fathers of the Internet and global social media phenomena/ephemera such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter may have earnestly intended their respective contributions to modern civilisation to facilitate the ‘democratisation of information’ (for example, YouTube’s motto: ‘Broadcast Yourself’ and ‘Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life’) but, in an echo of the words of the celebrated science-fiction writer William Gibson, ‘The street finds its own use for things’  – and perhaps never more so than in times of conflict.

The Internet is one of the foremost contemporary examples of this ‘repurposing’, otherwise known as the ‘law of unintended consequences’ (pace the acclaimed sociologist Robert K. Merton), and nowhere is safe in cyberspace – least of all such popular websites as Facebook, YouTube (which has been commandeered by the Israeli army; the first time a national army has created its own YouTube channel) and Twitter, which has hosted a press conference by the Israeli Consulate in New York.

But, as expressed in The Guardian’s recent article, ‘So what if Israel uses the internet?’ such ‘repurposing’ raises the sinister spectre of state-sponsored propaganda. Indeed, the dedicated blogger and commentator on the Arab-Israeli conflict Richard Silverstein brands the Israeli online campaign as ‘outright propaganda’ and ‘a cynical attempt to flood the web and news media with favourable flackery in a vain attempt to tilt public opinion toward Israel’.

Nevertheless, it is abundantly clear that both sides are making strenuous efforts to garner online support for their respective causes – ‘Gaza crisis spills onto the web’ – and it is patently obvious that both sides are peddling (mis)information of dubious veracity to advance their highly politicised agendas.

As yet, neither side appears prepared to compromise, with both sides resolutely determined to play out their wearisome end-games, where the first casualty in any missile strike is, inevitably, the truth; all this and yet more tragedy to come in the (supposedly) traditional season of goodwill to all men – Happy Hanukkah!

 

* In ‘A Rumor of War’ author Philip Caputo provides an intimate portrait of the Vietnam conflict and documents both the brutality of war and the author’s experiences as an officer in the US Marine Corps, which serve as an indictment of the idiocy behind governments’ grand schemes and strategies and an appropriate warning from recent history (see also ‘A Bright Shining Lie’ by Neil Sheehan, which won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 1989).