Be it writings on the wall, pigeons, printing presses, or digital networks—communication infrastructures have always been at the center of ruling class power. Further development and technosophistication is mostly followed by domestication. In due process, the hegemonic powers attached to it sometimes shift, occasionally even tilting the social balance of forces, in which case instruments of warfare can become tools of the oppressed. But this is not always true; what are regarded as potential counterhegemonic voices can also turn into voluntary mediators of state propaganda, thus further deepening hegemony. The latter occurs in settler colonies where society (across class or culture) has a common enemy in the form of the indigenous population. In Israel, technologies and online platforms are often geared to mobilize pro-Israeli public opinion and to suppress support for Palestine. And it is this crucial and often overlooked context that is detailed and critiqued by Rebecca Stein and Adi Kuntsman in Digital Militarism. One of the book's main tasks is to demonstrate and critique how complicity takes shape in the digital age. The book is an overview of a traumatic epoch between 2009 and 2012 and touches on 2014 in the epilogue.
Israel has faced strong criticism over its military campaigns, and the period 2000–2005 (Second Intifada) was crucial for the crystallization of online battles. After Israel's devastating bombing campaign on Lebanon in 2006, the State Comptroller published a damning report and implored a central government office to revamp Israel's public diplomacy. This ideological apparatus—popularly known as hasbarah—was welcomed but deemed a failure after many subsequent debacles, its biggest challenge so far in 2014. During the seven-week military attack on the Gaza Strip, over 2,000 Palestinians were killed, over 10,000 were wounded, an estimated 500,000 were internally displaced, and an estimated sum of US $4 billion was spent on reconstruction and relief. A digital citizen-journalism catalogued this Palestinian tragedy in a breadth that discomfited the Israeli state and confused mainstream media.
It is not surprising that online Israeli public diplomacy has grown massively, not only as a lucrative sector but also especially as a task fulfilled enthusiastically by scores of students and multilingual Israelis. What we can distill from the many hasbarah handbooks as techniques to challenge Palestinian online narratives is the advice to deny and divert; “Cast Lead” (the 2008 military attack on Gaza) produced the tactic to constantly cast doubt. Why is this hasbarah 2.0 so normalized? An important answer is found in the social implications of the most crucial establishment: the military, and its smooth synchronization with public, commercial, private, and personal online mediation. A look into the behavior of those in the military, those attached to the military, and those blindly supporting the military provides an important clue to solve this riddle.
Casting doubt on Palestinian claims is discussed in “The Politics of Digital Suspicion” (Chapter 4), in my view the best part of the book. An incredible photograph of a funeral procession—its harrowing depth and almost magical perspective, its strange angle and line of light making the looming shadow terrifying—seemed to have been too good because it was declared fake. It was scrutinized, dissected, and debated over and again, thousands of words devoted to it. The subtext became that Palestinian claims and their pictures are fake—the figure of the “lying Arab” thus a metonymy for the Palestinian nation (p. 67). Reality got buried in detail, suspicion, and hysteria. That is exactly the point, because, wait, what was it about again? We find, somewhere between the lines (p. 65), that a panel of experts making up the World Press Photo committee (because it was selected as photo of the year) proved the photo was not digitally modified. Through our own act of reading about digital manipulations, we experience how distraction works. Behind this astonishing photo of weeping men carrying little wrapped things are the youngest casualties of the 2012 war on Gaza. But one mistaken photo from Syria cannot deem all images false because, unfortunately, there is no lack of photos of dead Palestinians. Nevertheless, if there are cases of Palestinian digital manipulation they are nowhere as impressive as their well-funded Israeli rivals. Israel's faking of video and audio evidence during the attack on the Mavi Marmara aid flotilla is a prime example, as discussed in Chapter 2, “Another War Zone” (an update of the authors’ 2010 Middle East Research and Information Project article together with the “Inside Israel's Twitter Room” article from 2012).
There are countless writings about cyberwar and many debates about Israeli propaganda, but few are based on academic scrutiny. Digital Militarism stands apart through its scholarly treatment and theoretical framing (about memory, time, and digital archiving), which are interwoven with media and communication themes and enriched by recollections of dramatic events that draw on alternative Israeli sources (e.g., Breaking the Silence). The result is a fast-paced, concise (140 pages), and sharp book. The opening chapter frames the themes theoretically and (borrowing from Michael Taussig's notion of the “Public Secret”) postulates that through some sort of (obscured) social contract Israeli society pretends normality in what is clearly an abnormal situation, therefore rendering its acts at once visible and invisible (p. 8). This approach lifts the discussion of media activism to a higher level and helps us to grasp the paradoxes of contemporary warfare. Each of the chapters represents a different venue—propaganda, selfies, hashtags—of the digital. We learn that the (already militarized) state transformed itself into a vernacular player (p. 33). Via private pictures of the family and handwritten placards, state violence is reduced to individual and private spheres (p. 38).
“Anatomy of a Scandal” (Chapter 3) and “Selfie Militarism” (Chapter 5) exemplify that these soldiers are a product of their time, that is, of an Instagram/Facebook-induced narcissism. Looking at the selfies reminds us that warfare involves a lot of nothing. Taking selfies is fun while waiting, especially with powerless Palestinians. One wonders whether the selfie stick is a phenomenon in the army. Or perhaps the phone can be strapped on a weapon as a sniper did with his rifle whilst zooming in on a Palestinian kid—he uploaded the resulting image to Instagram (p. 73). This kind of exhibitionism exceeds that of the infamous Abu Ghraib photos. The authors argue that much of the visual representation is invested in the beauty of the ordinary. Of course the “everyday” in a settler colony means boots and guns, but this is now offered with Instagram aesthetics—with a duck face and uploaded with retro filter. It is more than a social media culture—it is a style that fits the larger social condition: extreme national self-indulgence. The hashtags #kill#sexy#nevergiveup#sleep#sleep#instalove# (no spaces) are telling; they illustrate the pleasure of commonplace acts with social media consumer engagement. Taken together, we get sentimental portraits of colonial occupation but free from dirt and blood—for instance, free from explaining the terrible humiliation experienced by the blindfolded Palestinian “extras” in selfie-portraits. Initially condemned, the Eden Abergil selfie scandal was followed by “funny” memes, such as a selfie of her on the moon. But is this subversive or a further dehumanizing of Palestinians?
As the authors put it, in the last five years the extremist and racist national underbelly moved from the margin to the center. It all looks so ordinary but once zoomed out, the militarized and racist Israeli society—seen in its bare and holistic whole—is not so ordinary anymore. It is, in fact, rather insane. This exasperating paradox is fitting for the book's high-density and journalistic undertone, but this style simultaneously manages to turn a detached reportage tone into a much more engaging intervention. A related strength of the book is that it doesn't only describe but also shows. As any study about digital diplomacy or warfare in a hypervisual format should, the authors offer us generous graphic (no less than thirty-seven) examples. The book teaches how to incorporate images extracted from social media and challenges the conventional (and increasingly unrealistic) reluctance towards online visuals in printed publications. The book will hopefully set an example for other publishers.
While global anger is manifested in shifts of international public opinion, the increasing academic boycotts and economic divestments reflect the success of Boycott Divestment and Sanctions. As a result, Israeli politicians and their pundits are kicking wildly at what comes their way, still trying to become used to a world that endows Israel with less diplomatic and cultural impunity that it enjoyed for so long. The more they are held accountable, the more they are forced to respond. Israel's colonial enterprise is part of the digital field. As the book shows, in the digital sphere military acts and peoples’ complicity are never over; they live on forever. The afterword, “#Revenge,” is a clear example. This popular hasthag from 2014 clearly communicated “death to the Arabs”; indeed, this wish was fulfilled when the body of a boy burned alive was found in Jerusalem. But while many protested this atrocity across Palestine, yet another war on Gaza was declared. Here we find the dialectical relation between the celebration of Palestinian death online and the discourse of suspicion (p. 95).
The book could have engaged more directly with the political economy of digital propaganda, that is, the material dialectics of mediated hegemony. But its detailed analysis makes up for the lack of discussion about the myriad corporate connections that shape these occurrences. This is an insightful addition to a growing body of literature on cyber warfare and digital politics. I particularly recommend it to colleagues in media studies because it is a refreshing companion for the celebratory views about internet politics since the “Arab Spring.” And I recommend it for Middle East studies syllabi since its overt online features invigorate debates about contemporary imperialism. The authors invite us to read their book as a perpetrator's archive, and I can only agree with their hope that this testimony will be part of a reckoning.
