If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, Let my right hand forget her cunning. Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, If I remember thee not; If I set not Jerusalem above my chiefest joy.
I am a teacher’s aide for a Jewish Studies course at my high school. The other day, I witnessed a tense exchange between a student and our teacher:
“Why can’t I say that the Torah means whatever I want it to mean? It’s all up to interpretation, right?” the student questioned as we studied the dual creation accounts in Genesis. Never mind years of clarifying commentary or consensus on biblical terminology. The student adhered to a doctrine of, if I see it that way, it can be true for me.
My response to the student was emphatic: societies are functional only when they operate upon a shared set of facts. From this reality then comes analysis and interpretation. In a rational world, never vice-versa.
For a while, I’ve worried that social media subverts our society’s fundamental logos. My concern has increased tenfold as I’ve witnessed the most recent escalation between Israelis and Palestinians and, correspondingly, its social media contortion.
Many modern activist spaces are characterized by a fervent return to tribalism displayed strikingly on social media. When it’s a question of injustice, each tribe manufactures its own seductive fiction of the ‘how, when, and why’ by extracting inconvenient realities from the rigid story it tells. The explanations, justifications, and stock terms become so easy: to apply, to misuse, and to wholeheartedly believe. Truth and critical interrogation become entirely irrelevant to narrative construction.
Right now, casting Israelis and Palestinians in interchangeable roles of ‘victim’ and ‘oppressor’ supplants contemplating the gray areas that render peace unattainable. In a post-fact world, if a tribe sees some aspect of the Conflict one way, even when the unadulterated facts don’t corroborate its view, it will still be true for that tribe. Nuance, we know, seldom merits mass attention.
We use social media to put aspects of this manifold conflict on trial, yet these sites are not structured to administer justice—which would mean telling an honest, two-sided story. A proper cross-examination juxtaposes personal testimony against other evidence. On social media, interrogating the posts with which we’re being inundated and the producers’ singular loyalties takes shape through vitriolic, nonsensical DM wars.
Indeed, viewing the fighting through a platform like Instagram presents an unprecedented challenge: confronting the constant barrage of disturbing visual documentation in sequences manipulated by A.I. algorithms. From our positions of relative comfort, our digital echo chambers select for us which realities inform our perception. We can inundate ourselves with chilling images of successive rockets raining over Israel, whilst avoiding the rubble and despair in Gaza. Or, we can let the Iron Dome’s efficacy numb us to the implications of living under Hamas rocket fire for days on end. Can both realities exist in tandem? Not during a war of optics, when we—the international peanut gallery—entrap ourselves in a single camera’s orientation.
Journalist Matti Friedman wrote in an op-ed for Tablet on May 11th, “The subtleties seem beside the point when the villains and the heroes are so clear.” As various tribes make profound, sweeping calls for justice catered exclusively to the people with whom they most sympathize, conveying a multi-sided truth about the Conflict seems inconvenient, frivolous even. In our sound-bite society, the masses only mobilize when we fashion enemies in broad strokes. Heaven forbid we indict all sides for fostering a politically untenable status quo.
Yet, I find the saddest, least considered reality to be the abysmal political leadership on all slides perpetuating this ongoing struggle. Bibi Netanyahu, Mahmoud Abbas, and Hamas are corrupt power brokers in a stalemated game of political chess. They’ve long failed to come to the table with a sincere interest in peace. For all their public opposition, they seem to concur that stability poses the single greatest threat to their authoritarian trajectories. Every so often, we’re reminded that their de facto reigns are lethal.
This is one of those times.
I see a student subscribing to the “if I see it that way, it can be true for me” doctrine in the classroom, and I know it’s only a matter of time before that same thinking permeates their entire worldview. As a TA, I’ve learned that my students’ subjective readings on Torah rarely stem from a disrespectful place. Biblical texts incite discomfort, so students subvert them by injecting their own experiences.
Still, we cannot take a flippant approach toward accuracy lightly. Accuracy is tantamount to truth. Otherwise, we’ll exist in a world where the same cognitive dissonance one side uses to construe extremist settlers into ideological heroes morphs Hamas terrorists into humanitarian warriors. History reminds us that opposing extremist poles are never really that far apart. And when we’re complicit in a social media diet devoid of critical thinking, we play right into the hands of oppression.
Fundamentally, the Conflict collages nebulous stories, grave political decisions, and different ideologies. Many perspectives interlock to form an honest story about a deeply imperfect land, whose origin holds beauty and pain in equal measure. With regard to current tensions, I yearn for the truth in unambiguous terms: Israeli and Palestinian leaders oppress each other’s people, their own people, and in so doing, civilians become victims of hate.
Fabricating truth to corroborate perception, a tendency perhaps once relegated to dark corners of internet sub-forums, has gone frighteningly mainstream. Social media continues pinning one tribe’s reconstruction of reality against the next. Until we convey truth in its painful wholeness, eliminate inapplicable stock language from our discussions, and assess honestly the intentions of the leaders reaping political benefits from this fight, we’ll spiral further into a catastrophic pattern of picking and choosing our realities. Our worlds may exist in parallel, but they’ll become irreconcilably disparate. We’ve seen—we are seeing—how one-sided thinking on a political level incites unadulterated violence.
Author’s note: Terminology is complex. Often, names are treated as a litmus test for political leanings or loyalties. In this piece, I say “Israel,” not “Israel-Palestine.” I pray for a free and democratic Palestinian state to come into existence. No such state exists right now. I cannot gloss over this reality by calling the land “Israel-Palestine.”
