Gaza: Manipulation versus Activism
How media and social media impact the conflit between the Hamas and the Israeli Defense Forces, and why it should matter to us all.
Dear readers and passers-by,
After 74 days of massacres in the Gaza Strip, the United Nations are still trying to convince the United States of America to not veto a resolution to encourage a ceasefire.
It is very hard to carry on in everyday life when such profound violations of our human rights are perpetrated over and over.
Women tend to the sister of Palestinian journalist Adel Zorob, who was killed overnight
during Israeli bombardment, as she mourns his death in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on 19 December 2023 amid continuing battles between Israel and the militant group Hamas. MOHAMMED ABED / AFP
Latest news
Israel faced another round of global pressure on Monday then Tuesday (18 & 19 Dec. 2023) for a ceasefire in Gaza, with a new UN vote and fresh Western diplomatic efforts, although the United States vowed to continue arming its ally.
The UN Security Council was set to convene on Monday then on Tuesday, then who-knows-when, to weigh a call for a ceasefire in the besieged Palestinian territory, after a previous bid was vetoed by the United States.
On Tuesday evening, the UN security council vote on resolution calling for a halt in the fighting to allow for the delivery of humanitarian aid into Gaza was postponed… again.
On the same day, a UN official said the US is “defending the indefensible” when it comes to Israel’s operation in Gaza. Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, told Sky News that the US continued to post obstacles in defence of Israel.
“This operation has already caused almost 20,000 deaths, 8,000 are still missing and 1.9 million people in Gaza have been displaced,” she said.
What are the US waiting for to declare a ceasefire? This is unfathomable for me.
Meanwhile, the UK Foreign Minister David Cameron was due to meet French and Italian leaders to push for a "sustainable ceasefire" in the conflict, his office said.
However, on Monday, on a visit to Israel, the US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin vowed to keep arming its ally, which Washington has already provided with billions of dollars in military aid.
"We'll continue to provide Israel with the equipment that you need to defend your country, including critical munitions, tactical vehicles and air defence systems," Austin said.
From 9 December, the NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW) had said that the US risks “complicity in war crimes”, by continuing to provide Israel with weapons and “diplomatic cover” as it commits “atrocities” in Gaza.
The HRW UN director, Louis Charbonneau, posted a statement after the US first vetoed a security council resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire in the Palestinian territory.
The veto by the US (that’s been repeated since) prevented the council from making some of the calls Washington itself has been demanding, including compliance with international humanitarian law, protection of civilians and releasing all civilians held hostage, he wrote.
The statement, shared on social media, continues: “By continuing to provide Israel with weapons and diplomatic cover as it commits atrocities, including collectively punishing the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza, the US risks complicity in war crimes.”
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Bias, lies and propaganda
When I first shared this piece of news from HRW on social media, it remained unnoticed…
Today, I received a note from Facebook saying they deliberately “moved the post lower in feeds”, explaining that the images chosen by newspapers to illustrate the news were “too violent”
And, surely, the violence is outrageous, thanks for admitting, Meta!
A few days prior, Meta’s new network, Threads, that I had just joined as it arrived in the EU, also cancelled one of my posts, on activism, politics and art.
In October, the EU demanded that Meta and TikTok detail efforts to curb disinformation from the Israel-Hamas war.
The networks are heavily “spreading and amplifying terrorist and violent content, hate speech and disinformation.”
This week, the EU launched proceedings against X over Israel-Hamas disinformation.
How does it impact us, journalists?
It is a terribly worrying trend, that I was already worried about after the profoundly shocking Cambridge Analytica scandal.
I discussed the issue with my students the three years I was a journalism lecturer in the UK.
This week, some of my posts were blocked on Threads then Facebook by Meta.
I also wrote about this more lengthily on my blog:
On our types of online socialisation
https://melissa-on-the-road.blogspot.com/2023/12/on-our-types-of-online-socialisation.html
This is an extremely worrying trend on the coverage of the conflict in Gaza, and more generally in the Middle East.
As I wrote in another post here in October, the Middle East was one of the subjects I covered the most when I had my first full time permanent job as an international news journalist.
And, though I cover Africa more extensively and on a daily basis, I still regularly interview artists and activists from the region (some of the features can be read here).
African news in general is always “moved down” in feeds; it’s appalling but very few people have the power to change this situation for now.
This is said, in journalism schools, at least in France, to be linked to the “law of death-kilometres”, that states that if our readers are in the West, they are only concerned by news from places that are close to them… A highly problematic statement, that some may never have heard about, but you can check most media houses and newspapers near you, and see. Only Al Jazeera has managed to break that rule, to try and cover the global world.
But in this conflict in Gaza, the lack of transparency and the level of misinformation has immediate huge consequences, especially on the UN.
This is why social media matters. They have taken all the space, and many readers & viewers check TikTok, Facebook or Twitter way before checking the news, or to find the news there.
So, these networks prioritise the news instead of us, journalists and editors.
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Beyond the news, activism
This is why so many influencers and activists are turning even more to social media… in a vicious circle of bias.
If they are systematically silenced for some of their thoughts, the game is rigged.
Israel is known to be a super tech nation, and the boss of Instagram himself, Adam Mosseri, is American-Israeli, and one of the richest men in Israel.
“The instagram algorithm is now showing me pro-Israel videos non stop as if trying to change my mind,” a user wrote, according to this piece in The New Yorker.
“The popular investigative programme ‘What is Hidden is Greater’ on Al Jazeera Arabic has exposed the social media giant Facebook’s complicity with the Israeli occupation in the silencing of Palestinians,” according to research that predates this war. Read this article from tech magazine The Verge for more.
In 2020 and 2021 already, reports showed that Instagram had to alter its algorithm “after complaints it censored Palestinian content during Gaza conflict.”
The CEO even acknowledged part of the problem on Twitter:
Many people thought we were removing their content because of what they posted or what hashtag they used, but this bug wasn’t related to the content itself, but rather a widespread issue that has now been fixed.
— Adam Mosseri (@mosseri) May 7, 2021
I personally know many users who for years have had their content on Palestine censored on Instagram.
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Another issue that got worse in the past two months is censorship in cultural places.
The cases of the USA and Germany are the most worrying.
In Germany, “there has been a strict clampdown on pro-Palestinian protests” journalists reported (see here).
An example: the exhibition of the German-Jewish artist Candice Breitz was cancelled by the Saarlandmuseum in Saarbrücken, Germany, after the artist criticised the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government for the “grotesque and inhumane bombardment of Gaza” while also expressing “deep empathy for the brutally violated and murdered civilians of Israel”.
But events have also been cancelled in England.
In a letter organised by Artists for Palestine UK, more than 1,000 creative practitioners, artists and curators accused cultural institutions of “repressing, silencing and stigmatising Palestinian voices and perspectives” as the war entered its third month.
Incidents cited by the letter include Lisson Gallery’s cancellation of its Ai Wei Wei exhibition after the Chinese artist posted a statement on social media suggesting that the “sense of guilt around the persecution of the Jewish people” had been transferred and held against the Arab world.
Wei Wei also referred to the strong influence of the Jewish community in the media, finance and culture of the US.
The gallery said there was “no place for debate that can be characterised as anti-Semitic or Islamophobic”.
Other incidents mentioned in the letter include the cancellation of two Palestinian Film Festival events in my beloved Bristol, at the Arnolfini arts centre, where I was a writer in residence from October 2019, and throughout all of the Covid-19 pandemic.
I wrote extensively on political artists and cultural events, and Arnolfini hosted the Bristol Palestine Festival for over a decade.
In 2022, I hosted a discussion around the cultural boycott of Israeli extremists in the gallery, with activists from Palestine, Israel and England, including the filmmaker Ken Loach.
Sadly, this year, Arnolfini said it had taken the decision to “not the host the events” because, “as a charity”, it could not “be confident that the event would not stray into political activity”, adding that it was beyond its resources to “adequately risk assess” such events at the current time.
This is not the Arnolfini I know.
We need an explanation... Something must have turned wrong...
I wrote further on the issue on my blog here:
Palestine: Art centres, artists and messages
https://melissa-on-the-road.blogspot.com/2023/12/palestine-art-centres-artists-and.html
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For all these reasons, I do support initiatives by Palestinian artists to rebalance the unjust situation, both in the battlefield, where one of the most powerful armies in the world is targeting and starving civilians, and in the media, ‘social’ or traditional.
One must-read, if you can find the time:
In the Shadow of the Holocaust
How the politics of memory in Europe obscures what we see in Israel and Gaza today.
By Masha Gessen
In The New Yorker, from December 9, 2023
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-weekend-essay/in-the-shadow-of-the-holocaust
And this comment, after the backlash the author had to face:
Hannah Arendt would not qualify for the Hannah Arendt prize in Germany today
The irony of Masha Gessen almost not being awarded the prize because of their writings on Gaza is almost too thick to cut
To finish, one voice:
MC Abdul from Palestine - 'Shouting At The Wall'
Abdul-Rahman al-Shantti was born in Gaza on 14 September 2008; he's known professionally as MC Abdul or MCA Abdul.
He started rapping at 9 years old, inspired by Palestinian voices. He also says his international idol is Eminem!
The Palestinian rapper "gained popularity when he sang a rap about freedom, in front of his school in Gaza, which garnered hundreds of thousands of views on social media."
Subsequently, as of August 2023, his videos for "Shouting At The Wall" and "Palestine" have received more then 930,000 views and 700,000 views, respectively, on YouTube alone.
Read on here: https://melissa-on-the-road.blogspot.com/2023/12/mc-abdul-from-palestine-shouting-at-wall.html
Listen here:
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Double standards
Finally, some last words.
“Europe is losing moral ground with the rest of the world as a result of its stance on Gaza,” the EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell admitted on Monday.
Speaking at a conference in Aosta, Borrell added that the EU has been unable to adopt a united view since some countries in Europe suffered guilt due to the Holocaust in the Second World War.
Borrell was seeking to explain why the EU had been left so divided over Gaza and its relations with the global south so damaged.
He said “relations with the global south had not been very good before 7 October, now it has become worse”, and that “we are losing moral ground with the rest of the world including in the middle east”.
The accusations of double standards seemed massive compared with the EU’s standard in Ukraine, he said.
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I leave you with this to meditate.
Thanks again for reading, and even more for coming back and sharing, for those of you who have the time and courage.
With my best thoughts on these last days of a sad year for the world.
Try to find joy where you can,
melissa
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Melissa Chemam
Journalist / Art Writer
@ RFI English, New Arab, ART UK...
Site: https://sites.google.com/view/melissachemam
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