Israel's occupation has been transformed in the social media age. Over the last decade, military rule in the Palestinian territories grew more bloody and entrenched. In the same period, Israelis became some of the world's most active social media users. In Israel today, violent politics are interwoven with global networking practices, protocols, and aesthetics. Israeli soldiers carry smartphones into the field of military operations, sharing mobile uploads in real-time. Official Israeli military spokesmen announce wars on Twitter. And civilians encounter state violence first on their newsfeeds and mobile screens.
Across the globe, the ordinary tools of social networking have become indispensable instruments of warfare and violent conflict. This book traces the rise of Israeli digital militarism in this global context—both the reach of social media into Israeli military theaters and the occupation's impact on everyday Israeli social media culture. Today, social media functions as a crucial theater in which the Israeli military occupation is supported and sustained.
Israel's occupation has been transformed in the social media age. Over the last decade, military rule in the Palestinian territories grew more bloody and entrenched. In the same period, Israelis became some of the world's most active social media users. In Israel today, violent politics are interwoven with global networking practices, protocols, and aesthetics. Israeli soldiers carry smartphones into the field of military operations, sharing mobile uploads in real-time. Official Israeli military spokesmen announce wars on Twitter. And civilians encounter state violence first on their newsfeeds and mobile screens.
Across the globe, the ordinary tools of social networking have become indispensable instruments of warfare and violent conflict. This book traces the rise of Israeli digital militarism in this global context—both the reach of social media into Israeli military theaters and the occupation's impact on everyday Israeli social media culture. Today, social media functions as a crucial theater in which the Israeli military occupation is supported and sustained.
Digital Militarism: Israel's Occupation in the Social Media Age
192
Digital Militarism: Israel's Occupation in the Social Media Age
192eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Israel's occupation has been transformed in the social media age. Over the last decade, military rule in the Palestinian territories grew more bloody and entrenched. In the same period, Israelis became some of the world's most active social media users. In Israel today, violent politics are interwoven with global networking practices, protocols, and aesthetics. Israeli soldiers carry smartphones into the field of military operations, sharing mobile uploads in real-time. Official Israeli military spokesmen announce wars on Twitter. And civilians encounter state violence first on their newsfeeds and mobile screens.
Across the globe, the ordinary tools of social networking have become indispensable instruments of warfare and violent conflict. This book traces the rise of Israeli digital militarism in this global context—both the reach of social media into Israeli military theaters and the occupation's impact on everyday Israeli social media culture. Today, social media functions as a crucial theater in which the Israeli military occupation is supported and sustained.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804794978 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2015 |
| Series: | Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| File size: | 22 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Digital Militarism
Israel's Occupation in the Social Media Age
By Adi Kuntsman, Rebecca L. Stein
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-9497-8
CHAPTER 1
When Instagram Went to War
Israel's Occupation in the Social Media Age
"When you think cyber, think of Israel." Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, Cybertech 2014 Conference
"Israelis are addicted to all forms of communicating and the very latest technology. Indeed, many of the world's instant messaging and communication systems were invented in Israel." Israeli Ministry of Tourism, promotional website
"Israel is addicted to occupation." Gideon Levy, 2014
IN NOVEMBER 2012, during the Israeli aerial assault on the Gaza Strip of that year, many Israeli soldiers went into service with smartphones in their pockets, checking and updating their social media accounts from army installations as they awaited the start of the ground invasion. The social networking field of the wartime moment was crowded and diverse, including users from a range of geographical locations and political standpoints. Official military spokespersons from Israel and Hamas joined thousands of civilian users from Israel, the Palestinian territories, and the international arena, anti-occupation activists numbering heavy among them, all of whom employed popular apps as political tools in what the global media called Israel's "first social media war." The mobile uploads from individual soldiers differed markedly from the official output of the Israeli military, with its emphasis on PR didacticism and the production of an institutional record. And they contrasted sharply with the viral content from Gaza's Palestinian residents that saturated global social networks, amateur documentation of the unfolding Israeli military devastation that was delivered to global users in the familiar staccato of digital real time. Israeli soldiers, for their part, chiefly employed social media to personalize the military campaign, to share images of mundane military scenes and army ephemera as they waited for the onset of the ground incursion (which would, in fact, never occur).
During these days of waiting, Israeli soldiers uploaded a series of selfies to their personal Instagram accounts. In most respects, it was a standard catalogue of smartphone self-portraiture, including casual snapshots of uniformed young men and women smiling for the camera in compliance with Instagram's investment in the beauty of the ordinary, featuring everyday moments of military life in uniform: riding on a bus, posing for an elevator self-portrait, embracing a friend, all framed by the extended temporality of waiting, waiting to deploy (see Figures 1.1–1.4). With the aid of retro filters, and their familiar aesthetics of the out of time and place, these mobile snapshots produced an exquisite and highly sanitized visual archive of soldiering. As such, they offered a digital twist on the long history of Israeli nationalist sentimentality and associated iconography, in which war is simultaneously heroized and aestheticized while disassociated from resultant violence. Through the genre of the selfie, this iconography was mobilized to serve the needs of self-branding, with war configured as meme and employed as a tool of micro-celebrity. These were images of militarism but not of battle, beautified bodies free of dirt or blood, at a considerable remove from the carnage of the concurrent military operation. The accompanying hashtag strings gestured toward the violence that the visual field had cleansed:
#kill#sexy#nevergiveup#sleep#m16#instalove#happy and #war#army#soldier#artillery#fire#friends#cool#sad#israel#idf#instamood. Read together, the selfies and their hashtags generated unsettling intersections between the patriotic and the intimate, the lethal and the playful, the army and the algorithm.
This book explores such intersections between social media and militarism: between ordinary networking practices and wartime violence, between the pleasure of commonplace digital acts and the brutality of Israel's military occupation. We term this phenomenon digital militarism. In our rendering, digital militarism describes the process by which digital communication platforms and consumer practices have, over the course of the first two decades of the twenty-first century, become militarized tools in the hands of state and nonstate actors, both in the field of military operations and in civilian frameworks. In the broadest terms, the digital of digital militarism is a highly varied domain of new technologies and technological aptitudes, including high-tech weaponry and cyberwarfare—a field in which the Israeli military proudly excels. Our investigation focuses chiefly on the role of social media and enabling mobile technologies within this framework, with attention to how they have been mobilized by Israeli state and civilian "networked publics" as tools, sites, and languages of militarist engagement. Hence, we use digital militarism to refer to the extension of militarized culture into social media domains often deemed beyond the reach of state violence, and to the impact of militarization on everyday Israeli social networking. We are proposing, then, that both terms in this equation shape the other: namely, that the evolving terms of social media usage impact the field of Israeli militarism, just as shifts in Israeli militarization are altering the social media field. Digital militarism allows us to think beyond the paradigm of the repressive Israeli military state in an effort to make visible the varied and often ordinary ways in which Israel's military regime and pervasive culture of militarism are perpetuated and sustained.
The militarization of social media is by no means unique to the Israeli context. Rather, as is by now something of a truism, social media have been integrated into military operations in contexts across the globe, with platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube employed for wartime PR, as tools of surveillance and counter-insurgency, and as archives of perpetrator violence. In the social media age, contemporary warfare and armed conflicts have increasingly encompassed digital communication platforms—a process that has enlarged theaters of military operation and changed our understanding of the political function and political ends of digital technologies. In recent years we have seen the increasing incorporation of social media into the military toolboxes of Western states, employed to win hearts and minds and conduct counter-terrorism. Today, violent conflicts between states, or with stateless groups, take shape on social networks—digital battlefields deemed vital to the success of conventional military operations on the ground. Today, we expect the presence of smartphones, computers, and video-enabled cameras on the battlefield; the integration of social networking into military arsenals; the real-time Twitter and Facebook updates from war zones; the violent footage filmed and shared by the perpetrators themselves. Digital militarism was once an aberration, located on the periphery of the Internet and its associated social worlds. By 2014, it had become commonplace.
Although digital militarism has diverse geopolitical coordinates, this book studies the ways it takes shape in the contemporary Israeli context and the history of its emergence. We argue that within a global culture of mobile capture and viral circulation, Israeli militarism is being reframed and recruited by ordinary Israeli users and their international supporters as part of the social media everyday. In Israel today, mainstream militarized politics are being interwoven with global networking protocols: their grammars, aesthetic norms, structures of feeling, and modes of consumer engagement. On platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, the classic terms and aesthetics of Zionist settler-nationalism are being reshaped in compliance with networking norms. Like any global phenomenon, this interplay between militarism and social media necessarily takes highly localized forms, a process by which global protocols are retooled to articulate national needs. It is precisely this process of localization that concerns us here.
While broader histories of Israeli militarism inform this book, we focus on how digital militarism functions in the context of Israel's ongoing military occupation of the Palestinian territories. In particular, we are interested in the ways that social networking practices are mediating the everyday Israeli relationship to military rule. Our objects of analysis, then, include the Israeli soldier in the occupied West Bank or Gaza Strip with a smartphone in his or her pocket for whom routine army operations have been rebranded as a potential "share." They include official Israeli military bodies endeavoring to incorporate social media into the state's toolbox. And they include ordinary Jewish Israeli civilians and pro-Israeli supporters outside the nation-state who consume and circulate digital images of Israel's occupation from the comfort of their mobile devices, often while the military operation is unfolding. In all of these instances, ordinary social media practices and users are being conscripted into the state's military project. And in the process, state violence is being practiced through other means—through acts of "liking" and "sharing," through the visual syntax of the selfie, through the structures of feeling that social networking make uniquely possible.
A central tension lies at the core of digital militarism: namely, the ways it renders the Israeli occupation at once palpable and out of reach, both visible and invisible. On the one hand, mobile technologies have made the spectacle of state violence instantly available, often in real time, in the palm of the hand on smartphone screens. As such, digital militarism has the potential to extend Israel's occupation into the most private Israeli spaces and times, the most mundane networking contexts, zones of Internet activity typically deemed beyond the purview of Israel's military projects. At the same time, the patina of the digital everyday can minimize and banalize this violence, obscuring its visibility and mitigating its impact. Such tensions undergird this study.
The Innovation Nation and Its Vanishing Occupation
Our analysis concentrates on a particular historical period of Israeli digital militarism: 2008–2014, the years of its development, consolidation, and eventual normalization. These were years of growing social media literacy in political arenas across the globe, years in which mobile digital technologies were becoming more affordable and more pervasive. During this short span of time, digital militarism moved from the margins of Israeli society to its center. Initially, the interplay between social networking and militarized projects of various kinds took Israelis by surprise, alternately lauded by the Israeli media in the language of digital pioneering (as when the Israeli military began to experiment with networking tools) or condemned by pundits as scandalous aberrations (as when the private Facebook posts of soldiers, depicting military abuse, became widely exposed). By the end of the period in question, militarism had been fully incorporated into Israeli digital culture.
Israelis have long been celebrated for their technological literacy and have long enjoyed high per-capita penetration of information and communication technologies. During these years, this literacy was extending to new digital communication tools, aesthetics, and grammar. In 2011, Israel was deemed one of "the world's biggest users of social networks." In 2014, Israelis were said to spend the most per-capita time engaged in social networking, celebrated as a global leader in digital technology adoption. At the same time, Israel's much-touted high-tech sector continued its growth as an international leader in technological innovation, representing what some have called the most important technology incubator next to Silicon Valley—its growth fueled by the sector's close ties to the military industrial complex, with technologies honed in militarized contexts frequently reengineered for civilian ones. It was during these years that Israel was famously dubbed the "Start Up Nation" and later the "innovation nation," a branded concept installed to retell a classic Zionist modernizing narrative, a formulation that some have termed "High-Tech Zionism." For the state's "Brand Israel" campaign, the discourse of technological innovation could be effectively mobilized to supplant the deleterious global story of military occupation and conflict. Technology, in this rendering, functioned as the occupation's surrogate.
The growth of the Israeli high-tech economy, and the spread of social media within the Israeli populace, was coterminous with a very particular chapter in the history of the military occupation and Israeli militarism more generally. In the mid-to-late 2000s, while Israelis were learning the art of social media, mainstream Israeli political agendas were changing. In prior decades, the so-called "Arab-Israeli conflict" (or, euphemistically, the "situation," hamatzav [in Hebrew]) had dominated the national political agenda. But in these years, the perceived importance of the conflict began to wane, as mainstream Jewish Israeli society began to lose interest in the "peace process" and matters of occupation. Such disinterest was enabled by the strong Israeli economy of this period, and the spatial fiction advanced by the separation barrier—a structure that enabled Israelis to live as if at a remove from Palestinians under occupation. It was also bolstered by Israel's unilateral withdrawal or "disengagement" from the Gaza Strip in 2005, a political euphemism that obscured the continuation of military occupation over the Gaza Strip, albeit in new forms. In the years following disengagement, many Jewish Israelis would insist that "there is no occupation in Gaza," the language of "war" replacing and obfuscating that of "military occupation" during Israel's successive incursions into the Gaza Strip (2008–2009, 2012, 2014).
As Jewish Israelis turned away from the military occupation, domestic issues began to figure more centrally in the national political agenda, chiefly matters of economy and "lifestyle" that had been thought to exist at a remove from matters of military rule (a formula that framed the mass Israeli social protests of 2011). The national elections of 2012, for their part, were conducted in the absence of a robust public discussion about Israel's relationship with the Palestinians. In the same year, a judiciary panel convened by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu would "reject the claim that Israel's presence in the territory is that of an occupying force," an opinion that aimed to pave the way for widespread settlement in the West Bank. In the Israeli media, images and discussion of Israel's military rule were receding, relegated to the domain of "non-news" (in the words of one Israeli blogger). In broader political discourse, Palestinians rarely appeared, save in the language of "terrorism" and "security threat." In some centrist and right-wing discourse, Israeli pundits went further by disavowing Israel's occupation altogether, referring to the term only in quotation marks.
And yet, Israeli military rule in the Palestinian territories continued and flourished during these years, as did the Jewish settlement population in the West Bank, supported by an ever-expanding road network. And even as the occupation was receding from political discourse, Jewish Israelis were progressively embracing a politics of militant patriotism. Racist anti-Palestinian sentiment once relegated to Israeli right-wing margins moved to the center of mainstream political discourse, the evolution of a set of rightward shifts that began in 2000, growing in force and magnitude during the periodic military assaults on Gaza. During such operations, many Jewish Israelis would support a politics of militant security in the name of "Israel's right to self-defense," usually with little regard for mounting Palestinian civilian casualties. The chorus of militancy would grow markedly during Israel's 2014 Gaza offensive. As the Palestinian death toll from Israeli military actions grew, enabled by widespread popular Israeli support for the operation, left-wing pundits spoke with new candor about the Israeli "culture of hate [...] and vengeance," about "an environment where casual racism is a norm." The Israeli public of the wartime period had little patience for a discussion of Palestinian dead and wounded. Even recitation of their names was considered a slanderous act. The Israeli appetite for militancy, on the other hand, had never been stronger.
Our discussion of digital militarism focuses on the intersection of these historical and social processes: increasing digital literacy among Jewish Israeli populations and an Israeli political landscape characterized by growing patriotic militarism and denial of occupation. These coterminous developments are typically viewed as separate phenomena. Instead, we suggest that they are mutually productive, that they function together and through each other.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Digital Militarism by Adi Kuntsman, Rebecca L. Stein. Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents and Abstracts1When Instagram Went to War: Israel's Occupation in the Social Media Age chapter abstractThis chapter provides the historical and theoretical parameters of the book, defining the term "digital militarism" and outlining the ways it has changed during the first two decades of the twenty-first century. It sketches the relationship between the changing Israeli political playfield of these years and the growth of the national culture in social networking and digital literacy. Through a focus on the Instagram accounts of Israeli soldiers during Israel's 2012 assault on the Gaza Strip, the chapter studies the ordinary ways that patriotic militarism can be translated into social media grammars (e.g., selfies, hashtags, "likes").
2"Another War Zone": The Development of Digital Militarism chapter abstractThis chapter traces the growth of digital militarism in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, chiefly the ways that social media have been incorporated into the toolbox of the Israeli state during times of war and military operations in the occupied Palestinian territories. It focuses on the use of social media by numerous Israeli and pro-Israeli actors – civilians and military users – during two Israeli military assaults on the Gaza Strip (2008-9 and 2012), and during the Flotilla affair of 2010. The chapter also traces the rise of personalized militarism by means of social media and the ways it functions to obscure and excuse Israeli violence.
3Anatomy of a Facebook Scandal: Social Media as Alibi chapter abstractThis chapter focuses on a landmark case in the history of digital militarism: the 2010 exposure of a Facebook album of former Israeli soldier Eden Abergil, containing her joyful self-portraits with bound and blindfolded Palestinian detainees. The chapter traces the social life of this scandal, with a focus on the varying strategies used by Israeli publics to manage the event's dangerous virality by turning away from matters of military occupation onto questions of social media.
4Palestinians Who Never Die: The Politics of Digital Suspicion chapter abstractThis chapter studies the digital doctoring charges that proliferated on Israeli social networks during the 2012 Israeli incursion into the Gaza Strip. Israeli social media users took aim at images of Palestinian dead and injured, using digital forensics and everyday modes of what we term "digital suspicion" to assert forgery claims. This is a study of the ways that Israeli and pro-Israeli social media users have employed doctoring charges as a tool of digital militarism. This study is framed within the much longer history of Israeli suspicion of Palestinian political claims and associated evidence.
5Selfie Militarism: The Normalization of Digital Militarism chapter abstractThe book's final chapter reflects on the development of Israeli digital militarism from 2008 to 2014, tracking key shifts in this formulation. It focuses on the changing ways that soldiers have used selfies—the popular genre of mobile self-portraiture, images shared on photo-sharing platforms such as Instagram—to document their experience of life in the Israeli armed forces. The chapter proposes that digital militarism began as an aberrant phenomenon, the activity of marginalized Israeli youth, and has since become an ordinary Israeli practice, an everyday way of living with and representing Israeli military rule.