Digital Militarism

Israel's Occupation in the Social Media Age

Adi Kuntsman, Rebecca L. Stein

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780804794978
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Antropología cultural y social

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.

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 Conference¹

“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 website²

“Israel is addicted to occupation.”

Gideon Levy, 2014³

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.⁴ 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.”⁵ 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.⁶ 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).⁷ 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.⁸ 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.⁹ 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.¹⁰

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.¹¹ 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.¹² 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.

FIGURE 1.1. ISRAELI SOLDIER SELFIES I, INSTAGRAM, 2012. Israeli soldiers pose for selfies while awaiting their deployment for a ground invasion of the Gaza Strip. SOURCE: http://www.buzzfeed.com

FIGURE 1.2. ISRAELI SOLDIER SELFIES II, INSTAGRAM, 2012. SOURCE: http://www.buzzfeed.com

FIGURE 1.3. ISRAELI SOLDIER SELFIES III, INSTAGRAM, 2012. SOURCE: http://www.buzzfeed.com

FIGURE 1.4. ISRAELI SOLDIER SELFIES IV, INSTAGRAM, 2012. SOURCE: http://www.buzzfeed.com

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.¹³ 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.¹⁴

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.¹⁵ 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.¹⁶

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.¹⁷ 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.”¹⁸ 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.¹⁹ 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 ...