Mother kisses child in the Gaza Strip, where the Hamas terrorist attacks took place Photo: Libertinus/Creative Commons
Since the 7th, the world has watched with horror the recent escalation of violence in Israel and Palestine, triggered by the attack by Hamas terrorists, which has so far claimed thousands of lives on both sides. But this conflict is not just in the Gaza Strip region: it has swept across the world via social media, in a war full of versions filled with frightening words and images.
This served as ammunition for political and ideological groups that unscrupulously embraced barbarism to impose their worldview. This news invades our lives through computers and cell phones, exciting people who don’t even understand what is happening in the Middle East. This adds to the pain of this endless confrontation, driven by the hatred and intolerance of radicals on both sides.
Wars are not only won on the battlefield: victors must also win the hearts and minds of public opinion. Since the First World War, this has happened more intensively and quickly with the further development of the press and technology. But the equally horrific Russian invasion of Ukraine ushered in a new kind of “reporting,” carried out directly from the front lines by both fighters and civilians on their cell phones. The current phase of the IsraeliPalestinian conflict has made this clear.
In this ideological and digital crossfire, people are practically forced to choose sides. Since Palestinians and Israelis have their arguments, it is important to disqualify the enemy to gain international sympathy. However, since the majority of the population does not have access to reliable and balanced information, a constructive debate in the search for peace turns into an arena of insults.
Here the conflict does not kill people like there, but the social structure is destroyed by ignorance!
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A sad example occurred last Tuesday (10) in a debate on the causes of the conflict organized by the Institute of International Relations of the PUCRJ. Under the mediation of Professor Monica Herz, Márcio Scalercio, professor in the department, Nizar Messari from Al Akhawayn University (Morocco) and Michel Gherman, researcher at UFRJ, from the Center for Zionism and Israel Studies at BenGurion Negev University and the Vital Sasson Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, as well as academic coordinator of the IsraelBrazil Institute.
In his speech, Gherman strongly condemned the Hamas attack as a terrorist act. He tried to explain to the Palestinians themselves the harmful consequences of it and pointed to the need for negotiations with the Palestinian Authority. For this reason, he was attacked by a group of students who accused him of having sympathies for Hamas and, surprisingly, antiSemitism.
Faced with the impossibility of continuing his speech, Gherman left the event. “I’m leaving, you win,” he said as he left. Despite Herz’s protests about what had happened, the debate devolved into an ideological flak among the students.
Gherman’s “sin” was that he had failed to arouse deepseated hatred of Hamas, even though he had made it clear that he classified the group as terrorists. But for the group blinded by hate, anyone who doesn’t behave like this should be silenced. The voices of common sense do not serve as a mirror for them and belong to the “enemy”.
In these times, the splinters of war strike the entire world. If we lose the ability to engage in civil dialogue with those who think differently, terror threatens societies that its bombs cannot reach.
Streaming Horror
The specialized press filters its publications and avoids fake news and overly violent content, which aims to stir up hatred even among those who barely understand what is happening. Social media, on the other hand, acts as gigantic uncontrolled pipelines and lends itself to irrational polarization.
The UN (United Nations) said it had “clear evidence” of war crimes and a large number of reports of civilian deaths by armed groups on both sides disseminating them via digital platforms. They try to gain support for their actions and terrorize the enemy population. And children and young people end up being bombarded with it, without the slightest preparation for so much terror, which means that they later join the ranks of intolerance of all kinds.
Digital terrorists are much faster and more numerous than the press. Furthermore, since they do not feel committed to the truth, they use not only real images of war, but also contextindependent content and material generated by artificial intelligence. From this point on, those who blindly identify with one side take over the spread of terror, whether true or false.
Extremists on both sides are exactly hoping this will happen and be normalized to the point of support. This cannot happen as each group tries to rewrite the history that is still lived, but with their own ideas!
As long as extremists dominate the conflict, there will be no peace. For them, massacres on both sides of the border serve to consolidate their position and consolidate power. Perhaps this is the greatest deviation of this barbarism.
In this war, where ideology kills as many as gunshots, images have lost their ability to represent the truth. On the contrary, they only show what those who posted them want to enforce. And so it is no surprise that the specialized press is being targeted by the same groups for its insistence on not just spreading the facts, but explaining them to everyone, especially those who have always seen the crisis between Palestinians and Israelis as something Feeling incomprehensible and distant and unimportant.
Terrorism cannot be normalized, relativized or accepted. Likewise, extremism is the great enemy of peace because it does not listen to the voice of others or even accept their existence.
Each of us needs to understand, from the comfort of our screens, that life is not binary. People cannot choose sides in a conflict, e.g. B. who decides which team they support, especially if their own team has been disqualified. We know that intolerance kills even in organized fan groups.