No Vacation from War

I recently returned from a twelve day vacation in Costa Rica. This post isn’t about Costa Rica, but about a how a vacation shouldn’t be a break from reality.

It seems unfair and wrong that I took a vacation, and planned that vacation, while Israel is destroying the Palestinians of Gaza. How is it that I’m allowed to not only have a roof over my head and an access to three meals a day, but to also leave the country and visit different places in completely safety?

Perhaps vacations are what we need to keep us sane. It’s hard to return with the same energy and passion, and it’s equally important that we use any break or vacation we take to recover the energy energy we need to dive back in with more passion.

A vacation should not be a break from reality. Done correctly, it’s a time to learn. It’s also a time to read, as any vacationer would tell you. To me, that means reading more about reality, or reading non-fiction

War in 140 Characters by David Patrikarakos, is a vignette of several people who used social media to influence war. Mainly about war and conflict in 2014, the book is about Russia’s gray war (neither war nor peace) that rose to prominence that year and about Israel’s war on Gaza (also known as Operation Protective Edge).

Besides the obvious message that Patrikarakos conveyed that social media is changing war as we know it, I noticed a pattern about Israel’s incessant attacks on Gaza.

To quote one passage from the book, to sway public opinion during the 2014 war Israel concluded that to win the war of narratives it must push “three narratives to push at all cost.”

First was the rocket threat that Israeli civilians were being subjected to; second was the tunnel threat, with Hamas burrowing deep underground and across the border into Israel, again to threaten civilian lives; third, and most important, was Hamas use of human shields as a military tactic.

These sound oddly familiar to Israel’s current attack on Gaza, and indeed the same message Israel has used successfully since at least 2014 to convince the global media – legacy media rather than social media – that Israel is under a constant threat of a ruthless enemy.

All of that sounds threatening – the rocket attacks, a network of tunnels that are now famous, and the use of human shields. Israel has convinced the policy makers of the world – wrongly! – that the occupied Palestinians have no right to defend themselves. The tunnels, now infamous, are not a threat to Israel. Before October Hamas had few, if any, “human shields” to use, except for families families of Hamas commanders Israel might target. It’s possible that at this point 70 hostages taken by Hamas in October have been killed by Israeli bombing and attacks.

One final point Patrikarakos makes is that Israel won the 2014 conflict militarily but lost the narrative war. People are able to access their news on social media and the propaganda spin Israel provides legacy media is no longer convincing people of Israel’s argument it’s always under threat of attack.