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I’ve worked in Jewish media for a decade. I’ve never seen social media this unhinged.
This essay originally appeared in Kveller.
(JTA) — It was a slow trickle, each long press of the finger and ensuing quick tap was days and sometimes weeks apart (it’s hard to comprehend that a whole month has passed since Oct. 7), but I am here to tell you that I — a former social media manager — have removed each and every social media app from my phone.
In fact, as I was writing this very esssay, I realized I still had Threads downloaded, opened it for a minute, saw a Thread that said “Zionism is antisemitism,” and promptly deleted that, too.
I have zero desire to restore a single one of them.
What happened to me has probably happened to you, too. I saw a Tweet, a TikTok, an Instagram Story that filled me with such fury and indignation that I spent hours — sometimes days — formulating and reformulating an epic, fact-based, emotionally charged, imagined response. Imagined, of course, because I knew I’d never post it. I’ve seen so many celebrities and random acquaintances do such utterly embarrassing and harmful and reputation-destroying things in the last weeks to even dare to try.
And to be clear: I would try if I thought I could change someone’s mind and force them to see my humanity, but beyond the small, intimate, personal conversations that I can have off the apps, I feel like these enraged indignant responses only seem to silo people further.
I’ve worked in social media since 2014 — in the Jewish realm of social media, specifically. That means I’ve seen a lot of awfulness, gas chamber memes, overt antisemitism and Islamophobia. I’ve personally been told many times to go back where I came from (which, yes, is Israel, and that feels grimly funny now). Yet I’ve also believed in its power to heal, to make people feel seen, to energize activism, to educate.
I still believe that — kind of? But I’ve also never seen it this awful, this polarizing, this … honestly, unhinged. An unscientific poll of people I know seems to indicate the same thing: Social media is the worst it’s ever been, maybe because the Israel/Palestine conversation has always been so impossibly polarizing.
People are so stuck in their “side” and binary that they’re willing to share anything — without fact-checking, without making sure they’re not getting in bed with people whose worldview is dangerous, without asking themselves for a small second, wait, is this Islamophobic? Antisemitic? Completely detached from reality? Without wondering if they sound like a conspiracy theorist, or if they’re just being cruel for cruelty’s sake.
And the amount of words wasted on misinformation and meanness doesn’t even compare to the number of words some people insist on putting into other people’s mouths (or keyboards, rather) when their statement doesn’t 100% pass whatever standards they’ve arbitrarily decided it must. Beyond Israel and Palestine, we’ve been tearing ourselves apart inside our Jewish community, and that also breaks my heart.
I understand the deep grief and rage behind most posts. I’ve been enraged and grieving myself. I’ve been scared too: Of the growing antisemitism. Of the people who tell me that I and my family, because we were born in Israel, can’t be innocent civilians, that we all deserve the horrors of Oct. 7 to befall on us.
I’ve also been scared for the life of every innocent person lost and about to be lost. Around 1,200 Israelis killed, 300 kidnapped, over 10,000 Palestinian lives believed to have been taken, all unfathomable numbers. And I’ve been scared about the cycle of rage and violence and siloed indignation that removes the humanity of a whole swath of people. Because I do believe that that’s part of what got us here. And I keep seeing it evinced, over and over again, on social media.
I am — unlike many “experts” newly minted by numbers of followers or magnitude of chutzpah — not an expert of Middle Eastern politics, despite being Israeli and working in Jewish media for almost a decade. I know a lot, but I am not a politician or historian. And yet, to the extent I believe that there is a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I believe that it has to be one that takes into account the inherent humanity of all those involved. I believe that it will be human and imperfect.
I’m awed by the people who are still managing to use social media for good right now, the little spots of light — people who parse through history and reality with wisdom and empathy, well-educated veteran observers of Israel and Palestine, academics, journalists, fierce activists, who, through immense pain, still manage to retain their humanity.
Yet for me, I’ve realized being on social media is doing more harm than good. It’s keeping me further away from solutions and useful action, and closer to rage and fear. So for now, I can’t stay there.
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The post I’ve worked in Jewish media for a decade. I’ve never seen social media this unhinged. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Iran Says Eight Arrested for Suspected Links to Israel’s Mossad Spy Agency
The Mossad recruitment ad. Photo: Screenshot.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said on Saturday they had arrested eight people suspected of trying to transmit the coordinates of sensitive sites and details about senior military figures to Israel’s Mossad, Iranian state media reported.
They are accused of having provided the information to the Mossad spy agency during Israel’s air war on Iran in June, when it attacked Iranian nuclear facilities and killed top military commanders as well as civilians in the worst blow to the Islamic Republic since the 1980s war with Iraq.
Iran retaliated with barrages of missiles on Israeli military sites, infrastructure and cities. The United States entered the war on June 22 with strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.
A Guards statement alleged that the suspects had received specialized training from Mossad via online platforms. It said they were apprehended in northeastern Iran before carrying out their plans, and that materials for making launchers, bombs, explosives and booby traps had been seized.
State media reported earlier this month that Iranian police had arrested as many as 21,000 “suspects” during the 12-day war with Israel, though they did not say what these people had been suspected of doing.
Security forces conducted a campaign of widespread arrests and also stepped up their street presence during the brief war that ended in a US-brokered ceasefire.
Iran has executed at least eight people in recent months, including nuclear scientist Rouzbeh Vadi, hanged on August 9 for passing information to Israel about another scientist killed in Israeli airstrikes.
Human rights groups say Iran uses espionage charges and fast-tracked executions as tools for broader political repression.
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Body of Idan Shtivi, Murdered on Oct. 7, Retrieved from Gaza in Special IDF Operation
Idan Shtivi. Photo: Courtesy of the family
i24 News – The body of Idan Shtivi, a 28-year-old murdered by Palestinian jihadists at the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023, was recovered in a joint operation by the IDF and Shin Bet in central Gaza, it was cleared for publication on Saturday.
Shtivi’s remains were returned to Israel alongside the body of Ilan Weiss, another hostage killed during the October 7 massacre.
“Idan Shtivi was abducted from the Tel Gama area and brutally murdered by Hamas terrorists after acting to rescue and evacuate others from the Nova music festival on October 7th, 2023. He was 28 years old at the time of his death,” read an IDF press release.
“Following an identification process conducted at the National Center for Forensic Medicine, along with the Israel Police and the Military Rabbinate, the Hostages and Missing Persons Headquarters notified his family.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Shviti “was a gifted student of sustainability and governance, and a courageous individual” who acted heroically on October 7, helping others flee.
“He was killed in the process and his body was abducted to Gaza by Hamas. My wife and I send our heartfelt condolences to the Shtivi family. So far, 207 hostages have been returned, 148 of them alive. We will continue to act tirelessly and decisively to bring back all our hostages—living and deceased.”
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Woman Stabbed at Ottawa Grocery Store in Latest Antisemitic Attack
A social media post by the alleged attacker, Joseph Rooke of Cornwall, Ontario. Photo: Screenshot via i24
i24 News – The stabbing of a Jewish woman at an Ottawa grocery by a man with a long history of antisemitic posts on social media, the latest antisemitic hate crime in Canada, sparked outrage and prompted condemnation from officials including the prime minister.
Both the victim and the attacker are in their 70s. The woman is reportedly in serious condition.
The suspect was identified as Joseph Rooke, who has authored a series of lengthy rambling screeds on social media, ranting against Israel and Jews.
“Judaism is the world’s oldest cult,” he writes in one post, going on to say “over time jews have become insidious in governments, businesses, media conglomerates, and educational institutions in order to do what they do better than anyone else. Jews are the world’s masters of propaganda, gaslighting, demonization, demagoguery, and outright lying. Using their collective wealth they have become masters of reprisal.”
“I am under no obligation whatsoever, legal, moral, or otherwise, to like jews and I do not. If that means I meet the jewish definition of an anti-semite, so be it.”
Canada has seen a steep spike in antisemitic attacks over the past two years, including a recent incident in Montreal where a Hasidic Jew was beaten in front on his children.
After Prime Minister Mark Carney condemned the incident, many, including former Israel’s ambassador the US Michael Oren, pointed out that Carney’s rhetoric and policies contribute to the increasing insecurity of Canada’s Jewish community through uncritical embrace of outrageous and easily disprovable allegations that Israel and its supporters were guilty of the worst crimes against humanity.