The outbreak of deadly fever which has set Israel and Gaza on fire and blood is also the symptom of a visceral cultural war, which in turn fuels a merciless information war. In such divisive soil, propaganda and disinformation grow like wheatgrass. Absolutes too.
Rarely have we harvested so much in such a short time. We are called upon to decide between camps that we are forced to essentialize. Do you mourn the hundreds of Jews, children and adults, whose lives were vilely taken away? It is therefore that you acquiesce in the vengeful and asphyxiating policies of the Israeli government. Do you deplore the hundreds of Palestinians, children and adults, whose lives have been similarly stolen? So you are showing weakness in the face of terrorism that screams its name. Simple, right? No of course not.
It is even less so when the rumor machine goes into overdrive, as we saw with the murdered babies of Kfar Aza, symbols par excellence of the dirty war of communication in which Israel and Hamas are engaged. The latter was quick to shout about the news. The Israeli Prime Minister responded by publishing unbearable photos of dead babies without commenting on their number or their context.
Who and what to believe? The exploitation of these innocent people by both camps is despicable. It relegates to the shadows the hundreds of adults and children who fell on either side of this powder keg in the last days. Above all, it deliberately short-circuits the roots of an otherwise old and complex conflict, by cutting it off from its political, social, economic, religious or ideological dimensions.
We must resist this poison. Manichaeism is a trap from which it quickly becomes impossible to escape. Palestinians and Israelis have been caught in this vise for decades. They need calm, nuanced allies capable of stepping back so as not to fall into it in turn. But the speed with which each jolt reaches us makes our moral dilemmas epidermal.
Although indignation may be a driving force for action, it is rarely a good advisor. Especially when we feed it with photos, videos and outrageous words (some true, but violent to the point of unreason, others false, but manipulative to the point of delirium) in an environment as little regulated as that of social networks. Their immediacy, their lack of embellishment, their virality too, give these ultra-charged contents an illusion of dangerous truth which only fuels the cycle of violence.
These manipulations go far beyond the borders of the Middle East. The Institute for the Study of War also observes that the Kremlin is participating in the instrumentalization of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in order to reduce, through gang, Western support for the war in Ukraine.
There, as everywhere else on the planet, we no longer count the fake photos, the diverted videos and the lying words that drag us into their abyss. The European Digital Commissioner threatened the bosses of Meta, X and TikTok with sanctions. This is because fabricated or manipulated content has abounded there, especially since Hamas took Israel by surprise last Saturday.
Alas, such warnings hardly worry these giants whose moderators are overwhelmed. It’s up to the public to make do in this informational chaos that distrust of journalists and the trivialization of disinformation circuits have made stratospheric. All this creates a terrible burden on the information, which is even heavier in Canada, where the news was declared persona non grata by Meta.
To the right to be indignant, to cry and to get angry in the face of the fury of the world, we must nevertheless oppose a vigorous duty to doubt, to inform oneself and to contextualize. This is what a large number of media are forced to do which, in our busy times, constitute an excellent antidote to arbitrariness. Journalistic truth, however, needs to be seen, read, discussed and shared in order to exist. Finding information in times of war, multiplying reliable sources and formats, here and abroad, is a concrete act of resistance, demanding of course, but oh so useful.