My mother was a very safe driver but one morning in June 1967 she drove straight into the back of a parked car on Grev Magnigatan, outside our flat in Stockholm. She had been worrying, she explained, about the Arab Israeli war. This became a family joke but now that the latest war has broken out I think her reaction was as sane as any outsider’s could be. The awful thing that twitter and the newspapers make clear this week is that a lot of people who are in real life entirely unendangered by the violence are really cheered by the latest atrocities.
They feel vindicated and victorious. The war becomes a sporting contest held by other means.
This is not of course the case if you’re an Israeli, a Jew, or if you live in Gaza. The war then is nothing like a sporting contest. I spent four or five days in Jerusalem once, writing a profile of Benny Morris that the Guardian never used — Israel/Palestine was then an issue as inflammatory within the paper as trans would become fifteen years later. I liked and admired Morris for exactly the qualities that made him unprintable: a willingness to step down from omniscience, and in Brechtian terms, to sink into the slime, and embrace the butcher. This also was Orwell’s view, “The truth is very simple. To survive you often have to fight, and to fight you have to dirty yourself. War is evil, and it is often the lesser evil.”
This is not a Christian perspective, but Christianity can only be understood as a response to its truth. At the same time, those who have fought understand that the lesser evil is still an evil. Benny Morris showed me that the café where I ate breakfast had been the victim of a suicide bomber; the old Arab behind the bar in the Kosher hotel where I was staying explained to me — as he served me a cappuccino — that he wouldn’t make them for a Jew that day because they required him to operate machinery on a Sabbath. The cold satisfaction with which he confided this taught me a great deal.
I don’t doubt that if I were a Palestinian I would be happy to see all the Jews driven into the sea or dead. I don’t doubt that if I were an Israeli or even a diaspora Jew the memory of that, and similar interactions would colour my every thought about the Arabs.
But I am not a Palestinian, nor an Israeli, and I try to maintain a decent respect for the moral luck which means I don’t have to make such choices. There are of course noble people on both sides who are able to transcend those urges but it seems presumptuous to assume I would be one of them.
I know that my parents’ generation felt like that about killing Germans, and they were, when I knew them, good people as well as decent ones. But part of their decency was a knowledge, dearly bought, that war was terrible for the effects on the winners as well as the losers. It is exactly that respect which social media strip out, even more effectively than the traditional mass media. Social media suggest to us a world in which we have unlimited power and no responsibility. Most of the behaviour online is simply childish (and no kinder or more thoughtful for that). But this particular irresponsibility is completely infantile: it is the way that a baby experiences the world.
There is also a problem with salience here. It is simply impossible to care equally about all the crimes and injustices in the world. All of the atrocities of last week, and all the atrocities to come, have been prefigured in the Syrian war but I don’t know anyone who feels just as strongly about both horrors. I’m not even arguing that anyone should make the attempt, since it is clearly impossible to do so and the attempt can easily degenerate into those ludicrous shopping lists for God that you get in evangelical prayers.
Honestly, if you feel the urge to cheer on one side or another on twitter, go crash your car instead.
Re: social media and online behaviour, I think Ryan Long nails it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0Pw_TxBe7w&t=5s