IDENTITY, WAR & SOCIAL MEDIA

Exploring such a controversial and heated topic requires an interdisciplinary approach. This article identifies potential research tenders in the interlacing realm of political communication, sociology and neuropsychology. More specifically, it aims to get grip on how Palestinians and Israelis interact in on- and offline environments during war in relation to intra- and intergroup identity, what implications this has for the role of social media and why this local conflict matters globally. Given the rapid and everchanging unfolding of this conflict, it shall be disclaimed that this work comes with a myriad of limitations.

State of the art of campaigning on social media

Across the globe, political communication in the forms of impression management (De Munter & De Vries, 2023) and agenda-setting are shifting towards digital environments and topics are reciprocally communicated on social media (Gilardi et al., 2022; Kalita & Croke, 2023; Wang et al., 2023; Zhang et al., 2023, Yuliatiningtyas, 2023). Notably, the discipline of political communication has been contested by Phelan and Maeseele (2023a) who found that scholars barely engage in ontological reflections ono their field of academia. Nonetheless, it has been suggested that social media can mobilise real-life behaviours such as hate crimes as in the case of the Trump social media campaign against US citizens with Asian heritage (Cao, Lindo & Zhong, 2022). This demonstrates the power of such digital political communication environments from a societal perspective, and the importance and leverage potential from a political perspective. Next to the political communication discipline, news agencies and journalists are also confronted with the surge of digital media as an opinion-making space. Traditional and alternative media do not necessarily differ in allowing for pluralist discourse, at least in Western Europe (Peeters & Maeseele, 2023a). However, researchers have unravelled indications that journalists too are subjects to external influences that might shape the interpretation (Verkest, 2023) and intention of a news article (Peeters & Maeseele, 2023b). Bearing in mind the dynamics of politics and journalism in digital media, it is interesting to explore how those dynamics change in a conflict or crisis situation.

Notion of border and diaspora identity dynamics

One conflict sparks particular interest: the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict. There are countless reasons why especially this conflict is immensely interesting to investigate. Borders have always fascinated scholars of social sciences (Arieli, 2016; Dietz, Stetter & Albert, 2006; Durand, 2022; Novak, 2022; Schultz, 2015; Tegenbos, 2019) and having lived exclusively in border areas since 2016 (Bratislava, Nijmegen, Vigo, Wesel, Antwerp), I am tend to agree. Authors like Shomron and Schejter (2019) specifically encourage to investigate the dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian relationship in digital media, particularly when it comes to the handling of current affairs.

Even more interesting than the concept of border is the one of identity (in conflict). The relationship between group identity and self-identity self-perpetuates a spiralling conflict. In order to escape conflict, the self would need to abjure the collective group identity, leading to fractions and possibly self-conflict (Brewer, 2011). Hence, humans tend to harmonise group and social identity in order to preserve identity homogeneity (Brewer, 2011). It is then interesting to investigate how this very haptic notion of identity translates into digital environments, where soil is no longer existent. Specifically, to explore utterances of collective identity and social identity and to what extent they differ in creating meaning of the conflict. Another interesting concept is that of victim identity (Karlin, 2010). Preliminary results show that both sides compete about the position of the victim in digital media either to justify aggression or elicit sympathy from the international community (Karlin, 2010). 

The notion of identity become particularly interesting when looking at the Israeli and Palestinian diasporas. The Palestinian diaspora has utilised digital media for making the public aware of their misery and to demand the boycotting of Israel (Hitchcock, 2016; Kumar, 2018). When compared, the agendas of the diasporic community differ from the local agenda: the diaspora emphasises topics of community and their right of repatriation while the local community preaches solidarity and demands the boycott of Israel (Ben-David, 2012). Yet, claims or demands made by the diaspora rarely translate into action on the ground (Hitchcock, 2016). The Israeli diaspora on the other side maintains close physical relationships with their homeland and relatives, for example through exchange programs (Adamson, 2016). Moreover, it has been argued that Israel’s state apparatus actively promotes and supports the diaspora and has established a digital communication infrastructure to ease and aid with communications (Winer, 2019). An interesting dynamic is the return of Israeli diaspora to Western Europe, albeit it might only be temporary (Remennick, 2019). Against the backdrop of the aforementioned dynamics of diaspora, the primary interest here is to explore differences between the diaspora and non-diaspora communities related to the other research topics articulated in previous paragraphs. 

Area of interest: What effects or behaviour can be observed within the diaspora communities? Does digital media move the frontier into digital environments? What persists, what perishes? 

Differences in perception/media presence? How long is the arm of indoctrination? Spatial, velocity and volume spectres of digital media: when pursuing same interests, how does media affect you when accessed somewhere far away from the scene? Differences in use, representation, utilization, agenda-setting, propaganda-making, does distance enhance chances for perspective-taking or consensus-building?

Applying a political communication research lens

Unfortunately, another aspect of this conflict is its severity and pervasiveness. Almost every area of life is occupied with the conflict: teaching (Makkawi, 2002), freedom of speech, movement, access to fresh water, electricity – there is virtually nothing that is not fought about. This status quo has been classified as apartheid by Amnesty International (2023) and it is therefore safe to say that one encounters a highly polarised society with fierce and sometimes violent opposing sides. 

Israel has pursued politically conservative agendas for decades, but with the latest disruptive change in legislation there is a climax that prompts Israelis to demonstrate for more liberalism and democracy in the country (Berg, 2023). Some argue that this change is indicative of an increasingly authoritarian policy-making (Beauchamp, 2023), notably associated with extreme nationalist and ultra-religious leaders being the driving forces behind it (Cook, 2023). The future and societal reception or dealing with the situation remains unclear (Berg, 2023), which contributes to the instability in the region. Furthermore, this change has far-reaching implications for the legal rights of Palestinians (Zaher, 2023) and generally exacerbates the already difficult reality of many Palestinians (Najjar, 2023; Reuters, 2023). 

On the Palestinian side, the society is facing the retirement of president Mahmoud Abbas, leaving a power vacuum which is to be filled (International Crisis Group, 2023; Najib, 2022; VOA Middle East, 2023). Some speculate that Hussein al-Sheikh could be the new PA leader (Rasgon & Boxerman, 2023). He has vouched to cooperate with Israel and seems to be entangled in the daily operations of the Israeli authorities (Rasgon & Boxerman, 2023). This would lead to polarising reactions from Palestinians as some would welcome such a cooperation as a hope for peace, others would perceive it as a humiliation and condemn al-Sheikh as a traitor. Meanwhile, Dekel and Shusterman (2022) have drafted six possible scenarios for a post-Abbas era and each of them bears different consequences for the geopolitical security of the region. Regardless of what is going to happen, there is high (geo)political uncertainty about the future of the region and the discourse on digital media about the succession can be expected to intensify within the upcoming months which makes this conflict all the more interesting to observe. 

Neuropsychological group dynamics in (digital) conflict

Interestingly, research indicates that when Palestinians and Israeli engage face-to-face, moral and ethical implications of the conflict are being reflected upon (Ron & Maoz, 2013). Wolfsfeld (2018) found identical results when interviewing Palestinian and Israeli political leaders: both sides agreed that digital media channels have changed conflict dynamics very negatively, conveying messages of hate and instilling phobia or at least making intergroup differences salient. This means that more dialogue needs to be facilitated in an offline setting to reduce the conflict. From a communication science lens, it would be highly interesting to explore the mechanisms that lead to reflection and consensus in those talks. Insights about this could be implemented in digital technologies to encourage the interaction between sides, perspective-taking and more empathetic communication. The importance of these three factors; perspective-taking, consensus-finding and empathy in communication is tremendous and studies (Ron & Maoz, 2013; Wolfsfeld, 2018) fall short to explore them through the lens of communication. Perspective-taking invites conflict parties to perceive a dispute as more task-oriented than a people-oriented (Sessa, 1996), at least if they have a tendency of liking the opposite party (McPherson Frantz & Janoff-Bulmann, 2000). The research on perspective-taking is rather immature and academics from computational linguistics or neuroscience still need to disentangle the various cognitive processes that take place in perspective-taking during conversation (Brown-Schmidt & Heller, 2018). Saveski et al. (2022) found that Twitter users exposed to opposing political tweets were eager to engage with the tweet but did not make efforts in understanding the other’s perspective. The latter only occurred when they were incentivised to reflect on past disagreements with friends (Saveski et al., 2022). Their participants too expressed desire to handle political disagreements in the form of debate offline instead of online (Saveski et al., 2022). Interestingly, visual cues like avatars may aid perspective-taking or ignite attitudinal shifts (Yee & Bailenson, 2006). This highlights the interplay with empathy in communication. There are several limitations when investigating perspective-taking in digital environments. Gehlbach (2004) discerned social perspective-taking into a comprehensive taxonomy of circumstances or capacity and other scholars have shed light on predispositions like guilt (Leith & Baumeister, 2008), dispositional forgiveness (Rizkalla, Wertheim & Hodgson, 2008) or levels of distress (Wolgast et al., 2020) that both influence social perspective-taking. Self-evidently, those circumstances are impossible to dissect in qualitative methods when studying digital media in this context as the utterances do not reveal the psychological state of the author. The societal relevance of exploring perspective-taking, consensus-finding and empathy communication in digital media against the backdrop of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is excruciatingly high. Insights could enhance our understanding of how people with fundamentally different worldviews interact online and to what extent this contributes to a peace-consolidating process. Results would be of paramount importance to digital media companies for that implementing the recommendations might lead to a less fragmented society, taking the Israel-Palestine conflict as a microorganism for global trends in society. Essentially, these three parameters form the very basis of factual argumentation and debate, an art that humanity seems to have lost grip on (Bushweller, 2022; Davies, 2019; Huckins, 2016; Jenkins, 2019). 

© Luka Paul Vethake, 2023