A decade ago, in the final days of the weekly joint Palestinian–Jewish protests against Israel’s construction of the separation wall in the West Bank village of Al-Ma’asara, one of our pre-demonstration rituals was a speech by Mahmoud, a local community leader. Phone in hand, he would declare: “We will not have another Nakba, because now we have this. We have a smartphone. We have Facebook. They will try to drive us away again, but everyone will see it and stop it. In ’48 we had no smartphones, no Facebook. Now it will not happen.”
He repeated this mantra every Friday — to the activists beside him, to the soldiers facing us, and to himself. At the time, it felt reassuring. But he was wrong.
Israel’s ongoing genocidal campaign in Gaza may be the most thoroughly documented atrocity in recent history, measured both by the sheer volume of evidence and the speed of its circulation. Smartphones and social media — which were still a world away during the genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda — allow events to be captured instantly, from countless angles, and shared globally in real time, with traditional media still playing a not-insignificant supporting role. ….more