The Gaza War Everyone Thinks They Understand

One of the most documented wars in history may also be one of the most misunderstood.

photo: Mohammed Ibrahim/Unsplash

Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.

---

This is a guest essay by Lucy Tabrizi, a writer specializing in politics, philosophy, religion, ethics, and history.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

---

One of the most common things I still hear about Gaza sounds something like this: “We watched the first live-streamed genocide with our own eyes.”

How’s that for the ultimate conversation-ender?

Before we get to what people think they saw, there is a more obvious question that almost nobody deploying this phrase is willing to answer: Why did you see this particular war so relentlessly in the first place?

Let’s assume that every image and video you encountered was accurately captioned and authentically from Gaza. (It wasn’t, and we’ll come back to that. But for now, let’s give the internet the benefit of the doubt.)

Dozens of armed conflicts have raged across the Middle East and North Africa in recent years — most notably in places like Syria, Yemen, and Sudan, all of which have produced comparatively higher cumulative death tolls, mass displacement, and catastrophic hunger — yet none have achieved even a fraction of Gaza’s near-permanent residency on the Instagram feed. Why has no one been “live-streaming” these, I wonder?

This is so self-evident that explaining it feels faintly ridiculous, but the number of times you see something online is not evidence of its relative scale.

And if what appears most often on our screens simply becomes what we care about most, this produces a rather alarming implication: Whoever can saturate the Western information space can effectively commandeer Western attention.

That is quite the incentive for actors seeking to influence Western opinion.

Hardly surprising, then, that this week Chinese Communist Party-linked funding networks were found to be behind “pro-Palestinian” protests. Nor is it particularly surprising that the Islamic Republic of Iran has been caught operating anonymous and purportedly Jewish activist accounts, or that Qatar has poured billions into building a global media empire Al Jazeera and AJ+, whose digital media arm is designed specifically for the social-media generation. Foreign powers figured out the game long ago, even if many of the people whose opinions they seek to shape remain blissfully unaware they’re being played.

There is another reason Israel attracts such extraordinary attention: Anti-Jewish animus and conspiratorial traditions remain deeply embedded in Western and global culture. This creates a feedback loop. Content about Israel attracts disproportionate attention, that attention generates more content, and the resulting saturation is then mistaken for evidence that this conflict must be uniquely monstrous.

Which brings us to the other problem: What, exactly, did you “see with your own eyes”?

We know what you think you saw. But in reality, you watched an information war unfold through your screen, mediated by algorithms, activists, journalists, anonymous accounts, and bot farms, through eyes untrained in propaganda, military analysis, international law, or genocide determination. Seeing something is not the same as knowing what you are seeing.

More specifically, you saw 30-second clips extracted from events lasting hours: dead children without knowing who killed them, destroyed buildings without knowing whether fighters or military infrastructure had been inside them, and explosions without knowing what was targeted.

You saw “journalists” and “aid workers” without necessarily being told of militant affiliations. And yes, a terrorist with a press vest is still a terrorist.

You saw casualty figures without knowing who was a combatant or how deaths were classified. In short, you saw the aftermath, not what preceded it. And sometimes you saw things that weren’t what they claimed to be at all.

The footage flooding our screens exists within an information environment that has been rife with old footage recirculated as new, images and videos misattributed from other conflicts such as Syria and Yemen, selectively edited clips, disputed or staged material and, increasingly, AI-generated or digitally manipulated content.

And yes, I’ve seen the crying mother with three hands, reverse-image-searched a supposedly starving Gazan baby only to discover the photograph was 10 years old and from another country, and watched a “lifeless” body start moving before the camera cuts. No, I’m not suggesting everything is fake. But why manufacture suffering when there is already so much real suffering to document?

It doesn’t even need to be fake. Authentic footage can be given a false date, location, perpetrator, or explanation the footage itself does not establish.

Then this smorgasbord of manipulation and missing context passes through the algorithm, before landing in front of an audience largely unequipped to interrogate it and remarkably willing to swallow it whole. Social media platforms reward whatever arrests attention and provokes emotion. The correction three days later generally does not travel nearly as fast.

While we’re interrogating the phrase “livestreamed genocide,” here’s another question: Why has there been a livestream at all? Israel is routinely accused of exercising near-total control over Gaza, yet for almost three years an extraordinary volume of footage documenting its supposed genocide has reached the outside world.

Here is another point that really should be self-evident: regimes determined to control the flow of information can. Earlier this year, the Islamic Republic cut more than 90 million people off from the global internet for nearly three months to suppress footage of its crackdown. Regimes committing atrocities generally understand the advantage of not letting their victims livestream them.

The fact that we barely pause to question any of this tells you just how spectacularly effective the information war has been. So effective, in fact, that millions became remarkably confident they could determine not merely that civilians were suffering, but the military circumstances surrounding their deaths, the legality of individual strikes and, ultimately, the specific intent of an entire state.

There are many reasons I reject the genocide charge, from the unusually low civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio to the simple fact that Israel has the military capacity to kill hundreds of thousands of Gazans in a matter of days, but has demonstrably refused to.

Genocide has never been determined by the emotional force or volume of images emerging from a war zone. It is a defined crime with a uniquely high evidentiary threshold and a demanding mental element: the intent to destroy a protected group as such. Images can provide supporting evidence of atrocities, civilian suffering, or potentially unlawful conduct. But they cannot, by themselves, establish the specific intent that distinguishes genocide from other forms of warfare and mass civilian death.

A photograph or video, however graphic, cannot, by itself, tell you what was in the mind of the person who caused it.

The term “genocide” has also undergone some fairly ambitious renovations in recent years, which makes the claim that you can “watch a livestreamed genocide”considerably easier to pull off. Prior to October 7, 2023, genocide meant the intentional destruction, in whole or in part, of a protected group. Now, apparently, you can post an unsourced clip of a suffering child, caption it “the genocide is still ongoing,” and consider the evidentiary burden met. By that standard, every country on earth is committing genocide.

Indeed, many convinced by the bright screen in their pocket that Israel is committing genocide also insist the genocide has been underway since 1948. Quite a remarkable use of the term for a Palestinian population that has, over those same decades, grown at one of the highest rates in the region.

Genocide, by its actual definition, has never simply meant civilians suffering, civilians dying, or infrastructure being destroyed. It does not mean a lopsided casualty ratio, or even the commission of war crimes.

Genocide, by its actual definition, has never simply meant civilians suffering, civilians dying, or infrastructure being destroyed. (photo: Mohammed Ibrahim/Unsplash)

Some of the footage is, of course, real. How much? I don’t know, and neither does the average person scrolling Instagram. But no serious person claims there is zero suffering in Gaza. War is hell.

The trouble is that much of the modern West has become so accustomed to conflict-free comfort that we’ve forgotten what war looks like. When its brutality suddenly arrives in high definition on our smartphones, we mistake what is aberrant to our experience for something aberrant even by the standards of war.

But human beings were capable of unimaginable brutality long before smartphones documented it. During the Rwandan genocide, families were hacked to death with machetes and people slaughtered inside churches where they sought refuge. In one documented case, a 3-year-old watched his siblings being killed, begged for his life, and was killed anyway. Up to a million people were murdered in roughly 100 days. Rwanda is hardly an anomaly; read about Nanjing, the Eastern Front, Bosnia, or Darfur.

And if you think this barbarity belongs to the past, think again. In Sudan today, women and girls are being gang-raped, often in front of their families, while civilians fleeing violence are intercepted, ordered to the ground, and shot in groups. Behind the information wall in Xinjiang, former detainees describe beatings, electric shocks, rape, and sexual torture, including assaults with electric batons; one teacher described torture rooms close enough to classrooms that detainees’ screams could be heard through the walls.

Anyone who believes Gaza has revealed some uniquely horrifying face of human conflict is revealing, more than anything, how little human conflict they had encountered before Gaza.

That is exactly why preventing wars from beginning in the first place is so imperative. So who started this one? Hamas, whose leadership appears to have engineered October 7th knowing the devastating Israeli response it provoked would be strategically useful. Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar reportedly anticipated retaliation so extreme that he raised the possibility of a nuclear strike on Gaza, and later treated mounting Palestinian casualties as a necessary price for “advancing the Palestinian cause.”

Hamas official Ghazi Hamad reiterated the same thinking. In an October 2023 television interview, he said Hamas was prepared to repeat October 7th “again and again,” describing Palestinians as a “nation of martyrs” willing to make sacrifices.

This goes right to the heart of Hamas’ human shield strategy, which is central to what we see on our phones. The strategy was championed years earlier by senior Hamas commander Nizar Rayan, who encouraged civilians to gather around buildings threatened with Israeli strikes and celebrated the use of civilians to deter attacks. Since then, Hamas has embedded military infrastructure throughout Gaza’s civilian environment more deeply than any armed group in history. It deliberately operates from densely populated areas and has constructed an enormous tunnel network beneath them to maximise civilian casualties.

This is not factored into the wrenching images we have become accustomed to coming out of Gaza, but the strategic logic is brutally effective: Force Israel to choose between abandoning military targets and striking an enemy operating among civilians, then turn the resulting civilian suffering into political and informational ammunition.

Consider the following scenarios, which are real:

1. Hamas attacks Israeli forces from a booby-trapped civilian building while preventing civilians from leaving.

2. Israel establishes evacuation routes or safe zones, and Hamas operatives deliberately move into them.

3. Hostages are held in booby-trapped tunnels under orders to be executed if Israeli troops approach.

What, exactly, does our aspiring Instagram genocide scholar propose Israel do? I’m genuinely asking. Paint me the picture.

If the answer is to leave fighters untouched whenever civilians or hostages are placed in their path, congratulations: You’ve just incentivised human shields and hostage-taking. Put civilians in the line of fire, weaponise their suffering when your enemy responds, and international pressure does the rest. The world has taught terrorists that civilian suffering pays.

Notice where your 30-second Instagram clip begins: at the end of this chain of events. Much of the horror on your screen cannot be separated from the way Hamas chooses to fight.

Which brings us back to the supposedly unanswerable declaration: “We watched the first live-streamed genocide with our own eyes.”

No, you watched a war through a screen, alongside a spectacularly effective disinformation campaign.

When someone tells me they “watched a genocide with their own eyes,” all I hear is someone proudly announcing that the information war reached its target.

---