This image made from undated bodycam video footage taken by a downed Hamas militant and released by Israel Defense Forces shows a Hamas militant walking around a residential neighborhood at an undisclosed location in Israel.The Associated Press
Richard Poplak is a Canadian journalist and filmmaker based in Johannesburg.
Several days after 1,400 Israelis were slaughtered by Hamas militants outside the Gazan border wall, I watched a film called Golda. It is an account of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, in which Israel fended off a surprise attack by Egyptian and Syrian forces, mounted on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar.
Golda Meir, who served as Israeli president during the 18-day conflict, is played by the British actor Helen Mirren. The narrative unfolds in a fug of cigarette smoke and seventies furniture, with Mirren-as-Meir alternating between resolve, sadness, uncertainty and terminal cancer – a woman propelled through history by violence, confusion and nicotine.
Because the words “Palestine” and “Palestinian” never appear in the film – just the catch-all “Arabs” – Golda is set in a context-less realm, where Israel exists as an aspiration of freedom within an ocean of aggression. (This is inadvertently fitting, given that Meir once said, “There was no such thing as Palestinians.”) Indeed, Golda is less a movie than secular canonization, a hagiography exonerating Meir of any blame for the gaps in Israeli preparedness. It is also propaganda, at once so melodramatic and lifeless that it’s unclear what it is propagandizing. Valour before adversity? First wave girl boss-ism? The inherent moral value of might?
Regardless, Golda, which was released earlier this year to middling reviews, is now enjoying a second life. The Yom Kippur War has re-entered the discourse, this time as historical precedent, a warning of much worse things to come. Fifty years and a day after the launch of that war, Hamas militants mounted their own surprise attack, pouring into Israel from Gaza in pickup trucks, golf carts and motorcycles.
Terrorism imitates art imitates life: While there are imperfect echoes between the two conflicts, several are worth noting. As in 1973, this new round of violence was made possible by a lapse in Israeli intelligence, compounded by Israeli military hubris. As in 1973, the conflict could escalate a proxy war between Russia and the United States, dragging in regional belligerents such as Iran and Lebanon. As in 1973, Israel finds itself facing an existential crisis, and neither it nor the world will ever be the same again.
But there are several important differences. The Egyptian and Syrian invasion was an act of conventional warfare, which included tanks, artillery, infantrymen and fighter jets. Postmodern conflict, however, is the art of flattening asymmetry. It is a series of feints, cheats, lies and disinformation. In Ukraine – which, coincidentally, was Golda Meir’s birthplace – local combatants have over the past 18 months reinvented the shooting war, using off-the-shelf components to build a drone fleet that augments Second World War tanks and jets from the Vietnam War era to fend off invading Russian forces, combining all of that with sophisticated Western weapons systems.
That said, for Ukrainian combatants, and for their opponents, the primary weapon is the smartphone, the coup de grâce the TikTok video. The real war is the war for moral authority – for control of the narrative – and that happens online. What actually happens on the front line is anyone’s guess.
The Hamas attack was designed in that spirit. By necessity, but also with monstrous aesthetic acuity, it used the tools of insurgency to confront one of the more formidable military states on the planet. Its targets were, for the most part, soft: civilians cowering in their homes; kids partying at a rave; motorists going about their business. This was also war as meme: Countless acts of barbarism were uploaded and live-streamed, sometimes on the victims’ own social-media profiles.
Before underpaid Facebook moderators in Kenya knew what was happening – far worse, before the Israeli military knew what was happening – many hundreds of people were dead, their mutilated bodies posted online, while still others were swept behind the wall into Gaza before the leviathan next door awakened. The Jewish faith does not make space for ghosts, but there they were, screaming in the digital realm for eternity.
The definition of terrorism is simple: It is mass violence designed for the screen. The Hamas attacks reached their full terroristic potential, cutting with surgical precision through the Israeli (and Jewish) psyche. While the Yom Kippur War was from the Israeli perspective a military and intelligence debacle, this new horror reverberated backward and forward through time, recalling pogroms and massacres that the State of Israel was established to forestall. Never again.
And yet, again.
Right from the beginning, it was clear that this war would be fought to the death in the metaverse – wherever that is, and whatever it may be. The director of Golda is a young Israeli named Guy Nattiv, the first filmmaker from his country to win an Oscar (for a short called Skin, concerning, of all things, the rehabilitation of a neo-Nazi.) As the Hamas attacks unfolded, he was approached by dozens of Israelis begging him for help. “A lot of people [were] like, ‘Please, Guy, post that my sister is missing’ and ‘my kid is missing’ and ‘my wife is missing,’” he told the Hollywood Reporter. “They say, ‘Please post about it so the world can hear and help us!’”
Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir on Feb. 26, 1973 during a press conference in Washington DC. Helen Mirren as Golda Meir in a scene from the film Golda.Left: Bob Daugherty/AP Photo. Right: Bleecker Street via AP
Mr. Nattiv’s Instagram account became a repository of loss, but also a strange, real-life coda to Golda, which was itself reliant on archival footage for verisimilitude. Now, the mourning has been stripped of its dignity by a staggering display of rage – a bombing campaign that defies all logic outside of the crudest interpretation of dissuasion: this is what happens when you hurt us. It is a display of shock and awe that, with each explosion and civilian casualty, negates any hope of meaningful resolution. It is war as spectacle, the Michael Bay-ification of geopolitics.
The Israel Defense Forces have developed an online personality, that of the alt-right Twitter (sorry, X) troll, posting images and videos that approach snuff porn in their nature and intent. Their feed is barely distinguishable from their enemies. For Very Online People, the past two weeks have been an uncommon sprint through the abattoir of war, a doomscroll of butchery, all restraint lifted in order to win hearts and minds. Viewer indiscretion is advised.
If the Yom Kippur War was defined by a lack of information, this new conflict has already been swamped by too much information. Which leads, inevitably, to disinformation. In this wanton orgy of slaughter, where the death of civilians is not “collateral damage” but the entire point, new taboos must be invented. When U.S. President Joe Biden accused Hamas militants of beheading babies, his evidence was sketchy, the sketchiness of which was subsequently debunked, and in turn debunked again.
In this context, does truth actually matter? What, we must ask, is the acceptable way to kill a baby? How many damaged hospitals is too many? What is a “humanitarian corridor”? This is moral cacophony, and it makes a mockery of 21st century wired civilization. Indeed, disinformation is this century’s primary medium of expression. Like all official art backed by the establishment over the centuries – medieval Christian painting, Persian miniatures, Hollywood – disinformation reifies power and devalues alternative forms of perception. This may seem counterintuitive, but the ultimate goal is chaos. And despite what they say, governments aren’t really serious about combatting the frenzy, because they can misgovern more efficiently within it.
There is a cost, though. Case in point is the man at the centre of this war, the man whose attacks on Israel’s judicial norms were so destabilizing that the Hamas incursion – or something like it – was almost a fait accompli. Benjamin Netanyahu has been, for much of his 15 years in power, a disinformation machine, a harbinger of far right meme-ography that extends to his son, who was once accused of reposting an antisemitic cartoon of the billionaire philanthropist George Soros.
In aligning with the right-wing troll-o-sphere, in his attempts to own the libs (and boy, does he own them) and in his quest to mount a throne from which he cannot be dislodged, Mr. Netanyahu may have destroyed his country. What is happening now cannot unhappen. The tools he has mastered may now master him.
What is to be done? Truth is imagination plus morality. But nuance and ambiguity is impossible to negotiate in the so-called Information Age, where morality has been hacked for profit and narrow political gain. But just as the war cannot be unfought, so too the internet cannot be switched off. We have to find hygiene inside the filth, to wade in biohazard suits through the muck of confusion. As with Israelis in Gaza, as yet, there is no exit strategy.
Who knows, maybe in the future Guy Nattiv will make a film called Bibi, detailing the Prime Minister’s attempts to avenge the Hamas attack and render the region quiescent enough for the extension of his preferred lifestyle. Will the Palestinians feature in this story? Perhaps they might. But in order for it to be an accurate rendering, it would need to be a digital scream, all noise and no signal, a black hole of rage and mess in service of Bibi’s power.