Memes, Missiles, and Mobilizations An Analysis of the 2021 Israel/Hamas Conflict

Key Findings:

This report examines the May 2021 Gaza conflict as a case study for the emergence of a progressive left ecosystem of antisemitism, complete with online and real-world spikes in antisemitism, robust social cyber signals, coded language, and moral outrage. 

Word associations were mapped by week using a machine learning algorithm, word2vec. In the second week of May 2021, “Jew” became more closely associated to apartheid, settler, white, oppressor, and evil in Twitter posts. Palestine, by contrast, became more closely associated to victim, suffering, indigenous, and murder.

Warfare during the May 2021 Gaza-Israel conflict sparked the largest increase of online mentions of social justice terms like “apartheid”, “colonialism” and “settler” in the history of social media. A key finding in this respect is that the language of human rights becomes extremely eroded (i.e., completely misappropriated) on social media with respect to Israel, thereby losing its meaning and intent in the human rights realm. 

The authors further demonstrate that these “social justice terms” become co-opted as “weaponized conflict language,” which create an overwhelming volume of racialized, demonizing, and unprecedented double standards against Israel. The scale and intensity of this phenomena suggest that this activity is antisemitic, due to clear matching of the criteria set out in IHRA definition of antisemitism.

Warfare during the Gaza-Israel conflict also sparked the largest increases in anti-Israel protests and antisemitic incidences in recent history in the United States. Notably, NCRI data suggests that expressions of that outrage on social media corresponded in both time and location with anti-Israeli protests and antisemitic acts and incidents.  

This phenomenon makes sense in consideration of the fact that weaponized conflict language activity is found to foster “virtue targeting” — animosity to inspire real world attacks or incidents based on the belief that attacking Israel and Jews is the moral thing to do. Political actors often demonize their opponents in order to justify violence against them. In this respect, leftist virtue-targeting is no different than far-right, white supremacist inspiration for antisemitic attacks. Crucially, “virtue targeting” lands not only on Israel, but on vulnerable diaspora Jewish populations in the U.S. and elsewhere.

In totality, the results indicate that active warfare, neutral conflict language, social justice outrage and antisemitic incidents demonstrate a pattern: Active warfare dies down rapidly along with neutral conflict-descriptive social media signals; Weaponized conflict language (social justice outrage), protests, and antisemitic activity, however, appear to share a prolonged distribution beyond the life of the conflict itself. This shows that moral and political sentiments triggered by the conflict were more persistent than both the conflict itself and the neutral terms describing the conflict on social media.

Some considerations for future research and policy makers: (1) Does social media demonization of Israel cause antisemitic harassment and hate crimes in the U.S.? (2) What can be done to protect American Jews from the violence that such forms of protest and speech potentially motivate without undermining democratic protections of free expression, protest, and human rights? (3) What can be done to protect communities outside of the U.S. as well against anti-Jewish violence resulting from the online weaponization of anti-Israel rhetoric? (4) To what extent do overwrought characterizations of Israelis as genocidal Nazis constitute a symmetrical manifestation of the same type of extremist distortions by some on the progressive left? (5) What can universities do to prevent such incidents and protect vulnerable groups on their campuses?