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I can’t help but notice the millions of people around the world taking to the streets to support Palestinian rights in the middle of a tragedy that repeats once every decade or so. The only difference this time is the number of demonstrators is exponentially higher. If we exclude the Arab world, most of these protests are in advanced Western countries. In Los Angeles a large group of the protestors were American Jews who can longer reconcile Israel’s right to exist with its continued brutality towards Palestinians.
Without revisiting the old tired narrative that always ends inconclusively, here’s what I think is happening that will eventually force the West and Israel to approach this issue differently: The old Western narrative no longer works, plain and simple. Those who still believe in it are going crazy trying to keep the world from looking anywhere else for answers. The arguments made in reaction to the current conflict could have been made 50 years ago without changing a word. They are frozen in time and mercilessly default the debate to “us v them” narratives that kill any new ideas for a permanent solution while invoking arbitrary or historic facts that each side expects the other to accept as a rationalization for their actions.
The primary disruptor of the carefully crafted Israeli narrative is the same one that is disrupting and weakening democracies all over the world and empowering autocracies in their place. It is the ubiquitous and unstoppable rise of the Digital Age that has forever disrupted the way we gain knowledge and information. This is at the heart of how our cognitive abilities and worldviews change for better or for worse. The Digital Age gave the world millions of media outlets with millions of alternative and diverse narratives. This platform is just one of those alternatives. It made citizen journalists out of anyone who has a smart phone, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg
From politics, to economics, education, and everything in between, the Digital Age is leveling what remains of the silos of the Industrial Age and hierarchical structures that contain the ethos of this now bygone era. Post WWII narratives and governing structures and the ideas behind democracy are not immune from this disruption. It includes the carefully guarded and uniquely crafted Western narrative about the creation of the state of Israel. Regardless of how the most genius arguments about its right to exist continue to be made today, they will automatically be filtered through a digital landscape that levels the global playing field, making Palestinians into victims and Israelis into oppressors.
One of the consequences of the Digital Age the remains greatly unappreciated is its mandate to destroy hierarchal non digital structures. It is doing it very fast, and at a deep and pervasive level and won’t stop till everything in its wake is disrupted. The primary purpose of that disruption is “democratization” and it’s happening everywhere. It is that democratization and the transparency that comes with that disruption that has led to the weaponization of media and other modern institutions we have taken for granted. It will keep chiseling away at the foundations of modern democracy. It is behind much of the chaos we see around the world today. It is responsible for the rise of the Israeli extreme right and its alliance with Benjamin Netanyahu that wants to silence the independent voice of the Israeli judiciary. It is also behind the rise of the Trump/MAGA phenomenon that wants to silence liberal progressives and destroy democracy in the process.
The Digital Age is also behind the bypassing of traditional Industrial Age channels that branded the Palestinian as terrorists and allowed them to bring their case directly to the world in its raw unfiltered form. It made sure the world knew that 90% of Gazans have no access to drinking water and that over 50% of the population went to bed hungry every night for two decades all due to a blockade by Israel. It matters not what led Israel to impose the blockade. It shows that collective punishment modeled after the Western idea of sanctions, punishes the people, millions of them, not the leadership. Yet, that antiquated ethos, still defines the Israeli and Western approach to dealing with the problem.
Whether good or bad, the Digital Age is bringing transparency to everything we do. It will not restore worn out narratives or ideologies that worked just a few decades go. It will not support whatever appears to be oppressive or discriminatory in nature, nor would it empower the left or the right of the political spectrum to rule in a democracy. The only way to stop it is to stop the flow of information and only dictators and autocrats can do that. Short of having these repressive forms of governance, the world will continue to go through chaos that empowers those who were disempowered, expose those who are unfairly empowered and continue leveling the playing field until the world reaches some state of egalitarianism. That will be the time when and a new post-modern generation of leaders informed by humanity’s collective reality begins to design a more inclusive and equitable form of governance for the future.