The pro-Israel information war

I have not read this article. I am sad to see it here. I am Jewish and Hacker News has been my one sanctuary from all that has been going on. I feel a dreadful sadness about this whole situation, and unfortunately I have found that any issue I have looked into in any detail descends into a battle of claim and counterclaim. I have had to just give up and let it play out, not only what has happened and what will happen in Israel and Gaza, but also the battle of words on social media and newspapers. It is too painful for me to interact with.

Even if you're legitimately attempting to analyze political preferences or skew on social media, it seems incredibly inappropriate to be basing that analysis on someone who makes purely biased claims in all of their social media posts. There are so many analytical flaws in the graphs he provides, that they really shouldn't be used for anything.

They've selectively[1] searched for multiple Palestine hashtags, which all show up under the same base hashtag[2], but then count all of the hashtags as separate data points -- and then compares them to a singular Israel hashtag that includes an emoji, which won't include most results regarding Israel. What's worse, is that including a Palestine hashtag doesn't remotely guarantee that the post is pro-Palestine or anti-Israel, and the same is true for posts including Israel hashtags not necessarily being pro-Israel, which can also be seen in [2]. In reality, the #palestine hashtag is used in pro-Israel posts all the time, so the sweeping generalizations made by Anthony Goldbloom aren't based on any legitimate statistical methodology.

Instead of echoing Goldbloom's manipulation of data as factual, it should be used as an example of pro-Israel disinformation and entirely backs the article's claim. In fact, even Goldbloom admits that he made mistakes[3], and the other graph was made by him and not the company who conducted the survey, who actually disputes his claim.

I think it could even be argued that your comment, without any supporting facts other than a very pro-Israel Twitter pundit who already debunked himself, is contributing to the misinformation discussed in the article, even if you're doing so unintentionally.

[1] https://twitter.com/antgoldbloom/status/1721561226151612602/...

[2] https://www.tiktok.com/@kituuuub/video/7298048299905355041?q...

[3] https://www.semafor.com/article/12/07/2023/tiktok-antisemiti...

The actual conflict on the ground is about territory and resources. But lots of other people are interested because they were raised to believe that events happening in 'the holy land' thousands of years ago have deep, ongoing, and eternal significance for them as individuals. That's why a great many people care about this that would not care about similarly bloody conflicts in other countries, even nearby ones (eg Kurdistan or the Syrian civil war).

I don't adhere to an Abrahamic religion and frankly dislike monotheism on general principle. But while I don't believe in any of this, it's a fact that huge numbers of people do for different reasons. For example US Evangelicals are obsessed with events in Israel because many of them consider conflict there to be the harbinger of the Apocalypse prophesied in the Book of Revelation. The principal military and political actors in this conflict may be privately secularist or only nominally religious, but they're quite willing to leverage religion for financial and political capital.

>I think the fundamental assumption of the analysis that there are two mutually exclusive groups, 'pro-Israel' and 'pro-Palestine' is flawed. It is possible to simultaneously support the interests of Palestinian and Israeli civilians

That would be a nuanced view. The reality is that most people and especially most people who post their views online are not capable of seeing things that way.

I thought I'd get some better take on the situation here then in the rest of social media but apparently that's difficult to come by. Especially when discussing a 100 years old conflict.

I can't see how any leftist could support Oct 7 events, and call it resistance or freedom fighting in some form. Just for context, if Hamas would have targeted military positions in the attack, then it would have been possible to say they are fighting for some liberation goal. But as this is not the case and they clearly targeted civilians locations like a rave party and villages, it's clear that this was not their goal, but their goal was to inflict terror on Israeli population.

My take is that in this long fought battle both sides made wrongdoings, but we need to be very clear and nuanced about each event. In this case it's clear that Hamas, and I may say that since Hamas is a popular movement, the Palestine public in Gaza in genera, made a grave mistake and now suffer the consequences of that decision as there is very little possibility for Israel to defeat Hamas without causing civilian casualties when they are some embedded within the population.

In this sense President Biden approach makes perfect sense; defeat Hamas with minimal civilian casualties.

The Palestines deserve better, but I think that as long as they stay fixated on the results of the 1948 war, and do not agree to let that stay in the past, there will be no end in sight.