In a time of war, don’t post what you won’t perpetrate

In his first lecture of POL 388: Causes of War, Professor Gary Bass described a small number of the horrors of war as detailed by its survivors and perpetrators. He detailed the sight of the transformation of a human body into a mist of blood and guts after being hit with artillery blasts, or the sounds of soldiers dying whilst screaming for their mothers. This instilled in us a sense of the solemnity of our topic. Every time I’ve opened Instagram in the past two weeks and seen my acquaintances, peers, and friends negotiate the justice of war and revolution in Israel and Gaza through infographics, memes, and reposted videos, I think back to this lecture. Then, I contemplate when people began to mistake the figurative battleground of social media for the real thing and began to believe that they accomplished something by promoting rhetoric that demands to be fulfilled in blood.

It feels supremely silly to think about internet virtue signaling when I have friends on military bases risking their lives at this very moment. Yet clearly, something about the political climate of young America can be gleaned from the use of these sites. We do no deeds by using Instagram, but it is certainly a revelatory tool which provides insight into individual values, which are not unimportant.

We must hold two truths about social media. As individual users, using social media means nothing — it does not cost us anything to go on the site, and we signify nothing about our willingness to take actions by posting, sharing, or liking. Yet, it acts as a tool of real political power: terrorists make videos of their terrorism to globalize their mission, using social media as a conduit. Social media is powerful when it is used to disseminate information backed by intention to act.

We can see that people who post messages glorifying “revolutionary” death by indicating solidarity with the criminal terrorist violence initiated against Israel are promoting, and seeking to continue, warfare. But their engagement is patently absurd, as they offer nothing to support their lofty and inhumane goals. It is a supreme failure of self-understanding to be advocating for revolt behind a screen, which reveals both a deep fear of being silent when “justice” demands action and the shallowness of that fear when action never materializes.

What does it mean to attempt to engage in a war while ensconced in the comfort of America’s safety? More than the content of messages themselves, social media activism demonstrates the egotistical dissonance that lies within the young people of today. People feel helpless, yet they want to do something — what else can they do? The act of posting is reassuring: they assuage their inner guilt and fear of their own unimportance and satisfy their ideals by calling for this “revolutionary” death. Yet, they also believe that no one will actually die as a result of their actions, because they’re risking nothing by simply sending a message into the void. This self-centered cognitive dissonance is deeply troubling, and while it doesn’t result in action, it does have consequences.

The national outrage over the statements of elite youth is distracting and disproportionate, but it does correctly recognize the inanity of many young “radicals.” While Harvard students are far from indicative of America, they do demonstrate the self-absorption that is pervasive online. In America, young people are used to having it both ways: they want to be on the forefront of a good cause, yet to retain their privilege and safety. Journalist and Bates College Professor Tyler Austin Harper sharply diagnosed this incoherence in a biting end to an article about soft radicalism at universities, noting that the “American elite” has always managed “the class war at home and real wars abroad.” We are trained to “cosplay rebellion,” using the speech of genuine radical action to promote revolution and violence everywhere but at home, where we might actually find ourselves in danger.

Even the extent to which material action is taken in America is fundamentally un-radical. Chanting “long live the Intifada,” as Princeton students did at a walkout in solidarity with Gaza on Wednesday, does not in any way result in the realization of violent rebellion in Israel. Are these students really planning on strapping on a bomb and blowing themselves up in a bar? Linguistically, this is what such a saying suggests: “long live” refers to a continuity, and thus an association with the last Intifada against Israel, whose mission was encapsulated by this form of terrorist violence.

No one can take physical actions to support every cause they believe in: many of us support American operations without donning the uniform of an active duty service member. Yet, endorsing violence necessitates deeper thinking and action than the two seconds it takes to repost media on your Instagram story. It involves reconciling yourself to the fact that your beliefs may result in the loss of human life. This truth should not be minimized, but proclaiming it on the same account that you post your European vacation photos to does just that.

Much of the passive advocacy I have seen since Oct. 7 has been both immensely infuriating and incredibly stupid. The sort of speech students are using has nothing behind it: it holds no impressive weight and contributes to nothing meaningful. All the same, it is terrifying to see people I have sat next to in lecture, graduated high school alongside, and eaten dinner with justify the torture and death of my people because they have political power in their ancestral homeland. An incomprehensible Editorial from the Cornell Daily Sun’s Editorial Board detailing their realization that war is difficult to understand claims that “we cannot threaten or silo those who speak out of turn when they are themselves victims of a conflict that has no given vocabulary.” I offer this instead: by virtue of our life in Princeton and our spatial removal from the areas of bombardment and destruction, our vocabulary is the only accountability we can cling to. Language that threatens those within our community or defends terrorism reveals the insidious hatred held by the speaker.

We have gotten far too accustomed to an uncomplicated understanding of the world; we are so caught up in being on the right side of history that we end up caring more about our own reactions than the reality of actions themselves. We cannot mistake these reactions, while ideologically telling and revelatory, for anything worthwhile: we must not let our ultimate fear of our own incapacity to create change cloud our understanding of what constitutes meaningful support. War is not simple, nor is it something most of us are ever going to participate in. We must not simplify it whilst we sit in privileged safety.

Abigail Rabieh is a junior in the history department from Cambridge, Mass. She is the head Opinion editor at the ‘Prince’ and can be reached by email at arabieh@princeton.edu.