Violence Starts in the Comments
and finally, the essay on Gaza I promised you
Hi, friends. Just under 2 weeks ago, I sent you this essay about how I felt watching Iranian missiles fly over my home in Amman in response to Israel’s assassination of former Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, and how I was tired of seeing my government underwrite escalations in this increasingly bloody regional conflict.
I had been silent on the issue for longer than I would have liked due to my unique circumstances, which those of you who have been here for a while will be familiar with: I am an expert in security policy who only recently left my job as a Defense Department civilian staffer, and I live in Jordan (about half of whose population, including the queen, is of Palestinian origin) as the wife of a staffer at the U.S. embassy in Amman. After breaking my silence in a moment of fear and frustration, I promised to follow up once I had taken time to think about how to address this sensitive, emotional topic in a way that better serves you.
This is that follow up, but much of it, including the comment section, will only be available to paid subscribers. After the original post, I was harassed by a handful of people I had never met. They called me, among other things, an “idiot,” a “child,” and a “pathetic defender of terrorists.” (I’d like to be clear here: I’m a grown woman who has never once defended Hamas or Hezbollah’s actions or agenda, and never will. On the charge of idiocy, you can reach your own verdict.) I promptly closed comments on that post; I don’t believe the attacks would have stopped if I hadn’t.
But being on the receiving end of such trolling prompted me to put into words something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, a thing I want everyone who reads my work to know: how we choose to engage each other on the Israel-Gaza-Lebanon conflict is critical, and it can have a profound impact on what happens in the real world.
A quick story. When I was in graduate school, I took a course with a professor whose goal was to extract lessons on national security from works of fiction. During a discussion of The Cellist of Sarajevo and the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, our class got to talking about how murderous, cynical leaders can induce otherwise normal people to commit the most heinous war crimes, like torture, rape, and extrajudicial executions.
What the professor told us was that the act of inflicting such pain and suffering on other humans has a huge psychological cost for the perpetrator, and there are a couple necessary conditions to defraying that psychological cost. First, the victim must be demonized and dehumanized (they are extremists, they are evil, they are barbarians—these are statements I’ve seen made about Muslims in my comment section and elsewhere on Substack, and I have no doubt they’ve been made about Jewish people as well). Second, the perpetrator must believe that what they are doing is not only righteous (these people are what’s wrong with the world, therefore I am saving it) but also not truly their fault (someone with authority made me do it, and anyway, my victims deserved it).
While real-world war crimes and internet trolling are certainly not equivalent situations, I see a chilling parallel. My harassers did not say “this argument is stupid and pathetic” or “these ideas are extreme” (which still would have been unproductive). They said, “you are stupid. You are pathetic. You are an extremist.” The point was to shut down debate entirely by destroying not just my credibility, but my worth as a human being.
Despite what these trolls seem to think of me, I don’t believe they are necessarily bad people. I think they were, in their way, expressing legitimate anger and fear following October 7, not unlike what I was experiencing when I wrote the piece they were reacting to. Those are deeply human feelings, and sometimes anger and forcefulness are warranted. But there is an ocean between disagreeing over concepts in the abstract and assigning immutable traits to living, breathing people (or even worse, groups of people). The former can be productive; the latter can be dangerous. Because once someone is labeled stupid, their opinion no longer matters—THEY don’t matter—and once someone is labeled an extremist, we start to believe they can’t be reasoned with, and therefore must be dealt with by other means. Suddenly any action against them is justifiable.
I don’t want to catastrophize, or to imply that by attacking my character, what my trolls did was tantamount to violence. What I’m saying is this sort of rhetoric is exactly how arguments start to bleed into real-world conflict and savagery. This is how we take an already out-of-control conflagration and throw lighter fluid on it.
And so my message to you is this: no matter what side of this debate you fall on, keep your arguments within the realm of ideas. Be deeply skeptical of the motivations of people who degrade others, and always, always choose to humanize your detractors. This is how we avoid slipping into an endless cycle of vilifying each other, a cycle whose logical conclusion is violence: by stopping the normalization of violence before it has a chance to start.
Below the jump, I’m going to talk about what I believe the U.S. should do in the immediate term to stop the bloodshed. After today, I’ll be leaving this topic and returning to the personal essays and interviews I do best. If you have been considering upgrading to a paid subscription to read my opinion pieces, travelogues, and more vulnerable work, now is a great time. For the next week, I will donate all proceeds from new subscriptions to ’ World Central Kitchen, which does incredible work to feed people in conflict zones—including those in Gaza, Lebanon, and Northern Israel. I will personally match up to $500.
