The little girl was sliced like salami. Someone was rolling the pieces along the floor, reassembling her body in a wet pile. The screams were presumably piercing but I wouldn’t know because I was watching without sound – I scrolled on.
Since the horror of 7 October, and Israel’s retaliatory massacre in Gaza, videos of this kind have surged across Western social media platforms along the peak and trough of virality, variously censored according to content moderation policies and the free speech sensibilities of their owners. Meanwhile, in tandem, national politics and media coverage has been characterised by a sanitised euphemism. Six children evaporated by a missile: “technical error”. The murder of three British aid workers: “an appalling incident”. What started as a bleak state of disassociation has quickly alienated a generation from the Labour party, the political movement with which they would typically find common cause. The scope of the electoral fallout will be as significant as the Iraq or Vietnam wars.
Among my peers, broadly defined as anyone politically conscious under 35, opposition to the war is close to universal. I know two Israel fans. One is part Israeli, the other is a Brit converting to Orthodox Judaism. It doesn’t matter that before the war most of these people thought that Rafah was a cycling brand. They’re now telling you that 500 aid trucks once entered the Gaza strip every single day, and how the current blockade is a violation of Article 33 of the Geneva Convention. These conversations take place over a coffee, pint, or, in the most unexpected instance, a children’s birthday party. From the Instagram story to Thursday drinks with the office, Palestine is the governing moral question of conversation.
The sheer unrelenting savagery of Israel’s offensive is an affront to our allegedly shared humanity. War crimes are televised. Slideshows circulating Westminster and Washington imply ethnic cleansing. If your knowledge of what during my education was called the Arab-Israeli Conflict started on 7 October it looks pretty asymmetric. It even looks simple.
In the United Kingdom we have not needed to seriously consider invasion and the subjugation of our people for 80 years, not since the Nazi peril. But in that time the material destruction of the Israeli state has twice been a plausible outcome: after the Nakba in 1948 when Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq simultaneously invaded in response to Israel’s declaration of independence, and briefly during the Yom Kippur war in 1973.
Forgive the GCSE history lesson, but the Foreign Secretary recently felt the need to address the Commons and remind some of his fresh-faced 2024 intake MPs that the Iranian regime repeatedly and publicly asserts its desire to destroy “the cancerous tumour” of Israel; that its leaders chant the mantra “Death to America” like jihadist yogis. You can’t take anything for granted these days. And Israel’s unique and complex history means I wincingly accept its uncompromising military doctrine. Reality dictates: nie wieder flows from the barrel of a gun, otherwise it’s just a prayer. Moral certainty is a dangerous thing. So is ignorance.
But I am fretting about the context not provided in a 900-word column, so what does a vertical video? Too much phone is weird. A few weeks ago, a scroll of my X newsfeed started with confident racism, next I was served a kamikaze drone’s camera feed as it taunted a resigned and despairing Russian soldier, his final moments sharp in 1080p, engagement and cannon fodder. Then some pornography. A WhatsApp message took my attention elsewhere.
The extremity and density of information consumption in our time is without precedent, accelerated by the social media barons, and the tangible vibe shift of Trump’s presidency. The six hours of screen time the average member of Gen Z spends online is, indeed, too much. This is part of the explanation for Gaza’s saliency. Other wars dramatically impacted culture and politics but none took place in this information environment, the attention economy.
Some politicians understand this, like the upstart New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. Others do not, including the prime minister of the United Kingdom, whose opponents lap him around the digital circuit whether they are hard-right criminals like Tommy Robinson or leftist TikTokers.
British politics is shuddering beneath Starmer at constitutional and street level. Vigilante mobs mass outside hotels housing asylum seekers, sometimes race rioting breaks out. MPs are intimidated, harassed and assassinated. Five political parties are polling between 10 and 25 per cent in a first past the post electoral system. This includes, according to one poll, the Jeremy Corbyn breakaway party, which would campaign on an explicitly pro-Gaza platform.
Labour seats previously considered safe and occupied by big figures like Jonathan Ashworth have already fallen, others will too. Wes Streeting and Yvette Cooper are probably the most high-profile. Jess Phillips and Stella Creasy have found new politics, but the thing about chipping away your base is it affects the entire electoral map.
Downstream of electoral politics is a possibly permanent shift in attitudes towards Western foreign policy, as structural and formative as Vietnam was for our parents and grandparents. Whenever a ceasefire is agreed, whenever this war ends, and however it is judged by history, its impact on the politics of the young is already clear.
[Further reading: A question of intent]
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