Letters from the information war
In one of my first times talking about the Israel-Palestine conflict I urged people to be careful with their words.
It was a lot of rumbling on an Instagram story, but my message was this: be mindful about the messages you share because this is also an information war and both sides can be intentionally spreading misinformation.
I then got a very interesting response to that message.
One of my friends was very upset because I used the word “conflict” to describe the events, and that proved to her that “there was no journalistic objectivity” in my announcement. So I asked her what would be a more journalistic neutral term to use in this case, to which she answered: “invasion” would be more neutral, although, she argued, we should all be calling it a “genocide”.
I got branded as pro-Israel simply by the word I used to describe the situation, not even by the content of my message.
I disagree with her argument, but that stayed in the back of my mind. Over the following months, I started to talk more and more about the topic, and would eventually hesitate whenever I was using the word “conflict” to describe… well, the conflict.
More than endlessly discussing the multiple meanings of this term, I think this is the perfect opportunity to dive even deeper into the information war debate because this is a battle we’re all involved in. It’s not just powerful states and armed groups that are engaged here. It’s all of us, with every post, every video, every share.
In an information war both sides are not only disputing territory, they’re also disputing words and narratives. And since one of the most important things in a war is to know who is on your side, branding words as belonging to one side or the other is very useful in this context. So terms like “conflict”, “terrorist”, and “hostages” are now repurposed and branded as pro-Israeli. Words like “genocide”, “invasion”, and “Zionists” are repurposed and branded as pro-Palestine.
What’s left is no neutral territory. If all the words we have to describe this situation are immediately seen as part of an instance, the mere act of talking about the topic will put you in one of the opposing trenches.
And this is another strong message of our ever-polarizing times: everybody has to pick a side.
I remember another time in which I felt this very strongly. I was covering politics at a time when we had our first female president in Brazil. There were a lot of firsts in terms of language. That’s because Portuguese, like other Latin idioms, is a gendered language. This means that all adjectives and nouns get assigned a gender. For instance, you can’t say “a lawyer” without specifying the gender of the lawyer in question. Is either “um advogado” (a male lawyer) or “uma advogada” (a female lawyer).
Usually, words ending in “a” are used for women and words ending in “o” are used for men. But there are exceptions, like words that end in “e” and are gender neutral, the same being used for both men and women. President (presidente) is one of them. So when Dilma became president, the grammatically correct way would be to call her “Presidente Dilma Rousseff”.
Despite that, some movements on the left understood that having our first female president was a special occasion that deserved a more appropriate term. They started calling her “Presidenta Dilma”. Movements on the right on the other hand got upset with the grammar change and made a point of calling her “presidente”.
Soon you could tell which side people were on by the last letter they were using in a word.
In the middle were us, journalists. You see, it’s really difficult to write about politics without using the word president. In the newspaper I worked for at the time we ended up deciding to stick to grammar and hope other publications would do the same. But there was always the risk that whole stories would be seen as right-leaning because of that last letter.
When all the possible words we can use to describe a topic get polarized, moderate discussion becomes a really hard task.
Trying to give my Instagram followers objective news about what was happening in Palestine, I kept having to dance around a bunch of terms. The biggest one of them was “terrorism”. How do I name Hamas men who killed civilians on October 7th? Hamas members? Attackers? Isn’t the act of purposely killing random civilians in mass an act of terrorism? And isn’t the perpetrators of a terrorist act called terrorists? So why is no one else using this term in the more progressive media? Will I be labelled as anti-Palestinian if I use this term? But if I don’t, won’t I be labelled as pro-Hamas?
Now you can see why so many moderate people left the discussion. It’s simply exhausting.
What gives me hope is people who decide to stick to it and insist on having the discussion on their own terms. In Episode 5 of their podcast Unapologetic, Ibrahim and Amira, two Palestinian Israeli citizens, talk about the discussion around the terms used in the discussion. “We’re obviously not going to agree on the terminology, and I think this is the simplest thing that we’re going to disagree on”, Amira says.
I agree. I think that if we even want to discuss topics like this we need to cut each other some slack and look at the content of the messages, not just the form.
