Altalena underway bound for Israel with volunteers and freedom fighters on board, June 1948
Lady Gaga’s manager is quoted saying that they “produce music videos for YouTube”. When my Twitter, Facebook and email stream lit up with the identical links to the Gaza flotilla videos one could have gotten the impression that the Israeli Navy Seals are in the business of staging the viral clips for YouTube. But there was something unusual about all the links. People who never post on Facebook or Twitter, even some who stopped responding to my personal emails, felt compelled to spam up. The day before on a bus to NY I glimpsed a headline from the Israeli Navy: “We know exactly how to handle the flotilla” – and this often means they really had no idea.
But back to the spam, it tells little about the actual event but it tells everything about the “confirmation bias” of the sender and the “forwarder”. Just to double-check the was the Twitter stream of my nominally Jewish “followers” and not a blip about the blockade, still the oil gasher talk… The confirmation bias works both ways and besides confirming the views and the “likes” of the lovers and the haters it works under the operating assumption that the “world” cares about this issue with the same intensity. A national variant of the personal insecurity syndrome, the provincial paranoia of everyone always judging you.
But really now, Israel is the nation born in the Altalena, an identity that came of age during the attack on the USS Liberty. One would expect that the “flotilla” would barely make a splash. One should take note that the last Lebanon war was a costly defeat, the Gaza war accomplished little and Gilad Shalit is still a prisoner. At some point a dreamer would take the river of the viral spam and re-float it as an introspection in the sea of love and hate.
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