Digital Militarism Israel's Occupation in the Social Media Age [Hardcover]

Israel's occupation has been transformed in the social media age. Over the last decade, military rule in the Palestinian territories grew more bloody and entrenched. In the same period, Israelis became some of the world's most active social media users. In Israel today, violent politics are interwoven with global networking practices, protocols, and aesthetics. Israeli soldiers carry smartphones into the field of military operations, sharing mobile uploads in real-time. Official Israeli military spokesmen announce wars on Twitter. And civilians encounter state violence first on their newsfeeds and mobile screens.Across the globe, the ordinary tools of social networking have become indispensable instruments of warfare and violent conflict. This book traces the rise of Israeli digital militarism in this global contextboth the reach of social media into Israeli military theaters and the occupation's impact on everyday Israeli social media culture. Today, social media functions as a crucial theater in which the Israeli military occupation is supported and sustained. With this genuinely innovative study, Kunstman and Stein open an entirely new direction of research on the Israel/Palestine issue, and pave the way for future debate on the growing digitalisation of military discourses (and militarisation of digital spaces) in the broader context of contemporary armed conflicts, making this book useful not only for scholars specialising in the area, but for all social scientists investigating the cultures and practices of war and soldiering. Finally, warning how information technologies can slowly and subtly transform into new weapons of war and contribute to a process of domestication of violence in a context of prolonged military occupation, the book highlights the need  political and ethical, as well as scientific  for further and deeper investigation into the topic. Adi Kuntsman is Lecturer in Information and Communications at Manchester Metropolitan University, and al#&