They Are Exploiting Our Anger

How my time covering stories in Israel has taught me about anger, how it can be exploited, and how I'm seeing it everywhere today.

Note: This is a long read.

Around 2008, during Operation Cast Lead, I was in Israel and doing my first paid writing gig as a correspondent for Chabad.org, a Hasidic publication geared towards non-Orthodox Jews. I had visited Sderot (later to be one of the main targets on October 7th) both before and after the war and joined the residents as they spent every fifteen minutes or so escaping into bomb shelters as rockets rained down on them. I visited soldiers on the border of Gaza. I went to the funeral of the first soldier killed and saw his family cry for him. I visited soldiers in the hospital.

I had been in Israel to learn with a Hasidic yeshiva that taught (and indoctrinated) non-Orthodox students into becoming Hasidic. The combination of the political indoctrination of the yeshiva and my experiences covering these stories and others during the war had turned me quickly from a liberal secular Jew to a right wing religious hawk.

So when Netanyahu ended the war, I, like others with my views, felt an incandescent anger. In our minds, he had ended the war prematurely, letting Hamas stay and fester. Didn’t he know that as long as they stayed in power in Gaza, the attacks would continue and worsen? This wasn’t a long term solution. Yes, continuing the war to its conclusion would be devastating and destroy much of Gaza, but it had to be done.

I look back on that now and can see and understand the anger of many Israelis and American Jews today. Whatever I felt then they feel thousands of times more than I did back then. Rockets, as dangerous and as upsetting as they were, were nothing compared to October 7th. And with the taking of the hostages, the pain is not in the past but an ever present scream.

For those who hold this view, the many operations since 2008 were just further examples of the failed policy of being too lax in responding to Hamas. And with the videos of celebrations of Gazans along with their joining in swarming the hostages, Gazans as a whole.

The trauma and pain are real. And it should come as no surprise that for many, it transformed into anger.

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By the same token, as my views on war and the conflict have changed and evolved since 2008, I am now seeing and feeling the pain and anger of those who have been on the other side of this conflict, especially in America. 

I think a lot about my time in Israel and how, despite visiting it multiple time as a child of Israeli parents and living there for three years, I rarely interacted with Palestinians and even Palestinian citizens of Israel.  If I did, it was more often than not just when I shopped at their stores. Going into their neighborhoods was often framed as putting our own lives in danger, much as any Black neighborhood in America is portrayed.

I was recently at a talk with Palestinians and Israelis sharing their respective experiences in their countries of origin. What became very apparent very quickly was that my experience was the norm for many Israelis. It was a privilege we were afforded by the state we lived in.

The Palestinians, and every Palestinian I have met since, had the opposite reality: the occupation affected virtually every aspect of their lives. From the founding of Israel, which caused many of their families to be removed from their ancestral homes, to the realities of being policed and controlled in an entirely undemocratic system of the present day to the diasporic community fearing that if they re-enter their communities through Israel they may lose their passports forever, Israel literally occupies their very lives.

Gazans, meanwhile, have endured bombing campaign after bombing campaign, the blockade, and now a war. Regardless of the security realities, no population can endure these indignities and horrors without lifelong trauma. 

But it isn’t relegated only to Israel-Palestine. Speak to a diasporic Palestinian today and you will hear the frustration of feeling unheard for their entire lives, the way any time they speak of their pain publicly or protest they are accused of antisemitism, the stories of their concern for their families and/or the imprisonment or bombing of family members, and it becomes clear that anger is a logical response.

It often reminds me of my own experience speaking out about abuse or extremism in the Hasidic and Orthodox communities I left, where it seemed like it was impossible to speak about these topics without being accused of disloyalty and hate. The combination of refusal to acknowledge basic morality with the demonization can and does easily turn activists angry. It was only after leaving and building a new life that I have found the ability to begin to let go of that pain and anger.

How much moreso if this is your daily life since you were born.

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Anyone that happens to read even a bit of the news today knows how much anger and vitriol we live with. It is in the air we breathe, the lives we live, the relationships we care about. Politics, of course, is where it lives most potently. And the Israel-Palestine conflict is perhaps the most distilled version of that anger.

And that anger has radiated outwards. The anger and fear of the Israeli people has affected much of the Jewish diaspora. And the anger of activists who have seen the Palestinian struggle thrown aside for decades has led to its own form of anger.

And despite what people think, anger actually has its place. Anger in the face of injustice isn’t just logical and understandable, it is often the spark that can get movements off the ground. Among other emotions, anger in the face of the horrific murder of Trayvon Martin and the subsequent acquittal of his murderer that led to the Black Lives Matter movement. It was anger at the many stories of abuse and harassment revealed in 2017 that helped popularize Tarana Burke’s #MeToo movement.

And it is anger at the repeated images of Gazans suffering under the war that has pushed President Biden to begin to respond more forcefully to Netanyahu as well as popularizing the cause itself.

In other words, anger is no sin. In fact, it is often quite the opposite.

But its strength is also its weakness.

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In 2008, I covered a story that was not about Operation Cast Lead, but about the occupation. Since it was the time I was becoming indoctrinated, I was beginning to feel sympathetic to the cause of the settlers even if I didn’t agree with their instances of violence. Either way, my editor had told me explicitly that I couldn’t write anything critical of the movement.

At the time, there was a massive dispute between settlers in Hebron and the Israeli government. A group of settlers had purchased and occupied an apartment building in the city that they subsequently named Beit HaShalom (House of Peace), but which later would be known in much of Israel as Beit HaMeriva (House of Contention).

Israeli government and courts at the time had determined that the house was bought illegally and ruled that it had to be evicted. In response, about 200 settlers occupied the house. Almost all of them were young men and a few women, likely between the ages of 14 and 17. I covered an initial protest, in which I described the frustration they were feeling (and the way I was beginning to shed my belief that they were extremists):

“There was a feeling of pent up energy. The settlers simply felt voiceless. Despite the journalists that surrounded them, they could not speak to them. Despite the fact that every single move a settler makes is recorded and watched, they felt unheard. Even though they lived in the Holy Land, they felt hated by their own people.

They felt alone.”

(Ironically, later in the piece I described how I had seen the nearby soldiers shooting in the air to disperse some of the young settlers who were roaming around Hebron and harassing residents and even then I couldn’t see they were extremists.)

I then joined them again about a month later. Despite the fact that the Israeli courts had ordered the house evicted and the Prime Minister had promised to send in the army and police if they didn’t leave, nothing had happened yet. I wanted to see how things had progressed.

The night when I arrived, since I was with a sympathetic outlet, I was able to embed closely with the settlers in a way that other journalists were unable to. I witnessed mostly a celebratory mood (it was days before Hanukkah). But there were very obvious hints of the other side to it. Some young settlers snuck off to “explore” Hebron. 

In retrospect, one moment that now stands out to me very strongly was a visit by a rabbi. He, an older man, did not join the encampment. Rather, he spoke to a group of teenage boys who he encouraged to fight back against the army if they came. He called them heroes, then he was walked to his expensive car and was driven off, none of the responsibility for what would come next on his hands.

The next day, after morning prayers the young men were given a speech by one of the women leading the group, where she described how in the eviction of settlers in Gaza, they had made a mistake in responding nonviolently. That wouldn’t happen this time, she said. After, a boy no older than sixteen screamed incredibly angrily that they would be ready no matter what happened. They would be violent, they would attack, they would not be led by sheep to the slaughter.

A few hours later, I was standing outside when one of the settlers came running and screaming that the police were coming. Moments later, we were surrounded.

The rest is a longer story, but suffice to say that I saw anger in a different context. Since I didn’t have a press badge and wore a bandana over my dreadlocks, the police treated me as a settler, including getting thrown to the ground, hit by their batons, and even having a flash grenade thrown at me. I saw what looked like a 14 year old laying on the ground with blood coming out of his head as his friend comforted him. He was likely hit by a rock that other settlers were throwing from the floor above onto the police who were working to get past the barricades in front of the entrance of the building.

When I was finally placed in the area they were keeping the settlers to stop them from returning, I watched as they tried to break through. The police beat anyone who came close. Soon, some settlers broke into a house near me and lit it on fire. On one side, the fire. On another, the police. And on the other two sides, some Palestinian residents were throwing stones at us.

I am lucky I made it out with few injuries. Much less lucky were the Palestinians living in Hebron, who were subjected to these hundreds of angry settlers rampaging through the town lighting more homes on fire, attacking innocent people, including shooting a father and his son who nearly died.

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As someone who was buying into a certain form of extreme Jewish tribalism myself at the time, I was struck by seeing Jew fighting Jew. It felt like a violation of something sacred. And so I understood and sympathized with the anger of the settlers even though I was shaken by their violence.

It is wild to look back on. That I could have witnessed extremism up close and not seen it for what it was because of this worldview and only after a short time of indoctrination seems unworldly to me. Even worse, none of my mentors attempted to disabuse me of my sympathies: they encouraged it.

It is this aspect of mentorship, in fact, that most sticks with me today.

Despite all the violence I witnessed the strongest memory I have is of the rabbi who came the day before. It was this combined with the age of the settlers who were the angriest and most likely to be violent and injured that strikes me most because it actually feels strongly parallel to what we are seeing today.

The anger and loneliness of these young men did not come out of nowhere. It was stoked and encouraged by their older counterparts. Their mentors and elders treated it as holy. And they directed it.

Most of these men were safe, unaffected by the danger they were putting their young charges in. The rabbi could come one night and leave, and yet he was seen as some sort of good, holy man.

In the hands of these extremist leaders, the anger of young men was their greatest tool. They could use it to wield against the Israeli state and Palestinians alike. And it works: today, Beit HaShalom is back in the hands of settlers. This time, they are blessed by the government and protected by the army that once evicted them.

All of this feels bizarrely reminiscent of the present moment. As I have worked to cover how the digital age has led to the growing extremism on the right and the way antisemitism has exploded in its ranks, I have seen a scaled up version of what happened that day in Hebron. 

Since 2016, the digital space has been used to stoke anger on controversy after controversy. Immigrants, DEI, trans rights, COVID, and on and on. Each one has had two corresponding results: further recruitment to the far right and deeper anger. 

None of this is minor in any sense. It led to an attempted coup. It helped contribute to the more than one million deaths from COVID. It has led to laws and shootings targeting Black people, immigrants, trans people, and more.

Social media is the primary reason for these changes. That is because it has allowed bad actors to scale up the process I saw happen in my witnessing of indoctrination.

Like the settlers, a false reality can be created easily as people become closely networked. Second, that reality has to then be used to stoke the anger that it first initiates. It has to be fed like a fire so that it both spreads and increases in intensity. Then, it needs to be directed towards a victim/and or goal.

One simply needs enough influencers and marketing techniques to pull it off.

The point here, then, is that while anger itself is no sin, anger is easily exploitable. It makes us single-minded, less likely to introspect, and moved by a network of likeminded angry people.

This is exactly the power that led to massive social movements in America and beyond. For the most part, that was because they were largely able to escape the influence of bad actors. But as time has passed, these people, leaders, governments, and extremist movements have become better at inserting themselves and asserting their influence.

In that sense, the democratic nature of the internet and social media is used as a weapon to be wielded by the authoritarian-minded. Instead of wielding state control or taking young men and separating them from society so you can indoctrinate them, it is possible to invade people’s minds.

The end result is that, like the young men running into the batons of the soldiers and police, the angry indoctrinated will run into the face of danger while their indoctrinators stay safe and protected. How much easier to do so when you don’t even need to even meet your subjects.

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Now we come to this moment. Anger is everywhere. Some of it is legitimate. Some of it isn’t. At this point, that distinction is less and less relevant than who has power to shape the narratives, build the networks, and indoctrinate their targets.

The anger after the horrors of October 7th has allowed a man who is absolutely reviled by his own people to exploit his country into thinking that they should put the lives of soldiers (young men, of course) into even more danger so that they can fight a war that has no hope of achieving its goals and which will kill the very hostages it claims to be defending.

The anger has spread to much of the pro-Israel diaspora who has bought the same message and which is surrounded and infiltrated by a plethora of influencers who have shaped and distorted reality to make it seem as if the war is successful, humane, and moral. The suffering of Gazans is either erased or outright denied. And further anger is stoked as protests spread and the few antisemitic incidents are used to justify war.

The anger of the anti-war, pro-liberation, pro-Palestinian movement around the world is being exploited as well. As I have written elsewhere, a group of white nationalists and far right influencers have pivoted to pretend to care about Palestinians in order to spread antisemitism and extremist recruiting. At least one of them appears to have strong connections to Russia.

It is not just white nationalists, of course. There are many extremists who want to exploit these movements, not least of which is the Iranian regime, which is known for its soft influence campaigns, and it should cause significant alarm that people who work for the regime have been witnessed spreading its slogans among some in the movement.

But the important takeaway here is not just about the war. It is about everything. Every conflict. If there is anger involved, there is almost without doubt a group or groups of extremists waiting in the wings to exploit it. Some will succeed, many won’t.

The takeaway, though, is that our anger has been weaponized against every single one of us. We are the settlers running into the batons. Or, at the very least, there are many people trying to make us into them.

As someone who is interviewed and put on panels to discuss extremism, disinformation, and antisemitism, without fail I am asked the same question: how can people be protected and protect themselves from these dangers?

People like myself have tried to focus on technological solutions: it is often the mechanics of social media itself that contributes to and creates anger. In addition, studies have shown that anger is one of the “high arousal” emotions most likely to cause something to go viral.

The simpler (but harder) solution would be to put pressure on social media companies and the government to improve moderation and remove the worst aspects of the tech that prioritize engagement and addiction over safety.

In a country where even our Democrats are more likely to back outright banning social media than regulating it, even as billionaires buy and destroy these companies as if they were disposable dishes, I am becoming less and less sure that this is a feasible option. An appeal to authority seems to be a losing battle when authority itself is deeply corrupt.

The problem with this view is that it immediately leads to fatalism. If those above us can’t be influenced to change something so integral, what can we do?

I am becoming increasingly convinced that, while we should never give up on trying to influence the powerful in this way, we also need to arm ourselves culturally, emotionally, and psychologically.

Even with the best protections, the simple fact is that indoctrinators and bad actors would have far more access to us than they ever did. The settlers are surrounded by the dangerous leaders.

Another way to address this situation, then, is to increase the amount of good faith leaders, influencers, and movements across the globe. The indoctrinators have a head start because they learned this lesson earlier, but this does not make their success in any sense inevitable.

In fact, as much as dangerous people now have access to us, their access is dependent on a democratic reality. We are networked. We are able to be part of communities far more easily than we’ve ever been. We are able to ourselves spread good messages just as easily as others. 

This actually gives democratic movements an advantage. Authoritarians and extremists ultimately rely on complete control and a networked world where people contribute their individual strengths to help bring about an end, be the end bad or good, ultimately relies on creating a democratic system to succeed. This means that authoritarian movements are ultimately unsustainable. Anger is the way they are exploited but the anger is like wildfire, ultimately burning down the entire forest, including the people who lit the spark. There is no world in which a leader like Donald Trump could maintain complete control over his movement.

This means that newer groups devoted to working with the democratic nature of the internet, the networks, and the very fabric of nature itself are going to be more sustainable, even if the road itself will be bumpy.

The most urgent need we have now is not defeating extremism but in growing a truly democratic global movement devoted to empowerment and liberation for all people. We need less “anti-extremism” and more “pro-democracy.”

We also need psychological protection, not just structural and cultural. We need to learn about anger, learn about ourselves, understand ourselves. To feel and know who we are and admit the mistakes we’ve made. Too much of our culture teaches us to be authoritarians over our own minds, forcing us to stay static, to think that we can’t back down on the road we’re on, to not question ourselves.

These are the guardrails to protecting ourselves against our anger becoming exploited. In addition to simply learning how we can be exploited, we need a place to actually direct our anger, one which doesn’t extinguish it and turn us passive, but uses it to empower us.

The problem is that those of us who care about democracy, freedom, and liberation are ourselves stuck in the past just as the indoctrinators are learning to embrace the democratic future.

While those of us (including myself), lobby for government regulation of social media and demand moderation on these platforms, the exploiters are creating their distributed networks and movements. They are busy moving forward while we are trying to turn the clocks back.

And many of the movements we share the goals of are often themselves deeply authoritarian in method, far more concerned with policing the behavior of those who share their goals than in achieving their goals. This allows the exploiters of these movements to claim control by being the most “pure” while they beat down those who are not following the “rules.”  In this way, they turn the anger inwards and destroy their own movements.

All of this makes us vulnerable to indoctrination and to unsustainable movements. In both cases, we aren’t moving forward in the ways we think we are. If anything, we may be contributing to the problem.

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Like many people, I am rethinking much of my politics and ideas as I look at the anger around me and see where it may take us. So much of it reminds me of these times in my past.

I have seen what happens when we reach the limits of our anger, seen the beaten faces on the ground, the young man with a hole in his head as his friend cradled him, the soldiers crying as they beat their brothers.

Our anger, holy or not, has made us vulnerable. 

We cannot let them do this to us. Those of us who imagine a democratic movement cannot abandon anyone, and must embrace the distributed nature of the internet and the new reality we live in.

Because if we keep resisting it, keep thinking we can either turn time backwards or hope that the government will somehow save us or become militant ourselves without being aware of the exploiters around us, we will lose sight of the potential of the moment. 

Everything we see as dark today is also the light, also the opportunity. We just need to embrace it.