The recent events in Israel have highlighted what we believe is an important type of rhetorical jiu-jitsu employed by Pro-Israel and Pro-Palestinian adherents alike that we call Gerrymandering Power. This is our attempt to explain it.
“This is what decolonization looks like”
On October 7th, members of the al-Quassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, entered Israeli territory and proceeded to butcher every civilian they could find. At this point, the video evidence is undeniable — Hamas militants paraglided into a music festival and slaughtered hundreds of ravers. They also and raided many nearby Kibbutzes, killing grandmothers, women, and children. Total deaths are still being counted, but as of November 2023, they’re estimated to be over 1,400.
The images and videos from that day are particularly gruesome. There was a viral video of a German-Israeli woman’s corpse being carted around on the back of a Hamas pickup truck while the residents of Gaza spit on here, shouting “Allahu Akbar”. Later reports suggest fragments of her skull were found. In another article, Israeli coroners observe two spines of a mother and child tied together with wire and soot in their throats, suggesting that they were burned alive.
The screams of Israeli ravers and kibbutzim were quickly accompanied by the entirety of leftist twitter popping champagne bottles in unison. By now, you’ve probably seen the tweets that went viral in that time, but here they are in case you’ve been living under a rock:
In short, the attacks were celebrated among the leftist twitter class because this is what decolonization looks like. Decolonization is obviously a good thing, and the October 7th attacks were treated accordingly. In the weeks following, there’s been a slow rollback of the celebration that occurred on October 7th. Once the indefensible became impossible to defend, reactions turned from celebration to denial. See Inverse Florida’s excellent post for more details.
At this point, enough retrospectives on the left’s reaction to October 7th have been written. Instead of adding to the pile, we want to narrow our focus to a particular rhetorical tactic employed by Israel and Palestine supporters alike that also shows up in conflicts far removed from the Middle East. We call it Gerrymandering Power, and hope you agree it routinely makes online conversations worse.
Punching down
A common refrain is that one should only ever punch up, and never punch down. Punching down is what bad people do; Punching up is what good people do. The rationale for this maxim is intuitive — no one likes hearing about teachers bullying students, or parents hurting children.
However, things get complicated when you start talking about groups. What does it mean for one group to have power over another? In some cases, it’s clear. In South African apartheid, there were legal systems in place such that Black people were systematically barred from accessing the same spaces and resources as White people. In other cases, it’s less clear. Who has more power: Chinese immigrants living in Australia, or Japanese immigrants living in Australia? There may very well be an answer here — perhaps Chinese immigrants tend to be much wealthier than Japanese immigrants — but you have to think really hard about what makes them more powerful in a way you didn’t need to for South Africa.
This isn’t just a quirky thought experiment. Who is defined as powerful matters a great deal in contemporary discourse about any number of events. This is because progressive and leftist-types have spent decades legitimizing a particular way of viewing conflicts such that the powerful and the powerless cannot be held to the same standards of behaviour. In the case of racism, we get quotes like the following:
In other words, a Black person and White person could each demean the other on the basis of their skin colour, but it’s totally different because a White person has power over the Black person. There’s a few problems with this:
Individuals do not experience systems. A white person bullied by a black person is not suddenly made (partially) whole by the knowledge that their race tends to be very privileged relative to the race of their bully.
Intersectionality matters. Focusing on only one dimension of privilege can lead you to ignore other relevant considerations. A white person bullying a black person could have a racist element, but what if their incomes were drastically different such that the white person is dirt-poor and the black person is quite wealthy?
Words have meaning. Most people think racism means being mean to others based on their race. This redefinition is only uncritically endorsed in particular online spaces with a tenuous-at-best connection to what normal people think.
Regardless, this style of analysis shapes many commentators’ analysis of events and is worth accounting for if you want to understand the contours of online discourse about a particular event involving racism.
Gerrymandering Power
What does this have to do with Israel and Palestine? Well, people seem to care a great deal about who is powerful and who is not. In the case of this conflict, that’s difficult to determine, and therefore there is room to play rhetorical games that reframe who is powerful and who is not. In other words, there is space to gerrymander power.
First, what does gerrymandering mean? In short, the term describes drawing lines on maps to produce electoral outcomes favourable to oneself. See below for an example:
In this case, a 40% red state can be salvaged by the red team by drawing borders such that some districts are almost entirely blue, and the remainder have slightly more red than blue.
This technique is not merely limited to elections. The same happens when companies talk about market share; market share can only be calculated with respect to some reference category. For example, Apple’s sold about $15 billion worth of AirPods in 2022. How big is this? Compare AirPods to two overlapping markets:
The consumer audio market is worth ~$110 Billion, meaning AirPods have a 13.6% market share
The wireless headphones market is worth ~$51 Billion, meaning AirPods have a 29% market share
By simply changing the reference class you can double Apple’s market share! And you aren’t even incorrect for doing it — if the numbers are real, these are both valid ways to contextualize AirPods sales.
We argue that the same type of process happens in discussions of Israel and Palestine when trying to determine which group is more powerful.
Gerrymandering Israel and Palestine
Who is punching down when it comes to Israel and Palestine? To a first approximation, the conflict looks something like this:
Israel is much bigger than Palestine. They have a bigger military. They have more expensive weapons. When Palestinians shoots thousands of rockets at Israel, Israel has the Iron Dome and can stop most rocket barrages outright. When Israel shoots one missile at a building in Gaza, it is near-guaranteed to hit. In the eyes of many leftists, this fully represents the current situation. Israel is powerful, Palestine is weak. Because punching down is bad, Israel punching Palestine is bad.
However, focusing only on Israel and Palestine is a mistake. Even a cursory reading of the conflict would tell you that the surrounding nations matter a lot. Gaza was once owned by Egypt, and the West Bank was once owned by Jordan. At numerous points throughout Israel’s history, it hasn’t been Israel fighting a much smaller Palestine, but Israel fighting a gang of other neighbouring countries AND Palestine. To Israel the situation looks more like this:
Read about Israel’s 1948 war of independence, the 1967 war, the 1973 Yom Kippur war, or Israel’s numerous conflicts with Palestinian militias in the past 20 years. There’s no way of analyzing this situation without first looking at just how small Israel is compared to every surrounding nation. But even this is not enough context. Israel is notable for being a bastion of multi-ethnic and tolerant democracy in the Middle East, and enjoys the support of many Western nations. To that end, Western nations support Israel far more than they support Jordan, or Lebanon, or Syria. This too changes the balance of power. To many in the pro-Palestine camp, the situation looks a whole lot more like this:
While Israel may be under threat from every surrounding nation, it’s important to point out that it is a strong ally of the United States. Needless to say, the United States could go toe to toe with every single Middle East nation at once with decent odds, and that’s just considering its military. The United States is the world’s largest economy and can put immense economic pressure on every surrounding nation (and fund Israel too!) to advance Israel’s interests and the United States’ own.
The problem is that all these perspectives can be advanced without uttering a single false statement. It’s true that Israel is more powerful than Palestine. It’s true that the entirety of the Middle East is probably stronger than Israel alone. It’s true that the United States and other Western nations are more powerful than the entirety of the Middle East. Choosing where to draw the borders when analyzing this conflict thus matters a great deal when deciding who is powerful and who is powerless.
Reading articles from Pro-Palestinian accounts, a common thread is to emphasize just how weak and helpless Palestinians are to Israel’s superior military might. Reading articles from Pro-Israel accounts, a common thread is to contextualize the power of surrounding nations in dictating terms of the conflict. Rejoinders from the former to the latter jiu-jitsu flip the power calculations by appealing to the US military and Western nations as players that make any intra-Middle East power imbalances immaterial.
This tactic doesn’t just work geographically, it applies temporally too. “Who started it?” is a question that can’t be answered without a prior sense of when to start the clock. Because this conflict is cyclical, virtually every action taken by either party can be justified with reference to a prior action by the other side.
This game can be played near-infinitely. Why did the Second Intifada happen? The failure of the Camp David Accords and Ariel Sharon’s visit to Al-Aqsa explain it, in part. Why’d Camp David fail? One reason might be that Arafat, negotiator for the Palestinians, wouldn’t accept anything less than the right of return. Why did he care so much about that? *gestures vaguely at the entirety of Israel/Palestine relations*.
Selectively choosing which time periods matter significantly alters your judgments of events. Consider this viral image that’s made its way into every college-age young woman’s instagram story:
Uncritical endorsement of this map requires that one ignore a lot of history that occurred in between these different time points — and some outright historical revisionism. To begin, there was no historic nation of Palestine, because the entire area was owned by the Ottoman Empire and subsequently conquered by the British post-WW1. Even then, there were significant Jewish populations in the area, and prior to 1947, Jewish people had slowly been legally purchasing land in the area.
The UN partition plan was itself accepted by the Jewish people and rejected by the Arab population, at which point Israel declared its independence and secured the partition-plan borders anyway. Most egregiously, the graph suggests that, over the course of 20 years, Israel took 50% of the Palestinian’s land, seemingly for no reason.
In 1967, Israel re-affirmed that Egypt closing the Straits of Tirana to Israeli vessels would constitute a declaration of war. Egypt did that, and the 1967 war was born. To simplify a great deal, Israel fought a coalition of 6.5 surrounding nations (the 0.5 is Lebanon, who didn’t do much). In the course of this war, Israel secured control over the Golan Heights, the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank, all of which had previously been owned or controlled by its neighbours. While the graph would have you believe Israel simply seized these territories, it would be much more accurate to say that these territories were conquered as part of a defensive war on Israel’s part.
In other words, graphs like the above gerrymander power by choosing particular time periods to focus on in a way that guides laypeople’s perceptions of who started it, who’s in the right, and who’s more powerful.
It’s not just Israel
To be clear, this phenomenon is not limited to the Israel/Palestine conflict. At multiple points throughout the past few years we’ve seen similar bids to gerrymander perceptions of who is powerful and who is not. To give one more example, consider the current Russia/Ukraine war. To many, the conflict looks a lot like this:
A weaker Ukraine is perceived as being attacked by a much stronger Russian invader. However, if you’ve spent any time on leftist twitter you’ll know that leftists HATE this framing. Instead, they will pivot to a wider geographic lens on the conflict, showing graphs like the following:
Or, put more simply, they want to show you this:
In more words: “Noooo, Russia isn’t the big powerful bad guy, look at NATO! Ukraine was going to join NATO so really Russia is the weak and powerless one”. Whatever your object-level beliefs about Russia and Ukraine, this tactic is undeniable — there is a concerted effort in leftist spaces to consistently reframe one’s preferred side as being more weak and powerless, and thus making them the virtuous victims in a conflict.
Conclusion
All of this isn’t to say that expanding one’s temporal or geographical scope when analyzing geopolitical conflicts is bad. Rather, we want to identify that the breadth of one’s scope is itself a very important decision that can meaningfully alter downstream judgments of a situation. Useless as this advice may be, one’s scope should be the right size — not too narrow, and not too broad. And one’s scope certainly shouldn’t be chosen in advance to advantage one side over the other.
While we’ve mostly focused on individuals making particular claims, gerrymandering power is most relevant when considering how news media, historians, and pundits talk about conflicts. These entities have the power to shape discourse in a way that random twitter users do not, and they should use that power responsibly.
Knock out debut! It's true that individuals do not experience systems, but you can still gerrymander the field of view down to their level. Power dynamics discourse does not have a coherent response for disputes between individuals. It's obvious who has the power if you draw a tight boundary around a black man beating a white woman, but you'll get resistance over conceding this answer. Instead, the boundary has to be stretched out until you get the "right" answer, until you reach diluted categorizations about race or wealth or privilege or whatever else is lying around.
If the result of the analysis depends entirely on what kind of boundary you draw, then power dynamics analysis is a useless tool.
Great analysis, looking forward to more :)