By Brigitte L. Nacos
Instant global communication brings day-in and day-out visuals of political violence and human suffering into our living rooms. Civilians killed or injured--most of the time not in wars between nation-states but in terrorist and counterterrorist actions. And whereas the principals in violent conflicts clash over differences, the plight of the victims is very much the same on both sides. Just look at the visuals of the latest conflicts in the Middle East: when a child is killed, a mother wounded--the sorrow is the same in Gaza, Israel, and Lebanon. Yet, even the reactions to human suffering are not universal but depend on audiences' political preferences.
By taking Israeli soldiers hostage and sending rockets into Israel, Hamas and Hezbollah provoked Israel to retaliate and fight on two fronts. Since both Hamas and Hezbollah know a great deal about the usefulness of communication and media--Hezbollah has its own global TV-network (Al Manar) and Hamas a newly established television station (Al Aksa Television)--,they count on the pictures of the suffering Arab civilians to win more support in their neighborhood. Already, one of Iraq's most radical and influential clerics, Moktata-al-Sadr has threatened not to be a spectator in the fight between Hezbollah and Israel.
Commentators have suggested that the time clock has been turned back to the early 1980s, when Israel invaded Lebanon in pursuit of Arafat and the PLO. The perhaps most important difference is the changed communication and media landscape. In the early 1980s, there was certainly a great deal of reporting from the Middle East, including live TV coverage. CNN had just started as the only global all-news network. Today, far more people in the region have access to global television and a variety of Arab networks and stations; many get their news from the Internet as well. But what is the effect of more and more easily accessible information?
Years ago, advances in communication technology were believed to create something like a global village in which people had access to the same information. This, the optimists believed, would help people of different nationalities, cultures, languages, and religions to understand each other better; that this would create good conditions for peaceful coexistence.
Unfortunately, the same words and the same visual images have different effects in different societies. The pictures of rockets hitting Haifa trigger very different emotions among Israelis than among Arabs; the visuals of bombs destroying targets in Beirut do not have the same effects on people in Israel and in Arab countries.
In other words, the advances in communications and media are more likely to widen the gap between different peoples, groups and countries; they are more likely to magnify and even cause conflict.
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