It feels like a race for the hearts of young people: the "war" on social media for the dominant interpretation of the Israel-Gaza war, a war Israel lost long ago. Just a few weeks after October 7, 2023, the world seemed to have forgotten the brutal bodycam footage of the terrorists massacring innocent people. A team from Young Christians Standing with Israel (JCSI), led by Anna Frey and Dina Ehrhardt, responded with an awareness campaign on social media. Two years later, they take stock.
A commentary by Dina Ehrhardt and Anna Frey
“The trigger for our awareness campaign was a video that appeared in my Instagram feed on the Friday after October 7th,” Dina explains. “I already knew it from an Israeli Telegram group. It showed Israeli marines attempting to stop terrorists at Israel’s seafront as part of their defense.”.
Less than a week later, the video went viral on social media with the caption, "Israeli soldiers shoot swimming civilians fleeing Gaza." "That felt like a punch in the gut," Dina and Anna said. With the help of a twelve-person team, they launched an information campaign that ran for three months. The result: eight professionally produced short videos, hundreds of thousands of views—and countless hate comments.
Emotion instead of evidence
In one of the videos, we examined Hamas's sophisticated PR strategy. It began with images of destruction from Gaza, accompanied by the following sentences: "Destroyed houses behind wailing Palestinians, fathers with lifeless children in their arms. These are images we see again and again from the Gaza Strip, images that appeal to our emotions..." Surprisingly, the video received many likes from apparent Palestinian and Hamas sympathizers.
The reason for this quickly became clear: apparently, many of the Palestinian supporters hadn't watched the video for more than ten seconds. Had they watched just one more second instead of scrolling on immediately after liking it, they would have realized that the video aimed at precisely the opposite of their own goal: namely, exposing Hamas propaganda. This demonstrates how short the attention span of many young people is, whose need for an "emotion" was satisfied by the first three sentences of a video, leaving them completely uninterested in the context of the statements.
Psychologist and extremism researcher Ahmad Mansour described precisely this phenomenon during a Stern TV talk show: “It’s left-wing radicals from the identity politics movement, […] Islamists, as well as Palestinians who are – unfortunately – unable to distance themselves from Hamas. […] And the fuel for everything is social media, where hatred, incitement, and highly emotionalized images are spread hundreds of times a day.” This mobilizes people to take to the streets – something we’ve seen almost daily since October 7th.
Social media provides a 24/7 service for emotions: anger, pity, belonging, reward. Young people experiencing identity crises finally find a sense of "us" there. The price: creating enemies. Thus, the Israel-Hamas war transforms into a global game of content: every tear monetizable, every explosion clickable, every opinion a product.
Emotions after the news
This is how the now 19-year-old TikToker Guy Christensen (TikTok name "Your favorite Guy") apparently found his calling. After "reporting" on the Israeli-Gaza war for almost two years, he tearfully declared in a video from July 2025 that Israel had now bombed all the hospitals and buildings in the Gaza Strip, and that "hundreds of thousands" were dead. He expressed his shame for his own US government: "This is our genocide, not just Israel's."
The clip ends with a Nazi comparison: “The way […] corresponds to the same tactic the Nazis used to entice starving Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to board trains that took them to the death camps.” And millions of young people watch his videos and believe him. A teenager becomes a digital missionary for a cause he feels but doesn't understand. About a war he only knows from a screen, in a country he has probably never even set foot in.
The pro-Israel influencer Yechiel Jacobs commented laconically: “Get a job.” Whether unemployment actually promotes radicalization is not scientifically proven. But the idea is disturbingly plausible. Those who work don't have time to post hate comments daily, let alone produce such content or regularly be ferried to anti-Israel demonstrations in Berlin in specially chartered buses. When more than 400 people were massacred in a Sudanese hospital at the end of October, no one took to the streets for the victims or against the terrorist group responsible…
Click-through rate instead of context
According to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2025, one in three 18- to 24-year-olds in Germany gets their news primarily from social media. This includes, above all, Instagram, YouTube, and WhatsApp. We have clearly felt the consequences of this over the past two years. Because what counts in the social media feed is not context, but click-through rate—that is, the number of times a post is viewed. The social media algorithm rewards outrage, not analysis.
From emotionalization to disinhibition
The Israel-Hamas war demonstrates how digital emotionalization is diffusing into reality. Antisemitic attacks in Europe and the USA have increased dramatically since 2023. Jewish students are being attacked, Israeli tourists are seeing "Boycott Israel" signs in Europe, and a hostel in Amsterdam is refusing to book Israeli guests.
Social media is not merely a stage, but an accelerant. Every story, every hashtag, every meme becomes part of a moral arms race. Hamas understands this masterfully: it sells victimhood like branded products. Justice, resistance, honor – all visually curated to perfection.
Anyone who believes radicalization is a slow process has never encountered the algorithm. The problem isn't emotion—it's part of being human. The problem is that everything is emotionalized until there's no room left for doubt. Between the justified outcry against antisemitism and the justified outrage over civilian casualties, a gap exists where discussion is barely possible. This space is shrinking—clip by clip, comment by comment.
The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, in a study by Nicolas Stockhammer (CTC Sentinel, July 2025), describes six individual European cases between 2023 and 2025 in which radicalization took place "within a few weeks" via platforms such as TikTok and Telegram. The number of unreported cases is likely higher.
The myth of "recognizing fake news"
In Germany, people love to "fact-check." But let's not kid ourselves. As if a 15-year-old, after five hours of endless scrolling, is going to suddenly open The Guardian or the NZZ to verify whether the videos and information are accurate.
The war in the Middle East thus becomes a mirror to our Western powerlessness: We want to take a stand, but we shy away from complexity. We want to feel, but not think. Yet perhaps that is precisely the task of our time – to endure contradictions again, instead of suppressing them. Perhaps we should begin to stop fearing complexity. Those who think, feel, and doubt escape the algorithm. And perhaps something begins there that can be called hope.
This article first appeared in our newspaper "Israelaktuell," issue 143. You can order the newspaper here . We would also be happy to send you several copies for distribution.
