YOU ARE WHAT YOU READ

Poor mental health linked to browsing negative content online

University College London

People with poorer mental health are more prone to browsing negative content online, which further exacerbates their symptoms, finds a study led by UCL researchers.

The relationship between mental health and web-browsing is causal and bi-directional, according to the Wellcome-funded study published in Nature Human Behaviour.

The researchers have developed a plug-in tool* that adds ‘content labels’ to webpages—similar to nutrition labels on food—designed to help users make healthier and more informed decisions about the content they consume. These labels emphasise the emotional impact of webpage content, along with its practicality and informativeness.

Co-lead author Professor Tali Sharot (UCL Psychology & Language Sciences, Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology) said: “Our results show that browsing negatively valenced content not only mirrors a person’s mood but can also actively worsen it. This creates a feedback loop that can perpetuate mental health challenges over time.”

Over 1,000 study participants answered questions about their mental health and shared their web browsing history with the researchers. Using natural language processing methods, the researchers analysed the emotional tone of the webpages participants visited. They found that participants with worse moods and mental health symptoms were inclined to browse more negative content online, and after browsing, those who browsed more negative content felt worse.

In an additional study, the researchers manipulated the websites people visited, exposing some participants to negative content and others to neutral content. They found that those exposed to negative websites reported worse moods afterward, demonstrating a causal effect of browsing negative content on mood. When these participants were then asked to browse the internet freely, those who had previously viewed negative websites—and consequently experienced a worse mood—chose to view more negative content. This finding highlights that the relationship is bi-directional: negative content affects mood, and a worsened mood drives the consumption of more negative content.

Co-lead author, PhD student Christopher Kelly (UCL Psychology & Language Sciences, Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology), said: "The results contribute to the ongoing debate regarding the relationship between mental health and online behaviour.

“Most research addressing this relationship has focused on the quantity of use, such as screen time or frequency of social media use, which has led to mixed conclusions. Here, instead, we focus on the type of content browsed and find that its emotional tone is causally and bidirectionally related to mental health and mood."

To check whether an intervention could be used to change web-browsing choices and improve mood, the researchers conducted a further study. They added content labels to the results of a Google search, which informed participants whether each search result would likely improve their mood, make it worse, or have no impact. Participants were then more likely to choose the positively-labelled sites deemed likely to improve their mood—and when asked about their mood after, those who had looked at the positive websites were indeed in better moods than other participants.

In response, the researchers have developed a free browser plug-in that adds labels to Google search results, providing three different ratings of how practical a website’s content is, how informative it is, and how it impacts mood.

Professor Sharot said: “We are accustomed to seeing content labels on our groceries, providing nutritional information such as sugar, calories, protein, and vitamins to help us make informed decisions about what we eat. A similar approach could be applied to the content we consume online, empowering people to make healthier choices online.”

* Digital Diet browser extension

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Journal

Nature Human Behaviour

DOI

10.1038/s41562-024-02065-6 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Web-browsing patterns reflect and shape mood and mental health

Article Publication Date

21-Nov-2024

An 83-year-old short story by Borges portends a bleak future for the internet

Fifty years before the architecture for the web was created, Jorge Luis Borges had already imagined an analog equivalent. 

Sophie Bassouls/Sygma via Getty Images

The Conversation

November 20, 2024

How will the internet evolve in the coming decades?

Fiction writers have explored some possibilities.

In his 2019 novel “Fall,” science fiction author Neal Stephenson imagined a near future in which the internet still exists. But it has become so polluted with misinformation, disinformation and advertising that it is largely unusable.

Characters in Stephenson’s novel deal with this problem by subscribing to “edit streams” – human-selected news and information that can be considered trustworthy.

The drawback is that only the wealthy can afford such bespoke services, leaving most of humanity to consume low-quality, noncurated online content.

To some extent, this has already happened: Many news organizations, such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, have placed their curated content behind paywalls. Meanwhile, misinformation festers on social media platforms like X and TikTok.

Stephenson’s record as a prognosticator has been impressive – he anticipated the metaverse in his 1992 novel “Snow Crash,” and a key plot element of his “Diamond Age,” released in 1995, is an interactive primer that functions much like a chatbot.

On the surface, chatbots seem to provide a solution to the misinformation epidemic. By dispensing factual content, chatbots could supply alternative sources of high-quality information that aren’t cordoned off by paywalls.

Ironically, however, the output of these chatbots may represent the greatest danger to the future of the web – one that was hinted at decades earlier by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges.
The rise of the chatbots

Today, a significant fraction of the internet still consists of factual and ostensibly truthful content, such as articles and books that have been peer-reviewed, fact-checked or vetted in some way.

The developers of large language models, or LLMs – the engines that power bots like ChatGPT, Copilot and Gemini – have taken advantage of this resource.

To perform their magic, however, these models must ingest immense quantities of high-quality text for training purposes. A vast amount of verbiage has already been scraped from online sources and fed to the fledgling LLMs.

The problem is that the web, enormous as it is, is a finite resource. High-quality text that hasn’t already been strip-mined is becoming scarce, leading to what The New York Times called an “emerging crisis in content.”

This has forced companies like OpenAI to enter into agreements with publishers to obtain even more raw material for their ravenous bots. But according to one prediction, a shortage of additional high-quality training data may strike as early as 2026.

As the output of chatbots ends up online, these second-generation texts – complete with made-up information called “hallucinations,” as well as outright errors, such as suggestions to put glue on your pizza – will further pollute the web.

And if a chatbot hangs out with the wrong sort of people online, it can pick up their repellent views. Microsoft discovered this the hard way in 2016, when it had to pull the plug on Tay, a bot that started repeating racist and sexist content.

Over time, all of these issues could make online content even less trustworthy and less useful than it is today. In addition, LLMs that are fed a diet of low-calorie content may produce even more problematic output that also ends up on the web.
An infinite − and useless − library

It’s not hard to imagine a feedback loop that results in a continuous process of degradation as the bots feed on their own imperfect output.

A July 2024 paper published in Nature explored the consequences of training AI models on recursively generated data. It showed that “irreversible defects” can lead to “model collapse” for systems trained in this way – much like an image’s copy and a copy of that copy, and a copy of that copy, will lose fidelity to the original image.

How bad might this get?

Consider Borges’ 1941 short story “The Library of Babel.” Fifty years before computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee created the architecture for the web, Borges had already imagined an analog equivalent.

In his 3,000-word story, the writer imagines a world consisting of an enormous and possibly infinite number of hexagonal rooms. The bookshelves in each room hold uniform volumes that must, its inhabitants intuit, contain every possible permutation of letters in their alphabet

. 

In Borges’ imaginary, endlessly expansive library of content, finding something meaningful is like finding a needle in a haystack.

aire images/Moment via Getty Images

Initially, this realization sparks joy: By definition, there must exist books that detail the future of humanity and the meaning of life.

The inhabitants search for such books, only to discover that the vast majority contain nothing but meaningless combinations of letters. The truth is out there –but so is every conceivable falsehood. And all of it is embedded in an inconceivably vast amount of gibberish.

Even after centuries of searching, only a few meaningful fragments are found. And even then, there is no way to determine whether these coherent texts are truths or lies. Hope turns into despair.

Will the web become so polluted that only the wealthy can afford accurate and reliable information? Or will an infinite number of chatbots produce so much tainted verbiage that finding accurate information online becomes like searching for a needle in a haystack?

The internet is often described as one of humanity’s great achievements. But like any other resource, it’s important to give serious thought to how it is maintained and managed – lest we end up confronting the dystopian vision imagined by Borges.

Roger J. Kreuz, Associate Dean and Professor of Psychology, University of Memphis

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Op-Ed: Maybe polarizing social media was an even dumber idea than it looks

By Paul Wallis
November 20, 2024

DIGITAL JOURNAL

Elon Musk's X. — © AFP

The hordes of people leaving X are a sort of statistical obituary to years of propaganda. X is in big trouble, mainly because of its policies and algorithms and a bizarre relationship with infuriated advertisers.

Like most of American media, X instantly demoted itself to half of its own market share with its politics. It also became a servant, like FOX, to one side only. That’s not working out too well.

You’ll also notice from media coverage that nobody’s questioning the self-decapitation and disembowelment of X. The other glaring problem is that somehow this situation is now seen as normal.

It isn’t normal. People and advertisers are voting with their dollars and clicks.

Disgruntled X users are now heading to Bluesky in vast numbers. Millions of people have basically abandoned X. Bluesky looks a bit like early Twitter. Seems quite OK as an environment. I haven’t seen a rabid lunatic yet.

The new and huge problem is the quality of information vs communication. This is now an abyss of opposing information.

Unless there’s some middle ground, and the medium isn’t hopelessly biased, social media has just machinegunned itself in the foot. Politics is not the sole interest of the world. Other things happen, too, y’know.

That’s where audience loss is likely to be fatal. What if you don’t want to read about The Adventures of Donny and Elon in Disneyland?

What if you want a broad and useful mix of your own interests, instead?

The sole and whole purpose of social media is communication. Reducing your content range to such a narrow focus means you inevitably lose users.

Nor is the Chicken Little approach to information exactly popular. Nobody listens to raving lunatics if they don’t have to.

The possible exception to that theory is screen-fed America. Markets and media businesses take a long time to change course. This market doesn’t eat solid food anymore. The child-psychology is pretty obvious. These sources will probably simply continue to produce pablum.

The total stagnation of American mass media was one thing. This social media situation is stagnation of real-time information as well. X has made itself useless to its users.

People obviously don’t like that. The move to Bluesky is self-defense. The social media market can blame itself for a newcomer just walking off with its customers.

Let’s talk “dumb”.

Billions of dollars of investment are now evaporating in a festering social media environment and those billions aren’t coming back.

The World’s Richest Sudden Instant Fan Boy doesn’t have the excuse of being geriatric or illiterate. He should have enough metrics to see the cliff coming.

The big money markets in the US are all blue. The black holes are all red, with the possible exception of Texas. Ignore those big blue markets at your peril. Lose those markets and you’re doing hillbilly scale dollars. These much smaller markets can’t deliver the same value. Advertisers and marketers know that.

The rest of the world is also reacting very negatively to the toxicity of social media. The hubris and hype are all American-generated. The rest of the world can easily ignore most of this garbage.

What if reality gets involved in this mess? Economic risks and social disintegration are circling like buzzards over America in huge numbers with dollar signs on them. All types of media should be building financial fallout shelters about now. Markets can evaporate overnight.

No amount of fake news hysteria and self-congratulation can make an impression on that situation. You need “Make America Solvent Again” to do that, and it looks like that’s not happening for the next four years.

How would you read a commercial market that is basically suicidal? Would you focus on customer retention in the afterlife? You might have to do that.

Social media needs a functional market to exist at all. If the money’s pulling out, the message couldn’t be clearer.

__________________________________________________
Disclaimer

The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.

Social media users probably won’t read beyond this headline, researchers say

A new study of 35 million news links circulated on Facebook reports that more than 75% of the time they were shared without the link being clicked upon and read

Penn State

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Congratulations. Reading this far into the story is a feat not many will accomplish, especially if shared on Facebook, according to a team led by Penn State researchers. In an analysis of more than 35 million public posts containing links that were shared extensively on the social media platform between 2017 and 2020, the researchers found that around 75% of the shares were made without the posters clicking the link first. Of these, political content from both ends of the spectrum was shared without clicking more often than politically neutral content.

The findings, which the researchers said suggest that social media users tend to merely read headlines and blurbs rather than fully engage with core content, appeared today (Nov. 19) in Nature Human Behavior. While the data were limited to Facebook, the researchers said the findings could likely map to other social media platforms and help explain why misinformation can spread so quickly online.

“It was a big surprise to find out that more than 75% of the time, the links shared on Facebook were shared without the user clicking through first,” said corresponding author S. Shyam Sundar, Evan Pugh University Professor and the James P. Jimirro Professor of Media Effects at Penn State. “I had assumed that if someone shared something, they read and thought about it, that they’re supporting or even championing the content. You might expect that maybe a few people would occasionally share content without thinking it through, but for most shares to be like this? That was a surprising, very scary finding.”

Access to the Facebook data was granted via Social Science One, a research consortium hosted by Harvard University’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science focused on obtaining and sharing social and behavioral data responsibly and ethically. The data were provided in collaboration with Meta, Facebook’s parent company, and included user demographics and behaviors, such as a “political page affinity score.” This score was determined by external researchers identifying the pages users follow — like the accounts of media outlets and political figures. The researchers used the political page affinity score to assign users to one of five groups — very liberal, liberal, neutral, conservative and very conservative.

To determine the political content of shared links, the researchers in this study used machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence, to identify and classify political terms in the link content. They scored the content on a similar five-point political affinity scale, from very liberal to very conservative, based on how many times each affinity group shared the link.

"We created this new variable of political affinity of content based on 35 million Facebook posts during election season across four years. This is a meaningful period to understand macro-level patterns behind social media news sharing,” said co-author Eugene Cho Snyder, assistant professor of humanities and social sciences at New Jersey Institute of Technology

The team validated the political affinity of news domains, such as CNN or Fox, based on the media bias chart produced by AllSides, an independent company focused on helping people understand the biases of news content, and a ratings system developed by researchers at Northeastern University.

With these rating systems, the team manually sorted 8,000 links, first identifying them as political or non-political content. Then the researchers used this dataset to train an algorithm that assessed 35 million links shared more than 100 times on Facebook by users in the United States.

“A pattern emerged that was confirmed at the level of individual links,” Snyder said. “The closer the political alignment of the content to the user — both liberal and conservative — the more it was shared without clicks. … They are simply forwarding things that seem on the surface to agree with their political ideology, not realizing that they may sometimes be sharing false information.”

The findings support the theory that many users superficially read news stories based just on headlines and blurbs, Sundar said, explaining that Meta also provided data from its third-party fact-checking service — which identified that 2,969 of the shared URLs linked to false content.

The researchers found that these links were shared over 41 million times, without being clicked. Of these, 76.94% came from conservative users and 14.25% from liberal users. The researchers explained that the vast majority — up to 82% — of the links to false information in the dataset originated from conservative news domains.

To cut down on sharing without clicking, Sundar said that social media platforms could introduce “friction” to slow the share, such as requiring people to acknowledge that they have read the full content prior to sharing.

“Superficial processing of headlines and blurbs can be dangerous if false data are being shared and not investigated,” Sundar said, explaining that social media users may feel that content has already been vetted by those in their network sharing it, but this work shows that is unlikely. “If platforms implement a warning that the content might be false and make users acknowledge the danger in doing so, that might help people think before sharing.”

This wouldn’t stop intentional misinformation campaigns, Sundar said, and individuals still have a responsibility to vet the content they share.

“Disinformation or misinformation campaigns aim to sow the seeds of doubt or dissent in a democracy — the scope of these efforts came to light in the 2016 and 2020 elections,” Sundar said. “If people are sharing without clicking, they’re potentially playing into the disinformation and unwittingly contributing to these campaigns staged by hostile adversaries attempting to sow division and distrust.”

So, why do people share without clicking in the first place?

“The reason this happens may be because people are just bombarded with information and are not stopping to think through it,” Sundar said. “In such an environment, misinformation has more of a chance of going viral. Hopefully, people will learn from our study and become more media literate, digitally savvy and, ultimately, more aware of what they are sharing.”

Other collaborators on this paper include Junjun Yin and Guangqing Chi, Penn State; Mengqi Liao, University of Georgia; and Jinping Wang, University of Florida.

The Social Science Research Council, New York, supported this research.

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Journal

Nature Human Behaviour

DOI

10.1038/s41562-024-02067-4 

Method of Research

Content analysis

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Sharing without clicking on news in social media

Spanish-language social media increases Latinos’ vulnerability to misinformation

University of California - San Diego

A new study shows that Latinos who rely on Spanish-language social media for news are significantly more likely to believe false political narratives than those who consume English-language content. The research – published in PNAS Nexus and led by political scientists at the University of California San Diego and New York University – highlights growing concerns over misinformation targeting Spanish-speaking communities in the United States.

“Latino voters are heavily courted in U.S. elections, and there has been much speculation on the reasons behind their increase in Republican support in the 2024 Presidential contest. Understanding their news and information sources on social media, especially as it pertains to political misinformation, is an important factor to consider, ” said Marisa Abrajano, the study’s corresponding author and a professor of political science at UC San Diego.  “Our study, which we believe to be the largest of its kind to examine Latinos’ self-reported social media behaviors, finds that Spanish-speaking Latinos who access their news on social media are more vulnerable to political misinformation than those who use English-language social media.”

The research team, convened by NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics (CSMaP), surveyed more than 1,100 Latino Facebook and Instagram users in the United States. The team offered participants a small monetary incentive to join the study, and included English-dominant, bilingual and Spanish-dominant respondents. The participants were tested on their belief in seven false political narratives, including the claim that Venezuela is intentionally sending criminals to the U.S., the claim that the majority of Planned Parenthood clinics closed after Roe v. Wade was overturned, and the claim that the COVID-19 vaccine makes breast milk dangerous to infants.

The results reveal that Latinos who use Spanish-language social media for their news were between 11 to 20 percentage points more likely to believe in these false stories compared to those who rely on English-language platforms. The relationship persisted even when controlling for factors such as the primary language spoken at home, and the findings remained robust even after testing for acquiescence bias, where respondents might agree with survey statements regardless of their truth.

“While there's been widespread concern about the prevalence of Spanish-language misinformation on social media, our study is the first to empirically demonstrate its impact on political knowledge among Latino communities in the United States,” said Jonathan Nagler, co-author of the paper and co-director of NYU's CSMaP. “We've established a crucial link between the consumption of Spanish-language social media and a less informed electorate. This research fills a critical gap in our understanding of how misinformation affects different linguistic communities and highlights the urgent need for more robust fact-checking and content moderation in Spanish-language social media spaces.”

Additional insights on WhatsApp and YouTube

In a related study forthcoming in the journal Political Research Quarterly, Abrajano, Nagler and colleagues show that Latino online political engagement is very similar to that of non-Hispanic whites across major platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and X, formerly Twitter.

WhatsApp, however, stands out as a unique space for Latino users, who engage in political conversations on the platform far more often than non-Hispanic whites. Latinos rely on WhatsApp as a daily source for sharing news, discussing politics, and staying updated, highlighting its importance in Latino political digital life.

This study, based on a survey of 2,326 U.S.-based Latinos and 769 non-Hispanic whites, also used digital trace data – information that reflects real online behaviors, such as which social media accounts people follow or what videos they watch. This data helps researchers understand not just what people self-report about their online behaviors but what they actually do.

Findings from the digital trace data showed that both Latinos and whites frequently turn to YouTube for political news, raising concerns about misinformation given YouTube’s challenges with content moderation.

Spanish-speaking Latinos were also found to engage frequently with Spanish-language political pages from Latin America, creating a unique cross-border information environment.

The combined research findings have serious implications for U.S. democracy, the authors conclude. Their work also highlights the need for additional research efforts on how Latino news consumption helps to explain their political attitudes and beliefs.

The research is part of CSMaP's Bilingual Election Monitor, a project supported by Craig Newmark Philanthropies, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and NYU's Office of the Provost and Global Institute for Advanced Study.

In addition to Abrajano and Nagler, co-authors of the PNAS Nexus and PRQ studies are: Marianna Garcia from UC San Diego; Aaron Pope, formerly of CSMaP and now at the University of Copenhagen; Robert Vidigal, formerly of CSMaP and now at Vanderbilt University; and Joshua A. Tucker, co-director of CSMaP.

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Journal

PNAS Nexus

DOI

10.1093/pnasnexus/pgae442 

Method of Research

Survey

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

How reliance on Spanish-language social media predicts beliefs in false political narratives amongst Latinos

Content moderators are influenced by online misinformation

PNAS Nexus

Repeated exposure to lies online may influence the beliefs of professional content moderators, with consequences for online platforms. Hundreds of thousands of content moderators, typically based in non-Western countries, identify and weed out problematic and false content on social platforms. However, constant exposure to misinformation could convince some content moderators that false claims are true, in what is known as the “illusory truth effect.” Hause Lin and colleagues assessed the extent of this effect among professional content moderators in India and the Philippines and explored whether encouraging an accuracy mindset reduces the effect. The authors asked 199 content moderators to rate 16 COVID-19 news headlines, first on their interestingness and then, after a break, on their accuracy—along with 32 new COVID-19 news headlines. As predicted by the illusory truth effect, headlines seen for the second time were 7.1% more likely to be judged as accurate than non-repeated headlines. However, in a similar experiment in which content moderators were asked to rate accuracy first—thereby encouraging an accuracy mindset—repeated headlines were not rated as more accurate than new headlines. Similar experiments with members of the public in India and the Philippines found similar effects. According to the authors, the results suggest that the illusory truth effect is not idiosyncratic to Western populations, suggesting that content moderators may become less effective over time due to being chronically exposed to falsehoods, which could compromise the safety and integrity of online platforms. Accuracy mindset prompts could help, the authors note. 

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Journal

PNAS Nexus

Article Title

Accuracy prompts protect professional content moderators from the illusory truth effect

Article Publication Date

19-Nov-2024

COI Statement

Research by G.P. and D.G.R. has been funded by Meta and Google. TaskUs authors are employees of TaskUs. M.S. is an employee of TikTok and was a former employee of TaskUs. D.S. is an employee of Google. G.P. was a Faculty Research Fellow at Google in 2022. D.G.R. is in the PNAS Nexus editorial board

 

The chilling sound of the Aztec death whistle

University of Zurich

 

image: 

The skull-shaped body of the Aztec death whistle may represent Mictlantecuhtli, the Aztec Lord of the Underworld. (Bild: Sascha Frühholz, UZH)

view more 

Credit: Sascha Frühholz

Many ancient cultures used musical instruments in ritual ceremonies. Ancient Aztec communities from the pre-Columbian period of Mesoamerica had a rich mythological codex that was also part of their ritual and sacrificial ceremonies. These ceremonies included visual and sonic iconographic elements of mythological deities of the Aztec underworld, which may also be symbolized in the Aztec death whistle. Their skull-shaped body may represent Mictlantecuhtli, the Aztec Lord of the Underworld, and the iconic screaming sound may have prepared human sacrifices for their mythological descent into Mictlan, the Aztec underworld.

 

Aztec death whistles have a unique instrumental construction

To understand the physical mechanisms behind the whistle’s shrill and screeching sound, a team of researchers at the University of Zurich led by Sascha Frühholz, Professor of Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, created 3D digital reconstructions of original Aztec death whistles from the Ethnological Museum in Berlin. The models revealed a unique internal construction of two opposing sound chambers that create physical air turbulence as the source of the screeching sound. “The whistles have a very unique construction, and we don’t know of any comparable musical instrument from other pre-Columbian cultures or from other historical and contemporary contexts,” says Frühholz.

 

Death whistles very, very frightening

The research team also obtained sound recordings of original Aztec death whistles as well as from handmade replicas. Listeners rated these sounds as extremely chilling and frightening. The Aztec death whistle seems to acoustically and affectively mimic other deterring sounds. Most interestingly, human listeners perceived the sound of the Aztec death whistle to be partly of natural and organic origin, like a human voice or scream. “This is consistent ith the tradition of many ancient cultures to capture natural sounds in musical instruments, and could explain the ritual dimension of the death whistle sound for mimicking mythological entities,” explains Frühholz.  

 

Affective response and symbolic association

The Aztec death whistle sounds were also played to human listeners while their brains were being recorded. Brain regions belonging to the affective neural system responded strongly to the sound, again confirming its daunting nature. But the team also observed brain activity in regions that associate sounds with symbolic meaning. This suggests a “hybrid” nature of these death whistle sounds, combining a basic psychoaffective influence on listeners with more elaborate mental processes of sound symbolism, signifying the iconographic nature.    

 

Connecting modern humans with Aztec audiences

Music has always had strong emotional impact on human listeners in both contemporary and ancient cultures, hence its use in ritual religious and mythological contexts. Aztec communities may have specifically capitalized on the frightening and symbolic nature of the death whistle sound to influence the audience in their ritual procedures, based on the knowledge of how the sound affects modern humans. “Unfortunately, we could not perform our psychological and neuroscientific experiments with humans from ancient Aztec cultures. But the basic mechanisms of affective response to scary sounds are common to humans from all historical contexts,” says Frühholz.  

 

 Journal

Communications Psychology

DOI

10.1038/s44271-024-00157-7 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Psychoacoustic and archeoacoustic nature of ancient Aztec skull whistles

Article Publication Date

17-Nov-2024

 

War impacts on the function of children's DNA and slows development, according to new research

University of Surrey

Children living in war-torn countries not only suffer from poor mental health outcomes, but war may cause adverse biological changes at the DNA level, which could have lifelong health impacts, according to a ground-breaking study from the University of Surrey. 

In the first study of its kind, the research team collected saliva samples from 1,507 Syrian refugee children, aged 6 to 19, living in informal settlements in Lebanon. They analysed DNA methylation (DNAm), an epigenetic process where chemical tags are added to DNA at various sites in the genome (the complete set of genes). These DNAm changes can turn genes on or off without changing the DNA code. 

Questionnaires, completed by both the children and their caregivers, were used to measure exposure to the war-related events experienced by the child. 

Surrey – in collaboration with University College London, Institute for Development, Research, Advocacy and Applied Care, Lebanon, St Georges University Lebanon, and a leading international NGO – found that children who had been exposed to war events showed DNA m changes at several sites and regions in the genome. Some of these changes were linked to genes involved in critical functions like neurotransmission (how nerve cells communicate) and intracellular transport (how materials move within cells).  

These specific changes are not known to be present in other forms of trauma, like poverty or bullying, suggesting that war may trigger unique biological responses in the body. 

This research is funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). 

 Professor Michael Pluess, lead author of the study from the School of Psychology at the University of Surrey, said: 

 "While it's common knowledge that war has an adverse impact on the mental health of children, our study has found evidence of the biological mechanisms underlying this effect.  We also found that war is linked to slower epigenetic ageing – which could mean that war could be impacting the development of children. 

"All told, our study paints a clearer picture of the tragic cost of war, beyond the mental stress, for the many millions of children caught in the middle of it." 

This paper is part of the BIOPATH study, a cohort study which began in 2017. BIOPATH is the first large-scale study of its kind among refugee children, setting the stage for a deeper understanding of how trauma impacts mental health development. 

Additionally, the researchers also looked into how the biological effects of war differ between boys and girls. They found that girls who experienced war events showed more significant DNA m changes than boys, particularly in genes linked to stress response and brain development. While both boys and girls were affected, girls showed a stronger biological response to war exposure, suggesting that they may be more vulnerable to the long-term effects of trauma at a molecular level. 

DNA m is a natural process where small chemical groups, called methyl groups, are added to certain parts of our DNA. These groups act like switches, turning genes on or off or adjusting how strongly they are expressed. Importantly, this doesn't change the actual DNA sequence itself.  

DNA m plays a key role in normal development and can be influenced by things like diet, stress, and exposure to trauma. When someone experiences extreme events, such as war, it can lead to changes in DNA m, which might affect their long-term physical and mental health. Scientists study these changes to understand how stressful experiences can leave lasting biological marks on the body. 

The study has been published in JAMA Psychiatry. 

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Journal

JAMA Psychiatry

DOI

10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2024.3714 

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Associations between war exposure and DNA methylation in Syrian refugee children and adolescents

Article Publication Date

20-Nov-2024

Palestinians Displaced From Northern Gaza Fear This New Nakba

By Motasem A Dalloul

November 19, 2024   
Source: Middle East Monitor

Motasem A Dalloul is the correspondent in the Gaza Strip for the Middle East Monitor.

The most well-known football stadium in the Gaza Strip is chaotic, with masses of people flooding the pitch and seating. Everyone is carrying a bag on their back and some clothes. Some are helping sick people or carrying wounded relatives, while others are walking alone, struggling along on bare feet.

“We left the bodies of our children killed in Israeli air strikes either under the rubble or on the street,” an old man explains. He fled northern Gaza under heavy Israeli bombing.

Today, the people are not rushing to take their seats and enjoy a football match or a circus. They look for an empty place to rest after fleeing relentless Israeli bombing. The stadium is an encampment for displaced persons.

“Thanks be to Allah, we are safe,” said 72-year-old Hassan Abu Wardeh, who arrived in the stadium along with his sick wife and 13 children and grandchildren. “After the start of the third Israeli ground incursion into our area, we remained 25 days in our home,” he told me. “They were the worst days I have ever lived.”

That started on 6 October, when the Israeli occupation forces attacked Jabalia, concentrating on its refugee camp. Then the incursion was extended to the other north Gaza cities, including Beit Hanoun in the east and Beit Lahiya in the west.

“Since the start of their incursion, the Israeli occupation forces have been targeting homes and refugee shelters in Jabalia refugee camp, the beating heart of the city, clearly to put pressure on the inhabitants to run away,” explained Abu Wardeh. “However, most people persisted and stayed in their homes. We know that there is an Israeli plan to force us out of our land.”

Day after day, the Israeli occupation forces have targeted homes and refugee shelters alike, killing and wounding hundreds of people. The intensity of the bombardment meant that all rescue teams in the north had to suspend their services, including the Civil Defence and Ambulance teams.

Putting further pressure on Palestinian civilians to force them to leave, the occupation state has also targeted the three major hospitals in northern Gaza. Anyone seeking medical assistance and treatment has to go south to Gaza City.

Not content with dropping bombs and missiles on northern Gaza, said Abu Wardeh, the occupation forces have also used barrel bombs in the streets to displace the local population.


They detonate them without warning.

The sheer cruelty and brutality of the occupation forces saw Abu Wardeh ask his sick wife, his children and grandchildren to leave the house and move to Gaza City. His brother, who lived next door, moved 19 members of his family north to Beit Lahiya.

“I stayed at home along with two of my children and one of my grandchildren,” he said. “Five hours after the evacuation of the house, an Israeli missile turned it into rubble. It was a miracle that we survived.” It took another five hours for volunteers and neighbours to pull him and his children out from under the rubble.

“My grandson suffered from light bruises. I was happy that we were alive, but was very sad to hear that seven homes in our neighbourhood were bombed at the same time and 27 neighbours were killed. Only seven bodies were retrieved; the rest are under the rubble.”

This is how the Israeli occupation regime has been forcing the displacement — “evacuation” — of the northern Gaza Strip. People are killed, wounded or abducted. Hospitals have been destroyed, medical staff have been killed or arrested, and humanitarian aid is stopped from reaching the area. At the same time, the regime destroys entire residential compounds and is building massive sand barriers to separate northern Gaza from Gaza City.

Abu Wardeh, whose parents were forced out of Al-Majadal during the 1948 Nakba, is afraid that he is facing a new Nakba. The regime drops leaflets telling the people that they must leave their homes because they are in the middle of an “operation area”.

Then the occupation forces destroy their homes and destroy their refugee shelters.

During the ongoing incursion, the Israeli forces have killed more than 2,200 people in northern Gaza alone. A further 6,300 have been wounded while more than 1,000 have been detained — basically abducted — including children.

Spokespersons for the Israeli occupation army have declared several times that they will not allow the Palestinian residents of northern Gaza to return to their homes. According to Haaretz, the Israeli regime is carrying out ethnic cleansing as part of the “Generals’ Plan” laid out by one of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s military aides. Fanatical Jewish settlers are waiting expectantly to build illegal settlements in the Palestinian territory.

“I am afraid that we will never return to Jabalia,” added Abu Wardeh. “In any case, I am still hoping to return not to Jabalia, but to Al-Majdal.”

The right of return upon which his hope depends is entirely legitimate. It still seems a long way from happening though.

Motasem A Dalloul is the correspondent in the Gaza Strip for the Middle East Monitor.

Palestine: Islamophobia and resistance to the Israeli occupation

Monday 18 November 2024, by Louisa D

‘There was no such thing as Palestinians… They did not exist.’ This statement by Golda Meir in 1969 is the essence of what, fifty years later, would lead to the genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza. Despite live media coverage by its victims and a solidarity movement organised in many countries, it has continued unabated for a year

Anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia in the imperialist North, an ally of Israel, explains not only how consent to the genocide was created but also why the solidarity movement has not been on a mass scale. Anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia structure the consent to genocide

Genocide requires the dehumanisation of its victims. Israeli society is deeply racist towards Palestinians. Adherence to the Zionist project of colonisation requires this dehumanisation, which today is evolving into a widely shared feeling of genocide

The signs of this were visible before October 2023. Moreover, since 7 October, expressions of support for the Palestinians have been only very marginal in the demonstrations that began against Netanyahu and a reform of the Supreme Court and have continued for the release of the hostages.

It is this racist and supremacist dimension of Zionism that manufactures the consent to genocide abroad. In the discourse of the dominant classes, the struggle of the Palestinians is described as an expression of religious fanaticism and associated with international Islamist terrorism. The internalisation of a racial hierarchy enables Western countries to identify with the Israeli victims and, at the same time, make the murder of Palestinians invisible.

In this respect, Israeli bi-nationals benefit from repatriations and even tributes for those who died on 7 October, while Palestinian bi-nationals have the greatest difficulty escaping the massacres and repatriating their loved ones. And so, Israel and above all Netanyahu are supported not only by extreme right-wing regimes and far right regimes and parties, but also by all governments that see themselves in this culturalist interpretation of the ‘war of civilisations’, which is transposed into hostility towards Arabs, Muslims and those racialised as such. Systemic racism and a rise in Islamophobia common to the imperialist North have allowed such an alignment of discourse to take place instantly. Such is only possible because of our own colonial unthinking and the construction of the state on the ethnic homogenisation of the nation and supremacism.

Finally, the picture would not be complete without the Zionist government’s misuse of the fight against anti-Semitism, which maintains that the resistance of the Palestinian people is not motivated by their persecution as a colonised people but by anti-Semitism. In serving as a blank cheque for other racist regimes, Israel exonerates each of them of any anti-Semitism and in return allows them, under the pretext of fighting anti-Semitism, to target Muslims. Moreover, following the theory of the ‘new anti-Semitism’, contemporary anti-Semitism is said to emanate from Arabs and is therefore ‘imported’.

This discourse immediately places supporters of the Palestinian people in the camp of the enemies of the state, with the following fallacy: to support the Palestinian people would be to support terrorism against the Jews.

The erasure of the colonial dimension in favour of a civilisational discourse is echoed in the mainstream media, which have largely amplified it. The media treatment has dehumanised Palestinian lives, with the number of deaths put into perspective and the brutality of the Israeli offensive has been euphemised. Newsrooms have been forbidden from using terms that make visible the colonial context in which it takes place. The media also played a major role in demonising of the solidarity movement. It was accompanied by unabashed racist and Islamophobic expression.

Islamophobia: cornerstone of repression of the French solidarity movement

State-sponsored Islamophobia in France, which has its own colonial history, combines perfectly with Israeli propaganda. This is precisely what happened during the anti-Semitism demonstration on 12 November 2023, in which the anti-Semitic French far right took part. In the appeal, the link was made between ‘the Republic and the fight against anti-Semitism’ and ‘defence of secularism in the face of Islamism’. Very quickly, the attacks of 7 October were compared to the Bataclan attacks and the racist vocabulary of savagery was used to characterise Palestinian resistance.

While the racialised popular classes were quick to mobilise, state repression took a turn against any form of expression of support. General bans on demonstrations were motivated by the risk of anti-Semitic remarks during demonstrations and expressions of support for Hamas. It was this expression by Muslims and generations of racialised people from post-colonial immigration that the ruling class first sought to make invisible in the public arena by presenting it as an inherent threat to public order.

The imposition of the Israeli narrative had an impact on the solidarity movement. It was structured in conjunction with anti-racist and anti-imperialist struggles, and the emergence of Urgence Palestine, formed around Palestinians, enabled more radical demands to be made; at the same time, the historic front of support organisations fractured over the condemnation of Hamas. This may explain why the solidarity movement found itself more easily criminalised, because it was more isolated. This criminalisation was particularly strong in France, where prosecutors were asked to respond ‘firmly and quickly’ to anti-Semitism and apologies for terrorism in a total confusion between denouncing the crimes of the Israeli state and terrorism. The autonomy of the offence of apology for terrorism, which is no longer solely covered by the law on freedom of the press, has served as a basis for immediate appearance procedures. There were already more than 600 prosecutions for apology for terrorism in April, with a maximum sentence of seven years’ imprisonment.

A large-scale crackdown targeted mosques: several imams and heads of places of worship had their residence permits withdrawn and were deported because of remarks made in support of the Palestinian people. The most high-profile case was that of Abdourahman Ridouane, president of the Pessac mosque, who is due to be expelled after his appeal to the Council of State was rejected. This crackdown is obviously part of a more widespread attack by the state on organised Muslim cultural communities (the Pessac mosque had already been the subject of four attempts at administrative closure). Another example is Imam Ismaïl of the Bleuets mosque, who had to withdraw to avoid closure. The direct effect of this offensive is the destruction of communities and the demobilisation of people politicised through Islam. It has been greatly facilitated by the dissolutions of many anti-Islamophobia groups in recent years.

Palestinian voices and their allies have been intimidated, in particular Mariam Abu Daqqa, who has been expelled, Rima Hassan, who has been subjected to violent harassment, and Elias d’Imzalène, a member of Perspectives musulmanes, who is about to be tried for apology for terrorism after having taken up the Intifada slogan.

Because it denounces genocide and has refused to condemn armed resistance, la France insoumise (LFI) has been the target of an unprecedented attack designed to discredit it. The smear campaign combining accusations of anti-Semitism and clientelism towards pro-Palestinian voters was undeniably racist and Islamophobic because it was based on the following logic: only this clientelism towards voters racialised as Arabs and Muslims could explain LFI’s support for the Palestinian people (and therefore only other Arabs could have empathy for the Palestinians); and criticism of Israel can only be explained by anti-Semitism and not by real support for the Palestinians’ anti-colonial struggle.

Lastly, the French media’s approach was eminently racist and Islamophobic and was denounced as such by the association of anti-racist journalists. The structuring Islamophobia in France has encouraged the acceptance of this level of repression in society against pro-Palestinian supporters with patterns of domination specific to racist oppression.

Abroad, mobilisation constrained by racism

This observation of an increase in the level of repression against the pro-Palestinian solidarity movement can be extended to most of the imperialist countries allied with Israel: obstacles to the right to demonstrate, harassment and defamation of supporters, control of public expression, cancellation of cultural events, dismissals, criminalisation, stigmatisation of foreigners and so on. Palestinians in the diaspora have been particularly targeted. There were similar dynamics: a link with anti-racist and anti-colonial struggles, in particular due to the strong participation of racialised people, and pro-Palestinian activism perceived as threatening and, by default, anti-Semitic. Above all, there has been a sharp increase in Islamophobic acts (hate speech, stigmatisation, attacks on places of worship, but also physical violence and murders).

In Germany, censorship of the solidarity movement is very strong because of support for Israel, described as a ‘reason of state’. State racism has developed around the belief that anti-Semitism is imported by foreigners of the Muslim faith. Spain and Britain are exceptions, with a high level of mobilisation due to widespread public support for Palestine. The unconditional support of the British political class for Israel was offset by the strong mobilising role of Muslim and Palestinian community organisations. The university occupation movement that began in the United States had the potential to change the balance of power. Here too, the students mobilised were intimidated and defamed, accused of anti-Semitism and complacency towards Hamas.

While these mobilisations have been significant in places, they have not been able to sufficiently influence the support of the ruling classes for Israel, even if ‘unconditional’ support is now more timid. By importing the rhetoric of a civilisational conflict in which Israel is seen as a Western bastion against the Islamic threat, the ruling classes are using the expression of support for the Palestinian resistance to target Arabs and Muslims.

In the space of a year, we can take stock of an international mobilisation that has failed to rise above the ceiling of anti-Arab racism and a profound contempt for Palestinian lives. This racist portrayal of the Palestinian experience is not new, nor is the criminalisation of their support or the conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. On the other hand, unconditional alignment with Israeli propaganda has marked acceleration in general trend towards fascism, fuelled by a normalisation of the dehumanisation of Arabs and a deepening of authoritarianism. In this, we bear a collective responsibility to look into the mirror held up to us by Israel.

Attached documents

• palestine-islamophobia-and-resistance-to-the-israeli_a8744.pdf (PDF - 916 KiB)
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Palestinians, Both Civilian and Military, Are Transcending the Horror We’ve Unleashed

By Stan Cox

November 19, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Image by Muhammad Sabah, Creative Commons 4.0



In February, the public health specialist Muna Abed Alah published a paper in the journal Current Psychology titled “Shattered Hierarchy: How the Gaza Conflict Demolished Maslow’s Pyramid of Needs.” The idea of a hierarchy of needs—first published by the psychologist Abraham Maslow in 1943 and subsequently modified in various ways by Maslow and others—has long been pervasive in the world of pop psychology, while some in academia have poked holes in Maslow’s logic. Now, Alah suggests that the Palestinians of Gaza have rendered the hierarchy of needs wholly obsolete.

Briefly, Maslow and others who followed have identified universal human needs—including but not limited to basic physiological requirements, safety, cognition, self-actualization, and transcendence—and listed those needs along with others in a precise order. They maintain that an individual’s physiological needs (food, water, shelter, etc.) must be satisfied first and that each subsequent need can be fulfilled only after the needs that precede it in the list have been at least partially fulfilled.

Well, Alah writes, the people of Gaza have torn up and thrown away Maslow’s blueprint.

Regarding non-fulfillment of physiological needs, Alah of course cited Israel’s campaigns depriving Palestinians of food, water, fuel, shelter, sleep, and other necessities. Safety was being totally erased by Israel’s relentless bombing throughout Gaza. Endlessly repeated destruction of hospitals, assassination of medical personnel, and targeting of trucks and people that gather at food-distribution locations has prevented the satisfaction of both physiological and safety needs. With serial displacement of millions of people, separation of family members, and deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians, the need for esteem has been swamped; people’s sense of dignity and control over their lives has been wrecked. Israel’s intentional bombing of schools and universities has blocked their pursuit of cognitive needs. Regarding the need for self-actualization, Alah wrote, “The relentless focus on mere survival in the face of constant threat overshadows any opportunity for self-fulfillment . . . In such an environment, where safety and basic needs are a daily struggle, the luxury of realizing personal potential becomes nearly impossible.”

But what about transcendence, the peak of the hierarchy of needs? In Alah’s words, it “involves connecting with something larger than oneself, including spiritual experiences, deep connections with others, and contributions to the broader society.” With none of the prerequisites being satisfied, transcendence should have receded completely out of reach months ago, according to Maslow’s thesis. Instead, Alah, observed, transcendence is the one need that was being realized:

“Amidst ongoing conflict and siege, achieving transcendence is notably difficult, yet it manifests itself in unique and meaningful ways. Despite the limitations in aid and resources, many people in Gaza have started to help each other, fostering a strong sense of community and solidarity. This mutual assistance not only addresses immediate needs but also serves as a powerful form of transcendence, allowing individuals to connect with and contribute to something greater than themselves.”

The coordinated service, heroism, and sacrifice personified by Palestinian journalists, taxi drivers, first responders, and health care professionals during the war is by now legendary. But countless other people in all walks of life have demonstrated similar degrees of transcendence. In his article, Alah focused on the resilience of Gaza’s civilian population. Here, I’ll just add that the armed resistance forces in Gaza—encompassing the al Qassam Brigades (Hamas’s armed wing) and others—also have transcended unbearable hardship by mounting an extraordinary collective effort.
“Something Greater than Themselves”

A report released in August by Ground Truth Solutions and Arab World for Research and Development (AWRAD) revealed the extent of mutual aid occurring in Gaza over the past year. Conducted in June and July, the survey of 1,200 civilians confirmed that none of the fundamental needs at the base of Maslow’s hierarchy were being fulfilled in Gaza. As expected, when asked about their most immediate priorities, 90 to 99 percent of the respondents listed Maslow’s basic needs: food, water, shelter, and safety.

But more than 90 percent also listed priorities such as “care for marginalized groups” and “doing something to contribute or support.” A large share of people also provided food, water, help with daily affairs, electric power, housing, childcare, or psychosocial support to others in the community—and received such help from others. Community volunteer groups organized early in the conflict, and about one-third of respondents told interviewers they had benefited from support provided by these groups.

Displaced families or communities taking refuge in a new location said they’d found plenty of help. Local leaders and committees helped them set up tent encampments or “find other housing arrangements in host families.” Furthermore, “When asked about the most important resources available to them, people often mention community kitchens, which provide a means through which local aid groups can provide support and residents can pool resources to try and reach those in greatest need.”

At the time Ground Truth Solutions and AWRAD were conducting these interviews, the Israeli onslaught and aid blockade had been going on for nine months. When families and communities are forced to live with constant hunger and thirst, to go without medical care, to watch family members and compatriots die all around them for months on end, sustaining a functional society can become physically impossible. As a result, the report noted, “During in-depth discussions, both aid providers and community volunteers mentioned the erosion of mutual aid within communities as resources become scarcer.”

Burdens of scarcity, displacement, and death-risk accumulate over time. There’s only so much that people can take, however brave and generous they are. But that doesn’t mean the Palestinians are giving up. One woman told Ground Truth interviewers, “We are a mighty people who have dignity and we will prevail. We’ll die standing like palm trees and we will not kneel.” It may be that colonized people just don’t fit Maslow’s model. Alah himself noted that its “Western-centric origins may not adequately reflect the collective experiences of trauma and resilience that significantly influence societal dynamics in regions like Gaza, where cultural heritage plays a pivotal role in shaping communal responses to adversity.”
No Choice but to Fight

The Palestinian armed resistance too is exemplifying transcendence. As part of a great tradition established by wars of liberation throughout history, they have held their own against a far larger, more powerful army—one equipped and supported by the world’s biggest military-industrial complex, that of the United States and other Western powers.

Gaza’s fighters have so far thwarted the occupiers’ efforts to depopulate Gaza. They are mounting fierce resistance against the army’s attempt to drive all Palestinians from northern Gaza into the South, annex and resettle the North with Israelis, and let the South become one big, uninhabitable “deportation camp” (somehow inhabited by millions of Palestinians until they are pushed out).

The Palestinians are fighting with antitank weapons, rifles, and mortars that they designed and manufactured themselves. In so-called “return to sender” missions, they’re blowing up IDF tanks and troops using “barrel bombs” filled with explosives they’ve recycled from the Israeli “dud” munitions that litter Gaza’s landscape. They’ve also gained remote control of Israeli drones, landed, reprogrammed, and armed them, and then sent them back out to attack IDF sites. In these and many other ways, the resistance forces have shown great resourcefulness.

They’ve shown not only ingenuity but great courage as well. In resistance videos (starting at the 2 hr 6 min mark in this one), we can see fighter after fighter dash from a bombed-out building across dozens of meters of open ground, highly exposed to drone fire, lugginga 45-pound, locally manufactured explosive device. They place them just a few feet behind an IDF tank, dash back across the open ground, and take cover just before the bomb explodes.

The resistance fighters attack only military targets that threaten the people of Gaza. After they strike, and IDF ambulances and medevac helicopters arrive to carry away the wounded and dead, the resistance fighters film from a distance but do not attack them.

Some readers might object to the inclusion of resistance fighters among examples of how people of Gaza are rising above their demolished hierarchy of needs. But focus on the than 2 million-plus people who have lived through more than 13 months of unspeakable horrors—preceded by 18 years of open-air imprisonment and a blockade that has deprived them of fundamental human needs, a siege punctuated by deadly IDF bombing campaigns in 2006, 2008-9, 2012, 2014, and 2021, along with massacres of nonviolent protesters in 2018. (And Israel’s unlawful occupation of Gaza goes back another four decades, to 1967.) No population that’s been under deadly siege and bombing for two decades would accept an open-ended continuation of such savagery without fighting back.

The death and destruction that occurred during the Palestinian resistance’s October 7, 2023 military action could never justify Israel’s attempted eradication of an entire society—even if one chose to believe every one of the now-debunked claims that the Israeli military, government, and press have made about that day.

Even if on that day the resistance had committed every act of which the Israelis have falsely accused them, the latter’s genocidal campaign of the past 13 months (and counting) is a monumentally extreme violation of two fundamental principles of international conflict: proportionality (retaliation must not be disproportionately more severe that the acts being retaliated against) and distinction (military targets may be attacked, but civilians or civilian targets must not).
In Gaza, Nonviolence Is a Nonstarter

My friend Justin Podur, author of the 2019 Gaza novel Siegebreakers, points to the 2018 mass protest known as the Great March of Return as conclusive evidence that nonviolence had no chance of ending the Israeli occupation of Gaza—that, indeed, nonviolence has never freed a people from a violent colonial power.

Every Friday for a year starting in March, 2018, Palestinians, by the tens of thousands on some days, carried out nonviolent actions at various points along the giant fence that (along with a sea and air blockade), separates Gaza from the rest of the world. The groups protested on their own land, along their own side of the barrier. By sticking to wholly nonviolent resistance, March of Return protesters did what many around the world are constantly urging the people of Gaza to do. But starting on the very first Friday, Israeli forces on the other side of the fence fired with abandon at the unarmed protesters. Over the next twelve months, the troops shot and wounded 30,000 people, killing 266. The dead included dozens of children. Though a horrific massacre, it was just a peek-preview of the crimes Israel would commit against Gaza’s civilian population during this genocide half a decade later.

The Israeli regime will use any excuse at any time to kill, maim, or displace Palestinians. The regime, not the resistance, is the driving force behind the conflict. In Podur’s words, “the slaughter of Palestinians at the Great March of Return was not the fault of the nonviolent protesters any more than the genocide in 2023-24 was the fault of the Palestinian armed groups.”

Recently, the Palestinian journalist Abubaker Abed, who reports from Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, was asked if he has a message for Westerners who demand that those of us protesting the genocide answer the question, “But do you condemn Hamas?” He responded,

“Regardless of political affiliations, do you really condemn someone who defends you and has your back against a terrorist state? Israel has been butchering, dehumanizing, torturing, and bombing us for 76 years. And has imposed a strict siege on us in Gaza for 17 years. In this context, where does this question even fit? It’s incredibly enraging that people are trying to justify Israel’s genocide by asking such silly questions.”

Those of us who live in a country that’s supplying unlimited support for Israel’s all-out military assault and starvation campaign have no right to demand that the Palestinians refrain from fighting back. Our time is better spent demanding a total embargo on the provision of arms, money, or anything else to Israel. We too are responsible for bombing Gaza’s people out of access to their basic Maslow needs. Now, to do nothing more than celebrate the valiant perseverance into which we ourselves have forced them would be a hollow gesture indeed. And to engage in pious tut-tutting over their armed resistance would be immeasurably worse.


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Stan Cox began his career in the U.S. Department of Agriculture and is now the Ecosphere Studies Research Fellow at the Land Institute. Cox is the author of Any Way You Slice It: The Past, Present, and Future of Rationing, Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World (and Finding New Ways to Get Through the Summer) and Sick Planet: Corporate Food and Medicine.