In her recent essay about joining a counter-flotilla led by Yoseph Haddad, Hallel Abramowitz-Silverman described something deeply familiar to modern politics: before the boats even approached Israeli waters, the images already existed. The slogans were prepared. The captions were ready. The moral roles had already been assigned.
That observation points to something much larger than one flotilla. Modern activism is no longer simply political. It is algorithmic.
Protest has always involved symbolism and storytelling. The Civil Rights Movement understood television. Zionism understood imagery and myth. Political movements have always relied on emotionally powerful images to move societies.
But somewhere along the way, visibility itself became the goal. Activism is now increasingly judged not by whether it changes institutions or improves lives, but by whether it travels online.
The algorithm does not reward effectiveness. It rewards emotional immediacy.
Nuance performs badly online. Patience performs badly online. What succeeds is outrage, certainty, accusation, and emotional simplicity. So movements adapt. The activist becomes part organizer and part content creator. The protest becomes both a demonstration and a production set.
This does not mean activists are insincere. Social media can expose injustice, mobilize people quickly, and force public attention onto suffering the world might otherwise ignore. Digital tools are not the enemy. But the internet does not merely distribute activism; it reshapes it.
Historically, movements used imagery to support organization. Today, too often, organization exists to support imagery.
The activists who marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge were building legal networks, voter drives, churches, and institutions. Zionism was not built through posters alone, but through schools, farms, labor unions, newspapers, political congresses, and eventually a state. The image mattered because there was infrastructure behind it.
Today, many movements possess the imagery without the infrastructure. A protest can trend globally without changing a single law. A celebrity can post a cause and receive applause without engaging in the difficult work real political change requires.
In the attention economy, visibility feels like victory. But visibility and victory are not the same thing.
This dynamic now affects nearly every ideological camp: left-wing activism, right-wing activism, pro-Israel activism, pro-Palestinian activism, influencer politics, nonprofit culture, and even corporate branding. The cause becomes a brand. The activist becomes both participant and broadcaster. Suffering itself risks becoming content.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is especially vulnerable to this flattening because it resists moral simplicity. It contains Israeli trauma and Palestinian suffering, terrorism and occupation, fear and grief, failed leadership, and civilians trapped in realities they did not create.
But the algorithm dislikes contradiction. It prefers clean binaries: oppressor or victim, resistance or genocide, humanitarian or monster.
Once those roles are assigned, performance begins to replace understanding.
And our own community is not immune to this either. Pro-Israel influencers and activists can fall into the same trap we criticize in others.
Sometimes we optimize for clips instead of conversations, aesthetics instead of strategy, dunking instead of persuasion. We chase viral moments, perfectly framed protest photos, catchy slogans, and algorithm-friendly outrage because the internet rewards visibility more than substance.
It is easier to post than to organize, and easier to perform certainty than wrestle honestly with complexity.
If we are serious about defending Israel, Jewish peoplehood, and coexistence, then we also have to be willing to critique ourselves when activism becomes branding instead of bridge-building.
Real activism is often profoundly unglamorous. It is logistics, fundraising, policy work, volunteer coordination, difficult conversations, and years of patient institution-building. It looks less like a viral video and more like a meeting nobody wants to attend.
But civilizations are built in those meetings.
The algorithm rewards confrontation over construction, the chant over the policy paper, and the performance of moral certainty over the hard work of repairing reality. That is the real danger of activism becoming content: politics becomes theater, morality becomes branding, and movements optimized for virality struggle to build anything durable once attention fades.
The answer is not to abandon activism or symbolism. Images matter because stories matter. The question is whether the image serves the work or replaces it.
Because if the algorithm has eaten the protest, then the responsibility of serious people is no longer simply to perform outrage more effectively. It is to return activism to reality: to build institutions, strengthen communities, tell the truth even when it complicates the narrative, and continue the work long after the cameras stop rolling.
Hallel Abramowitz-Silverman is an activist and content creator. Raised in Jerusalem and living in Tel Aviv, she has become a leading voice on and offline for Liberal Zionism. A third-generation IDF veteran with over a decade in Israel Advocacy, Hallel has created and executed content for dozens of major organizations. She is an associate at the Tel Aviv Institute.
Adam Scott Bellos is the founder and CEO of The Israel Innovation Fund (TIIF) and author of the forthcoming book, What is Zionism: Why Never Again Is Not Enough!
Source:
www.jpost.com
