Two Years After October 7: How Social Media Transforms Terrorism Into Spectacle and Memory Into Political Currency

The live-streamed murder of the Elyakim Arava family marks a chilling evolution in modern warfare where terror becomes performance and grief becomes leverage.

The Digital Battlefield

On October 7, 2023, Hamas didn’t just attack Israeli civilians—they transformed violence into viral content. The assault on the Elyakim Arava family home in Kibbutz Nahal Oz represented a calculated fusion of traditional terrorism with social media strategy. By broadcasting the attack live on Facebook, the perpetrators weaponized the very platforms designed to connect humanity, turning Mark Zuckerberg’s creation into an instrument of psychological warfare.

The murder of Dikla, Noam, and Tomer Arava, and the subsequent kidnapping of Ella and Dafna, exemplified a new paradigm where terror groups understand that the camera phone can be as powerful as the Kalashnikov. This wasn’t merely about killing; it was about creating content that would ricochet across newsfeeds, forcing millions to become unwilling witnesses to atrocity.

The Commodification of Hostages

The eventual release of Ella and Dafna Arava through a prisoner exchange deal illuminates the cold calculus of modern conflict. Human lives become bargaining chips, their value measured not in dignity but in diplomatic leverage. Israel’s willingness to negotiate such exchanges—a policy dating back decades—creates a perverse incentive structure where kidnapping civilians becomes a rational strategy for achieving political goals.

This transactional approach to human suffering raises uncomfortable questions about how democracies should respond to hostage-taking. Every successful prisoner swap validates the tactic, yet refusing to negotiate condemns innocents to indefinite captivity or death. The Arava family’s tragedy encapsulates this impossible moral equation that has haunted Israeli policymakers since the state’s founding.

Memory as Ammunition

Two years later, the commemoration of October 7 has itself become a contested battlefield. Social media posts marking the anniversary serve multiple purposes: honoring victims, maintaining international attention, and shaping narrative frameworks for ongoing military operations. The same platforms that broadcast the original atrocities now host the war of memory, where each side weaponizes grief to justify present actions.

The transformation of personal tragedy into public spectacle reflects our era’s collapse of boundaries between private mourning and political messaging. Every anniversary post, every memorial hashtag, becomes both genuine remembrance and strategic communication, blurring the line between honoring the dead and instrumentalizing their memory.

As we mark this grim anniversary, we must ask ourselves: In an age where terrorism is performed for cameras and grief is measured in engagement metrics, have we become complicit actors in the very spectacle we claim to abhor?