How a handful of videos became evidence for millions of people

I spent some time opening the links in a recent essay by Dutch blogger Chris Klomp.

There were quite a few of them. Amnesty International was there, as were genocide scholars, newspaper articles, legal experts, human rights organisations and reports from Dutch media. One link led to an article about a Hamas commander involved in the planning of 7 October. Another led to an interview with genocide scholar Omer Bartov. Then came Amnesty, NOS, NRC and a growing collection of reports, experts and legal arguments. By the time I reached the end, the article looked less like a column and more like a plate of spaghetti, with sources and hyperlinks piled on top of one another in every direction.

What struck me was not the number of sources. Most of them were perfectly respectable and many addressed serious questions about Gaza, international law and the conduct of the war. What caught my attention was something far simpler.

The article contains links to Amnesty, NOS, NRC, genocide scholars, legal experts and human rights organisations. The one source I kept looking for was the one source I never found.

His name is Hamza.

Klomp introduces him in the opening paragraphs as a Palestinian TikToker whose videos have apparently left a profound impression on him. According to the article, Hamza regularly speaks to Israelis online and receives an endless stream of hatred in return. Children allegedly tell him that Palestinians should die. Adults celebrate the deaths of Palestinian babies.  Soldiers reportedly admit to killing children and appear proud rather than ashamed. Klomp watches these videos and arrives at a conclusion that grows larger with every paragraph until it eventually becomes a statement not merely about the individuals appearing on the screen, but about Israeli society itself.

“Virtually everyone reacts this way.

That is quite a claim.

Not because hatred does not exist. Anyone who has spent more than a few minutes on social media knows that hatred exists. The internet has made it remarkably easy for humanity to display its worst instincts in public and every conflict produces people capable of saying dreadful things. Israelis are not immune to that reality. Palestinians are not immune to it either. Neither are Europeans, Americans or, for that matter, my fellow Dutch citizens.

The question is not whether such videos exist.

The question is how we move from those videos to “virtually everyone”.

If Hamza is the foundation on which this argument rests, I find myself wanting to know a little more about him. Not because I suspect wrongdoing, but because source questions are among the most basic questions journalism can ask. Who is he? How does he work? How many conversations does he record? How many never make it online? How are subjects selected? What proportion of his material ends up in the final videos? Is the account primarily journalistic, activist or personal? What exactly are readers being asked to treat as representative?

Perhaps all those answers exist somewhere. Perhaps Hamza discusses them openly. Perhaps his methods are entirely transparent.

I simply do not know.

And that, I think, is part of the problem.

The article asks readers to accept conclusions drawn from a source they are not really given the opportunity to examine for themselves. There is no direct link to Hamza’s account. No explanation of his methodology. No discussion of selection. No attempt to show readers how the raw material becomes the final product. Yet the broadest and most ambitious conclusion in the entire essay rests largely on what Hamza allegedly reveals.

The more links I opened, the more curious this became. Almost every source in the article appeared to support one particular argument, namely that serious scholars, lawyers and human rights organisations increasingly believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Readers may agree with that argument or disagree with it, but at least the evidence is visible. One can read Amnesty’s report. One can read Bartov. One can read the NRC article discussing genocide scholars. One can read the NOS coverage. The evidence is there to be examined.

What I found much harder to understand was how those sources eventually lead to the conclusion that “virtually everyone” in Israel thinks a certain way.

That seems to me a completely different argument.

A government is not a population. A military campaign is not a society. A legal argument about genocide is not an opinion poll. Yet as I worked my way through the article, these different categories slowly began to merge. Reports about state policy sat alongside observations about ordinary citizens. Discussions about military conduct drifted into claims about public attitudes. Arguments concerning institutions became arguments about individuals.

That may sound like a minor distinction, but I think it matters enormously.

One can argue that a government is committing war crimes without concluding that an entire population shares responsibility. One can believe that military actions are criminal without deciding that millions of citizens have become morally indistinguishable from those carrying them out. One can even accept the strongest possible interpretation of the genocide argument and still recognise that governments and populations are not the same thing.

Indeed, Klomp himself appears aware of this. At one point he explicitly warns against blaming ordinary Israelis for the actions of the Israeli government, just as Palestinians should not be blamed for the crimes of Hamas. I found myself nodding along when I read that passage because it strikes me as both sensible and necessary.

What fascinated me, however, was how difficult it became to maintain that distinction in the paragraphs that followed.

The article begins with the actions of a state and ends with conclusions about a society. It starts with policy and gradually moves towards character. It opens with governments, armies and institutions and closes with observations about ordinary people. Somewhere along the way, a collection of TikTok videos becomes evidence for the moral condition of an entire country.

That is a remarkably ambitious leap.

Perhaps this is where social media enters the story.

One of the defining habits of the online age is our tendency to mistake visibility for representativeness. We see something often enough and begin to assume it is common. We encounter enough examples and start believing they must be typical. A hundred videos begin to feel like a population. A timeline begins to feel like a country. An algorithm begins to feel like fieldwork.

The clips may be real. The people in them may be real. The hatred may be real.

What I am less convinced by is the assumption that real automatically becomes representative.

Social media platforms are not designed to show us what is ordinary. They are designed to show us what attracts attention. The shocking rises to the top. The outrageous spreads further than the mundane. The exceptional often becomes more visible than the typical. That does not mean such material should be ignored. On the contrary, it may reveal important and deeply troubling truths. It does mean, however, that we should be careful before treating it as a mirror reflecting an entire society.

Israel is a country of nearly ten million people. It contains religious and secular communities, Jews and Arab citizens, liberals and conservatives, supporters of the government and fierce opponents of it. It is a society known for argument, disagreement and internal division. Anyone who has followed Israeli politics for more than a few weeks knows that there is rarely consensus on anything.

Reducing all of that complexity to “virtually everyone” requires a great deal more evidence than a collection of videos, however disturbing those videos may be.

What kept nagging at me while reading was not the quality of the sources themselves. Most of them were serious. Most were relevant to the arguments they were making. The problem, as I saw it, was that evidence supporting one argument gradually began to strengthen another.

Evidence for genocide became part of an argument about public opinion. Evidence about state policy became part of an argument about national character. Evidence concerning institutions drifted into conclusions about individuals. By the end, I had the distinct feeling that the article’s strongest sources were supporting a claim they had never actually made.

Perhaps that is why I kept returning to Hamza.

Not because I doubt that he exists. Not because I doubt that some of the videos are shocking. Not because I doubt that hatred exists.

I kept returning to him because he seems to carry an extraordinary amount of weight in the argument while remaining strangely absent from it. The article contains dozens of links, yet the person whose videos supposedly reveal what “virtually everyone” thinks remains largely out of view.

If Hamza is merely one source among many, that absence hardly matters.

If, however, he is the foundation on which the article’s broadest conclusions rest, then I would like to know considerably more about him before accepting those conclusions.

Because after opening every link, reading every report and following every reference, I was left with an unexpected impression.

The article contains plenty of evidence.

What it does not seem to contain is much evidence for its largest conclusion.

And somewhere between genocide and “virtually everyone”, I think an important step has gone missing.

Blog by Chris Klomp: Israël: hoe lang nog kijken we weg?