Israel and the ‘Start the Clock’ Problem

In a recent religious studies class at Kenyon College, a discussion about American Jews moving to Israel turned unexpectedly to Israel’s role in the Middle East. One student used the conversation to argue that “Israel is always the aggressor in the Middle East, and if Israel did not exist, there simply would be no conflict.”

I expected my professor to challenge such a sweeping historical claim, but he did not, and the discussion moved on. For a moment I considered speaking myself, but because I was caught off guard and worried about how challenging this argument might affect my standing in the class, I stayed quiet too. That moment stuck with me, not only because of what was said, but because such a claim could pass so easily without challenge.

Here’s what I wish I’d said. 

The problem is that this not only reduces an extraordinarily complicated history into a slogan, but also ignores everything that came before 1948 and conflicts in the region that have little to do with Israel today. Violence between Jews and Arabs did not begin with Israel’s creation, nor can Israel’s existence explain every modern conflict in the region.

Only a conspiracy theorist would try to connect Syria’s civil war in 2011 to anything related to Israel, and the same could be said about the famine in Yemen, the Turkish/Persian/Iraqi oppression of the Kurds, and the centuries long sectarian war between the Sunni and Shiite Muslims. Blaming Israel or the Jews for these longstanding regional conflicts and rivalries requires ignoring both their origins and their histories.

So why can this position sound so convincing to college students?

Part of the answer may be where young people encounter the news. A 2025 report found that 43 percent of Americans ages 18 to 29 regularly received news from TikTok and 40 percent from Instagram. Even more striking, 70 percent of young adults said they mostly encountered political news rather than actively seeking it out. 

We hear plenty about algorithmic echo chambers and online misinformation. But there is another, less obvious problem: chronology.

Social media can be valuable for learning that something has happened. But a short video is much better at showing a dramatic moment than explaining the context that surrounds it. A clip can show an Israeli airstrike, a destroyed building, or civilians fleeing. What it often cannot show is what happened the day before or the week before.

The fighting between Israel and Yemen’s Houthis in July 2024 offers a clear example. On July 19, a Houthi drone struck Tel Aviv, killing an Israeli civilian. Israel responded the following day with airstrikes around Yemen’s Hodeidah port. Dramatic images and videos of fires and smoke from the Israeli strikes quickly circulated across social media. For someone encountering the conflict through those images alone, Israel could easily appear to be the actor that initiated the violence. Start the clock one day earlier, however, and the picture changes considerably.

This illustrates what I call the “start the clock” problem. If you start the clock with an Israeli airstrike, Israel may appear to have initiated the violence. If you start it earlier, the picture may look vastly different. That does not mean the Israeli response is automatically justified, proportionate, or strategically wise. Those are separate issues. But we should at least understand what an action is responding to before deciding who started a conflict.

The bigger problem, however, is that this phenomenon is not solely a product of social media limitations. The entire information ecosystem is rife with biased clocks.

For decades, variations of the same cycle have repeated in discourse related to Israel’s longstanding conflict with Lebanon: an armed group operating from Lebanon attacks Israel, Israel responds militarily, and international attention increasingly focuses on the consequences of the Israeli response.

We can see that dynamic playing out today. In September, Hezbollah launched drones toward Israeli forces in southern Lebanon, prompting Israeli strikes that caused civilian casualties. Days later, the United Nations, citing mounting civilian casualties, expressed alarm over Israeli strikes and called on Israel to withdraw its forces. Those humanitarian concerns deserve scrutiny. But when the story begins with Israel’s response, the attack that preceded it can quickly fade into the background.

That is the ‘start the clock’ problem in practice. The initiating attack may remain in the story, but when Israel’s response dominates the headline or image, readers can come away with a very different understanding of how the fighting began.

A fifteen-second post of an Israeli strike in Lebanon can make it appear that Israel simply decided to bomb a neighboring country. A video does not have to be fake to be misleading; sometimes it only has to start the story at the wrong moment. Start the clock earlier, and the Hezbollah attacks that preceded the response become part of the picture.

We would never write a history paper after reading only a book’s final chapter, yet that is effectively what we do when we judge a war from a viral clip detached from its timeline.

TikTok and Instagram can tell us that something happened, but they should not be the end of our research. Before reposting or drawing conclusions, ask: When did I start the clock? Then work backward. Read credible sources, compare accounts, and learn the chronology. Context is not an excuse for anyone’s actions. It is the beginning of understanding them.