The Two Tel Avivs

In 2018, in a one-room restaurant in Ampara, Sri Lanka, a crowd at the counter accused a Tamil-speaking Muslim cashier named Farsith of putting sterilization pills in the food, a lie that had spread on Facebook the day before. He understood only that they meant a lump of flour, said in broken Sinhalese that he didn’t know, and then, afraid, repeated their words back to them as a question. Someone filmed it, the clip went viral as proof of a Muslim plot, and soon mobs were burning mosques and homes in several towns. A presidential adviser told Max Fisher and Amanda Taub of the New York Times that the germs were Sri Lanka’s own but Facebook was the wind.

In The Chaos Machine, Fisher argues that post-truth and polarization are the logical product of platforms that reward fear, outrage, and tribe.

Our Prime Minister learned that lesson long before most of us had heard of it. In 2012 he held up a cartoon bomb at the UN, and when the Internet laughed, his team posted a video pairing him with Daffy Duck. On Election Day in 2015 he warned on Facebook that Arab voters were going to the polls in droves, and he apologized only after he had won.

On Sunday, two days before today’s vote, he posted an AI image of a nuclear mushroom cloud over Tel Aviv, with a text calling Qatar, Urich, the draft, and the warnings a smokescreen. The cloud in this story that actually hides something is the mushroom. To be fair to Likud voters, the germs are ours, since Iran fired missiles at us this year. Still, the pill plot was a lie and the ruined Tel Aviv is a possibility, and the machine sells both as the present in the last hours before a vote.

On Channel 14 he also warned that the opposition would grant citizenship to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. The record says otherwise, since in 2021 the law barring it lapsed because Likud voted against it, and in 2022 a coalition that depended on Ra’am re-enacted it.

Today the imaginary country runs into the real one at the polling station. It disgusts me that Likud and Bezalel Smotrich’s party are sending some two thousand observers into Arab towns, on a day when a police directive lets licensed owners bring their guns to the ballot box.

Yesterday Channel 12 reported that Netanyahu had clashed with the chief of staff over an action that the army feared could reignite the war with Iran. I don’t know what happened, and both tribes have already heard the confirmation they wanted, the way the crowd at the counter heard a yes from a man who said he didn’t know.

On Saturday thousands marched in Tel Aviv, and a pregnant woman carried the words Change for him across her belly. On Sunday the same city appeared on the Prime Minister’s account beneath a mushroom cloud, and today the two Tel Avivs meet, the imaginary one needing only a screen and the real one needing to beat its usual sixty per cent turnout. Sunday showed which city the machine rewards. Tonight’s count will show which one we choose to live in.