In November 2012, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) took to Twitter – as it was then – to announce it had killed Ahmed al-Jabari, chief of the al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing in Gaza.
The announcement, with a hotlink to a grainy video of the air strike on al-Jabari’s car, marked the opening of another IDF incursion into Gaza. As historians Adi Kuntsman and Rebecca L. Stein noted in their book Digital Militarism, it made Israel’s Operation Pillar of Defense “the first military campaign to be declared via Twitter”.
What was also striking about the announcement was the pride and brazenness with which the IDF celebrated what it had done. Barely a decade earlier, Israel, along with the United States, the United Kingdom and the European powers, would have stonewalled questions about responsibility for the attack or retained a dogged stance of plausible deniability. Governments didn’t assassinate people – that was for political fanatics and religious extremists.
