The media war is at the heart of the Israel-Palestine issue. It was during a conversation where a group member proposed using one of the theories studied in class that this group of students decided to choose this subject for their Bauhaus exhibition. A course on Nazism and propaganda gave them the idea of applying the same analytical framework to the current conflict, and the students decided to conduct a comparative study between the two.
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To structure their analysis, the students drew on two communication theories: propaganda, which they define as any form of communication deliberately designed to influence the attitudes, beliefs and actions of a target audience, and the double-bind theory of the Palo Alto School, developed by Gregory Bateson and Paul Watzlawick. The students applied this theory to the position of European politicians and mainstream media, who they observed sending contradictory messages, a classic double-bind situation in which it is impossible to satisfy all demands simultaneously with no satisfactory resolution regardless of how one responds. They began by examining propaganda as it was deployed during the Second World War, noting that the conflict was not only fought on the battlefield but also politically, economically and ideologically. They analysed a series of Nazi propaganda posters from the interwar period and the Second World War, paying particular attention to their use of colour, slogans and dehumanising language vocabulary that assimilated targeted groups to rats, cockroaches and vermin. In their analysis, it was precisely this kind of propaganda that paved the way for what would later be called the Shoah. |
They then turned to the contemporary conflict, drawing comparisons between these propaganda techniques and the media strategies they observed in coverage of the Israel-Palestine situation. In their analysis, just as in 1939, media today propose a completely subjective point of view with an absence of neutrality towards the conflict. The majority of Western channels firmly condemned Palestinian actions and expressed their support for Israel, leading in the students' view to a filtering of information and a distortion of reality, including the dehumanisation of the Palestinian people, directly identified as terrorists, in the same way the Nazi regime treated the Jewish people to justify its crimes. Since the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023, the students also examined how social media became spaces of intense information and counter-information, with Generation Z conducting their own investigations giving rise, in the students' view, to the largest media war since the creation of the internet.
To bring their analysis to life, the students designed an exhibition with several interactive components. To illustrate the double-bind theory, they displayed caricatures of political figures making contradictory statements, placed on the windows of the exhibition space with speech bubbles in a deliberate comic register. They also created an interactive quiz called "Are you a pro of social media? Info or Intox?", in which visitors determined whether statements about the conflict were true or false by pulling a small tab. To close the exhibition, visitors were invited to fill in a canvas representing the Palestinian flag as an act of solidarity with the cause. |