Content area
Full Text
Introduction
In June 2018, the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei, tweeted yet another missive against Israel: that it was a "malignant cancerous tumor in the West Asian region that has to be removed and eradicated." In return, the Israeli Embassy in Washington used a GIF from the movie Mean Girls depicting 'Queen Bee' Regina George asking, "why are you so obsessed with me?" The tweet quickly became viral, retweeted more than 25,000 times with over 80,000 likes.1
While such trolling was seen as a surprising move for Israel, the state is particularly skillful in using social media to pursue its foreign policy goals, most notably in terms of its attempts to sway international public opinion. For instance, during the 2012 Gaza Conflict, Israel announced its campaign via Twitter, with the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) Twitter handle @IDFSpokes-person engaging Hamas' own @AlQassamBrigade handle.2 Israel was especially responsive to shifts in public international support during the conflict, and used Twitter extensively in its attempts to influence international audience perceptions of Israel's role in the conflict.3 Even more so, the use of humor in Israeli diplomatic practice has a longer history than the standalone Mean Girls GIF. Satirical videos parodying common misrepresentations of Israel and Israelis were an important aspect of the public diplomacy campaign "Presenting Israel," which was employed partly to rally ordinary Israelis travelling abroad into "citizen-diplomats."4 Much like the tweet of the Mean Girls GIF, the "Presenting Israel" campaign used humor as a tool to deflect criticism of Israel and assert greater control over international representations of Israeli identity.5
The true power of this exchange emerges in the shifting of online conversation away from Iranian criticism of Israel's response to the Gaza border protests, toward a reimagining of Mean Girls GIFs as political communication. Very few media or scholarly commentaries on the exchange reflected on the context of the series of tweets posted by Khamenei, namely his condemnation of the deaths of 121 Palestinians in clashes with Israeli troops at the Gaza border. Rather, the focus of debates surrounding the exchange largely remained examinations of how states are increasingly deploying images and GIFs in their online communication with each other. The success of this single tweet therefore illustrates...