If Netflix ever turns Middle East politics into a comedy series, this week's events are a candidate to play the lead role. Let's take a look behind the scenes of the “Netanyahu Death Conundrum”.
The curtain opens with a grandiose denunciation by the Iranian media: “Netanyahu died under the bombs!” All hell broke loose. Just when we were wondering, “What if?”, a tweet from an official Israeli office dropped on the scene: “He cannot be reached.” Oh my God! Crisis desks convene, analysts start commenting. But then... the tweet is deleted. Yes, deleted. In the digital age, when a state's official account deletes a tweet by saying “Sorry, it was a mistake”, what else is a tragicomedy like “We accidentally announced the death of the prime minister of the country”?
Fortunately, we breathed a sigh of relief with a video of a meeting. Netanyahu is alive and well, no one in the meeting is injured. Oh, it's over, isn't it? No, it's not! Immediately the second act begins: “This video was made with artificial intelligence!”
So here's where we are now: maybe he's really alive, maybe he's dead, maybe he's a hologram, maybe he's a deepfake. Nobody knows anything clear. State officials are tweeting and deleting, the enemy media is singing victory songs, and the public is sitting at home looking at the screen wondering, “Is he really dead?”.
At this point, let's take a look at my side of the story, that of an ordinary citizen challenging the world from his home computer. On my Twitter account, I made videos of Tayyip Erdoğan and Joe Biden having coffee in the same cafe and having them have absurd dialogues like “I have 5 fingers”. I made them sit the two most powerful leaders of the Middle East in a cafe and calculate their fingers. And what does this mean?
This means that disinformation is no longer the monopoly of states, intelligence agencies or Iranian media. The line is blurring between the forces that today create confusion about the death of one country's prime minister and the “content producers” who tomorrow will have another leader having imaginary conversations in a café. While Iran can officially kill and resurrect Netanyahu, I, as a citizen, can bring Erdoğan and Biden together over a cup of coffee.
This summarizes the current state of the information age: You cannot trust anything. News of a leader's death can turn into an absurd theater in a matter of hours. Whether by the state or the skilled fingers of a citizen, reality is now a play dough that anyone can reshape.
Maybe Netanyahu is not dead, maybe he is dead but they continue to rule thanks to artificial intelligence. Maybe Erdoğan and Biden really met in that cafe, maybe it's just my imagination. Who knows? All I know is that after this hour, there is no difference between someone saying “Netanyahu is dead” and someone saying “Hello, I am real”. In these days when we cannot even trust what we see with our eyes, Middle East politics has turned into a “Black Mirror” episode.
God rest his soul if he is dead, and we will miss you if you are real.