Philosophers and other theorists distinguish between the wide-open, harsh infinity of space as opposed to the buffered configuration of being in place. This structural distinction conforms also to digital space and place. Digital space is full of malevolent chaos. It is a miserable universe, out of joint, subject to malevolent beings who wish you emotional and even physical harm. In contrast to digital space, there is the place of digital home. One keeps and maintains digital home with and against the omniscience of the algorithm. A digital home creates a sense of place in the larger digital universe. The creation of a digital home depends upon supports and filters that determine whom one allows in and whom one excludes, and under what conditions. A digital home can be a closed and suffocating place or a welcoming place in a polarized and polarizing world, especially at times of political crisis and social violence. Reflecting the commitments and values of the occupant, a digital home depends upon contingent decisions to engage and not engage other people.

I have been thinking a lot about digital home in relation to the politics of Zionism and anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, October 7, and the Hamas-Israel war. At their best, the culture and politics of Israel and Palestine are always multi-perspectival. At moments of intense violence, it is easy to lose one’s bearings and best judgment when everything goes out of whack in the polarizing push and pull. One can lose a sense of one’s own best self. About Israel. I go to Twitter where I have found a group of people to whom I go for political and moral orientation. The political views of the people I engage vary. They do not all align with my own. But they do not close anyone out. Against all the American one-noters shitposting about Israel and Palestine, the people I engage generate points of view that are complex and multi-dimensional. They are almost all of them rooted cosmopolitans: Israeli, Jewish, Palestinian, American, Egyptian, Iranian, Pakistani, Saudi, British, French, Lebanese, Turkish. Based primarily in the United States and in Israel, they mostly write in English. They are journalists, historians, think-tankers. Many, but certainly not all of them, write or have written at Ha’aretz, the UAE based National News, the Saudi based Asharq Al-Awsat, Newsline, The Atlantic. Rejecting zero-sum politics, they are non-binary in their critical approach to the conflict and to culture.

I grew up in a Labor Zionist youth movement in the 1970/80s. I spent years in Israel during the 1980s. I pursued a PhD in modern Jewish thought and culture with a focus on religion. In the late 1990s, I started going online for news relating to Israel. It was my first exposure to Arab and Muslim news sites in English translation. Twitter has since then only worked to magnify and multiply that online experience. Twitter pulls the eye away from the myopic Jewish-Israeli-Jewish points of view that one tends to find as one goes out further onto the Jewish right or the Jewish left. On the Jewish left, no less than on the Jewish right, everything is always Jewish and all they see is Israel. The Jewish right is blind to the question of Palestine. The Jewish left blames all the terrible things that happen in the region on Israel. The people I follow at Twitter see things more clearly. They help one see better the place of Jewishness and Israel in the world and its place in the MENA. They see Israeli political dynamics next to Palestinian dynamics, next to Arab next to Turkish next to Iranian dynamics. This big view of the world is attuned to the region. It gives one to see that no national community is simply passive, that everything is in motion against and with each other.

A lot of people have bad experience on Twitter because they engage the wrong people. It is also probably true that larger profile accounts attract crazy and stupid people. I can only say that I came to Twitter relatively late in my online life and my own profile is modest. I wanted something bigger and less intimate than Facebook. And I found people at Twitter. I do not confuse them with friends. Most are complete strangers, even as I am on good terms and even friendly with some, mostly online. They are the reason and only reason I stay at Twitter, which is itself a hell-space. They both out and extend what I hope is a larger point of view. I “engage” with these people constantly. That means I like, comment, repost, and quote-repost. I expect no reciprocation and I am honored when I receive it. I engage with them constantly because I like them. And because the intentional engagement with them keeps my own algorithm clean. Twitter knows that these are the people I see online and who I want to see online; so they are the people I see online, especially now relating to October 7 and the Hamas-Israel war in Gaza.

At its best, the short-form of Twitter is a vital-digital complement to long-form thinking. Even as it opens place into space, the medium forces the user to refine perspective, to condense and to sharpen it. When and only when it works well, Twitter makes the user develop complex thoughts more to a point and sense of purpose that are human and home-like in structure.