This paper studies the Israeli state’s use of new media as a tool of military occupation. More specifically, I will study the ways that YouTube has been employed by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) as a means of PR dissemination and, arguably, counter-insurgency during two recent military episodes: the Israeli incursion into the Gaza Strip (December-January 2008-9) and the IDF attack on the “Freedom Flotilla” (May-June 2010). Launched in the early days of Israel’s incursion into the Gaza Strip, the IDF’s videos showcased black-and-white aerial footage of the Israeli assault viewed from the vantage point of the bombardier – images that functioned to sterilize the air campaign by rendering all persons and buildings as proto-targets. By war’s end, some of these videos would be viewed more than 2 million times. The numerous IDF videos produced in the aftermath of the Flotilla incident were at the center of the Israeli popular conversation about the Israeli commando raid at sea, bolstering the already strong public support for the state-sponsored narrative. Several would be ranked among YouTube’s most popular features during the first week of June. This paper will analyze both the particular visual conventions and logics deployed in these videos, the ways such logics might be situated within a larger visual history of the Israeli occupation, and the Israeli narratives about these videos and new media tools that circulated in the Israeli popular media at the time of their initial circulation. I am particularly interested in the tension between Israeli state efforts to employ YouTube as a means of controlling the visual field and political message of these military encounters, read against the public controversies and political contestations that the YouTube footage generated, resulting in a digital field rife with divergent readings of the same visual material. Read in light of contemporary theoretical scholarship on new media, this paper considers the ways these technologies are changing the ways the Israeli state manages and conceptualizes its military occupation even as they provide new tools by which to agitate against it.