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The Layalina Review

VOL. V NO. 3, January 16-January 29, 2009

Gaza Conflict Spreads to Cyberspace

"Social media [has taken] its place as the newest weapon in the modern arsenal, nestled next to laser-guided missiles and Oassam rockets," reports Helen Kennedy of the Daily News. Over the past month, Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter have become new vehicles of aggression in the Gaza conflict as "Israelis and Palestinians [have found] cyberspace fertile ground for a propaganda war."

The Israeli Defense Forces have made multiple online efforts to deflect international focus from the suffering of the Palestinians, including posting videos of "weapons caches discovered in mosques" and "schools with complex booby-traps" on their own YouTube channel. However, Palestinian digital counter-efforts depicting gory videos have understandably proved to be far more poignant and effective, "giving [them] an edge in the online war that they didn’t have against Israeli real-world might."

Furthermore, "The Israeli Consulate in New York made history by taking questions at a news conference from Twitter users, and answering via Twitter, a popular online service that allows users to broadcast 140-character messages to each other," Helen Kennedy continues.

Meanwhile, Hamas "unveiled its own YouTube knockoff called Palutube.com," an Arabic language site showing a series of videos with gruesome details of maimed people and dead children and infants.

Pro-Israeli attempts to accrue international support over the internet have not stopped there. Many Israeli bloggers created a site targeting the English-speaking world called HelpUsWin, which encourages other net-surfers to vote in online polls, leave anti-Palestinian comments on pertinent online articles, and install an ‘I (heart) Israel’ icon on their Facebook pages.

Riyaad Minty, Al Jazeera’s new media analyst, notes that this internet-based "War of Words" allows "the average, frustrated person on the street to express their views." Blogs, such as the one written by Palestinian CARE aid worker Jawad Harb, have made it easy for interested and concerned readers from across the world to gain exposure to first-hand accounts of the carnage.

Yigal Schleifer of The Christian Science Monitor reported that recent online efforts from both sides are influencing "public opinion in an unprecedented and sometimes worrisome way." For instance, Palestinian hackers "successfully [redirected] traffic from several high-profile Israeli websites to a page featuring anti-Israel messages."

On the Israeli side, an online collective group known as Help Israel Win even encouraged users to download a program that "would enlist their computer in an online effort to overload Palestinian websites." Another Israeli online organization "has employed various methods to remove or disable Facebook groups that, it says, are clearly anti-Semitic or actively promote Islamic terrorism or genocide."

Samantha Shapiro focused on Egypt’s ongoing "Facebook revolution" in the New York Times article. Just in the past month, "hundreds of Egyptian Facebook members…have set up Gaza-related ‘groups,’…most [expressing] hatred for Israel and the United States." Other Egyptian Facebookers "saw Gaza as a way to stoke and focus discontent against [Egyptian President Hosni] Mubarak and his government."

Many Egyptian youth view "Egypt’s relationship with Israel as one symptom of a larger set of problems, such as censorship, corruption, joblessness and government incompetence, whose solution would lie not in resistance in Gaza but in democratization at home."

Political parties have also attempted to disseminate their stances on the Gaza conflict through online avenues. In a particularly interesting case, "the Hadash party’s Internet sites offer different messages about the recent war in Gaza depending on whether you view them in Hebrew or Arabic," reports Yoav Stern on Haaretz.com.

The Arabic version of the Jewish-Arab party’s site "quotes a senior party official proclaiming ‘we are with the resistance everywhere’ – a statement that could be interpreted as support for Palestinian terror organizations." On the contrary, "the party’s two Hebrew-language Web sites denounce the war without expressing support for terrorist organization." Hadash has since issued statements rejecting accusations of having a contradictory platform.