4 nov 2012
Abbas widely slammed on social networking websites
GAZA, (PIC)-- The latest serious remarks made by de facto president Mahmoud Abbas have received widespread condemnation on popular social networking websites from different Arab and Palestinian noted writers and intellectuals.
Editor-in-chief of the London-based Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper Abdulbari Atwan described Abbas on his twitter page as "dangerous to the Palestinian constants."
"Abbas is not able to defend the right of others from his people to return to Palestine when he gave up his own right to return to his hometown Safed…This man has become a threat to the Palestinian constants and must go," Atwan said.
Saudi political writer Hasan Al-Ajmi commented on Atwan's twitter remarks by saying, "he has been dangerous for a long time and he is definitely more evil than the occupier. He is the one who confers legitimacy on the existence of the occupier. May God be with you, Palestine."
Specialist in Israeli affairs Saleh Al-Naami twitted: "the Palestinian left, which boycotted the visit of the Qatari emir to Gaza at the pretext he had ties with Israel, continues to sit with Abbas, although he waived the right of return."
"All Fatah leaders are aware of the damage caused by Abbas's outspoken concession on the right of return, but they embark on vulgarly inventing interpretations for it for fear they lose their financial privileges," Naami added.
Director of the London-based Islamic political thought institute Azzam Al-Tamimi said on his page that "Abbas does not have anything in order to give up, and his statements are a kind of hallucination and of no value except that they confirm his deviance and bankruptcy."
Journalist for Palestine newspaper Mohamed Yasin stated on his facebook page that "what many facebook activists said against Abbas following his remarks on the right of return was like a popular trial and a final irrevocable sentence against him releasing him from his posts."
In a related incident, the Islamic student bloc at Birzeit university staged on Saturday afternoon a protest against Abbas's remarks on the right of return and the popular intifada (uprising).
According to the reporter for the Palestinian information (PIC) in Ramallah city, dozens of Birzeit student rallied outside the student council carrying Palestinian flags and banners slamming Abbas's antinational remarks.
Editor-in-chief of the London-based Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper Abdulbari Atwan described Abbas on his twitter page as "dangerous to the Palestinian constants."
"Abbas is not able to defend the right of others from his people to return to Palestine when he gave up his own right to return to his hometown Safed…This man has become a threat to the Palestinian constants and must go," Atwan said.
Saudi political writer Hasan Al-Ajmi commented on Atwan's twitter remarks by saying, "he has been dangerous for a long time and he is definitely more evil than the occupier. He is the one who confers legitimacy on the existence of the occupier. May God be with you, Palestine."
Specialist in Israeli affairs Saleh Al-Naami twitted: "the Palestinian left, which boycotted the visit of the Qatari emir to Gaza at the pretext he had ties with Israel, continues to sit with Abbas, although he waived the right of return."
"All Fatah leaders are aware of the damage caused by Abbas's outspoken concession on the right of return, but they embark on vulgarly inventing interpretations for it for fear they lose their financial privileges," Naami added.
Director of the London-based Islamic political thought institute Azzam Al-Tamimi said on his page that "Abbas does not have anything in order to give up, and his statements are a kind of hallucination and of no value except that they confirm his deviance and bankruptcy."
Journalist for Palestine newspaper Mohamed Yasin stated on his facebook page that "what many facebook activists said against Abbas following his remarks on the right of return was like a popular trial and a final irrevocable sentence against him releasing him from his posts."
In a related incident, the Islamic student bloc at Birzeit university staged on Saturday afternoon a protest against Abbas's remarks on the right of return and the popular intifada (uprising).
According to the reporter for the Palestinian information (PIC) in Ramallah city, dozens of Birzeit student rallied outside the student council carrying Palestinian flags and banners slamming Abbas's antinational remarks.
26 oct 2012
Israeli government offices targeted by computer virus
NAZARETH, (PIC)-- A number of Israel's government offices have fallen victim to a cyber attack over the past week, one apparently aimed at slipping a "Trojan horse" into the computer servers at these ministries, Haaretz revealed.
The "Trojan horse" has been sent as files attached to emails bearing the name of the IOF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz in the subject line.
The newspaper added that the "Benny Gantz" virus is the responsible for the cyber threat that forced the Israel Police to disconnect its computers from the civilian network earlier Thursday.
A senior government is quoted by Haaretz as saying that the threat facing the police was being investigated by experts, but at the moment it seemed to be an isolated incident.
Haaretz has gotten access to a cable sent Wednesday by the Foreign Ministry's defense department to all ministry employees both in Israel and abroad, warning that unusual e-mails had been noticed in various delegations and embassies over the course of the last week.
Those emails either mention Gantz or were sent from an address bearing his name. The body of the email contained remarks made by Israeli politicians. Some of the emails also contained requests for friendship on Facebook or links to Gantz’s website.
Dozens of identical emails were sent Wednesday to Israeli embassies abroad and to Foreign Ministry employees in Israel, but this time, an automated system identified them as "offensive" – in other words viruses, or Trojan horses – and warned that opening them would activate them and penetrate the central computer system.
The "Trojan horse" has been sent as files attached to emails bearing the name of the IOF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz in the subject line.
The newspaper added that the "Benny Gantz" virus is the responsible for the cyber threat that forced the Israel Police to disconnect its computers from the civilian network earlier Thursday.
A senior government is quoted by Haaretz as saying that the threat facing the police was being investigated by experts, but at the moment it seemed to be an isolated incident.
Haaretz has gotten access to a cable sent Wednesday by the Foreign Ministry's defense department to all ministry employees both in Israel and abroad, warning that unusual e-mails had been noticed in various delegations and embassies over the course of the last week.
Those emails either mention Gantz or were sent from an address bearing his name. The body of the email contained remarks made by Israeli politicians. Some of the emails also contained requests for friendship on Facebook or links to Gantz’s website.
Dozens of identical emails were sent Wednesday to Israeli embassies abroad and to Foreign Ministry employees in Israel, but this time, an automated system identified them as "offensive" – in other words viruses, or Trojan horses – and warned that opening them would activate them and penetrate the central computer system.
17 oct 2012
Israeli media misinterprets Abbas' Arabic remarks on Facebook
By Abdul-Hakim Salah
BETHLEHEM (Ma'an) -- Israeli media on Wednesday misinterpreted a Facebook status by Mahmoud Abbas to suggest the president had abandoned the two-state solution.
Discussing the bid to upgrade Palestine to a non-member state at the UN, Abbas posted an Arabic-language status update explaining that recognition of statehood would prove that Palestinian territory is under occupation rather than "disputed" land.
The president referred to Palestinian land occupied before 1967 using terminology commonly used to refer to the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
His use of the preposition "before" alarmed Israeli media, including the third most-read newspaper Maariv and Israel radio which reported that Abbas was seeking a state in all of historic Palestine.
Maariv accused Abbas of incitement and claimed Abbas was claiming Israel as "our occupied homeland," even though in both bids to upgrade Palestine's status at the UN -- in Sept. 2011 and Sept. 2012 -- the president has requested recognition of a Palestinian state on 1967 borders.
Usually, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza would be referred to collectively as "1948 Palestine," and so the president's use of "pre-1967" clearly referred to land occupied in 1967.
The president referred to "all the territory" occupied in 1967 because Israel has consistently refused to return all the land it occupied in 1967 during years of negotiations in Oslo and even earlier.
BETHLEHEM (Ma'an) -- Israeli media on Wednesday misinterpreted a Facebook status by Mahmoud Abbas to suggest the president had abandoned the two-state solution.
Discussing the bid to upgrade Palestine to a non-member state at the UN, Abbas posted an Arabic-language status update explaining that recognition of statehood would prove that Palestinian territory is under occupation rather than "disputed" land.
The president referred to Palestinian land occupied before 1967 using terminology commonly used to refer to the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
His use of the preposition "before" alarmed Israeli media, including the third most-read newspaper Maariv and Israel radio which reported that Abbas was seeking a state in all of historic Palestine.
Maariv accused Abbas of incitement and claimed Abbas was claiming Israel as "our occupied homeland," even though in both bids to upgrade Palestine's status at the UN -- in Sept. 2011 and Sept. 2012 -- the president has requested recognition of a Palestinian state on 1967 borders.
Usually, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza would be referred to collectively as "1948 Palestine," and so the president's use of "pre-1967" clearly referred to land occupied in 1967.
The president referred to "all the territory" occupied in 1967 because Israel has consistently refused to return all the land it occupied in 1967 during years of negotiations in Oslo and even earlier.
16 oct 2012
Administration of Facebook closes the account of Hamas leader Mohammed Nazzal
BEIRUT, (PIC)-- Activists on Facebook said that they have not been able, on Monday, to access to the Facebook page of Mohammad Nazzal, a Hamas leading figure, pointing out that the website administration had closed the page, which Nazzal has been using for the past two years.
Sources close to Mohammed Nazzal, member of Hamas Political Bureau, pointed that the Facebook administration justified its procedure claiming that the page "is supporting a terrorist organization."
Nazzal's account supervisors told "Quds Press" news agency that they demanded the administration of the Facebook website to re-open the account, but they were told that "in case of committing such serious breaches, re-opening the account is not possible."
The administration of Facebook has closed during the last period many accounts of leading figures in Hamas movement, including Ismail Haniyeh and Izzat al-Rishq, in a move that provoked reactions of the Arab and international human rights organizations.
Sources close to Mohammed Nazzal, member of Hamas Political Bureau, pointed that the Facebook administration justified its procedure claiming that the page "is supporting a terrorist organization."
Nazzal's account supervisors told "Quds Press" news agency that they demanded the administration of the Facebook website to re-open the account, but they were told that "in case of committing such serious breaches, re-opening the account is not possible."
The administration of Facebook has closed during the last period many accounts of leading figures in Hamas movement, including Ismail Haniyeh and Izzat al-Rishq, in a move that provoked reactions of the Arab and international human rights organizations.
2 oct 2012
Israeli army admits its exposure to communication breaches by resistance
RAMALLAH, (PIC)-- The Israeli news website Wella revealed that the Israeli army has been exposed since years to considerable cyber attacks and radio transmission breaches by the Palestinian resistance spearheaded by Hamas's armed wing, Al-Qassam Brigades.
Wella quoted a senior military official as saying that the Israeli army is extremely shocked at the ability of the Palestinian resistance to penetrate its field communication system and spy on its military activities and moves.
The official added that the military communication system has been vulnerable to major penetrations that enabled Al-Qassam Brigades to eavesdrop on military information and instructions exchanged between posts along Gaza border areas.
He affirmed that the resistance eavesdropped communications that happened during the execution of military operations.
Wella quoted a senior military official as saying that the Israeli army is extremely shocked at the ability of the Palestinian resistance to penetrate its field communication system and spy on its military activities and moves.
The official added that the military communication system has been vulnerable to major penetrations that enabled Al-Qassam Brigades to eavesdrop on military information and instructions exchanged between posts along Gaza border areas.
He affirmed that the resistance eavesdropped communications that happened during the execution of military operations.
1 oct 2012
Gaza ministry says asking for cheaper mobile, internet services
GAZA CITY (Ma’an) -- Gaza's telecommunications ministry is contacting mobile and internet companies to ask them to reduce prices and improve services, the ministry said on Monday.
The ministry’s director of public relations Samir Hamtou told Ma’an that his ministry conducted a comprehensive evaluation into the quality and prices of internet services in the coastal enclave in September.
Consultations are still ongoing, he said, and some providers have already announced reduced packages.
With regards to mobile prices, Hamtou says his ministry has been receiving a lot of complaints and for that reason the ministry is studying the pricing system adopted by Palestinian provider Jawwal.
The ministry’s director of public relations Samir Hamtou told Ma’an that his ministry conducted a comprehensive evaluation into the quality and prices of internet services in the coastal enclave in September.
Consultations are still ongoing, he said, and some providers have already announced reduced packages.
With regards to mobile prices, Hamtou says his ministry has been receiving a lot of complaints and for that reason the ministry is studying the pricing system adopted by Palestinian provider Jawwal.
23 aug 2012
Zahhar denies he has Facebook page
Dr. Mahmoud Al-Zahhar, a political bureau member of Hamas, has denied having opened a Facebook page on the internet.
He said in a statement on Thursday night that he had nothing to do with a Facebook page that carried his name and position, adding that any statements published on this page did not reflect his stands.
The Facebook page carrying the name of Zahhar had quoted him as criticizing Egypt for partially opening the Rafah border crossing while allowing Israelis free access through the Taba crossing, both with the Sinai Peninsula.
He said in a statement on Thursday night that he had nothing to do with a Facebook page that carried his name and position, adding that any statements published on this page did not reflect his stands.
The Facebook page carrying the name of Zahhar had quoted him as criticizing Egypt for partially opening the Rafah border crossing while allowing Israelis free access through the Taba crossing, both with the Sinai Peninsula.
10 aug 2012
New US-Israeli computer virus targets Lebanese banks
Experts say the new US-Israeli virus, Gauss, which has been detected in many computers in Lebanese banks, is written by the same programmers who created Flame.
A Russian computer security firm has discovered a new “state-sponsored computer virus,” co-developed by Tel Aviv and Washington, which targets the computers of specific major banks in Lebanon.
According to a Thursday New York Times article, the Kapersky Lab said the virus appeared to have been written by the same programmers who created Flame, a data-mining computer virus, and it might be linked to the Stuxnet virus, the virus that was intended to disrupt Iran’s nuclear energy program in 2010.
The same paper confirmed in a June article that Stuxnet was jointly developed by the United States and Israeli government.
Iranian authorities have always maintained that the Stuxnet virus was detected in time by Iranian IT and nuclear experts and had no effect on the country’s nuclear energy program.
The latest virus, nicknamed Gauss, has reportedly been detected in hundreds of computers in Lebanon with an apparent aim of acquiring “logins for e-mail and instant messaging accounts, social networks and, notably, accounts at certain banks.”
The report further revealed that targeted banks included several major Lebanese banks such as the Bank of Beirut, BLOM Bank, Byblos Bank and Credit Libanais, as well as Citibank.
“We have never seen any malware target such a specific range of banks,” said Costin Raiu, Kaspersky’s director of global research and analysis.
“There is absolutely no doubt that Gauss and Flame were printed by the same factories,” added Raiu.
“An early version of Stuxnet used a module from Flame, which shows they are connected. Stuxnet was created by a nation-state - it simply could not have been designed without nation-state support - which means Flame and Gauss were created with nation-state support as well.”
The report further quotes Kaspersky researchers as saying that the Gauss virus contained a “warhead” that “seeks a very specific computer system with no Internet connection and installs itself only if it finds one.”
Gauss virus: Stuxnet-like cyberweapon hits Middle East banks
A Russian computer security firm has discovered a new “state-sponsored computer virus,” co-developed by Tel Aviv and Washington, which targets the computers of specific major banks in Lebanon.
According to a Thursday New York Times article, the Kapersky Lab said the virus appeared to have been written by the same programmers who created Flame, a data-mining computer virus, and it might be linked to the Stuxnet virus, the virus that was intended to disrupt Iran’s nuclear energy program in 2010.
The same paper confirmed in a June article that Stuxnet was jointly developed by the United States and Israeli government.
Iranian authorities have always maintained that the Stuxnet virus was detected in time by Iranian IT and nuclear experts and had no effect on the country’s nuclear energy program.
The latest virus, nicknamed Gauss, has reportedly been detected in hundreds of computers in Lebanon with an apparent aim of acquiring “logins for e-mail and instant messaging accounts, social networks and, notably, accounts at certain banks.”
The report further revealed that targeted banks included several major Lebanese banks such as the Bank of Beirut, BLOM Bank, Byblos Bank and Credit Libanais, as well as Citibank.
“We have never seen any malware target such a specific range of banks,” said Costin Raiu, Kaspersky’s director of global research and analysis.
“There is absolutely no doubt that Gauss and Flame were printed by the same factories,” added Raiu.
“An early version of Stuxnet used a module from Flame, which shows they are connected. Stuxnet was created by a nation-state - it simply could not have been designed without nation-state support - which means Flame and Gauss were created with nation-state support as well.”
The report further quotes Kaspersky researchers as saying that the Gauss virus contained a “warhead” that “seeks a very specific computer system with no Internet connection and installs itself only if it finds one.”
Gauss virus: Stuxnet-like cyberweapon hits Middle East banks
14 july 2012
Commanders post naked photo on soldier's Facebook page
Lieutenant, sergeant major relieved of their duties after replacing soldier's profile picture with naked pic of similar looking man. 'I was devastated,' soldier says.
A lieutenant and a sergeant major belonging to a combat IDF unit were relieved of their duties over a prank they pulled on a soldier under their command, Yedioth Ahronoth reported Friday.
After noticing that the soldier had accessed his Facebook account from a laptop, the two commanders ordered the company's troops to rush to nearby training grounds to simulate a response to a sudden emergency.
The simulation lasted about two hours, and during this time the lieutenant and sergeant major entered the troops' tent and replaced the soldier's Facebook profile picture with a photo of a naked man.
Upon his return from the drill, the soldier found numerous messages on his cell phone from friends who were wondering about the racy profile photo.
When he opened his Facebook page, the soldier was shocked to see that the man in the photo uploaded by his commanders "looks so much like me."
"I was devastated and barely left the house," the soldier told a friend while he was on leave.
The soldier's commander granted his request for an additional two days of rest before retuning to the base.
The soldier filed a complaint with IDF Ombudsman Brig.-Gen. (res.) Yitzhak Brik in which he claimed that the company commander merely reprimanded the lieutenant and sergeant major.
Brik responded with a letter saying he found a "severe moral failure" in the commanders' conduct.
"Even if I accept their claim that the prank was not meant to humiliate you, I do not believe this kind of behavior can be tolerated," he wrote.
The ombudsman ordered military authorities to dismiss the lieutenant from the army and relieve the sergeant major of his duties.
A lieutenant and a sergeant major belonging to a combat IDF unit were relieved of their duties over a prank they pulled on a soldier under their command, Yedioth Ahronoth reported Friday.
After noticing that the soldier had accessed his Facebook account from a laptop, the two commanders ordered the company's troops to rush to nearby training grounds to simulate a response to a sudden emergency.
The simulation lasted about two hours, and during this time the lieutenant and sergeant major entered the troops' tent and replaced the soldier's Facebook profile picture with a photo of a naked man.
Upon his return from the drill, the soldier found numerous messages on his cell phone from friends who were wondering about the racy profile photo.
When he opened his Facebook page, the soldier was shocked to see that the man in the photo uploaded by his commanders "looks so much like me."
"I was devastated and barely left the house," the soldier told a friend while he was on leave.
The soldier's commander granted his request for an additional two days of rest before retuning to the base.
The soldier filed a complaint with IDF Ombudsman Brig.-Gen. (res.) Yitzhak Brik in which he claimed that the company commander merely reprimanded the lieutenant and sergeant major.
Brik responded with a letter saying he found a "severe moral failure" in the commanders' conduct.
"Even if I accept their claim that the prank was not meant to humiliate you, I do not believe this kind of behavior can be tolerated," he wrote.
The ombudsman ordered military authorities to dismiss the lieutenant from the army and relieve the sergeant major of his duties.
11 july 2012
Hackers from Gaza breach Knesset website
Hackers calling themselves as "Pirates of Gaza, the winds of victory" said they managed to penetrate into the website of the Israeli Knesset on Thursday.
The Hebrew media reported that the hackers defaced the website with a statement reading that they possess many secrets about Israeli leaders.
Their statement demanded an end to all excavations near the Aqsa Mosque, the settlement activities especially around the Mosque and the military aggression against Gaza as well as the release of all Palestinian prisoners.
The hackers also wrote on the website that the resistance, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah, will be victorious.
Haaretz newspaper claimed the website was retrieved and fixed within minutes and investigation was initiated into the incident.
The Hebrew media reported that the hackers defaced the website with a statement reading that they possess many secrets about Israeli leaders.
Their statement demanded an end to all excavations near the Aqsa Mosque, the settlement activities especially around the Mosque and the military aggression against Gaza as well as the release of all Palestinian prisoners.
The hackers also wrote on the website that the resistance, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah, will be victorious.
Haaretz newspaper claimed the website was retrieved and fixed within minutes and investigation was initiated into the incident.
3 july 2012
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Israeli soldiers caught on video beating Palestinian child
The Israeli organization for human rights B’Tselem published on Monday video footage in which two Israeli border guards capture and beat a nine-year-old Palestinian child in Al-Khalil. The videos show Abdulrahman Barqan, 9, captured by one of the soldiers, who beat the child throwing him on the ground, then another soldier mercilessly kicking him with his foot. The child was screaming and crying. The footage was taken by a B’Tselem volunteer on Friday 28 June. |
‘It’s a shame they didn’t kill him’: Israelis react to video of soldiers kicking Palestinian child
Eden Oreus (Gedera Regional High School): Channel 2, you are the garbage of the state, all respect to the Border Police officer and it’s a shame he didn’t put a bullet in the head of the son of a bitch videographer who documented it.
This posting from a high schooler was one of hundreds by Israeli Facebook users reacting with pride and joy, and incitement to violence and murder, on seeing a video of Israeli occupation soldiers in Hebron kicking a young Palestinian boy as he screams in pain.
The video, shot by a Palestinian videographer and released by B’Tselem, was widely reported in the Israeli media, and shows Israeli occupation soldiers in Hebron, occupied West Bank, violently assaulting a child whom B’Tselem identified as Abd al-Rahman Burqan, aged 9.
B’Tselem described the incident captured on film as follows:
The video shows a Border Police officer ambushing a child from around the corner. As the child walks past, the officer grabs him by the arm and says: “why are you making trouble?” The officer then drags the child, who is screaming, on the ground for a few seconds. A second Border Police officer then appears and kicks the boy. The officer then lets the child go. He runs away, and the two Border Police officers leave the scene as well.
Jessica Montell, the director of B’Tselem, said Israeli occupation authorities had opened an investigation into the incident, however in practice such investigations almost never lead to accountability and punishment of routine violence against Palestinians.
J Montell, B'Tselem Though rare to catch on film, Border Police violence against Palestinians is unfortunately not a rare occurrence: http://www.btselem.org/annual_report_2011/130898
On Facebook: Calls for the child to be shot
On the Facebook Page of Israel’s Channel 2, dozens of Israeli Facebook users posted comments congratulating the soldiers and calling for more violence against children.
This posting from a high schooler was one of hundreds by Israeli Facebook users reacting with pride and joy, and incitement to violence and murder, on seeing a video of Israeli occupation soldiers in Hebron kicking a young Palestinian boy as he screams in pain.
The video, shot by a Palestinian videographer and released by B’Tselem, was widely reported in the Israeli media, and shows Israeli occupation soldiers in Hebron, occupied West Bank, violently assaulting a child whom B’Tselem identified as Abd al-Rahman Burqan, aged 9.
B’Tselem described the incident captured on film as follows:
The video shows a Border Police officer ambushing a child from around the corner. As the child walks past, the officer grabs him by the arm and says: “why are you making trouble?” The officer then drags the child, who is screaming, on the ground for a few seconds. A second Border Police officer then appears and kicks the boy. The officer then lets the child go. He runs away, and the two Border Police officers leave the scene as well.
Jessica Montell, the director of B’Tselem, said Israeli occupation authorities had opened an investigation into the incident, however in practice such investigations almost never lead to accountability and punishment of routine violence against Palestinians.
J Montell, B'Tselem Though rare to catch on film, Border Police violence against Palestinians is unfortunately not a rare occurrence: http://www.btselem.org/annual_report_2011/130898
On Facebook: Calls for the child to be shot
On the Facebook Page of Israel’s Channel 2, dozens of Israeli Facebook users posted comments congratulating the soldiers and calling for more violence against children.
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Avishy Nappe, for example, wrote that he would have put “five bullets through the head” of the boy.
Many Facebook users justified the violence against the child, claiming – without any evidence whatsoever – that he must have thrown rocks and therefore deserved the kicking. Eliran Zarbiv wrote: This boy threw stones a few minutes before the two soldiers, and wounded one of them in the head (the soldier who kicked) then the other soldier just managed to catch him, I have a friend in the [army] unit there – all honor to the IDF you are doing a great job Keep at it! If it were me, I would have smashed a [concrete] block on his head! Not just a kick! Racist comments pervasive It is important to emphasize that these kinds of racist and violent comments are not exceptional, but are pervasive and common. There are hundreds of them – far too numerous to translate and on Channel 2’s Facebook page they appear to far outnumber opposing sentiments. Of course some Israelis expressed “shame” at the violent and racist comments, and on many occasions were denounced as “lefists” or worse for doing so. On the Facebook page of “100,000 Protestors Against the Occupation,” which drew attention to the racist comments on Channel 2’s page, for example, there were comments by a handful of Israeli Facebook users strongly condemning and lamenting the racism and calls for violence. These are a few of the earliest comments posted in response to the Channel 2 item on the video: Daniel Deri: It’s a shame he didn’t smash his face, the son of a bitch threw stones before. I wish each and every member of B’Tselem would die, those human scum. Dan Malka: This should be done to all those children Tal Avraham: Look at what you are writing … racists. Do you understand that what you are writing here is inhumane… You are disgusting and inhumane, sorry, but that’s the truth. Kfir Levi: This time the little terrorist got off lightly. |
Ariel Davidpur: The Border Police are the hero! It’s a shame he didn’t kill him with the kick.
Shira Oktan: Why all respect? It’s a child
Aviran Ezer: Since he’ll grow up to be a terrorist, it’s a shame he wasn’t killed.
The racism and incitement widely expressed online following this video echoes an incident earlier this year when many Israelis on Facebook expressed joy over the deaths of Palestinian children in a road accident.
Shira Oktan: Why all respect? It’s a child
Aviran Ezer: Since he’ll grow up to be a terrorist, it’s a shame he wasn’t killed.
The racism and incitement widely expressed online following this video echoes an incident earlier this year when many Israelis on Facebook expressed joy over the deaths of Palestinian children in a road accident.
Police officer kicks 9-year-old boy, and Israeli commenters cheer him on
There is a viral video from B'Tselem of an Israeli border policeman kicking a Palestinian boy in Hebron (about 1:20 in in the video). It was aired by Israeli Channel 2. In the ensuing conversation at Facebook, Hadass Hacohen, who I am told is an Israeli English teacher, offers this colloquial comment in Hebrew (thanks to Ofer for translation):
"That all, just a kick? This cannot be compared to what happened in 1933!! The Germans (may they be cursed) did this for no wrong on our part, just out of hatred and jealousy of Jews!!! If we were a smart enough country, we would already kick all those scumbags/terrorists far far away from here!!!!"
Ali Abunimah has been on the story, picking up similar comments:
Eden Oreus (Gedera Regional High School): "Channel 2, you are the garbage of the state, all respect to the Border Police officer and it’s a shame he didn’t put a bullet in the head of the son of a bitch videographerwho documented it."
This posting from a high schooler was one of hundreds by Israeli Facebook users reacting with pride and joy, and incitement to violence and murder, on seeing a video of Israeli occupation soldiers in Hebron kicking a young Palestinian boy as he screams in pain.
The video, shot by a Palestinian videographer and released by B’Tselem, was widely reported in the Israeli media, and shows Israeli occupation soldiers in Hebron, occupied West Bank, violently assaulting a child whom B’Tselem identified as Abd al-Rahman Burqan, aged 9.
"That all, just a kick? This cannot be compared to what happened in 1933!! The Germans (may they be cursed) did this for no wrong on our part, just out of hatred and jealousy of Jews!!! If we were a smart enough country, we would already kick all those scumbags/terrorists far far away from here!!!!"
Ali Abunimah has been on the story, picking up similar comments:
Eden Oreus (Gedera Regional High School): "Channel 2, you are the garbage of the state, all respect to the Border Police officer and it’s a shame he didn’t put a bullet in the head of the son of a bitch videographerwho documented it."
This posting from a high schooler was one of hundreds by Israeli Facebook users reacting with pride and joy, and incitement to violence and murder, on seeing a video of Israeli occupation soldiers in Hebron kicking a young Palestinian boy as he screams in pain.
The video, shot by a Palestinian videographer and released by B’Tselem, was widely reported in the Israeli media, and shows Israeli occupation soldiers in Hebron, occupied West Bank, violently assaulting a child whom B’Tselem identified as Abd al-Rahman Burqan, aged 9.
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West must condemn Israeli barbarism
Human rights group B'Tselem has uploaded a video showing Israeli police officers brutally attacking a Palestinian child, providing more evidence of Israeli violence against Palestinian children. The video shows a border policeman apprehending a nine-year-old boy, identified as Abd al-Rahman Burkan, and knocking him to the ground while the child shouts, near the Ibrahimi Mosque in the city of al-Khalil (Hebron) in the south of the occupied West Bank on June 29. A second policeman is then seen approaching the child and kicking him. Press TV has conducted an interview with Bruce Katz, president of Palestinian and Jewish Unity, to further discuss the issue. The following is a rough transcription of the interview. |
Press TV: Israelis have always showed hatred towards the Palestinians but this time the footage shows Israeli soldiers beating a small Palestinian child. This is a child! What can explain such hatred towards children?
Katz: I think the first thing we have to point out is this is something that’s caught on video and is to the credit of B'Tselem, that they did manage to get this online.
What needs to be understood is that this is one occasion when it’s been finally caught on camera but this is a practice that’s been going on for numerous years, the beatings of the Palestinian prisoners, even young children.
As a matter of fact, just recently, the United Kingdom and the European Union as well made a rounded criticism of Israel for the fact that it keeps young Palestinians in irons in Israeli jails. This is a much larger policy of intimidation, of terrorizing the Palestinian population.
Quite frankly, there’s nothing else that can be said other than the fact that this is an act of absolute barbarism and one that should be denounced everywhere in the world including the Western nations that are complicit and remain complicit in this type of very brutal, dehumanizing problems that Israel has been carrying out for decades now.
Press TV: Another situation that comes to mind is if you can tell us more about the dualistic, discriminatory legal system against the Palestinians in Israel.
Katz: This is where you have the very nature of apartheid. What apartheid is, essentially, you have for example in the occupied territory, Jewish settlers in the settlements are under Israeli civil law. They have the course to Israeli courts to Israeli constitution, etcetera, whereas the Palestinians are under military law within the same region.
Now that is not a supposed apartheid; that is a clear case of apartheid -- a system which is made to oppress an indigenous people, in this case for purposes of basically trying to push them off their land which is something that has been going on for more than 60 years.
The fact that you have these so-called administrative detentions, which basically is simply an excuse, is a way of justifying throwing people into prison without any accusation, without any proof.
Then to look for other people to claim that this is the only democracy in the Middle East, nothing could be farther from the truth. This…administrative detention, of terrorizing the civilian population is proof of the fact that it’s amazing that there isn’t more of an outcry in Western democracy.
Katz: I think the first thing we have to point out is this is something that’s caught on video and is to the credit of B'Tselem, that they did manage to get this online.
What needs to be understood is that this is one occasion when it’s been finally caught on camera but this is a practice that’s been going on for numerous years, the beatings of the Palestinian prisoners, even young children.
As a matter of fact, just recently, the United Kingdom and the European Union as well made a rounded criticism of Israel for the fact that it keeps young Palestinians in irons in Israeli jails. This is a much larger policy of intimidation, of terrorizing the Palestinian population.
Quite frankly, there’s nothing else that can be said other than the fact that this is an act of absolute barbarism and one that should be denounced everywhere in the world including the Western nations that are complicit and remain complicit in this type of very brutal, dehumanizing problems that Israel has been carrying out for decades now.
Press TV: Another situation that comes to mind is if you can tell us more about the dualistic, discriminatory legal system against the Palestinians in Israel.
Katz: This is where you have the very nature of apartheid. What apartheid is, essentially, you have for example in the occupied territory, Jewish settlers in the settlements are under Israeli civil law. They have the course to Israeli courts to Israeli constitution, etcetera, whereas the Palestinians are under military law within the same region.
Now that is not a supposed apartheid; that is a clear case of apartheid -- a system which is made to oppress an indigenous people, in this case for purposes of basically trying to push them off their land which is something that has been going on for more than 60 years.
The fact that you have these so-called administrative detentions, which basically is simply an excuse, is a way of justifying throwing people into prison without any accusation, without any proof.
Then to look for other people to claim that this is the only democracy in the Middle East, nothing could be farther from the truth. This…administrative detention, of terrorizing the civilian population is proof of the fact that it’s amazing that there isn’t more of an outcry in Western democracy.
2 july 2012
IDF Ranks – Become The Ultimate Virtual Soldier!
Have you ever wanted to join the military and fight to defend Israel? Well, now you can, with IDF Ranks — embedded directly in all IDF social platforms!
IDF Ranks promotes YOU for your activities around IDF-related material. Your every action — commenting, liking, sharing and even just visiting — rewards your efforts, as well as helps spread the truth about the Israeli army all over the world.
OH MY, I’D LIKE TO JOIN!
Fantastic! And it only takes 10 seconds. In fact, you might’ve already noticed IDF Ranks is enabled at the bottom of your screen in this blog. Now that you understand better what it does, you can activate IDF Ranks by clicking on it where it says “Click to join“.
IDF Ranks promotes YOU for your activities around IDF-related material. Your every action — commenting, liking, sharing and even just visiting — rewards your efforts, as well as helps spread the truth about the Israeli army all over the world.
OH MY, I’D LIKE TO JOIN!
Fantastic! And it only takes 10 seconds. In fact, you might’ve already noticed IDF Ranks is enabled at the bottom of your screen in this blog. Now that you understand better what it does, you can activate IDF Ranks by clicking on it where it says “Click to join“.
Attacking Israel Online
Throughout the greater Middle East, opposition to the concept and existence of a Jewish state is an idée fixe for hundreds of millions of Arab and non-Arab Muslims. A hatred of Jewish political sovereignty that frequently dovetails with more traditional anti-Semitism animates café discussions and street protests as surely as it prohibits regional political progress. Yet the strand of anti-Zionism that has lately come to attract the most attention in the West is the one articulated by a tiny minority of left-wing Jews at a handful of websites.
Full-time antagonists of Israel such as M.J. Rosenberg, Max Blumenthal, Philip Weiss, and Peter Beinart have accumulated an influence that vastly exceeds their single-digit numbers. This is in part due to the financial sponsorship of successful and well-established media institutions. Until March 2012, Rosenberg was employed by Media Matters for America (MMfA) at a salary of some $130,000 per annum. Weiss was supported for years by the Nation magazine’s Nation Institute. Peter Beinart’s new Open Zion blog is hosted by the Daily Beast, an online publication jointly owned by the Harman family and the Internet media giant IAC.
But Rosenberg, Weiss, and Beinart take a different view of their place in the media conversation. They believe themselves to be fearless truth-tellers who actively resist a censorious tribal culture that bulldozes any hint of discord. Rosenberg offered a pithy insight into this in an April 2012 opinion piece for the website of Al Jazeera. After claiming that pro-Israel advocacy organizations were hindering efforts to secure a peaceful resolution of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, he concluded with an exhortation. “Being pro-Israel means caring about Israel,” wrote Rosenberg, whose career has been built on the fact that he briefly worked for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee three decades ago. “It does not mean using it as an excuse for power brokering and suppressing dissident voices.”
Dissident voices? Properly understood, the word dissident describes intellectuals and activists operating in oppressive societies. What they do frequently results in imprisonment, torture, and even death. The dissidents of whom Rosenberg speaks so modestly, since they include himself, are not silenced, but rather celebrated, by media establishments ranging from the Huffington Post to the BBC.
The persistent inclusion of these “dissident voices” in discussions of America, Jews, and Israel has proven very useful indeed, since their membership in the tribe is deemed to give them special standing in presenting their indictment of Israel—and, somewhat more subtly, inoculates Gentile critics of the Jewish state against the charge that their attacks on Israel might be anti-Semitic. How can they be if they are merely echoing the arguments made by such passionate, such moral, such fearless, such dissident Jews?
In an Internet age characterized by instant, rolling comment, they have helped to reactivate a set of ideas that many thought had perished with the grubby pamphlets published in the old Soviet Union, screeds that bore titles such as “Zionism: A Tool of Reaction.” Whereas the true dissidents of the Cold War era introduced words such as samizdat into the vocabulary of the West, the ersatz dissidents of the Jewish left have popularized a host of expressions—Judaization, Israel-firster, Zionist apartheid, and so forth—that were once relegated almost entirely to the openly anti-Semitic fringe.
What an accomplishment.
As Rosenberg’s remark makes plain, the common point of departure for online Jewish anti-Zionists is the unaccountable, transcendent power of disparate pro-Israel organizations lumped together under the umbrella term the Israel lobby. The determination of this lobby to muzzle “dissenting” voices inside the Jewish community is the favored theme of writers such as Michael Lerner, the Berkeley-based progressive rabbi and founder of Tikkun magazine, and Richard Silverstein, a Seattle-based blogger with a penchant for seeing Mossad plots behind every Middle East news story. Similarly, the explicitly anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) operates a blog, appropriately entitled Muzzlewatch, that purports to monitor “efforts to stifle open debate about U.S.-Israeli foreign policy.”
Such paranoid theories take their expositors into deep—arguably clinical—eccentricity. In an April 2012 blog entry, Rosenberg opined that the availability of kosher food at a White House reception was just another display of forelock-tugging by an administration that lives in fear of the Israel lobby’s wrath. The post’s title (“Obama: Stop Pandering to the Jewish Right Already”) was meant to be read in the folksy cadence of an offended American Jew. “The same exact impulse that causes the Obamas to blowtorch their ovens to Hassidic standards,” he wrote, “also leads the administration to be in perpetual suck-up mode to Prime Minister Netanyahu on matters like Iran and the Israeli occupation, matters of life and death.”
In addition to being uncommonly powerful, the Israel lobby is supposedly made up of U.S. citizens whose primary loyalty is to Israel, and who will choose the Jewish state over the United States should circumstances demand. It is Rosenberg who is credited with having spread the term Israel-firster in the online columns he wrote in his capacity as a “foreign-policy fellow” at Media Matters. And with the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman asserting, in December 2011, that the standing ovation for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the U.S. Congress “was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby,” it is no wonder that Rosenberg expressed great authorial pride as a result—or that Media Matters might initially have felt great pride that it had come to exert such influence on the most “mainstream” of mainstream commentators on the Middle East.
Almost immediately, however, Jewish groups and pro-Israel commentators charged that the term Israel-firster, as deployed by Rosenberg, was inherently anti-Semitic—and presented indubitable evidence that the term was a favored epithet of neo-Nazi groups. Rosenberg was compelled to announce that he would cease abusing his opponents in this way, and within three months, he and Media Matters parted company. Rosenberg indignantly denied that he had been fired, claiming on the Huffington Post that he made the magnanimous decision “to leave to protect an organization I love from people who, in their single-minded devotion to the Israeli government, will go after anyone and anything who stands in their way.” So much for taking responsibility for making rhetorical common cause with Hitler-lovers.
In any case, his Israel-firster charge is neither clever, nor daring, nor new. It is, rather, a shopworn offense to common decency. The notion that Jewish officials are more loyal to their own kind than to the state or the institutions they serve goes back at least to 1894 and the false conviction of the French army captain Alfred Dreyfus. George Orwell, writing about anti-Semitism in the immediate aftermath of World War II, noted similar sentiments in the grumblings about a “Jewish war” in which the fighting and the dying was principally done by Gentiles. “To publicize the exploits of Jewish soldiers, or even to admit the existence of a considerable Jewish army in the Middle East, rouses hostility in South Africa, the Arab countries, and elsewhere,” Orwell wrote. “It is easier to ignore the whole subject and allow the man in the street to go on thinking that Jews are exceptionally clever at dodging military service.” It is exactly this kind of lazy, conspiracy-laden thinking that informs the Israel-firster smear.
Philip Weiss, editor of the Middle East–focused website Mondoweiss, takes a more personal approach to his anti-Zionism. He writes often about his psychic struggles with his own Jewish identity—not surprising, since what he most hates about himself is also the source of his reputation. Interviewed by the anti-Semitic ex-Israeli writer Gilad Atzmon, Weiss reflected that Jewish identity imparts “a sense of difference, yes, inevitably of elite identity, that’s part of Jewish history and one I struggle with.” He also delights in stoking the notion that he traffics in anti-Semitism. “I can justly be accused of being a conspiracy theorist because I believe in the Israel lobby theory,” he wrote in a recent blog entry. “I quoted seven Jewish writers on this point, including [Harvard Professor Alan] Dershowitz: ‘The recent neoconservative movement in America has also been dominated by Jews.’” The practice of selectively quoting Jewish advocates against themselves is associated most of all with neo-Nazi propaganda outfits such as the website Jew Watch, so Weiss is in exactly the kind of company he deserves.
In 2009, the Web provocateur Max Blumenthal posted a video on YouTube called “Feeling the Hate in Jerusalem.” In it he talks to drunk American Jewish students in downtown Jerusalem and elicits grotesque statements about how much they hate Arabs. On the Huffington Post, Blumenthal went on to defend the stunt as an example of in vino veritas. “The notion that the racist diatribes in my video emerged spontaneously from a beery void is a delusion, but for some, it is a necessary one,” he wrote. “It allows them to erect a psychological barrier against acknowledging the painful consequences of prolonged Zionist indoctrination.”
Blumenthal has a knack for uncovering the influence of Zionism in the most unlikely places. Writing on the Web-only English-language version of the Lebanese newspaper Al Akhbar in November 2011, he noted that the “Israelification of America’s security apparatus, recently unleashed in full force against the Occupy Wall Street Movement, has taken place at every level of law enforcement, and in areas that have yet to be exposed.” It was a fitting observation for the readership of Al Akhbar, which has made a hero of the late Hezbollah terrorist Imad Mughniyeh and whose editor believes that Jews in Israel should return en masse to the more comfortable “capitalist environment” of Europe. In another Al Akhbar piece, Blumenthal asked, “When have Zionists ever let historical nuance get in the way of a campaign to muzzle critics of Israeli policy?”
Compared with such explicit ugliness, Peter Beinart’s blog, Open Zion, seems mild and contemplative—an impression that appears very much to be Beinart’s goal, given the radicalism of his own policy suggestions. He recently proposed that the United States pursue a targeted boycott of Jewish communities in the West Bank. He did so as part of the promotional drive for his latest book, The Crisis of Zionism. Beinart’s account of Israel’s failures and liabilities earned him praise in the Atlantic and the New Yorker for his “courage” in taking on the Israel lobby, which posed such a threat to him and his career that, after the publication of the article from which his book would spring, Beinart reportedly received a courageous advance of several hundred thousand dissenting dollars.
Open Zion, in its name and design, seems intended to herald some supposedly long-neglected flowering of unapologetically diverse opinion on Zionism. There is Beinart himself, supporting a boycott of Jewish businesses, musing endlessly about the pitfalls of Jewish power, along with a host of lesser impersonators who write articles with titles such as “How I Lost My Zionism” and “Can You Be a Zionist If No-One Thinks You Are?” (Answering his own question, the author of this last piece, Jay Michaelson, writes, “I hesitate to claim the label because I don’t want to be associated with those who wear it proudly.”) Then there are the pro-Israel loyalists: the forceful Israeli historian Benny Morris, the Judaism scholar Yehuda Mirsky, the Knesset Member Einat Wilf. One gets the distinct sense that these writers are intended to function as a permanent opposition.
A third category is composed of think-tank analysts and nonprofit advocates who are ostensibly focused on the iniquities of Israeli policy but who willingly deploy the stock-in-trade dogmas of anti-Zionist ideology. Jewish critics of Israel, such as Daniel Levy of the New America Foundation and Lara Friedman of American Friends of Peace Now, play a key role in undermining the influence of Open Zion’s pro-Israel contributors.
Responding to a piece by Morris on Palestinian rejectionism, Levy argued that the real obstacle to a negotiated settlement is the naqba—the Arabic word for “catastrophe,” used by Palestinians and their supporters to describe the creation of Israel—and “the second-class status of Palestinian citizens within the Jewish state.” These words are an uncomplicated reflection of the basic stance of anti-Zionism, which holds that Jewish sovereignty is the diseased heart of the Middle East’s discontents.
Finally, there is the category of Open Zion writers for whom the very existence of Israel is at best an irritant, at worse an offense. Members of this clan include Trita Parsi, the president of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), whose mandate is to encourage an empathetic American engagement with the current Iranian regime, and Yousef Munayyer, a Palestinian activist who pushes the insidious line that Israel is an apartheid state that must yield in favor of a single Palestinian entity between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.
But for all its strenuous posturing about “open” discussion, Open Zion is most notable for its silences. Readers will search the blog in vain for analysis of the recent events that have spread extraordinary discomfort throughout the Jewish world. When Günter Grass, the former Waffen SS recruit who later became one of Germany’s literary celebrities, penned the turgid poem “What Must Be Said,” in which he laments that Holocaust guilt was propelling his country to support an Israeli war against Iran, Open Zion did not deem these verses worthy of even a paragraph. The question of why a man who was personally involved in the slaughter of the Jews felt confident enough to repackage his anti-Semitism as hostility to Israel was left to other outlets to consider—few of which are explicitly concerned with the “Jewish future,” as Open Zion declares itself to be.
Similarly, the website barely mentioned the March 2012 assault by an al-Qaeda gunman upon a Jewish school in Toulouse, France, which resulted in the murders of a rabbi and three small children. Again, there are a number of apposite questions about the Jewish future arising from this atrocity, ranging from the appropriate level of security at Jewish institutions to the denial by Tariq Ramadan, a European Islamist much admired by Western intellectuals, that the gunman was motivated by anti-Semitism. On these and related matters, Open Zion had nothing meaningful to say.
By contrast, it is safe to assume that had a lone Israeli extremist entered a Jerusalem mosque and sprayed worshippers with bullets, the blog would have gone into overdrive. Why? Because the paradigm of Jewish power to which Beinart subscribes does not allow for Jewish vulnerability, only Jewish aggression. Moreover, according to prevailing liberal sensibilities, when Jews do suffer, it is because the iniquities of the state of Israel brought such an outcome upon them. That, perhaps, is why Open Zion has a subject tag that reads “Real Anti-Semitism,” to be employed on those rare occasions when Jews face hatred as a reality, and not as the invention of some unscrupulous AIPAC staffer.
Such willful myopia is not without precedent. Prior to the Holocaust and the Arab war of annihilation against the nascent state of Israel in 1948, Zionism coexisted in an uneasy equilibrium with non-Zionist and anti-Zionist currents among American Jews. A marked distaste for Jewish national aspirations was shared by many liberal, assimilationist Jews. It is this tradition, more than any other, that finds its contemporary resonance in projects such as Open Zion.
In 1885, a gathering of Reform rabbis in Pittsburgh issued a statement on Jewish identity that eventually became known as the “Pittsburgh Platform.” More than a decade before the First Zionist Congress met in Basel, Switzerland, the Pittsburgh rabbis rejected the core philosophical foundations of Zionism: “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore, expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any laws concerning the Jewish state.”
The principles behind the Pittsburgh Platform found organizational expression in the work of the American Council for Judaism (ACJ). Now a shadow of its former self, the ACJ once enjoyed access to the highest levels of the American government. In 1954, a speech on the Middle East delivered in Dayton, Ohio, by then assistant secretary of state Henry Byroade drew heavily on the influence of Rabbi Elmer Berger, the ACJ’s founder, in urging that Jews in Palestine effectively surrender their national ambitions.
Both Berger and his colleague Alfred Lilienthal, a former State Department lawyer, became progressively more shrill in their denunciations of Zionism as the years wore on. Barely remembered now, Lilienthal was something of an innovator. Although Beinart might think it rather novel and provocative to write about the “hoarding” of the Holocaust by Jewish organizations, it was Lilienthal who coined the inelegantly offensive term Holocaustomania as the prime motivator behind what he called “Washington’s Israel-first” Middle East policy. “I sincerely resented the Zionist propaganda which wanted to make my Christian fellow citizens believe that all American Jews, in a fictitious ‘unity,’ desire a political separation of ‘the Jewish people,’” he wrote in a memoir.
Excoriated by their fellow Jews decades before an omnipotent Israel lobby could be fashionably blamed, Berger and Lilienthal would find their most sympathetic audience in the Arab world. In 1978 Lilienthal wrote a tome called The Zionist Connection: What Price Peace? It was published by the firm Dodd Mead. Three years later, Lilienthal was presenting smaller publishing houses with a letter guaranteeing the purchase of 10,000 copies of a paperback version of The Zionist Connection—a letter issued by the interior ministry of the government of Saudi Arabia.
In 1977, Lilienthal had turned up in the Libyan capital, Tripoli, for a conference on “Zionism and racism” organized by EAFORD, a nongovernmental organization financed by the regime of Muammar Gaddafi. “What we today know in the West as anti-Semitism has never existed in the Arab world,” he assured the assembled delegates. In 1987, Lilienthal and Berger were the star attractions at an EAFORD-sponsored symposium in Washington, D.C., on Zionism and Judaism. “Free, responsible, informed political debate about the policies of the Zionist state is impossible,” Berger snarled before his audience.
Might Berger and Lilienthal’s ideological heirs soon find themselves the exclusive darlings of Middle Eastern anti-Semites? There is already some indication fate is moving in this direction. M.J. Rosenberg’s troubles with Media Matters certainly indicate some institutional reticence in the United States with anti-Zionist punditry. Max Blumenthal, in addition to being a frequent contributor to Al Akhbar, was also the subject of a fawning profile on Press TV, an English-language satellite broadcaster financed entirely by the Iranian regime. In receiving this dubious honor, he won the seal of approval from a state that has turned the denial of the Holocaust into an official doctrine.
Mass-movement anti-Zionism will be happy to incorporate Jewish anti-Zionists and march onward. Hatred of Israel is a malleable doctrine of false justice that welcomes all comers and provides for unlikely bedfellows. These days, the burden of proof is increasingly, and perversely, placed on those arguing in Zionism’s behalf. But, ironically, charting both the writings and the career trajectories of devoted anti-Zionists makes a uniquely strong case for the continued existence and protection of the Jewish state.
Full-time antagonists of Israel such as M.J. Rosenberg, Max Blumenthal, Philip Weiss, and Peter Beinart have accumulated an influence that vastly exceeds their single-digit numbers. This is in part due to the financial sponsorship of successful and well-established media institutions. Until March 2012, Rosenberg was employed by Media Matters for America (MMfA) at a salary of some $130,000 per annum. Weiss was supported for years by the Nation magazine’s Nation Institute. Peter Beinart’s new Open Zion blog is hosted by the Daily Beast, an online publication jointly owned by the Harman family and the Internet media giant IAC.
But Rosenberg, Weiss, and Beinart take a different view of their place in the media conversation. They believe themselves to be fearless truth-tellers who actively resist a censorious tribal culture that bulldozes any hint of discord. Rosenberg offered a pithy insight into this in an April 2012 opinion piece for the website of Al Jazeera. After claiming that pro-Israel advocacy organizations were hindering efforts to secure a peaceful resolution of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, he concluded with an exhortation. “Being pro-Israel means caring about Israel,” wrote Rosenberg, whose career has been built on the fact that he briefly worked for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee three decades ago. “It does not mean using it as an excuse for power brokering and suppressing dissident voices.”
Dissident voices? Properly understood, the word dissident describes intellectuals and activists operating in oppressive societies. What they do frequently results in imprisonment, torture, and even death. The dissidents of whom Rosenberg speaks so modestly, since they include himself, are not silenced, but rather celebrated, by media establishments ranging from the Huffington Post to the BBC.
The persistent inclusion of these “dissident voices” in discussions of America, Jews, and Israel has proven very useful indeed, since their membership in the tribe is deemed to give them special standing in presenting their indictment of Israel—and, somewhat more subtly, inoculates Gentile critics of the Jewish state against the charge that their attacks on Israel might be anti-Semitic. How can they be if they are merely echoing the arguments made by such passionate, such moral, such fearless, such dissident Jews?
In an Internet age characterized by instant, rolling comment, they have helped to reactivate a set of ideas that many thought had perished with the grubby pamphlets published in the old Soviet Union, screeds that bore titles such as “Zionism: A Tool of Reaction.” Whereas the true dissidents of the Cold War era introduced words such as samizdat into the vocabulary of the West, the ersatz dissidents of the Jewish left have popularized a host of expressions—Judaization, Israel-firster, Zionist apartheid, and so forth—that were once relegated almost entirely to the openly anti-Semitic fringe.
What an accomplishment.
As Rosenberg’s remark makes plain, the common point of departure for online Jewish anti-Zionists is the unaccountable, transcendent power of disparate pro-Israel organizations lumped together under the umbrella term the Israel lobby. The determination of this lobby to muzzle “dissenting” voices inside the Jewish community is the favored theme of writers such as Michael Lerner, the Berkeley-based progressive rabbi and founder of Tikkun magazine, and Richard Silverstein, a Seattle-based blogger with a penchant for seeing Mossad plots behind every Middle East news story. Similarly, the explicitly anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) operates a blog, appropriately entitled Muzzlewatch, that purports to monitor “efforts to stifle open debate about U.S.-Israeli foreign policy.”
Such paranoid theories take their expositors into deep—arguably clinical—eccentricity. In an April 2012 blog entry, Rosenberg opined that the availability of kosher food at a White House reception was just another display of forelock-tugging by an administration that lives in fear of the Israel lobby’s wrath. The post’s title (“Obama: Stop Pandering to the Jewish Right Already”) was meant to be read in the folksy cadence of an offended American Jew. “The same exact impulse that causes the Obamas to blowtorch their ovens to Hassidic standards,” he wrote, “also leads the administration to be in perpetual suck-up mode to Prime Minister Netanyahu on matters like Iran and the Israeli occupation, matters of life and death.”
In addition to being uncommonly powerful, the Israel lobby is supposedly made up of U.S. citizens whose primary loyalty is to Israel, and who will choose the Jewish state over the United States should circumstances demand. It is Rosenberg who is credited with having spread the term Israel-firster in the online columns he wrote in his capacity as a “foreign-policy fellow” at Media Matters. And with the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman asserting, in December 2011, that the standing ovation for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the U.S. Congress “was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby,” it is no wonder that Rosenberg expressed great authorial pride as a result—or that Media Matters might initially have felt great pride that it had come to exert such influence on the most “mainstream” of mainstream commentators on the Middle East.
Almost immediately, however, Jewish groups and pro-Israel commentators charged that the term Israel-firster, as deployed by Rosenberg, was inherently anti-Semitic—and presented indubitable evidence that the term was a favored epithet of neo-Nazi groups. Rosenberg was compelled to announce that he would cease abusing his opponents in this way, and within three months, he and Media Matters parted company. Rosenberg indignantly denied that he had been fired, claiming on the Huffington Post that he made the magnanimous decision “to leave to protect an organization I love from people who, in their single-minded devotion to the Israeli government, will go after anyone and anything who stands in their way.” So much for taking responsibility for making rhetorical common cause with Hitler-lovers.
In any case, his Israel-firster charge is neither clever, nor daring, nor new. It is, rather, a shopworn offense to common decency. The notion that Jewish officials are more loyal to their own kind than to the state or the institutions they serve goes back at least to 1894 and the false conviction of the French army captain Alfred Dreyfus. George Orwell, writing about anti-Semitism in the immediate aftermath of World War II, noted similar sentiments in the grumblings about a “Jewish war” in which the fighting and the dying was principally done by Gentiles. “To publicize the exploits of Jewish soldiers, or even to admit the existence of a considerable Jewish army in the Middle East, rouses hostility in South Africa, the Arab countries, and elsewhere,” Orwell wrote. “It is easier to ignore the whole subject and allow the man in the street to go on thinking that Jews are exceptionally clever at dodging military service.” It is exactly this kind of lazy, conspiracy-laden thinking that informs the Israel-firster smear.
Philip Weiss, editor of the Middle East–focused website Mondoweiss, takes a more personal approach to his anti-Zionism. He writes often about his psychic struggles with his own Jewish identity—not surprising, since what he most hates about himself is also the source of his reputation. Interviewed by the anti-Semitic ex-Israeli writer Gilad Atzmon, Weiss reflected that Jewish identity imparts “a sense of difference, yes, inevitably of elite identity, that’s part of Jewish history and one I struggle with.” He also delights in stoking the notion that he traffics in anti-Semitism. “I can justly be accused of being a conspiracy theorist because I believe in the Israel lobby theory,” he wrote in a recent blog entry. “I quoted seven Jewish writers on this point, including [Harvard Professor Alan] Dershowitz: ‘The recent neoconservative movement in America has also been dominated by Jews.’” The practice of selectively quoting Jewish advocates against themselves is associated most of all with neo-Nazi propaganda outfits such as the website Jew Watch, so Weiss is in exactly the kind of company he deserves.
In 2009, the Web provocateur Max Blumenthal posted a video on YouTube called “Feeling the Hate in Jerusalem.” In it he talks to drunk American Jewish students in downtown Jerusalem and elicits grotesque statements about how much they hate Arabs. On the Huffington Post, Blumenthal went on to defend the stunt as an example of in vino veritas. “The notion that the racist diatribes in my video emerged spontaneously from a beery void is a delusion, but for some, it is a necessary one,” he wrote. “It allows them to erect a psychological barrier against acknowledging the painful consequences of prolonged Zionist indoctrination.”
Blumenthal has a knack for uncovering the influence of Zionism in the most unlikely places. Writing on the Web-only English-language version of the Lebanese newspaper Al Akhbar in November 2011, he noted that the “Israelification of America’s security apparatus, recently unleashed in full force against the Occupy Wall Street Movement, has taken place at every level of law enforcement, and in areas that have yet to be exposed.” It was a fitting observation for the readership of Al Akhbar, which has made a hero of the late Hezbollah terrorist Imad Mughniyeh and whose editor believes that Jews in Israel should return en masse to the more comfortable “capitalist environment” of Europe. In another Al Akhbar piece, Blumenthal asked, “When have Zionists ever let historical nuance get in the way of a campaign to muzzle critics of Israeli policy?”
Compared with such explicit ugliness, Peter Beinart’s blog, Open Zion, seems mild and contemplative—an impression that appears very much to be Beinart’s goal, given the radicalism of his own policy suggestions. He recently proposed that the United States pursue a targeted boycott of Jewish communities in the West Bank. He did so as part of the promotional drive for his latest book, The Crisis of Zionism. Beinart’s account of Israel’s failures and liabilities earned him praise in the Atlantic and the New Yorker for his “courage” in taking on the Israel lobby, which posed such a threat to him and his career that, after the publication of the article from which his book would spring, Beinart reportedly received a courageous advance of several hundred thousand dissenting dollars.
Open Zion, in its name and design, seems intended to herald some supposedly long-neglected flowering of unapologetically diverse opinion on Zionism. There is Beinart himself, supporting a boycott of Jewish businesses, musing endlessly about the pitfalls of Jewish power, along with a host of lesser impersonators who write articles with titles such as “How I Lost My Zionism” and “Can You Be a Zionist If No-One Thinks You Are?” (Answering his own question, the author of this last piece, Jay Michaelson, writes, “I hesitate to claim the label because I don’t want to be associated with those who wear it proudly.”) Then there are the pro-Israel loyalists: the forceful Israeli historian Benny Morris, the Judaism scholar Yehuda Mirsky, the Knesset Member Einat Wilf. One gets the distinct sense that these writers are intended to function as a permanent opposition.
A third category is composed of think-tank analysts and nonprofit advocates who are ostensibly focused on the iniquities of Israeli policy but who willingly deploy the stock-in-trade dogmas of anti-Zionist ideology. Jewish critics of Israel, such as Daniel Levy of the New America Foundation and Lara Friedman of American Friends of Peace Now, play a key role in undermining the influence of Open Zion’s pro-Israel contributors.
Responding to a piece by Morris on Palestinian rejectionism, Levy argued that the real obstacle to a negotiated settlement is the naqba—the Arabic word for “catastrophe,” used by Palestinians and their supporters to describe the creation of Israel—and “the second-class status of Palestinian citizens within the Jewish state.” These words are an uncomplicated reflection of the basic stance of anti-Zionism, which holds that Jewish sovereignty is the diseased heart of the Middle East’s discontents.
Finally, there is the category of Open Zion writers for whom the very existence of Israel is at best an irritant, at worse an offense. Members of this clan include Trita Parsi, the president of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), whose mandate is to encourage an empathetic American engagement with the current Iranian regime, and Yousef Munayyer, a Palestinian activist who pushes the insidious line that Israel is an apartheid state that must yield in favor of a single Palestinian entity between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.
But for all its strenuous posturing about “open” discussion, Open Zion is most notable for its silences. Readers will search the blog in vain for analysis of the recent events that have spread extraordinary discomfort throughout the Jewish world. When Günter Grass, the former Waffen SS recruit who later became one of Germany’s literary celebrities, penned the turgid poem “What Must Be Said,” in which he laments that Holocaust guilt was propelling his country to support an Israeli war against Iran, Open Zion did not deem these verses worthy of even a paragraph. The question of why a man who was personally involved in the slaughter of the Jews felt confident enough to repackage his anti-Semitism as hostility to Israel was left to other outlets to consider—few of which are explicitly concerned with the “Jewish future,” as Open Zion declares itself to be.
Similarly, the website barely mentioned the March 2012 assault by an al-Qaeda gunman upon a Jewish school in Toulouse, France, which resulted in the murders of a rabbi and three small children. Again, there are a number of apposite questions about the Jewish future arising from this atrocity, ranging from the appropriate level of security at Jewish institutions to the denial by Tariq Ramadan, a European Islamist much admired by Western intellectuals, that the gunman was motivated by anti-Semitism. On these and related matters, Open Zion had nothing meaningful to say.
By contrast, it is safe to assume that had a lone Israeli extremist entered a Jerusalem mosque and sprayed worshippers with bullets, the blog would have gone into overdrive. Why? Because the paradigm of Jewish power to which Beinart subscribes does not allow for Jewish vulnerability, only Jewish aggression. Moreover, according to prevailing liberal sensibilities, when Jews do suffer, it is because the iniquities of the state of Israel brought such an outcome upon them. That, perhaps, is why Open Zion has a subject tag that reads “Real Anti-Semitism,” to be employed on those rare occasions when Jews face hatred as a reality, and not as the invention of some unscrupulous AIPAC staffer.
Such willful myopia is not without precedent. Prior to the Holocaust and the Arab war of annihilation against the nascent state of Israel in 1948, Zionism coexisted in an uneasy equilibrium with non-Zionist and anti-Zionist currents among American Jews. A marked distaste for Jewish national aspirations was shared by many liberal, assimilationist Jews. It is this tradition, more than any other, that finds its contemporary resonance in projects such as Open Zion.
In 1885, a gathering of Reform rabbis in Pittsburgh issued a statement on Jewish identity that eventually became known as the “Pittsburgh Platform.” More than a decade before the First Zionist Congress met in Basel, Switzerland, the Pittsburgh rabbis rejected the core philosophical foundations of Zionism: “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore, expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any laws concerning the Jewish state.”
The principles behind the Pittsburgh Platform found organizational expression in the work of the American Council for Judaism (ACJ). Now a shadow of its former self, the ACJ once enjoyed access to the highest levels of the American government. In 1954, a speech on the Middle East delivered in Dayton, Ohio, by then assistant secretary of state Henry Byroade drew heavily on the influence of Rabbi Elmer Berger, the ACJ’s founder, in urging that Jews in Palestine effectively surrender their national ambitions.
Both Berger and his colleague Alfred Lilienthal, a former State Department lawyer, became progressively more shrill in their denunciations of Zionism as the years wore on. Barely remembered now, Lilienthal was something of an innovator. Although Beinart might think it rather novel and provocative to write about the “hoarding” of the Holocaust by Jewish organizations, it was Lilienthal who coined the inelegantly offensive term Holocaustomania as the prime motivator behind what he called “Washington’s Israel-first” Middle East policy. “I sincerely resented the Zionist propaganda which wanted to make my Christian fellow citizens believe that all American Jews, in a fictitious ‘unity,’ desire a political separation of ‘the Jewish people,’” he wrote in a memoir.
Excoriated by their fellow Jews decades before an omnipotent Israel lobby could be fashionably blamed, Berger and Lilienthal would find their most sympathetic audience in the Arab world. In 1978 Lilienthal wrote a tome called The Zionist Connection: What Price Peace? It was published by the firm Dodd Mead. Three years later, Lilienthal was presenting smaller publishing houses with a letter guaranteeing the purchase of 10,000 copies of a paperback version of The Zionist Connection—a letter issued by the interior ministry of the government of Saudi Arabia.
In 1977, Lilienthal had turned up in the Libyan capital, Tripoli, for a conference on “Zionism and racism” organized by EAFORD, a nongovernmental organization financed by the regime of Muammar Gaddafi. “What we today know in the West as anti-Semitism has never existed in the Arab world,” he assured the assembled delegates. In 1987, Lilienthal and Berger were the star attractions at an EAFORD-sponsored symposium in Washington, D.C., on Zionism and Judaism. “Free, responsible, informed political debate about the policies of the Zionist state is impossible,” Berger snarled before his audience.
Might Berger and Lilienthal’s ideological heirs soon find themselves the exclusive darlings of Middle Eastern anti-Semites? There is already some indication fate is moving in this direction. M.J. Rosenberg’s troubles with Media Matters certainly indicate some institutional reticence in the United States with anti-Zionist punditry. Max Blumenthal, in addition to being a frequent contributor to Al Akhbar, was also the subject of a fawning profile on Press TV, an English-language satellite broadcaster financed entirely by the Iranian regime. In receiving this dubious honor, he won the seal of approval from a state that has turned the denial of the Holocaust into an official doctrine.
Mass-movement anti-Zionism will be happy to incorporate Jewish anti-Zionists and march onward. Hatred of Israel is a malleable doctrine of false justice that welcomes all comers and provides for unlikely bedfellows. These days, the burden of proof is increasingly, and perversely, placed on those arguing in Zionism’s behalf. But, ironically, charting both the writings and the career trajectories of devoted anti-Zionists makes a uniquely strong case for the continued existence and protection of the Jewish state.
28 june 2012
Palestinians and Twitter: 15 Tips to Empower our Advocacy
By Maath Musleh
Today, being an activist is “cool.” A bully is not the “cool” person in your neighborhood anymore. It is even easier to obtain the title of an activist. A person who is very active on social media is a social media activist. If one actively discusses women’s issues, he/she is a feminist (women’s rights activist). The title of “activist” in Palestine is like the university degrees from Eastern Europe in the 70’s & 80’s that could be bought cheap. As those degrees do not help heal the sick or build a sustainable tower, having the “activist” title does not make one a great advocate of the cause.
A lot of people in Palestine explicitly and harshly criticize online activists. The main argument is that we need people on the ground not online. This criticism is mostly right when talking about Facebook activists and mostly wrong when talking about Twitter activists. Although the Palestinian community on Twitter is relatively small, it encompasses a lot of the field activists in a way that makes it easier to locate and network (in contrast to Facebook). Facebook users get thousands of followers by posting “sexy” photos, silly jokes and spamming walls. Needless to say, some Facebook pages are serious and do a great job in advocacy, but they are the exception to the rule. On Twitter, those with most followers are those who report live from the field or produce original content. In fact, Twitter users lose followers when they spam timelines with useless tweets.
For Palestinians, social media is not only important for live reports, but it is also essential to give Palestinians a voice while their voices are hijacked by the Palestinian politicians. It is also important to connect Palestinians in exile and the homeland. That is why I find myself convincing my comrades to join Twitter at a time when many criticize online “activism.” Among Palestinians the word “activist” has become a sensitive word. A lot try to distance oneself from this word, but let me break it to you: “activist” is not a recently created word. There is no reason to become sensitive about it; it is merely a common noun.
ac·tiv·ist [ak-tuh-vist]
noun 1. “an especially active, vigorous advocate of a cause, especially a political cause.”
It is true that sometimes we get over our heads in our online activities. Sometimes we get excited about trending or other advocacy methods without giving a thought about our goal. That is all fixable. The pro-Palestine presence is stronger on Twitter than the pro-Zionist presence, but we still have a long way to go. The number of Palestinians with over 10,000 followers does not exceed 20. We need to empower each other and have a stronger presence to advocate for our cause more efficiently and push forward our ideas.
Working as a social media specialist for the best part of my short career, I thought of sharing 15 tips for Palestinians to keep in mind when using Twitter as an advocacy tool to help make their tweets efficient and empower their existence on twitter. These tips are also based on my personal observation of Palestinians on Twitter.
1 Spamming: twitter is not a chatting tool. If you want to chat with someone use the Direct Messaging functionality (DM). People will unfollow you if you spam their Timeline. It is alright to reply to people and mention them. If you sense that the chitchat will be long, just take it off the public timeline.
2 Reporting Live: reporting from live events, especially tense ones, is the number one reason for boosting ones followership.
3 Originality: producing original content will boost your followership whether be it photos, videos or articles written by you.
4 Multimedia: posting photos and videos boosts the chances of retweets (RT) and thus boosts your chances of receiving more followers.
5 Verifying Photos: Posting photos of live events and Israeli attacks is essential but also critical. Posting old photos as if they were recent will make you lose credibility and thus followers. Before posting a photo verify it by using the google images search tool. Look up the photo and see where it appeared on the net before.
6 Creativity: Be creative when you post photos, videos or articles. If you tweet an article, do not merely copy-paste the title if the title is not catchy, find a line in the article that is catchier and use it. If you tweet a photo or video, be descriptive and creative in your tweet.
e.g.Wrong: From the demonstration in NabiSaleh
Right: Raining Gas in #NabiSaleh
7 Mention tweeps: mention other tweeps when you tweet their photos, videos or articles. This encourages others to mention you and retweet you and follow you.
8 Hash tags: use hash tags wisely. Too many hash tags in a tweets weakens it. Locate the one keyword in your tweet. If you must, do not exceed three hash tags per tweet.
9 Cursing: using bad language even when are angry or cursing at the occupation does not make the argument any stronger. On the contrary you drive away people especially those who follow to learn more and still newbies at following the cause and trying to know more. Revolution is about ethics first and foremost. If you have an ethical and just cause, you will find it unnecessary to use bad language since your hands will be full with facts, numbers and arguments to use. You shouldn’t have the time to figure out the dirtiest word in the language you speak to describe your enemy.
10 Mention sources: If you copy tweets or tweet pictures it is essential to mention the source if it was not obvious. Mention Twitter users whom you obtained the information from. This does not make your tweet any less important. When you mention people, people mention you as well. When you steal from people’s timelines, they become reluctant to RT or mention you.
11 Hasbara spams: if you get mentioned by hasbara trolls there is no need to open an argument with them. Most of the time their purpose is to drag you to their field and use you to promote their ideas. Block them and move forward. This way you exclude them from the Twitter community rather than make them an annoying part of it.
12 Respect: it is very important to show respect to people’s opinions even when you totally disagree. Do not ridicule their opinions or use provocative language. Pick words wisely. Otherwise you will end up only with followers who totally agree with you. That makes your presence on Twitter useless as you will lose the power to influence those who disagree with you.
13 Following spam: do not follow people with the expectation of a follow-back. It is not a give-and-take procedure. You follow people because you are interested in following their tweets on a daily basis, and people follow you for the same reason. It is okay to follow people who do not follow you back. There is no need to feel offended that someone is not following you back.
14 Trending: a trending campaign should have a specific purpose. Trending campaigns are used to bring attention to a forgotten cause. It is not helpful to just have the hashtag in the top trends. The content within the tweets is more important. You want people who find the hashtag and attempt to explore about it to learn useful information that will develop interest rather than to find meaningless but sentimental words.
15 Terms: do not use the Israeli-given occupation terms, even if those are the terms most widely known.
e.g. If you report on a rocket falling from Gaza on a settlement research the name of the Palestinian ethnically-cleansed village the settlement was built upon. Use the name of the original village, and put the name of the settlement in quotations.
e.g. Do not adapt your tweets to ‘political realities’. The land between the River and the Sea is Palestine. In the Palestinian political reality the term West Bank does not exist. To be more accurate it used to be a reference to all the land of Palestine West of Jordan’s river. If you must, you can say “occupied in 1967” this is a historic fact and is fine.
Today, being an activist is “cool.” A bully is not the “cool” person in your neighborhood anymore. It is even easier to obtain the title of an activist. A person who is very active on social media is a social media activist. If one actively discusses women’s issues, he/she is a feminist (women’s rights activist). The title of “activist” in Palestine is like the university degrees from Eastern Europe in the 70’s & 80’s that could be bought cheap. As those degrees do not help heal the sick or build a sustainable tower, having the “activist” title does not make one a great advocate of the cause.
A lot of people in Palestine explicitly and harshly criticize online activists. The main argument is that we need people on the ground not online. This criticism is mostly right when talking about Facebook activists and mostly wrong when talking about Twitter activists. Although the Palestinian community on Twitter is relatively small, it encompasses a lot of the field activists in a way that makes it easier to locate and network (in contrast to Facebook). Facebook users get thousands of followers by posting “sexy” photos, silly jokes and spamming walls. Needless to say, some Facebook pages are serious and do a great job in advocacy, but they are the exception to the rule. On Twitter, those with most followers are those who report live from the field or produce original content. In fact, Twitter users lose followers when they spam timelines with useless tweets.
For Palestinians, social media is not only important for live reports, but it is also essential to give Palestinians a voice while their voices are hijacked by the Palestinian politicians. It is also important to connect Palestinians in exile and the homeland. That is why I find myself convincing my comrades to join Twitter at a time when many criticize online “activism.” Among Palestinians the word “activist” has become a sensitive word. A lot try to distance oneself from this word, but let me break it to you: “activist” is not a recently created word. There is no reason to become sensitive about it; it is merely a common noun.
ac·tiv·ist [ak-tuh-vist]
noun 1. “an especially active, vigorous advocate of a cause, especially a political cause.”
It is true that sometimes we get over our heads in our online activities. Sometimes we get excited about trending or other advocacy methods without giving a thought about our goal. That is all fixable. The pro-Palestine presence is stronger on Twitter than the pro-Zionist presence, but we still have a long way to go. The number of Palestinians with over 10,000 followers does not exceed 20. We need to empower each other and have a stronger presence to advocate for our cause more efficiently and push forward our ideas.
Working as a social media specialist for the best part of my short career, I thought of sharing 15 tips for Palestinians to keep in mind when using Twitter as an advocacy tool to help make their tweets efficient and empower their existence on twitter. These tips are also based on my personal observation of Palestinians on Twitter.
1 Spamming: twitter is not a chatting tool. If you want to chat with someone use the Direct Messaging functionality (DM). People will unfollow you if you spam their Timeline. It is alright to reply to people and mention them. If you sense that the chitchat will be long, just take it off the public timeline.
2 Reporting Live: reporting from live events, especially tense ones, is the number one reason for boosting ones followership.
3 Originality: producing original content will boost your followership whether be it photos, videos or articles written by you.
4 Multimedia: posting photos and videos boosts the chances of retweets (RT) and thus boosts your chances of receiving more followers.
5 Verifying Photos: Posting photos of live events and Israeli attacks is essential but also critical. Posting old photos as if they were recent will make you lose credibility and thus followers. Before posting a photo verify it by using the google images search tool. Look up the photo and see where it appeared on the net before.
6 Creativity: Be creative when you post photos, videos or articles. If you tweet an article, do not merely copy-paste the title if the title is not catchy, find a line in the article that is catchier and use it. If you tweet a photo or video, be descriptive and creative in your tweet.
e.g.Wrong: From the demonstration in NabiSaleh
Right: Raining Gas in #NabiSaleh
7 Mention tweeps: mention other tweeps when you tweet their photos, videos or articles. This encourages others to mention you and retweet you and follow you.
8 Hash tags: use hash tags wisely. Too many hash tags in a tweets weakens it. Locate the one keyword in your tweet. If you must, do not exceed three hash tags per tweet.
9 Cursing: using bad language even when are angry or cursing at the occupation does not make the argument any stronger. On the contrary you drive away people especially those who follow to learn more and still newbies at following the cause and trying to know more. Revolution is about ethics first and foremost. If you have an ethical and just cause, you will find it unnecessary to use bad language since your hands will be full with facts, numbers and arguments to use. You shouldn’t have the time to figure out the dirtiest word in the language you speak to describe your enemy.
10 Mention sources: If you copy tweets or tweet pictures it is essential to mention the source if it was not obvious. Mention Twitter users whom you obtained the information from. This does not make your tweet any less important. When you mention people, people mention you as well. When you steal from people’s timelines, they become reluctant to RT or mention you.
11 Hasbara spams: if you get mentioned by hasbara trolls there is no need to open an argument with them. Most of the time their purpose is to drag you to their field and use you to promote their ideas. Block them and move forward. This way you exclude them from the Twitter community rather than make them an annoying part of it.
12 Respect: it is very important to show respect to people’s opinions even when you totally disagree. Do not ridicule their opinions or use provocative language. Pick words wisely. Otherwise you will end up only with followers who totally agree with you. That makes your presence on Twitter useless as you will lose the power to influence those who disagree with you.
13 Following spam: do not follow people with the expectation of a follow-back. It is not a give-and-take procedure. You follow people because you are interested in following their tweets on a daily basis, and people follow you for the same reason. It is okay to follow people who do not follow you back. There is no need to feel offended that someone is not following you back.
14 Trending: a trending campaign should have a specific purpose. Trending campaigns are used to bring attention to a forgotten cause. It is not helpful to just have the hashtag in the top trends. The content within the tweets is more important. You want people who find the hashtag and attempt to explore about it to learn useful information that will develop interest rather than to find meaningless but sentimental words.
15 Terms: do not use the Israeli-given occupation terms, even if those are the terms most widely known.
e.g. If you report on a rocket falling from Gaza on a settlement research the name of the Palestinian ethnically-cleansed village the settlement was built upon. Use the name of the original village, and put the name of the settlement in quotations.
e.g. Do not adapt your tweets to ‘political realities’. The land between the River and the Sea is Palestine. In the Palestinian political reality the term West Bank does not exist. To be more accurate it used to be a reference to all the land of Palestine West of Jordan’s river. If you must, you can say “occupied in 1967” this is a historic fact and is fine.
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Israel making false allegations against Palestinian youths
Amir and Mohammad are two brothers who come from a small town called Kufor Kana, near the city of Nazareth. Both live with considerable disabilities that keeps them home and in constant need of assistance. According to their family, Amir and Mohammad would rarely venture out of the house as a result of their disabilities. So the two brothers would spend most of their time online. But Little did they know that they would be arrested by the Israeli police in early December of last year. The Israeli police claim the two brothers are a security threat. In an apparent case of entrapment the two young men were detained on allegations of threatening public security. Israeli Police claim the alleged plot was weaved on the social networks. Much of the details and circumstances surrounding the case remain vague and the court has imposed a gag order on what goes on behind closed sessions. |
But what is being said and alleged is that the two young men were involved in online discussions with an enemy. What is also being said that the two brothers were apparently approached online by a character posing to be from an Islamic organization that has an anti Israel agenda. This character remains a mystery till today and is suspected of baiting the two brothers into consenting to carry out a certain action against Israel.
The defense lawyer confirms the speculation on the nature of this interesting case.
The case appears to be entirely built on online discussions.
Despite their poor health and constant need of medical attention the court was reluctant to release Amir and Mohammad. The defense says the Police wants to demonstrate to Palestinians inside Israel that they're being watched and what is said online would be taken seriously.
The defense lawyer confirms the speculation on the nature of this interesting case.
The case appears to be entirely built on online discussions.
Despite their poor health and constant need of medical attention the court was reluctant to release Amir and Mohammad. The defense says the Police wants to demonstrate to Palestinians inside Israel that they're being watched and what is said online would be taken seriously.
23 june 2012
Jerusalem Arab Libraries Get Together Online
European Union Representative to the Palestinian Territory John Gatt-Rutter launched on Wednesday the Arabic Manuscripts Digital Library of Jerusalem at the Khalidi Library in the Old City of Jerusalem, according to a press release.
The launch, made possible by the Manumed project within the framework of the Euromed Heritage 4 programme, came less than a year after the first meeting was held to discuss this on-line library. Within few months, the Jerusalem libraries were able to get together and to develop a single digital space to share and expose their collections.
The partners of the Arabic Manuscripts Digital Library of Jerusalem are the Khalidi Library, the Budeiri Library, the Al-Aqsa Library, the Ansari Library and the Waqf Restoration Center.
In few weeks, thanks to a simple internet connection, this on-line library will be able to offer a free-of- charge, multilingual access to dozens of thousands of images, said the press release.
The libraries will also work together within a scientific committee and will be encouraged to develop common projects in the field of the preservation and revitalization of cultural heritage.
The launch, made possible by the Manumed project within the framework of the Euromed Heritage 4 programme, came less than a year after the first meeting was held to discuss this on-line library. Within few months, the Jerusalem libraries were able to get together and to develop a single digital space to share and expose their collections.
The partners of the Arabic Manuscripts Digital Library of Jerusalem are the Khalidi Library, the Budeiri Library, the Al-Aqsa Library, the Ansari Library and the Waqf Restoration Center.
In few weeks, thanks to a simple internet connection, this on-line library will be able to offer a free-of- charge, multilingual access to dozens of thousands of images, said the press release.
The libraries will also work together within a scientific committee and will be encouraged to develop common projects in the field of the preservation and revitalization of cultural heritage.
22 june 2012
Beyond Compromise: unifying the Palestinian voice
So, what exactly is the news? A new online web project? They come and go, don't they? This is what might be going through your mind, if you were told that a new Palestinian web project has been launched.
For a number of reasons, however, you may be quite wrong if you meet this new web endeavor with skepticism. There are a few things that make this project fundamentally different. Consider this an invitation to explore its unique features, and you may well end up reaching the same conclusion as the Musical Intifada: this is an amazing and promising project that has the potential to become one of the most important online outlets of a united Palestinian voice.
Unity
Even if you have only browsed the website for a few minutes, one thing becomes really clear: Beyond Compromise presents the Palestinians as one people, wherever in the world they may be. It's title and subtitle ('Resistance Until Liberation & Return') leave no room for doubt: this is a beacon of online resistance, not some cosy coffee corner on the world wide web.
Defying the tireless efforts of Zionism to fragment the Palestinian people into as many subgroups and factions as possible, this website seems to be determined to preserve their unity by showing that Palestinians are united by their common ancestry, vision and aims, while leaving enough room for ideological diversity.
Shattering the Oslo-induced idea of Palestine consisting of a bunch of fragmented swathes of land in the West Bank and Gaza, this website provides space for Palestinians from the 1948- occupied territories, and from anywhere in the worldwide diaspora.
Interactivity
Despite its impressive cast of founders (see 'About Us') Beyond Compromise opens its doors to all Palestinians, whether they are high-profile 'tweeps', bloggers or publicists, or ordinary people who have an opinion to share, and possess the abilities to express it.
As you can see under 'Submissions', their policy however clearly shuns factionalism. It is obvious that the founders of this unique web project wish to make a clear statement against the divisive influence of political organizations: 'Beyond Compromise will not publish pieces that support regimes and political factions'.
Founders
Aren't you impressed yet? Well, you will be if you click on the 'About Us' tab. You will see who the people are who initiated this project, and if you are in any way familiar with social media activism for the Palestinian cause, you will recognize the names of some of the most serious web activists that Palestine has to offer.
Adam Akkad, Yasir Tineh, Nour Salman, Nadine Liddawi, Deema Alsaafin, Maath Musleh and Nader Elkhuzundar are all young people who have proven their dedication, skills and impact through years of activism on and off the internet. You can rest assured that their extensive experience in social media activism will help this project make an impact on Twitter, Facebook, and any other venue on the world wide web. They are people who are knowledgeable, refined and, perhaps more than anything, stubbornly Palestinian.
Palestine Speaks
Last but not least, this is another thing that raises the spirits of all those who genuinely support the Palestinians in their struggle: finally there is a comprehensive, well thought-out online project that puts a clear emphasis on the fact that the main representatives of the struggle must be the Palestinians themselves. All too often, we have been seeing a preference among international media and peace activist organizations for the mouths and pens of non-Palestinian writers and speakers - which is fine until it results in creating the baseless impression that Palestinians are incapable of representing their own struggle.
Palestinian Spring
When I first stumbled upon Beyond Compromise, I was truly enthused and psyched. Now that I have given it some more thought, I am even more confident that this project has a potential for durability, quality, impact, and for creating a new wave and style of Palestinian activism that can help inspire all Palestinians, inside and outside of the homeland. This, dear readers, is a truly budding online 'Palestinian Spring', if I ever saw one.
Make sure you add it to your bookmarks, and visit regularly - or better yet, contribute with some empowering submission that emanates straight from your Palestinian heart and soul. And if you are not Palestinian yourself, start looking at Beyond Compromise to hear the voices of our struggling people, and show your true solidarity by giving them your full support.
Resistance Until Liberation and Return! Yes, indeed!
For a number of reasons, however, you may be quite wrong if you meet this new web endeavor with skepticism. There are a few things that make this project fundamentally different. Consider this an invitation to explore its unique features, and you may well end up reaching the same conclusion as the Musical Intifada: this is an amazing and promising project that has the potential to become one of the most important online outlets of a united Palestinian voice.
Unity
Even if you have only browsed the website for a few minutes, one thing becomes really clear: Beyond Compromise presents the Palestinians as one people, wherever in the world they may be. It's title and subtitle ('Resistance Until Liberation & Return') leave no room for doubt: this is a beacon of online resistance, not some cosy coffee corner on the world wide web.
Defying the tireless efforts of Zionism to fragment the Palestinian people into as many subgroups and factions as possible, this website seems to be determined to preserve their unity by showing that Palestinians are united by their common ancestry, vision and aims, while leaving enough room for ideological diversity.
Shattering the Oslo-induced idea of Palestine consisting of a bunch of fragmented swathes of land in the West Bank and Gaza, this website provides space for Palestinians from the 1948- occupied territories, and from anywhere in the worldwide diaspora.
Interactivity
Despite its impressive cast of founders (see 'About Us') Beyond Compromise opens its doors to all Palestinians, whether they are high-profile 'tweeps', bloggers or publicists, or ordinary people who have an opinion to share, and possess the abilities to express it.
As you can see under 'Submissions', their policy however clearly shuns factionalism. It is obvious that the founders of this unique web project wish to make a clear statement against the divisive influence of political organizations: 'Beyond Compromise will not publish pieces that support regimes and political factions'.
Founders
Aren't you impressed yet? Well, you will be if you click on the 'About Us' tab. You will see who the people are who initiated this project, and if you are in any way familiar with social media activism for the Palestinian cause, you will recognize the names of some of the most serious web activists that Palestine has to offer.
Adam Akkad, Yasir Tineh, Nour Salman, Nadine Liddawi, Deema Alsaafin, Maath Musleh and Nader Elkhuzundar are all young people who have proven their dedication, skills and impact through years of activism on and off the internet. You can rest assured that their extensive experience in social media activism will help this project make an impact on Twitter, Facebook, and any other venue on the world wide web. They are people who are knowledgeable, refined and, perhaps more than anything, stubbornly Palestinian.
Palestine Speaks
Last but not least, this is another thing that raises the spirits of all those who genuinely support the Palestinians in their struggle: finally there is a comprehensive, well thought-out online project that puts a clear emphasis on the fact that the main representatives of the struggle must be the Palestinians themselves. All too often, we have been seeing a preference among international media and peace activist organizations for the mouths and pens of non-Palestinian writers and speakers - which is fine until it results in creating the baseless impression that Palestinians are incapable of representing their own struggle.
Palestinian Spring
When I first stumbled upon Beyond Compromise, I was truly enthused and psyched. Now that I have given it some more thought, I am even more confident that this project has a potential for durability, quality, impact, and for creating a new wave and style of Palestinian activism that can help inspire all Palestinians, inside and outside of the homeland. This, dear readers, is a truly budding online 'Palestinian Spring', if I ever saw one.
Make sure you add it to your bookmarks, and visit regularly - or better yet, contribute with some empowering submission that emanates straight from your Palestinian heart and soul. And if you are not Palestinian yourself, start looking at Beyond Compromise to hear the voices of our struggling people, and show your true solidarity by giving them your full support.
Resistance Until Liberation and Return! Yes, indeed!
