Gaza war has moved to social media

As a tough ceasefire takes hold in the latest Israeli-Palestinian clash, the battleground has shifted to the internet. Online hatred, harassment and coordination of physical violence erupted on social media. On both sides, they are trying to control the flow of information to gain followers for their cause. And all this especially fuels the violence between Israeli citizens themselves in towns and integrated neighborhoods where Arabs and Jews coexist. A very dangerous “game” involving veritable armies of hackers and bloggers as well as political figures from all over the Middle East, including the son of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

One of the main themes of this “Digital war” they are the evictions of Palestinians living in houses claimed by Jews in Sheikh Jarrah, the traditional Arab quarter of Jerusalem. A video recorded by a cell phone there was one of the fuses that sparked the conflict which ended in rocket fire by Hamas militiamen and the massive bombardment by Israeli air force in Gaza. The eleven days of fighting left 248 Palestinians dead, including 67 boys, and 13 Israelis, including 2 other children. The video shows a young Palestinian woman from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood shouting in English angry at a Jew: “You are robbing my house!” “If I don’t steal it, someone else will steal it,” he replies.

The cell phone joined a slew of pro-Palestinian voices, memes and videos on social media that contributed to what decades of Arab protests, boycott of Israel and periodic violence had failed: pushing the Palestinian cause, almost left for dead a few months ago, to put it back on the international agenda. But in reality, in the networks, the positions of the extremist Islamic group Hamas, which dominates the Gaza Strip, are mixed and confused with the more moderate ones which come from the Palestinian Authority, which reigns in the West Bank. Hamas activists in the networks, backed by Iranian and Lebanese hackers, are tasked with using a long-awaited demand for the realization of the Palestinian state for promote the destruction of Israel.

Palestinian activists say they intend to wrest control of the narrative from the media, which they say suppressed their point of view and wrongly equated Israel’s suffering with that of its occupied territories. They refer to Israeli policies as “The colonization of Palestine”, describe their discrimination against Palestinians as an apartheid regime and qualify the plan to expel Palestinian families from Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood as an “expulsion” and are part of an ethnic cleansing campaign.

On the Israeli side, tensions have been exacerbated by influential right-wing figures such as Yair Netanyahu, the prime minister’s son. With just over 130,000 followers on Twitter, a Telegram channel to which he has added 1,500 subscribers in the past two weeks, and a popular podcast, he has taken on a role in Israel similar to that played by Trump’s son Donald Jr. ., in the USA: unite your father’s online supporters and spread hatred against your opponents.

After the Israeli air force bombed a 12-story building in Gaza which the IDF said contained Hamas military intelligence resources“Destroying the offices of the AP agency and the Al Jazeera news network (which questioned the version), Yair Netanyahu has stepped up his attacks on the media. On May 19, he tweeted a cartoon showing a crowd of people gathered around a water well, including a man holding a rocket launcher. “Sheila works with Al Jazeera and I work with The Associated Press,” the woman said to the man with the rocket launcher. “And you?” Yair Netanyahu also continuously retweets posts from popular American right-wing influencers, such as Ben Shapiro, Dinesh D’Souza and Andy Ngo, and outlets such as Breitbart and The Federalist. And on the same day that the press building in Gaza was bombed, Yair tweeted a call for a protest outside the home of media official Avi Weiss. He posted an ad on Twitter and Facebook saying: “No more anti-Zionist media brainwashing.”

Yair Netanyahu uses his social media platform to provide an independent voice to millions of conservatives in Israel that they are marginalized by the Israeli establishment media and that they are very biased against the right, ”a spokesperson for the prime minister told BuzzFeed News.

From the sidewalk opposite, a message written in Arabic and sent to a WhatsApp group of more than 200 members, warned that Israeli soldiers were preparing to invade the Gaza Strip. “The invasion is coming. There will be a massacre ”, says the text which urged people to pray for their families. The post was deemed good and several of the people who received it amplified it on Twitter. It had been posted by Palestinians from Gaza even to cause confusion, but ended up being a boomerang. Many families of the two million inhabitants of this territory panicked and ran to hide in makeshift shelters. Videos were posted on Arabic-language news sites showing religious Jews tearing their robes as a sign of devotion. The clips were cited as evidence that the Jews faked their own wounds in the fighting in Jerusalem. It was wrong. The video was uploaded to Facebook earlier this year, four months before the conflict. Dozens of warnings of the imminence attacks by “Jewish hordes” against Israeli Arabs who had no basis.

Two independent Israeli media monitoring organizations, FakeReporter y Democratic Bloc, have been working since the start of this latest confrontation in Gaza to try to stop the fake news that is spreading on the networks and that ends up provoking more violence. “Right now, our mission is to save lives”, Achiya Schatz said in an interview broadcast by EuroNews. “During the two weeks of the conflict and the days that followed, we observed widespread hate speech which translated into violence in the streets. We are monitoring nearly 100 WhatsApp and Telegram channels, in Hebrew and Arabic, to try to prevent the massive spread of this fake news ”. And he clarified that “the ground was prepared for this type of violence, because I believe that the trend towards racism in Israel has been on the rise for years and has its deeply rooted counterpart among the most radicalized Palestinians ”, Said Schatz.

On May 12, in Bat Yam, a coastal town south of Tel Aviv, a mob attacked a man. It was broadcast live on public television and Telegram channels. The victim was on his way to spend the afternoon on the beach when a man leaned out of his car window as he stopped in traffic and asked him if he was Arab. When he said yes, other drivers got out of the cars and passers-by and started beating him. Several others were screaming and filming with their cell phones. He was left with multiple injuries and had to be treated in a hospital. When a reporter from Israel’s Channel 12 TV asked this father of four how he felt, he replied, “What am I going to feel? To hate Why am I to blame? What have I done to deserve this? Is it my fault that I was born Arab?“.

Ori Kol, co-founder of FakeReporter, monitored the situation and managed to neutralize several posts on the networks in which they showed what had happened and called for more attacks like the one against the Arabs in Bat Yam . “I invite you to join in a massive fight against the Arabs that will take place today at 6:00 pm on the Bat Yam waterfront. Bring the appropriate equipment, knives, swords, guns, stones, wooden planks, whatever you haveOne of them said. And as always, the violence also turns against the messenger. According to Jerusalem Post, four journalists, including one from the public broadcaster that broadcast the Bat Yam riots, were attacked while covering the events. Many more have received direct and online threats. “When we’re done fucking the Arabs, we’ll go fuck the media,” said a message in a Telegram conversation. Others called for the destruction of the studios and called Channel 12 “Al Jazeera in Hebrew”, a term popularized by Yair Netanyahu that implies sympathy for Hamas.

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