Middle East Report Online: Another War Zone: Social Media in the Isra... http://www.merip.org/mero/interventions/steinINT.html Another War Zone: Social Media in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Adi Kuntsman and Rebecca L. Stein September 2010 Search MERIP (Adi Kuntsman is Leverhulme Research Fellow at the Research Institute for Cosmopolitan Cultures of the University of Manchester. Rebecca L. Stein is associate professor of cultural anthropology at Duke University.) Middle East Report Online Subject Index In late May Afghanistan and 2010, the Pakistan convoy Algeria known as Arab and Muslim Subscribe Online to Middle East Report the Americans Freedom Arabian Peninsula Flotilla Egypt met off Elections Order a subscription and of Europe and the back issues to the award- Middle East winning magazine Middle Cyprus East Report. and From the Editors Horn of Africa Click here for the order headed page. south, Human Rights carrying International Law/International SPECIAL PUBLICATIONS Justice Interventions Primer on Palestine, Iran Israel and the Arab-Israeli Conflict Iraq Israeli ship warns Freedom Flotilla not to proceed to Gaza. Still from Click here (PDF) Israel Israeli navy video distributed on YouTube. [Click here for HTML Israel and version] humanitarian aid and hundreds of international activists who aimed to break Israel’s Lebanon/Syria Jordan blockade of the Gaza Strip. The organizers used social media extensively: tweeting updates from the boats; webcasting live with cameras uplinked to the Internet and a Kuwait satellite, enabling simultaneous rebroadcasting; employing Facebook, Flickr, YouTube Kurds and and other social networking websites to allow interested parties to see and hear them in Kurdistan real time; and using Google Maps to chart their location at sea. Until shortly after its Lebanon and Syria forcible seizure by Israeli commandos in the wee hours of May 31, the flotilla stayed in Morocco and the touch with the outside world despite the Israeli navy’s efforts to jam its Maghrib communications. A quarter of a million people watched its video feed on Livestream Mediations alone, while many more consumed these images in abbreviated form on television Occupied news. Palestinian Territories The Israeli state also deployed social media to argue its case for boarding and diverting Oil and Economics the aid vessels, a bloody interdiction the state claimed was defensive in nature and part Palestinians in of Israel’s continuing struggle against Islamic extremism. Many Israeli pundits and Israel journalists lamented, however, that the effort was belated and inadequate, raising more Peace Process questions than it answered. Amir Mizroch articulated the objections succinctly: “For a Refugees country so technologically advanced, and with such acute public diplomacy Sanctions challenges, to fail so miserably at preparing a communications offensive over new Saudi Arabia media is a failure of strategic proportions.”[1] Ordinary Israelis were also active in Sudan seeking to shape flotilla news in cyberspace. Some took to new media outlets to Turkey correct what they viewed as the state’s public relations failures, while a minority United Nations employed these tools in opposition to the state line. US Policy Western Sahara That contemporary warfare has been extended to cyberspace is by now a truism. Web Uzbekistan 2.0 technologies have increasingly turned the Internet into a digital battlefield. States Women combine conventional operations with disinformation and propaganda disseminated via Yemen blogs and YouTube; non-state actors retaliate with online narratives of their own; hackers who back the states or the non-state actors target the enemy’s websites for cyber-attack. In recent years, Western militaries have placed the new technologies in their toolboxes as well. The aftermath of the flotilla events suggests that the Arab-Israeli conflict will continue to play out in social media. In the words of Maj. Avital Leibovich of the Israeli army’s foreign press office, “The blogosphere and the 1 / 9 08/09/2010 11:54 Middle East Report Online: Another War Zone: Social Media in the Isra... http://www.merip.org/mero/interventions/steinINT.html new media are another war zone. We have to be relevant here.” Emerging Cyberwarfare The first outbreak of cyberwarfare between Israelis and Palestinians dates to October 2000, following the dissolution of that July’s peace talks at Camp David and the advent of the second intifada. At that time, both Israeli and Palestinian hackers went after the official and unofficial websites, databases and e-mail programs of the other side. Most notable among these efforts were “defacement attacks” whereby hackers scrawled on top of the content of opposing websites with patriotic taunts, hate speech and, occasionally, pornography. During the summer 2006 bombardment of Gaza, cyber-guerrillas based in Morocco who had disabled Israeli Internet networks left a calling card: “You kill Palestinians; we kill Israeli servers.” Cyberwarfare of this kind intensified during the second summertime war of 2006, between Israel and the Lebanese Shi‘i movement Hizballah. Indeed, that war represented the first instance in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict in which the virtual and real battlespaces were actively conjoined. In addition to hacking on both sides, new web technologies were enlisted in the waging of psychological warfare. Israeli hackers used Google Earth to identify areas where the Israeli army had successfully targeted Hizballah’s positions, while Hizballah employed the same service to point to Israeli-wrought destruction in civilian areas. After the war, Hizballah was credited with triumph. Critics argued that the Israeli state had grossly neglected to take cyberspace seriously, erroneously focusing on traditional modes of disinformation and psychological warfare, such as dropping leaflets and jamming broadcasts.[2] Not only that, but the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) were accused of laxity on the front lines, with soldiers placing cell phone calls that Hizballah (allegedly) tapped. Meanwhile, international journalists broadcast the war live “via broadband,” frustrating the Israeli censor’s efforts to prevent publication of sensitive information on IDF coordinates. The soldiers’ calls from the front were sometimes frantic in tone, revealing the ferocity of ground combat and boosting the morale of Hizballah fighters and their partisans. A damning internal investigation concluded that lack of media coordination and preparedness had been among the war’s chief failures. As a corrective, Israel established the National Information Directorate to “synchronize the content and tone of Israel's message” in subsequent military theaters, including heavy reliance on new media.[3] This shift in state strategy was also an effort to advance the lessons of the evolving “Brand Israel” campaign launched in 2005 by the Foreign Ministry. This campaign infamously took credit for a 2007 photo spread of scantily clad Israeli women soldiers in the men’s magazine Maxim. Operation Cast Lead Israeli consulate in New York tweets during Operation Cast Lead. Social media were a key weapon in what the press termed an “arsenal of Internet tools” during the 2008-2009 incursion into the Gaza Strip codenamed Operation Cast Lead. For the traditional media, there were severe restrictions, with both Israeli and foreign reporters allowed no closer to the fighting than a few desert hillsides in southern Israel. Meanwhile, following instructions from the new information directorate, state operatives and specially recruited volunteers were tasked with using social media to stress the morality of Israel’s war aims to the international cyber- public. On December 29, 2008, with the incursion in its early days, the IDF launched its own YouTube channel. Using English subtitles, the video clips showcased black-and-white 2 / 9 08/09/2010 11:54 Middle East Report Online: Another War Zone: Social Media in the Isra... http://www.merip.org/mero/interventions/steinINT.html aerial footage of the Israeli assault and video blogs from IDF spokespersons justifying the actions on screen. Most popular were the clips that circled bombing targets in color and added captions to aid the viewer: “Although the site appears to be empty, the secondary explosion confirms the presence of concealed rockets.”[4] Such footage, taken from the vantage point of the bombardier, functioned to sterilize the air campaign by rendering all persons and buildings as proto-targets. A number of YouTube viewers and human rights organizations subsequently disputed some of the IDF’s targeting justifications, but the controversies did little to temper the clips’ popularity. The station boasted more than 4,000 subscribers two days after launch.[5] By war’s end, some of the videos would be viewed more than 2 million times.[6] In tandem, Israeli officials delivered private briefings to international bloggers and maintained personal video blogs. Perhaps in testament to the efficacy of the image, Israel mounted video cameras at the Kerem Shalom crossing in order to broadcast -- online, in real time -- its transfer of humanitarian goods into Gaza after Cast Lead. Israeli consulate in New York's Twitter response to question about apartheid, during Operation Cast Lead. In the Twittersphere, the hashtag #gaza ranked among the world’s top ten throughout the war, with six new posts on the topic per minute. The pan-Arab satellite channel Al Jazeera’s Twitter feed had a central place in this discussion.