Informing humanitarians worldwide 24/7 — a service provided by UN OCHA

oPt

Another War Zone: Social Media in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Attachments

Adi Kuntsman and Rebecca L. Stein

September 2010

(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.)

In late May 2010, the convoy known as the Freedom Flotilla met off of Cyprus and headed south, carrying humanitarian aid and hundreds of international activists who aimed to break Israel's 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 satellite, enabling simultaneous rebroadcasting; employing Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and other social networking websites to allow interested parties to see and hear them in real time; and using Google Maps to chart their location at sea. Until shortly after its forcible seizure by Israeli commandos in the wee hours of May 31, the flotilla stayed in touch with the outside world despite the Israeli navy's efforts to jam its communications. A quarter of a million people watched its video feed on Livestream alone, while many more consumed these images in abbreviated form on television news.

The Israeli state also deployed social media to argue its case for boarding and diverting the aid vessels, a bloody interdiction the state claimed was defensive in nature and part of Israel's continuing struggle against Islamic extremism. Many Israeli pundits and journalists lamented, however, that the effort was belated and inadequate, raising more questions than it answered. Amir Mizroch articulated the objections succinctly: "For a country so technologically advanced, and with such acute public diplomacy challenges, to fail so miserably at preparing a communications offensive over new media is a failure of strategic proportions."[1] Ordinary Israelis were also active in seeking to shape flotilla news in cyberspace. Some took to new media outlets to correct what they viewed as the state's public relations failures, while a minority employed these tools in opposition to the state line.

That contemporary warfare has been extended to cyberspace is by now a truism. Web 2.0 technologies have increasingly turned the Internet into a digital battlefield. States combine conventional operations with disinformation and propaganda disseminated via 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 new media are another war zone. We have to be relevant here."