One can’t understand the Palestinian/Zionist conflict (an existential case of an implanted colonial State in our midst) without bringing the whole geopolitical context that happened for a century (and even beyond that) before the actual ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948,(or the creation of this colonial implanted State in the Near-East):
First, Palestine was inhabited by the native Palestinians (regardless of their religion) for Thousands of years before the zionist thought to build their “jewish state” in Palestine.
In the late 19th century, and due to the European persecution of the European jews, the European zionist “jews” started a European national political movement (The Arab jews were absent) calling for finding a separate homeland for the Jews. (An emulation of the colonial mentality to occupy lands and people and exercise their racist ideology)
They were given numerous proposals by the European governments, Argentina in South America, Uganda in Africa, and Palestine in the Arab world.
For Herzl, that was a sober, rational idea. No God involved, no holy scriptures, no romantic nonsense. Palestine did not enter his mind. Nor had he any interest in the religious fantasies of “Evangelical” Christian Zionists in Britain and the US, like Alfred Balfour.
“I can tell you everything about the ‘promised Land’ except its location”
Now, because that the jewish religion has ancient ties to Palestine they chose Palestine as a “homeland” to be established for the jews. (It was the suggestion and pressure of the colonial powers to divide the people in the Middle-East and prevent them from daily trade and communication)
The jews, just like any other nation that invaded Palestine, have never ever been the natives of Palestine but invaders:
1. Before the old jewish invasion of Palestine, the area was inhabited for thousands of years by the native Canaanites, Jebusites, plesheth in the south, and the Phoneticians in the north that BEFORE any jew imagined to create a “god” to promise him Palestine (actually, the Jews were, as many poorer classes in that land, who fled to higher plateau and the desert regions, away from the urban centers).
2. The old jews were Outside Palestine, a bunch of nomads roaming the Middle East, until they created their own “god” and made Him promise them a land that originally is not theirs (Jehova was their warrior God, and the Canaanites in Jerusalem built them a tiny temple so that they can be recruited in the wars as mercenaries) .
3. The old jews occupied and ruled parts of (but never all of) Palestine for only 77 years and they toppled the original Jebusite temple and built theirs on its rubble, before they were driven out by the Roman invaders.
4. The old jews were invaders and simply were kicked out very soon compared to the Muslim occupiers of Spain who occupied Spain for over 600 years… So, the Muslims have zero right in Spain just the same like both the old and modern jews had and have zero right in Palestine… unless you want to believe in their Talmudic heresies of the “promised land” which anybody can claim a land property anywhere lying at his invented “god”.
……………………
After the European zionist jews decided to colonize Palestine in the modern time aided and encouraged by the European colonization powers who (just like God in the old ages) promised them Palestine by the British “God” Arthur Balfour.
So, in the old ages, the jews invented their “god” to promise them Palestine and nowadays they found the British “god” to promise them Palestine again !!
Soon after modern European jews had decided to colonize Palestine in their First conference held in Basle, Switzerland (1899), they created the Jewish National Fund (JNF) in order to start buying land properties in Palestine to pave the way for establishing the “jewish state”,
But this project didn’t work well for them (despite the huge capital the JNF collected worldwide for that purpose) as the Palestinians not only didn’t sell their land but fought against that policy.
And in 1947, (despite the British facilitation of the jewish activities in Palestine) the JNF couldn’t buy more than 5.8% from Palestine (a place less than Te-Aviv city now).
(Actually, it were the Lebanese landlords in north Palestine who sold their lands and towns in order to create a political status in Lebanon, because they already considered Palestine a lost case for their investment)
Seeing that their (buy and sell) project wouldn’t work, The zionist colonizers needed and did an extreme violent path that can be summarized in two things as Ilan Pappe illustrates:
1. A detailed information about the local Palestinian inhabitants which (the JNF was asked to compile)
…. the JNF Arab village a inventory that was a blueprint completed by the late 1930s that included the topographic location of each village with detailed information including husbandry, cultivated land, number of trees, quality of fruit, average amount of land per family, number of cars, shop owners, Palestinian clans and their political affiliation, descriptions of village mosques and names of their imams, civil servants and more. The final inventory update was finished in 1947 with lists of “wanted” persons in each village targeted in 1948 for search-and-arrest operations with those seized summarily shot on the spot in cold blood.
2. to create several terrorist gang groups like Lehi, Irgun and Sternwhich started operating as early as 1920s by assassinating the Palestinians that posed an obstacle to the zionist colonization project.
11 years before the actual ethnic cleansing
Now, having done so .. the zionist needed a systematic plan for the actual ethnic cleansing which started way before 1948:
President Franklin D. Roosevelt (enough time before the actual cleansing of Palestine)put it in December 1942 , “I actually would put a barbed wire around Palestine, and I would begin to move the Arabs out of Palestine…. Each time we move out an Arab we would bring in another Jewish family…” And this was exactly what happened with planned massacres !!
The plan was set:
“Red House” in Tel-Aviv that became headquarters for the Hagana, the dominant Zionist underground paramilitary militia during the British Mandate period in Palestine between 1920 and 1948 when the Jewish state came into being. He details how David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, met with leading Zionists and young Jewish military officers on March 10, 1948 to finalize plans to ethnically cleanse Palestine that unfolded in the months that followed including “large-scale (deadly serious)intimidation; laying siege to and bombarding villages and population centres; setting fire to homes, properties and goods; expulsion; demolition; and finally, planting mines among the rubble to prevent any of the expelled inhabitants from returning.”
During the ethnic cleansing of the native Palestinians some 70 documented massacres ( Israeli Massacres on Palestinians ) were perpetrated by the Zionist terrorist groups in a systematic way to terrorize the natives out of their homes and villages:
Once the ethnic cleansing begun, the whole ugly business took six months to complete. It expelled about 800,000 people, killed many others, and destroyed 531 villages and 11 urban neighborhoods in cities like Tel-Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem. The action was a clear case of ethnic cleansing that international law today calls a crime against humanity for which convicted Nazis at Nuremberg were hanged. So far Israelis have always remained immune from international law even though names of guilty leaders and those charged with implementing their orders are known as well as the crimes they committed.
Terrorist zionist Haganah (later IDF) expelling Arab natives from their land, Haifa, 1948.
………………………………..
It should be noticed that:
1. Ethnically cleansing Palestine and creating “israel” is a European colonization project that was done by European jews. There has never been hatred or enmity between the Arabs-Muslims and the jews over history and it should be noticed that the jews had their ONLY jewish Golden Age under the Muslim rule and run out of Spain along with the Arabs fearing the European pogrom. In addition, in the modern history, while the jews were persecuted and massacred throughout Europe, they had a safe haven among the Arabs and in the Muslim countries.
2. The Arabs and Muslims didn’t kick the jews out of their homes from the Arab countries but it was the European zionist jews who had done the dirty job and MOST of the jews in the Arab-Muslim countries didnt migrate willingly to occupy Palestine but AFTER the creation of the zionist “jewish state” …. I would cite here exactly what my jewish Iraqi brother wrote after discovering the criminal zionist techniques:
” I write this article for the same reason I wrote my book: to tell the American people, and especially American Jews, that Jews from Islamic lands did not emigrate willingly to Israel; that, to force them to leave, Jews killed Jews; and that, to buy time to confiscate ever more Arab lands, Jews on numerous occasions rejected genuine peace initiatives from their Arab neighbors. I write about what the first prime minister of Israel called “cruel Zionism.” I write about it because I was part of it.”
3. You should know the fact that the zionist settlers systematically and deliberately ethnically cleansed Palestine from its natives both Muslims and Christians as they expelled over 750,000 Palestinians among them over 100,000 Christians and razed 540 native villages among them over 80 ancient Christian villages along with their ancient churches that stood since Jesus, for the zionists to come and invent their “jewish state”
So … the whole fight is NOT between the “the Arabs-Muslims and the jews” as the zionist lie again, it is between European zionist occupiers (who ethnically cleansed the native Palestinians in the name of Judaism) and the natives of Palestine (both Muslims and Christians) who unjustifiably were massacred out of their homes and their villages were erased.
Autrefois mon cher Walid, le train sifflait tout au long de la bande côtière libanaise . Il traversait Jounieh en longeant le mur d’enceinte du collège dès frères maristes où j’étais interne .
(Moi je n’ai monte’ que dans le train a fil electrique de Beirut. 5 kroush et il etait toujours bonde’. Ce balour de Charles Helo l’a elimine’. Les trains sillionaient de la Turkie, en passant par la Syrie, le Liban, la Palestine, jusqu’en Egypt. Le train chargait les hajjis jusqu’a la Meque. Israel fut implante’ pour couper court a ce movement journalier du meme peuple)
Au cours de la journée , on entendait son vrombissement et son sifflement quand il passait derrière la division des petits ( 8eme et 7eme ) , les classes se trouvant au rez-de-chaussée , on ne le voyait pas .
La nuit , du dortoir situé au deuxième étage , nous pouvions le voir passer aux temps chauds lorsqu’ on dormait les fenêtres ouvertes .
Aux cours de ces deux années, le frère surveillant , frère Tarcicio, m’avait placé près de la fenêtre . Alors , après l’extinction des feux, lorsque j’entendais le train passer, je me hissais sur mon lit et je le voyais glisser subrepticement vers sa destination, tout en sifflant ; alors je fermais les yeux et , gagné par le sommeil, après une journée harassante , je basculais dans les bras de Morphée , et je rêvais …
Je me voyais dans ce train, franchissant les espaces jusqu’aux confins du monde , et libre comme peut l’être un enfant de mon âge . Ce train de mon enfance , je l’entends encore siffler la nuit dans mon sommeil , particulièrement les jours de beaux temps., en été .
Ma chère Mireille , au collège , je ne faisais pas partie des grands de taille, mais je n’étais pas petit non plus (tout est comparaison: tu est toujours petit de taille, comme moi), mais j’étais sportif et surtout passionné de basket-ball. Charlot peut en témoigner ( et moi aussi: un joueur pas mal).
Le problème était que lorsqu’on jouait , j’étais souvent confronté à des espèces de Goliaths qui m’écrasaient de leurs regards assassins . C’était insupportable !
Alors , oubliant les études, je pris la décision de m’entraîner jour et nuit de sorte que je parvenais à sauter de plus en plus haut , à voler de plus en plus loin , bien au-dessus des nuages , tel Jonathan Levingston le goéland , et même jusqu’aux confins des sphères étoilées , afin de rivaliser avec les géants du terrain .
Aujourd’hui , je n’arrive même plus à sauter au-dessus d’une ligne tracée sur le sol .
L’heureux temps où nous jouions à la marelle sous le balcon de chez Charlot , ma chère Mireille , est bel et bien révolu . Hélas ! Mille fois hélas. Dix mille fois hélas …..
Many secret service agencies monitor and alter social platforms: Including Zionist Hasbara. Part 2
How Israel and its partisans work to censor the Internet
By Alison Weir
Israel and partisans of Israel have long had a significant presence on the Internet, working to promote the Israel narrative and block facts about Palestine, the Israel lobby, and other subject matter they wish covered up.
Opinionated proponents of Israel post comments, flag content, accuse critics of “antisemitism,” and disseminate misinformation about Palestine and Palestine solidarity activists.
Many of these actions are by individuals acting alone who work independently, voluntarily, and relentlessly.
There was to be a prize for the “Best Zionist Editor”—the person who over the next four years incorporated the most “Zionist” changes in the encyclopedia. The winner would receive a trip in a hot-air balloon over Israel.
High tech millionaire Naftali Bennett, a right-wing minister close to the settler movement, describes the program:
The UK Guardian reports: “One Jerusalem-based Wikipedia editor, who doesn’t want to be named, said that publicising the initiative might not be such a good idea. ‘Going public in the past has had a bad effect,’ she says. ‘There is a war going on and unfortunately the way to fight it has to be underground.’”
Again in 2013, there was evidence of pro-Israel tampering with Wikipedia.
Israel’s Ha’aretz reported that a social-media employee of NGO Monitor edited articles about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in an allegedly biased manner. “Draiman concealed the facts that he was an employee of NGO Monitor, often described as a right-wing group, and that he was using a second username, which is forbidden under Wikipedia’s rules,” according to the paper.
Such actions have had an impact. A website critical of Wikipedia said in 2014 that there were “almost 10 times as many articles about murdered Israeli children as there are articles about murdered Palestinian children,” even though at least 10 times more Palestinian children had been killed.
The website also pointed out: “While editors like Zeq (T–C–L) and CltFn (T–C–L) may get banned in the end, the articles theystarted remain.”
If YouTube reviewers and others use Wikipedia in their determination about whether content should be removed or not, these efforts to censor Wikipedia could adversely affect their decisions.
Social Media Missions for Israel
Title image from Forward article about the Act.IL campaign.
In 2017 yet another project to target Internet platforms was launched. Known as Act.il, the project uses a software application that “leverages the power of communities to support Israel through organized online activity.”
The software is a joint venture of three groups: Israel’s IDC University; the Israeli American Council, which works to “organize and activate” the half million Israeli-Americans who live in the U.S.; and another American group called the Maccabee Task Force, created to combat the international boycott of Israel, which it terms “an anti-Semitic movement.”
Maccabee says it is “laser focused on one core mission—to ensure that those who seek to delegitimize Israel and demonize the Jewish people are confronted, combated and defeated.”
In addition, the project is supported by Israel’s Strategic Affairs Ministry and Israel’s intelligence community. Its CEO is an 8-year veteran of Israeli army intelligence.
Israel’s Jerusalem Post reports that Act.IL is “a wide-ranging grassroots campaign app that lets individuals combat BDS in the palm of their hand” or, as we will see, from public computers in the US.
“Act.IL is more than just an app,” the Post article explains. “It is a campaign that taps into the collective knowledge of IDC students who together speak 35 languages, hail from 86 countries and have connections to the pro-Israel community all over the world.”
The article claims: “A platform like Act.IL offers world Jewry an opportunity to fight for one thing the majority can rally behind: Israel.” (This ignores the fact that there are many Jewish individuals who oppose Israeli policies.)
Israel partisans around the world download the app, and then “in this virtual situation room of experts, they detect instances where Israel is being assailed online and they program the app to find missions that can be carried out with a push of a button.”
An organizer notes: “When you work together, with the same goals and values, you can be incredibly powerful in the social media landscape.”
Some missions ask users to report videos. Israeli government officials say that the Act.il app “is more effective than official government requests at getting those videos removed from online platforms.”
The project is led by former Israeli intelligence officers and has close ties to American casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson.
Another funder is the Paul R. Singer Foundation, funded by the Republican hedge fund billionaire.
The Forward calls Act.IL a new entry into the “online propaganda war” that “has thousands of mostly U.S.-based volunteers who can be directed from Israel into a social media swarm.”
According to the Forward, “Its work so far offers a startling glimpse of how it could shape the online conversations about Israel without ever showing its hand.”
The Forward reports: “Act.il says that its app has 12,000 sign-ups so far, and 6,000 regular users. The users are located all over the world, though the majority of them appear to be in the United States.
Users get ‘points’ for completed missions; top-ranked users complete five or six missions a day. Top users win prizes: a congratulatory letter from a government minister, or a doll of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister.”
Photo of group that participated in Act.IL training
Act.IL’s CEO, a veteran Israeli army intelligence officer, said the Israeli military and its domestic intelligence service “‘request’ Act.il’s help in getting services like Facebook to remove specific videos that call for violence against Jews or Israelis.” This according to the Forward report.
The officer later tried to walk back his statement, “saying that the Shin Bet [intelligence service] and the army don’t request help on specific videos but are in regular informal contact with Act.il. He said that Act.il’s staff is largely made up of former Israeli intelligence officers.”
Teens in American JCCs carry out missions assigned from Israel
New Jersey “Media Room,” a project of IAC New Jersey in partnership with Act.IL.
The project recruits Jewish teens and adults and sometimes operates out of local Jewish community centers, the Forward says. The paper describes one example:
“The dozen or so Israelis sitting around a conference table at a Jewish community center in Tenafly, New Jersey, on a recent Wednesday night didn’t look like the leading edge of a new Israeli government-linked crowdsourced online propaganda campaign.
“Tapping on laptops, the group of high school students and adult mentors completed social media ‘missions’ assigned out of a headquarters in Herzliya, Israel.”
In addition to the Tenafly “media room” another operates in Boston in cooperation with the Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston. There are also regular Act.il advocacy-training sessions at The Frisch School, a Jewish day school in Paramas, New Jersey. Other media rooms are reportedly in the works, with one in Manhattan, hosted by The Paul R. Singer Foundation, scheduled to open soon.
The Forward reports: “In November, the Boston media room created a mission for the app that asked users to email a Boston-area church to complain about a screening there of a documentary that is critical of Israel. The proposed text of the email likens the screening of the film to the white supremacist riot in Charlottesville, Virginia, and calls the film’s narrator, Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters, a ‘well-known anti-Semite.’”
Photo of Boston Media Room published by Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston, which states: “Media Room Ambassadors are students and adult mentors who are trained with the knowledge, skills, and tools to positively influence public discourse by developing pro-Israel social media campaigns.”
According to the Forward, Act.il also produces “pro-Israel web content that carries no logo. It distributes that content to other pro-Israel groups, including the Adelson-funded Jewish fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi and The Israel Project, which push them out on their own social media feeds.”
The Forward predicts: “Initiatives in cyberspace seem likely to increase.”
Screenshot from video promoting the project, posted on the Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston website.
Israeli media report that the Israeli military “has begun scouring Jewish communities abroad for young computer prodigies” to recruit for its ranks.
An Israeli official described the process: “Our first order of business is to search Jewish communities abroad for teens who could qualify, Our representatives will then travel to the communities and begin the screening process there.”
Israeli Government Ministry backs secret online campaigns
General Sima Vaknin-Gil told Israeli tech developers to “flood the Internet” with pro-Israel propaganda. As Israel’s Chief Censor, she said: ” “We censor information that is critical to our enemies, who have no capabilities like us, do not have a Jewish brain, and therefore our enemy relies to a large extent on open information…”
Israel’s Strategic Affairs Ministry, which is behind this and similar projects, has mobilized substantial resources for online activities.
Israel’s Ynet news reports that the Ministry’s director “sees it as a war for all intents and purposes. ‘The delegitimization against the State of Israel can be curbed and contained through public diplomacy and soft tools,’ she says. ‘In order to win, however, we must use tricks and craftiness.’”
The director, General Sima Vaknin-Gil, told a forum of Israeli tech developers at a forum: “I want to create a community of fighters.” The objective is to “curb the activities of anti-Israel activists,” and “flood the Internet” with pro-Israel content.
An Israeli report in December stated that the ministry has acquired a budget of roughly $70 million to “stand at the forefront of the battle against delegitimization, adopting methods from the fields of intelligence and technology. There is a reason why ministry officials define it as ‘a war on consciousness terrorism.’” [‘Delegitimization’ is a common Israeli term for criticism of Israel. See here for a discussion of the term.]
A Ha’aretz article reports: “The Strategic Affairs Ministry’s leaders see themselves as the heads of a commando unit, gathering and disseminating information about ‘supporters of the delegitimization of Israel’—and they prefer their actions be kept secret.”
The article reports that the Ministry includes a job role entitled “Senior official—new-media realm,” responsible for surveillance and activities “in the digital realm.”
This individual head is responsible for analyzing social media and formulating a social media campaign against sites and activists who are deemed a threat to Israel.
Among the job’s responsibilities are:
“Analysis of the world of social media, in terms of content, technology and network structure, emphasizing centers of gravity and focuses of influence, methods, messages, organizations, sites and key activists, studying their characteristics, areas, realms and key patterns of activities of the rival campaign and formulating a strategy for an awareness campaign against them in this realm and managing crises on social media. That is, surveilling of activities mainly in the digital arena.”
Officials at the ministry are charged with “construction and promotion of creative and suitable programs for new media.”
The unit works to keep its activities secret from the public. For example, a program to train young Israelis for activities on social media was exempted from publishing a public bid for funding. Similarly, the ministry’s special unit against delegitimization, “Hama’aracha” (The Battle), is excluded from Israel’s Freedom of Information Law.
The 29th floor of Tel Aviv’s Champion Tower is the nerve center of a 24-7 ‘war’ in which Israeli agents working behind the scenes advance U.S. legislation, torpedo events, organize counter-protests, & close bank accounts.. The Director says: ‘In order to win we must use tricks and craftiness.’
Its activities reportedly include a “24/7 operations room monitoring all the delegitimization activities against Israel: Protests, conferences, publications calling for an anti-Israel boycott and international bodies’ boycott initiatives. The operations room will transfer the information to the relevant people to provide a proper response to these activities, whether through a counter-protest or through moves to thwart the initiative behind the scenes.”
Other programs include a 22-million-shekel project to work among labor unions and professional associations abroad “to root out the ability of BDS entities to influence the unions,” and a 16-million-shekel program focused on student activities throughout the world.
Israel’s UNIT 8200
Photo from article about Unit 8200 on Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre website.
Another Israeli entity that plays a role in covert Internet activity is the Israeli military’s legendary high-tech spy branch, Unit 8200. This unit is composed of thousands of “cyber warriors” primarily 18 to 21 years of age; some even younger. A number of its graduates have gone on to top positions at tech companies operating in the U.S., such as Check Point Software (where the spouse of the Jewish Voice for Peace head is employed as a solutions architect).
In 2015 Israel’s Foreign Ministry announced plans “to establish a special command to combat anti-Israel incitement on social media.” The command would operate under the foreign ministry’s hasbara [propaganda] department and would especially recruit from graduates of Unit 8200.
An article in the Jewish Press about the new command reports that Unit 8200 “has developed a great reputation for effectiveness in intelligence gathering, including operating a massive global spy network. Several alumni of 8200 have gone on to establish leading Israeli IT companies, including Check Point, ICQ, Palo Alto Networks, NICE, AudioCodes, Gilat, Leadspace, EZchip, Onavo, Singular and CyberArk.”
Check Point Software headquarters in Tel Aviv. Founded by a former Unit 8200 member, it also has offices throughout the U.S. Israeli tech companies sometimes assist in online spying efforts.
Numerous Israeli tech companies, many of them headed by former military intelligence officers, assist in these online spying efforts, sometimes receiving Israeli government funding “for digital initiatives aimed at gathering intelligence on activist groups and countering their efforts.”
According to the ministry’s statement, among the Command’s activities is “finding videos with inflammatory content and issuing complaints to the relevant websites.”
To be clear, this is an occupying military working covertly to achieve censorship of reporting on its atrocities.
YouTube & Google officials meet with Israeli Minister
YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki speaking to the Israel Collaboration Network’s Israeli Women in Tech Group on August 25, 2016.
Major Internet companies have reportedly been cooperating in this effort.
In 2015 Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely announced that she had visited Silicon Valley and met with YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki and Google’s Director of Public Policy (it is unclear whether this was was Jennifer Oztzistzki or Juniper Downs; Hotovely’s announcementreferred to “Jennifer Downs”).
“At the end of the meeting,” Israeli media reported, “it was agreed that Google would strengthen bilateral relations with the Foreign Ministry and build a collaborative work apparatus.”
Another Israeli news report about the meeting states: “…it was agreed that the companies would strengthen ties with the Foreign Ministry and build a regular mechanism of control to prevent the distribution of those incendiary materials on the network.”
Google, which owns YouTube, denied the Foreign Ministry’s report. The Ministry accordingly “clarified” its statement somewhat, but continued to say that Israeli officials would be in “regular contact with Google’s employees in Israel who deal with the problematic materials.”
Such officials often have close ties to Israel. For example, Facebook’s Head of Policy in Israel,Jordana Cutler, had previously been employed for many years by the Israeli government. (More about Facebook can be found here.)
The Linkedin page for Facebook’s Jordana Cutler
The meetings seem to have had a significant effect.
In 2016 Fortune magazine reported: “Facebook, Google, and YouTube are complying with up to 95% of Israeli requests to delete content that the government says incites Palestinian violence, Israel’s Justice Minister said on Monday.”
More recently, the Israeli Ministry of Justice said that its cyber unit handled 2,241 cases of online content and succeeded in getting 70 percent of it removed.
According to a 2017 report, Google, in its capacity as the operator of Youtube, announced that it was updating the steps it was already taking on this score.
Among other things, Google said it would increase the number of members of the “Trusted Flagger program,” which enables certain organizations and government agencies to report content. It also said it would “increase support for NGOs and organizations working to present a ‘corrective voice.’”
Given the record of infiltration and orchestrated activities described above—many financed by a combination of certain influential billionaires and the Israeli government itself—it’s hard to imagine that Israeli organizations and partisans are not thoroughly embedded in this program. In fact, one of the NGOs already working with YouTube as a “trusted flagger” is the Anti-Defamation League, whose mission includes ‘standing up for Israel.’
Anti-Defamation League celebrates Israel at 2017 New York City parade.
A leaked secret January 2017 ADL strategy paper detailed how to counter the pro-Palestine movement. Among its many strategies were some focused on the importance of efforts in cyber space.
The paper was produced in collaboration with the Reut Institute, an Israeli think tank, and included an endorsement by Sima Vaknin-Gil, who stated that “the correlation between the Ministry’s mode of operation and what comes out of this document is very high, and has already proven effective… ”
Strategy paper about how to counter the Palestine solidarity movement. (Full document posted here.)
The document’s executive summary noted: “Cyberspace, broadly defined, stands out as a crucially important arena (for monitoring and counter and pro-active strategies) which requires more resources and attention due to its current influence, rapid growth and growing complexity.”
The paper called for “a mix of policy advocacy and industry engagement with corporations such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter in a manner consistent with the ADL Center for Technology and Society and its Anti-Cyberhate Working Group.”
An illustration in the ADL-Reut working paper on improving Israel advocacy. It noted: “While the pro-Israel network increasingly is active in this domain, much more can be done.”
The paper also recommended: “‘Bottom-up efforts’ of crowd-sourcing to enhance the adaptive capacity of the pro-Israel network.”
At the same time, it urged:
“Strengthening pro-Israel organizations that mobilize and coordinate a network of ‘nodes’ e.g. Jewish Community Public Affairs (JCPA) and its network of Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRCs) in the USA; Hillel, which is present in nearly five hundred locations in the U.S. and globally; the Israel Action Network (IAN) that reaches nearly 160 federations in the U.S.; or the Jewish Congress (WJC) that represents dozens of Jewish communities around the world.”
The detailed, 32-page document reported that in recent years “a massive investment of resources and talent” had been directed against the pro-Palestine movement.
One of the results, the paper said, was to create a “world-wide pro-Israel network.” It was this network that the report wished to mobilize. One of the paper’s concerns was that since Israel’s 2014 attack on Gaza “a growing number of Jews have become more critical of Israel.”
The document recommended a degree of stealth, noting: “high-visibility response by the pro-Israel side can be counterproductive.”
What this means
Nevertheless, despite all these forces arrayed against information about Palestine reaching the American public, our channel is back up on YouTube. In fact, we’ve just uploaded a new video:
This one is about the death of a nine-year-old boy. [Perhaps the Israeli government would consider this incitement to Palestinians to rebel against occupation; we see it as incitement to the world in general, and Americans in particular, to care.]
In other words, Israel’s efforts at censorship don’t always succeed.
But sometimes they do, and other YouTube users have not always been so fortunate. For example, YouTube has terminated several Palestinian news organizations.
One was the al-Quds network, which, according to a report in Middle East Eye, “relies on young reporters and volunteers using phones and other digital devices to cover local news across the Palestinian territories.” They would often report Israeli soldiers committing various human rights violations.
Its YouTube channel was terminated in 2011, and its editor says they had to “to create a new channel from scratch.” By 2017 its new channel had gained almost 10 million views before it was suddenly suspended without warning again last October. It now, however, appears to have a YouTube channel in operation.
According to the MEE report, YouTube also suspended the Filisten al-Youm TV channel last August, and in 2013, apparently following complaints by the Anti-Defamation League, YouTube closed down Iran’s PressTV channel. (A Press TV YouTube channel now also appears to be available again.)
Palestinian social media users risk even greater consequences.
The Israeli government has arrested Palestinians for videos, poems, and other posts it dislikes. A 2016 report estimated that “more than 150 arrests took place between October and February 2016 based on Facebook posts expressing opinions on the uprising. A recent video posted on social media led to the imprisonment of a 16 year old girl, her mother and cousin.
In addition, Palestinian access to social media is somewhat controlled by Israel. As a Huffington Post article reports, ”Palestinians’ digital rights and access to the Internet are compromised in very basic ways, because Israel controls the infrastructure and services of Palestinian telecommunication companies in the West Bank.”
While the situation has greatly improved in recent years – the Israeli government finally announced in 2016 that it would allow Palestinians in the West Bank to access 3G wireless networks, making this one of the last regions in the world with such access after years of Israeli restrictions – it is important to remember the enormous power Israel wields over this largely captive population.
While Israel is able to organize entire campaigns to filter and flood social media, its immense control over Palestinians impedes their access to the same media.
Given these facts, it is extremely important for people to search out information for themselves, go directly to our websites and others, subscribe to diverse email lists, and not rely on social media for information. [Please subscribe to our news posts here.]
Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and others are private companies. In the end, they have the power to censor information, and they periodically do so. For a few days, we felt acutely what that was like. If Facebook had joined the ban, as has happened with others, we would have been even more cut off from what is essentially today’s “public square.”
The Internet and social media give us far more access to information and tools for communication and activism than ever before, but they, too, can be controlled—and they are.
Adonis Diaries 