Zvi Bar'el : Facebook Doesn’t Incite Palestinians, Reality Does
Mark Zuckerberg has blood on his hands. DNA testing performed by Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan proved that it’s the blood of Jews, murdered by terrorists who got their ideas and their appetite for murder from Facebook. “The younger generation in the Palestinian Authority, all its dialogue, all the incitement and lies it accumulates and finally goes out to commit murder, that happens on the Facebook platform,” Erdan said in an interview with Channel 2’s “Meet the Press.”
Erdan
did not invent the charges against incitement. Incitement is known
worldwide as a factor that can encourage terror, and no less important
as a phenomenon the purpose of which is to legitimize terror. The
question that Erdan does not answer is this: If the effect of Facebook
and the rest of social media is so sweeping that they spur the younger
generation of Palestinians to adopt terror as a means of action, how is
it that all social media has managed to do is spark the “lone-wolf
intifada” and the stabbing assaults? Why hasn’t broader protest started,
as would be expected in a population where most of the young people use
social media? What is stopping tens of thousands of Palestinian social
media consumers from taking to the streets, demonstrating and committing
stabbing attacks?
One
of the answers is that social media, despite its wholesale use, have
not really been able to spark mass action. Social media are not what
engendered the Arab Spring, the revolt in Iran in 2009 or the revolution
that never was against Hamas or the Palestinian Authority. Those who
want to attribute to social media the power to harness others to action
have to explain how the first and second intifadas broke out without
them, and how the terror attacks of the 1970s and 1980s won legitimacy
among the Palestinians.
The
truth is that the answer to this question is found in what might be
defined as “a reality that incites.” This is a reality shared by peoples
under occupation, populations living in conditions of terrible distress
where there is no need for incitement and encouragement to action.
Reality is what incites them. Under such conditions a “community of
distress” is created whose members are linked by one common denominator –
the aspiration to get rid of the cause of their distress. In the case
of the Palestinians that cause is the occupation.
These
communities do not need the internet to know they are suffering
distress, but it is through social media that they discover partners to
their troubles. When it is reality itself that incites, most members of
such a community do not take action themselves; they make do with
passing on information, letting off steam and trying to survive. Those
who carry out attacks or are killed in demonstrations, those who are
prepared to risk their lives for such a community, win legitimacy as
soldiers. It is not necessarily support for the attack but rather for
what it represents.
In
the same way one might wonder why racial incitement in Israel – the
various versions of “The King’s Torah,” shouts from the right-wing
rapper “The Shadow,” chants from Beitar Jerusalem soccer hooligans – do
not bring masses of Jews into the streets to attack Arabs and do not
even encourage more people to join the so-called “price tag” settler
attacks. The answer is similar. Racism is perceived as legitimate
because Jews feel that they are a community in distress living in a
reality that incites. But in the final analysis, “price tag” actions are
also a “lone-wolf intifada” that has earned public legitimacy despite
all the tongue-clucking.
And
so Erdan’s indictment of Facebook as an accessory to terrorists
actually lashes out at Facebook for doing what it was intended to do in
its very creation. Erdan is angry that Facebook allows Palestinians to
strengthen their common denominator as an occupied community and empower
its representatives on the ground. In this he joins a venerable group
of leaders – Hosni Mubarak, who blacked out the internet; deposed
Tunisian president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali; Iranian supreme leader Ali
Khamenei, who bans the use of Facebook; and Turkey’s Recip Tayyip
Erdogan. Whoever shuts down Facebook, these leaders believe, destroys
the community of distress and ensures his own rule.
Haaretz Correspondent
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