Rebecca L. Stein has a great post on the London Review of Books blog about Israel’s attempts to use social media as a “PR and counterinsurgency” tool. From the wonderfully titled “The Other Wall“:

The shift away from an official military idiom towards the language of personalised informality hasn’t been easy for the IDF. Facebook, with its high level of interactivity, is thought to present the best opportunity but also the biggest obstacle. The standard Facebook template, with a ‘wall’ which anyone can write on, is thought to be unfeasible, because of the barrage of comments expected from detractors. During the 2008-9 Gaza incursion, the IDF’s YouTube channel was initially left open to comments: it was closed the next day. IDF programmers are currently at work on an alternative, more tightly controlled template. Questions posted to the Facebook wall by everyday users will be screened and approved in advance, and then answered by IDF spokesmen; from there, users will be invited to participate in an open discussion forum.



A graphic from the Israeli movement to end US support for the Israeli occupation. (Credit: Michal Vexler)

Officials admit to being overwhelmed and understaffed when it comes to social media: just one person monitors the Foreign Ministry’s Arabic Facebook page, for example, and only during business hours. At the end of March, the Israeli Government Press Office took down its Facebook page two days after it launched, because it couldn’t cope with the wall posts of ‘anti-Israeli propagandists and hate spreaders’: comments like ‘Israel operates an entrenched system of racial apartheid’ had been rampant, much to the confusion of loyal subscribers who called for more active monitoring. In the same week, however, the state scored a Facebook victory when the site agreed to remove a page entitled ‘The Third Palestinian Intifada’ in response to pressure from Israel’s Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs Ministry and heightened public anxiety about the ways that Facebook was providing a platform for anti-Israeli incitement.

It’s still far from clear, however, how much control the state will be able to exert over Facebook and other social media sites. ‘We cannot but be impressed,’ the IDF spokesman Avi Benayahu recently said, ‘at how Western technology harms regimes… One cell phone camera can harm a regime more than any intelligence operation can.’ The regimes he had in mind were those toppled or threatened by popular uprisings in the Arab world. When I asked Israeli officials about the use of social media by anti-occupation activists, Jewish and Palestinian, on both sides of the Green Line, they didn’t want to talk about it. And none of them noted the resonance between the metaphorical Facebook wall and the concrete Separation Wall, both of which represent attempts by the state to control the political playing field.