GA special feature / An online battle for Israel’s
legitimacy

11.18.2008 | target=”_blank”>Haaretz
By Benjamin Hartman

The struggle for the Holy Land may be the world’s most ancient conflict. But in one respect, at least, the weapons and the battleground could not be more cutting-edge.<br
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This is the realm of the “virtual intifada,” digital combat played out in cyberspace

by intensely partisan pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli activists-cum-hackers, or in the

vernacular of the Information Age, “hacktivists.” One incarnation of this online

political activism has hitched its battlewagon to the stars of social networking,

taking advantage of the runaway popularity of sites like Facebook and MySpace.

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At the forefront of pro-Israel hacktivists are the shock troops organized as the

Jewish Internet Defense Force, a group best known for its activities against

anti-Israel groups on Facebook, the social networking colossus whose members may

establish and join network groups based on a wide variety of interests. The JIDF made

headlines in August by executing a takeover of a popular anti-Zionist Facebook group

called “Israel is not a country! Delist it from Facebook as a country.”

The JIDF (www.thejidf.org) describes itself as a “collective of activists and a

non-violent protest group with over 5,000 members and supporters, which seeks in its

own way to counter anti-Semitic content [that] promotes terrorism online in places

including (but not limited to) Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Google Earth.”

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Apart from its Facebook operations, which the JIDF calls only a small percentage of

its activities, the group publishes online “guides” detailing how users can identify

sites that promote hateful content. JIDF members also edit content on Wikipedia

entries and monitor YouTube and Google Earth.

JIDF’s measures include reporting Wikipedia editors it claims are anti-Israel, and

taking action against entries seen as including one-sided or false accounts of the

history of Israel and the Mideast conflict. On Google Earth, it has taken steps to

remove photos showing Palestinian villages listed as having been destroyed during the

foundation of the State of Israel. It has also waged a campaign against the listing of

Palestine as a country.

The online confrontation was first reported at the very outset of the second

Palestinian intifada in September 2000, when Israeli and Palestinian hackers began

targeting each others’ Web sites. Using an ever-evolving arsenal of e-weaponry,

including spam, hacktivists paralyzed the servers of targeted sites and overloaded

capacity. Stricken sites slowed to a crawl or crashed altogether.

Early on, anti-Israel hackers landed blows against the Web sites of the Foreign

Ministry, the Israel Defense Forces and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee

lobbying group. AIPAC’s site was compromised in November 2000 by a Pakistani hacker

who published the personal details and credit card numbers of hundreds of AIPAC

supporters.

Pro-Israel hackers returned fire, striking a number of anti-Israel sites, including

two sites run by Hezbollah, whose servers crashed after they were overloaded by

millions of hits. Sites run by Hamas met a similar fate.

The JIDF grew out of this battleground. Beginning in 2000 as a small circle of Jewish

Internet users exchanging emails on how to counter what they termed the “propaganda

machine” of anti-Israel organizations, the JIDF later began making lists of Facebook

groups posting material such as praise for attacks on Israeli civilians and content

the JIDF viewed as anti-Semitic. JIDF then forwarded the lists to Facebook

administrators.

In some cases, the JIDF complaints prodded Facebook to take action. For the most part,

however, Facebook’s response was less clear-cut, according to David, a leading JIDF

member who asked that his last name to be withheld, citing repeated death threats he

and other group members have received by email since their actions became public. He

says Facebook either did nothing or took months to police or remove groups the JIDF

reported, allowing the material to circulate online in the meantime.

When efforts to lobby Facebook to remove the groups failed, the JIDF escalated, moving

to intercept Facebook groups and make them impossible to access. The turning point,

David said, came with the founding of a range of Facebook groups praising the

terrorist who killed eight students in a shooting attack at Jerusalem’s Mercaz Harav

Yeshiva in March.

“The use of Facebook to blatantly praise acts of terrorism demanded an equally blatant

response,” David says. Many of these groups, including “R.I.P. ALA’A ABU DHAIM,”

founded in honor of the Mercaz Harav terrorist, have been targeted or removed by the

JIDF. Many others remain, however, due mainly to the ease with which Facebook users

can set up groups and the speed with which they attract new members. Facebook groups

often expand exponentially, and at the speed of the push of a button. Individual

members may have hundreds or even thousands of “Facebook friends,” the term used for

personal contacts registered by individual users as part of their network or

networks.

The JIDF has targeted dozens of groups for removal, some with only a few dozen

members, others with several thousand. JIDF activists employ a number of methods to

strike at targeted groups. In some cases, they have deleted the groups’ users and

redirected anyone who clicks on the group’s link to the Facebook login page instead of

the group profile – effectively removing the groups from Facebook.

A link on the JIDF site shows a screenshot from an Arabic-language group on Facebook

that JIDF says was promoting Hezbollah propaganda and had attracted more than 118,000

members on Facebook before the JIDF began a wholesale deletion of the group’s members,

eventually deleting 109,873 members, leaving the group with less than 10,000.

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In some instances, the JIDF has changed the names of the members of certain groups,

altering traditionally Muslim names to “Mossad collaborator” or other terms, while

also changing the homepage picture of the “Israel is not a country” group, among

others, to an image of an Israel Air Force F-16 charging head-on towards the camera,

before a backdrop of a billowing Israeli flag.

The JIDF says it has removed more than 100 of what it calls anti-Semitic groups that

promote genocide and anti-Israel propaganda on the Web, including those for Hamas fans

and Holocaust deniers and a Facebook group called “We Will Kill All Israelis Abroad.”

Many of these groups make an effort to state that they differentiate between Zionists

and Jews, and are insist they are not practicing anti-Semitism. At the same time, the

targeted groups tend to present a wholly one-sided view of the Israeli-Palestinian

conflict, often accompanied by sensationalist, blood-drenched videos and photographs

of Palestinians the sites say were wounded by the IDF. Others targeted by the JIDF,

including Holocaust denial and Hitler-appreciation groups, make no effort to conceal

explicitly anti-Semitic views.

The JIDF notes that some of the groups, especially “Israel is not a country,” have

also been described as anti-Semitic by the Anti-Defamation League.

But the JIDF, which has recently been the subject of an Internet campaign accusing it

of being a Mossad proxy, is careful to specify that it does not “hack” accounts, nor

break binary codes or steal passwords. Though David declined to reveal what methods

the group uses, he said that it does not practice any illegal activity, and prefers

the terms “seize control,” “take over” or “infiltrate” to “hack.”

In August, a new group copying the name of the original “Israel is not a country”

group was established by facebook users. Though it is a different group and has far

less members than the original, supporters of say its founding represents a setback

for the JIDF.

Amine Ez-Zaoui, a Moroccan in his 20s who is a member of “Israel is not a country,”

told Haaretz that after the group was attacked by the JIDF, he founded a group that

petitioned Facebook to restore it to “alert the administrators of Facebook and all

Arab and Muslim friends to the crime against freedom of expression committed by this

group of Zionist hackers.”

Ez-Zaui says the group enjoys a broad level of support. After it sent a wave of

e-mails to Facebook administrators requesting that the group be restored, “Israel is

not a country” returned August 1, in what Ez-Zaoui refers to as “the first victory

against the JIDF.” There are now several offshoots of the original group, including

“Israel is not a country!” (with 7,816 members, as of early this month) and “‘Israel’

is not a country!… …Delist it from Facebook as a country!” (with 2,888

members).

While the newly restored version of the original group has fewer members than the

original, it still includes most of the same content, including long essays on the

differences between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, videos and articles on the “ethnic

cleansing” and “genocide” it says Israel commits against Palestinians, and links to

dozens of anti-Israel Web sites.

Another prominent member of the group said that while his personal Facebook account

hasn’t been targeted by the JIDF, he knew of several people whose accounts had been

hacked, including one friend whose Facebook account had been deleted four times. He

attributes the hacking to the JIDF. In emails to Haaretz, he maintains that his group

never censors responses or posts from users that are pro-Israel, illustrating, he

says, that the JIDF practices censorship, as opposed to many of the groups on Facebook

that it targets.

The Anti-Defamation League, which has an Internet department monitoring anti-Semitism

online and has been recognized for its actions to fight “cyber bullying,” told Haaretz

that it does not condone any form of hacking or vigilante action online. The ADL says

its policy is to “put a spotlight” on hate sites, notifying hosts and servers that

these groups are violating the sites’ terms of usage and pushing them to respond to

those actions in a civil, legal way.

Calling social networking sites “the next frontier in online hate,” ADL civil rights

director Deborah Lauter says via email that while the ADL does not advocate

censorship, it has “reached out to Web site owners and Internet Service Providers

(ISPs), asking them to review the content of Web sites in relation to their policies”

to remove or block those users whose content they have uploaded violates the site’s

rules.

“The larger, more popular social networking Web sites are generally responsive in this

regard,” the ADL says, though the sheer number of users of social networking sites

makes it impossible to completely eradicate the problem.

“MySpace, for example, has a large, dedicated staff solely devoted to this issue. And

we know they are effective, by the great many complaints voiced by racists and

anti-Semites who have discovered that the offensive content (such as material that

advocates racist or anti-Semitic views, Holocaust denial, or calls for violence

against minority groups) they uploaded was deleted,” says Lauter. “Some extremists

have been so frustrated that they have gone on to set up their own white supremacist

social networking sites.”

Perhaps those sites will turn out to be the venue for the next phase of the Internet

intifada. Online warriors, take note.