The incessant Israeli atrocities in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, particularly in the Gaza Strip, had reached boiling point on 27 December 2008. That year's Christmas brought sad news to both Christians and Muslims living in the region. The 22-day unlawful Israeli invasion and blockade of the Gaza Strip left millions in grief and sorrow around the world. The whole world witnessed one of the most terrible versions of the press and human rights violations committed by the Israeli army, which is heavily equipped with deadly smart weapons including nukes. Between 2009 and 2014 Israeli forces assaulted Gaza three times under the names of Operation Cast Lead (2009), Operation Pillar of Defence (2012) and Operation Protective Edge (2014). These military campaigns led to one of the biggest humanitarian crises in the region since World War I. The careful use of the word “operation” suggests an act of surgery against radical forces responsible for firing rockets at the Israeli population. Hence, the Israeli self-defence rhetoric gained cover by avoiding the words “aggression” or “attack” that describe violent action. The battle between a well-trained regular army equipped with smart weapons and Hamas, Palestinian Jihad and the Al-Qassam Brigades that are only capable of launching home-made rockets resulted in blockades, mayhem and civilian atrocities and suffering. During Operation Cast Lead the Israeli authorities used every method it could to stop international journalists reporting their brutal actions against innocent civilians. Because of this dictatorial approach, according to the Reporters without Borders Press Freedom Index for 2009, Israel's ranking dropped from 46th place to 93rd out of 180 countries. Despite this poor reputation, since Israel's 2008 invasion of Gaza the country continues to control the media, supresses aid workers, and harshly target international campaigners, including UN agency members in Gaza. In recent years, the new media have become significant channels for the production, dissemination and provision of news, particularly in places where the mainstream media is either banned or severely constrained. The new media have emerged as challengers that provide a pathway to campaigning bloggers, activists and politically motivated individuals and groups to utilise a range of alternative platforms to debate, discuss, disseminate and share “restricted” information. This has also been true in Palestine. These platforms include Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Demotix, Vimeo, NowPublic, Mahalo, Global Voices and Crisis Wire. A recent US Pew Research Centre study revealed that 92 per cent of teenagers go online daily and 24 per cent of them use online sources “almost constantly”. But despite the growing influence of the new media no one can deny the enormous role and influence still played by the mainstream media. According to British journalist Phil Rees, the role of the new media has been exaggerated precisely because it has often not challenged the conventional news agenda. It has not challenged a simplistic, often inaccurate perspective in the case of Israel and Palestine, where the mainstream media has promoted a narrative of a pro-western democracy fighting a religious extremist and oppressive regime. Moreover, the new social media are often used only by well-off, westernised groups, and the 40 per cent of the population who live in the countryside in Palestine, for example, as well as many poorer urban dwellers, have been largely disenfranchised by social media. In that sense, social media are unrepresentative. Complex political dynamics also cannot be explained in 100 words on Twitter.
Western bias:To be fair, in regards to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict some sections of the western media have shown through their reporting that not all the media is biased. According to US commentator Norman Finkelstein, the point about the new media is not that it sets the news agenda, but that because of the new media, the mainstream media no longer sets the agenda either. The mainstream media must now compete for an audience with the new media. Although the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has changed enormously in recent years as the new media has gained a decisive role in covering it, there is still a disparity that harks back to the conspiracy theory that may or may not be correct that many major media outlets in the US in particular are directly or indirectly controlled by the country's strong Jewish lobby. But to hold the entire journalistic community responsible for such bias would certainly be unfair and a denial of the objective position of many journalists who have stood up against the attitude of the Israeli government and even to its organisations. The Israeli Defence Force's shooting of journalists Raffaele Ciriello, James Miller, Imad Ghanem, Fadel Shana and others has illustrated Israel's harsh strategies. Over the past five years, both sides in the conflict have made extensive use of the new social media to reach out to the world. In doing so, both sides have achieved considerable success in promoting their points of view, using various resources including diplomatic and political support within Europe and America in particular. The Israeli assault on Gaza in 2008 and the later attack on an aid ship flotilla captured the attention of the new media, primarily because the Israeli establishment banned mainstream media outlets from entering the Gaza territory. In the flotilla case, people on board the ships reported the incident, even though cameras were destroyed and films were confiscated. News of this incident reached the wider world, and both sides used the new media to manipulate public opinion. During the Gaza conflict, the news was so channelled through the social media that many viewed this as a watershed moment. Commentator Jon Burg has described the Gaza assault as “the world's first social media war,” for example. In the same vein, Moeed Ahmad, head of new media at the news channel Al-Jazeera, has branded the conflict “War 2.0”. During the Israeli attack on the flotilla, eyewitness accounts reached the entire world through the new social media. According to journalist Ewa Jasiewicz, “just getting up to the minute information out was hard as the Israelis bombed the transmitters for phones and the Internet in the north of the Strip where I was most of the time, so there was no tweeting or emailing or even calls I could make or take.” As a result, “there are violent facts on the ground that can put the brakes on the means of communication during conflicts — i.e. fighter jets bombing communications systems and targeting journalists.” The most revealing accounts of the human tragedy in Gaza at the hands of those who had once themselves experienced genocide were the thousands of pictures of innocent children with their bodies torn to pieces and blood-soaked women and men on Twitter and Facebook displaying the horrors, destruction and mayhem of the war. Of the role of social media in covering the conflict, one journalist told me at the time that “there is no doubt that people's perception of the conflict has changed dramatically. I have been involved in justice for Palestine since 1967. No one [in the West] knew then what a Palestinian was. Thanks to the social media, that equation has changed tremendously with people around the world now joining the Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement. BDS could not have been successful without the alternative media getting the message out to them. The majority of people under 35 only use social media for their news.” The havoc in Gaza has raised concerns among ordinary people in Britain, America and the European countries. For instance, in Britain one minister at the foreign office, Baroness Warsi, recently resigned, describing Britain's Middle East policy as “morally indefensible”. The storm of criticism went further when Irish Minister Sean Sherlock pledged to continue Irish support for the Palestinians along with Irish Senator David Norris who objected to Israeli atrocities in a speech to the Irish parliament in July 2014. Another major event that attracted the attention of thousands ofGuardian newspaper readers in the UK and led to extensive social media debate was when UN Spokesman Chris Guinness cried on camera over the horrific conditions suffered by Gazan children. This incident was shared by 43,000 people on various social media Websites including Twitter and Facebook, the newspaper said. Prominent British journalist Yvonne Ridley experienced something similar in Gaza when she said she had “felt emotionally damaged sitting for two hours watching the activities of Israeli soldiers at checkpoints in the West Bank. It was a traumatising experience, and now I understand why so many Palestinian women die in childbirth and/or give birth at Israeli checkpoints. I tried to reason with one soldier — an Argentinean — to allow an ambulance through. We could hear a woman screaming inside, but he remained impassive. I could not believe there wasn't an ounce of humanity in him for this woman,” she said. These stories provide a diverse picture of on-the-ground realities to people in faraway places who are eager to know about the conflict in Palestine. It is evident that there has been a phenomenal rise in the use of social media platforms, particularly in Gaza, because of limited resources and the mainstream media not being readily available. Media academic Noha Mellor makes further interesting points. She says that “social media in the Middle East region, as elsewhere, serve as new platforms for virtual conversations, and these tend to become quite heated during crisis situations, such as the Gaza conflict in July-August 2014. Both sides were highly active on social media sites, in order to rally support for their causes… Supporters of either party had access to social media campaigns tailored to their preferences, thereby propagating personalised propaganda.” No doubt, the significant rise in the new media has given new life to coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, not only in the Middle East, but also in European cities and on the Internet. Today, there are more sympathisers of the Gazans in European cities and political circles even though the PR machine is still working for the Israeli authorities and lobby groups who can fire journalists and threaten politicians for raising their voices in favour of the Palestinians. The writer is a journalist from Pakistan.
