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Young Israelis Fight Hashtag Battle to Defend #IsraelUnderFire
Confronted with an outpouring of sympathy on social networks for Palestinians killed or wounded in Gaza in an eight-day military confrontation, a group of young Israelis is pushing back, using the hashtag #IsraelUnderFire to rally support for what they say is an unavoidable, defensive war provoked by rocket fire from Islamist militants.
As The Jerusalem Post reports, the effort to make Israel’s case is being spearheaded by 400 college students posting comments, memes, video clips, images and explanatory graphics on Facebook and Twitter from dozens of computers in a “Hasbara war room” at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, north of Tel Aviv. Hasbara, a Hebrew euphemism for propaganda, literally means “explanation,” and the organizers of the campaign promise to equip like-minded volunteers who visit their website, Israel Under Fire, with “everything you need in order to properly inform about and advocate for Israel,” in 19 languages.
Not only did #Hamas knock out power to 70K Gazans with rocket attack, but #Israel supplied the electricity! #oops pic.twitter.com/dYARn9gGWy
— Israel Under Fire (@israelunderfire) July 13, 2014
In addition to “informative texts, images, gifs” and blog posts written by a reservist in Israel’s army who is also a Hollywood screenwriter, the materials include YouTube videos in which young people argue for Israel’s right to self-defense and they equate rocket fire from Gaza with terrorist attacks in Boston, Madrid and New York.
“The goal is to deliver a very clear message to people abroad — Israel has the right to defend itself,” Lidor Bar David, one of the group’s organizers, told the Tel Aviv daily Yedioth Ahronoth. Before taking up a fellowship at the university in Herzliya, Mr. Bar David was a captain in the Israel Defense Forces, serving in the office of the military spokesman’s unit.
To Ali Abunimah, the Palestinian-American founder of the Electronic Intifada, the Israelis’ campaign raises questions about how open the students are in identifying themselves as partisans working in concert with their government to justify the use of force in Gaza.
According to data compiled by Brandwatch, a technology firm that tracks discussions on social media, the #IsraelUnderFire hashtag has been used in more than 36,200 tweets and 660 Facebook posts in the past week.
James Lovejoy, a Brandwatch researcher, notes that those on social networks who are more sympathetic to Palestinians have used the hashtags #GazaUnderAttack and #FreePalestine more during the same period. Since July 7, the #GazaUnderAttack hashtag has been used 622,000 times and #FreePalestine has racked up more than 220,000 mentions. An anecdotal measure of how mainstream the #FreePalestine hashtag has become is that even celebrities like Dwight Howard, the basketball player, and Rihanna, the singer, posted tweets with the slogan — although both subsequently removed the comments from their feeds after criticism.
As BBC News reported, the success of the #GazaUnderAttack hashtag has been undercut somewhat by the use of images in some posts that were later shown to have been taken during previous instances of violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or in other parts of the Middle East, like Syria and Iraq.
Partisans on both sides have shared images that appear to support their point of view that, on closer inspection, turned out to have been either misidentified or even fabricated. One widely-shared image posted by Israelis using the #IsraelUnderFire tag, apparently showing a devout Muslim protester holding placards that read “Stop Hamas Terrorism on Israel” and “Free Gaza From Hamas,” appears to have been created by digitally manipulating a genuine news photograph of a November 2012 protest in Sarajevo.
The headline on an earlier version of this article misidentified a hashtag associated with an online campaign by Israeli college students. It is #IsraelUnderFire, not #IsraelUnderAttack.
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