Palestinian conflict hits cyberspace

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"What do the world’s most popular board game and most popular online social networking site have in common? Both have run into trouble over the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Facebook, the ubiquitous networking site that has both users and employers scrambling to learn as much as possible about people’s personal lives, recently angered Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank when they found that Facebook located their settlements in “Palestine”.

And when Hasbro, the company behind the Monopoly board game, in February announced it was planning a global edition and would allow people to vote online for their favourite cities, it unwittingly kicked off a worldwide effort to have “Jerusalem, Israel” included.

While the two companies took different approaches to resolving what threatened to become public relations disasters, their dilemmas illustrated what some consider a new era in the battle between Israelis and Palestinians. Last week, right-wing Israeli hackers embedded the Israeli flag, the Israeli national anthem and the symbol of the Kach Movement, an ultra rightist Israeli movement that advocates the forcible expulsion of Palestinians from all of lands once known as Palestine, on three websites associated with Palestinian rights.

“These are symbolic struggles that mimic the fundamental basis of the larger struggle – one over legitimacy: what you call the land and how you write the history,” said Ali Abunimah, founder of the Electronic Intifada website."

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"The Jewish Internet Defense Force, a group that claims to have 5,000 members worldwide, says it is steadily removing members from a viciously anti-Israel and anti-Semitic group on Facebook, having taken control of the group on Sunday.

"Facebook wouldn't do anything about , so we did what had to be done," the group posted on its Web site. "We're not sure how long this can or will last, so we're moving fast to do what needs to be done."

The Jewish Internet Defense Force (JIDF) describes itself as a group of Jewish activists who fight anti-Semitism and terrorism trends throughout the Internet. It says it formed as a grassroots effort in 2000, mainly to mount mass e-mail campaigns, in response to the second intifada. It then began operating on various Web sites, including Facebook, to spread news about Israel and Jewish issues.

"As we used Facebook, we noticed many of the issues began literally to stare us in the face, as many various anti-Semitic and pro-Jihadist groups were springing up everywhere," said David, the spokesperson for the JIDF, who asked that his last name not be published. He said he had received four death threats since beginning his activities.

In the JIDF's latest efforts, the group has been working around the clock to dismantle the group on Facebook titled, "Israel is not a country! Delist it from Facebook as a country." That group had tens of thousands of members."

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