Israeli colonialism goes digital (+972 Magazine)

Israeli colonialism goes digital

Israel's collaboration with tech companies has turned social media from a tool of free political speech to a means of censoring and repressing Palestinians.

By Anwar Mhajne May 25, 2021

Surveillance has always been an integral part of Israel’s strategy to maintain its oppression over Palestinians, whether they are citizens of Israel, occupied subjects, or in exile. Social media, however, has undoubtedly made it much easier for the state to suppress and monitor Palestinian voices and narratives on a global scale.

We saw this play out, almost in real time, during the events in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah this past month: scores of Instagram users, for example, criticized the social media app for suspending accounts and deleting posts and stories regarding the imminent forcible expulsion of families from the neighborhood. Although Instagram later apologized and claimed the removals were a technical error, the recurrence of this phenomenon across online platforms shows that these responses are no accident.

This is not the first time social media companies have been accused of censoring Palestinian dissident voices. In fact, digital surveillance and control of Palestinians has become a foundational strategy for the Israeli government in the information age, with new institutions and policies emerging to carry out these goals.

The Oslo Accords, which were ostensibly designed in the 1990s to provide some form of local autonomy in the occupied territories, is supposed to grant Palestinians “the right to build and operate separate and independent communication systems and infrastructures including telecommunication networks, a television network and a radio network.” Yet Israel’s restrictions have systematically hindered the development of any independent Palestinian information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure.

The opening of a first completely Palestinian-owned and managed electricity substation, outside of Jenin, West Bank. July 10, 2017. (Miriam Alster/Flash90)

For instance, Palestinian internet traffic relies on a fragmented infrastructure that is entirely dependent on Israeli networks. According to a 2016 World Bank report, in addition to maintaining full control of the core network, Israel frequently blocks the import of ICT equipment to Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank. Israel’s control over cyberspace in the occupied territories further hampers service delivery in ways that essentially mirror Israel’s roadblocks, checkpoints, and Kafkaesque permit system in the physical world.

The Israeli army has also routinely jammed and hacked telephone, internet, and broadcast signals among the Palestinian population. It has even destroyed Palestinian network infrastructure in moments when violence is absent; in 2012, for example, the army deliberately and continually cut the sole landline connection between the southern and northern regions of the Gaza Strip, unconnected to any armed escalations.

State-company collaboration

Despite these limitations, access to the internet has given Palestinians a means to transcend their territorial fragmentation and has aided the unification of Palestinian voices. Palestinian civil society has capitalized on the use of social media to circumvent mainstream and traditional media to share their stories of Israeli occupation, displacement, and violence with the world.

But while digital activism may provide a level of virtual mobility, it also makes Palestinians an easy target of state control. Israel has especially intensified its crackdown on Palestinian digital users in the aftermath of the October 2015 uprising, which were sparked after Israeli Knesset members and Jewish settlers stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound under heavy army and police cover, and which became characterized by scores of lone Palestinian knife attacks and Israeli collective punishment.

A Palestinian youth points to logos of Facebook and WhatsApp on his computer in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip February 22, 2014. (Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90)

Since then, Israel has arrested hundreds of Palestinian activists, students, artists, and journalists under the pretext of “incitement” on social media platforms, and has seized private Palestinian communications to pressure them into ending their activism or to blackmail them into collaborating with the state’s security service.

This surveillance is now being done through collaboration between Israeli security units and social media platforms. As a result, Palestinian voices are constantly and disproportionally targeted by companies such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, YouTube, and even Zoom.

Facebook in particular has become a major arena of political confrontation, and is now weighing whether the word “Zionist” should be considered a racist proxy for “Jew” or “Israeli.” Under this policy, reasonable attempts to criticize and hold Israel accountable through constitutionally-protected political speech could be labeled as “hate speech” and removed from the platform. Last week, representatives of Facebook and TikTok even met over Zoom with Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz to discuss removing content that allegedly incites to violence or spreads disinformation from their respective sites.

According to a study by the Palestinian digital rights group 7amleh, in 2019, two-thirds of Palestinians said that the fear of censorship had made them worried about expressing their political views on social media. Sada Social, another Palestinian digital rights organization, documented about 1,000 violations against Palestinian social media users in 2019 in the form of removing public pages, accounts, posts, publications, and restrictions of access. 7amleh also reported that in 2020, social media companies complied with 81 percent of Israel’s requests to remove Palestinian online content.

Israeli activists deliver a petition signed by 50,000 people to Facebook’s Head of Israel Policy, Jordana Cutler, demanding the company refrain from changing its hate speech policy to include the word “Zionist” as antisemitic, Tel Aviv, February 26, 2021. (Heidi Motola/Activestills.org)

By contrast, it seems to take social media companies much longer to address inciting content posted by Israelis about Palestinians. Last week, 7amleh reported that right-wing Israeli groups have been using Telegram to both incite violence and organize attacks on Palestinians. Despite reports of right-wing extremists in Israel using WhatsApp groups to coordinate violence against Palestinians in Israel, WhatsApp did not offer any systematic solution; it simply removed some accounts of people who participated in some of these groups, only when the accounts were reported.

Persecution and repression

This collaboration to suppress and erase Palestinian voices online effectively extends Israel’s colonial practices from the physical to the digital realm, creating what is being increasingly described as a form of digital colonialism.

Like classic colonialism, digital colonialism is rooted in the tech industry’s design as a system for profit and exploitation. With the cooperation of oppressive governments, big tech corporations use technology to spy on users, process their data, and make decisions about its use. This data applies to speech regulation, content moderation, and freedom of association. As such, social network companies can easily censor content, shape what people see in their news feeds, and determine what kind of activist groups can be created on their platforms.

For Palestinians, physical restrictions and geographical fragmentation leaves access to social media as one of the few tools at their disposal to amplify their voices and counter disinformation about their people and their cause. Silencing them by deleting their posts and sharing their data with the Israeli government has not only led to the arrest of political dissidents; it has turned social media from a tool for strengthening freedom of speech and promoting human rights to one used for persecution and repression.

Governments and other stakeholders have a responsibility to uphold their obligations to protect human rights under international law, including in the digital sphere. This can begin by allowing Palestinians to develop their own ICT infrastructure, while holding social media companies accountable for surveillance of Palestinian activists and demanding they be more transparent about their conduct. With Palestinians being targeted from the streets to their phones, digital rights are an essential front to achieve justice by ensuring that Palestinian voices and stories continue to be heard, documented, and uplifted.

#Tech #censorship #silencing dissent #colonialism #Facebook #surveillance #7amleh

Many high-tech companies are censoring pro-Palestinian contents, silencing Palestinian voices, BDS voices. Here is a letter to Facebook addressing the issue:

* Movement letter to Facebook

May 26th, 2021

Dear sheryl sandberg,

We write as civil society organizations in the United States, Palestine, and beyond, angered and disturbed by the recent censorship of Palestinian users and their supporters on your platforms. We are equally horrified by the high levels of inciting content directed towards Palestinians on Facebook’s platforms. At this moment, social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram are often Palestinian protestors’ and residents’ only tools to share information to keep each other safe in the face of repression by the Israeli government and police, and during attacks on civilians. These platforms also play a key role in Palestinian users and their allies in documenting Israeli government human rights violations, and sharing the images, videos, and accounts of the murder and violent dispossession of Palestinians being perpetrated by the Israeli government and Zionist Israeli settlers. This blatant censorship of Palestinian political content is putting these activists further at risk. 

As Palestinian residents defend their homes in Jerusalem from forced dispossession by the Israeli government and state-sanctioned Zionist settler groups, their calls for support have received widespread international attention—inspiring social media campaigns and mass protests around the world. This international outcry only grew after the Israeli military attacked Ramadan worshippers at al-Aqsa mosque and started brutally bombing Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip —an ongoing onslaught that killed over 200 people, including at least 60 children. And the the international community continued to mobilize as, immediately in the wake of a ceasefire, Israeli police fired stun grenades on Palestinian worshippers at the al-Aqsa complex and embarked on a mass-arrest campaign of Palestinian citizens of Israel that has resulted in over 1,500 arrests targeting protestors.

Facebook executives’ decision at this moment to directly collaborate with Israeli Defense and Justice Minister Gantz on content moderation, without appropriate parity of government engagement until prompted by civil society, is beyond outrageous. Facebook may need to consult governments on various content and policy issues in its work; however, to coordinate with the Israeli government — which the United Nations and multiple human rights organizations have called an apartheid state — publicly in the middle of a military assault on Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip, attacks on Palestinian citizens in Israel, and forcible displacement of Palestinians in East Jerusalem is dangerous overreach at best. 

In addition, the numerous reports of removal or chilling of political speech that several of our organizations have received over the past two weeks, combined with the report released by 7amleh last week that includes 429 reported incidents from Instagram and Facebook, raise concerns about Facebook’s relationship with the Israeli Ministry of Justice’s extra-legal Cyber Unit. The fact that since May 6 there has been widespread removal of Palestinians’ content or supportive content (including removal of content and deactivation of accounts or pages based on Community Standards violations, as well as the mass removal of Instagram stories) that after review have been restored for lack of any violation, indicates that Facebook is perhaps voluntarily agreeing to takedowns recommended by the Israeli Cyber Unit. This unclear relationship between Facebook and the Israeli Cyber Unit is concerning, as it is not subject to any formal governmental or legal process. 

Such indications of Facebook’s privileged relationship with the Israeli government contradict the assurances that Facebook community engagement and content policy representatives have repeatedly made to those of us that have engaged in good faith as stakeholders in Facebook’s content policy process, specifically over the past six months around Facebook’s possible reinterpretation of “Zionist.” When expressing concern that current or future policies (such as those stifling criticism of “Zionists” or “Zionist” institutions) would silence Palestinians and those of us organizing to hold the Israeli government accountable, we have often been assured that Facebook does not have a privileged relationship with the Israeli government —that our concerns are unfounded. Given Facebook’s decision to collaborate with the Israeli Ministry of Defense and Justice, the possible relationship between Facebook and the Israeli Cyber Unit, and The Intercept’s recent investigation regarding Facebook’s content moderation rules silencing criticism of Israel, our communities’ mistrust of the company is increasing.

Facebook must take the following urgent and crucial steps to repair this mistrust with our communities and ensure that we can count on Facebook and Instagram as free civic spaces and tools for holding governments accountable:

1. Uphold your own commitment to respect human rights and “to be a place for equality, safety, dignity and free speech” as set in your corporate human rights policy, engage with human rights organizations and civil society groups to immediately address the concerns we have raised, and stop censoring Palestinians on your platforms.
2. Provide transparency on how Facebook is applying content policies, such as those around hate speech and incitement of violence, as it relates to the following ethnic and religious identities and political ideologies: Palestinians, Jews, Israelis, and Zionists. 
3. Evaluate Facebook’s relationship with the Israeli government across ministries and sever ties with Israel’s Cyber Unit, which may be directing the takedown of content that does not violate any community standards and, therefore, may be leading to the censorship or chilling of political speech. 
4. Preserve and share all data on content removals. This includes, but is not limited to, information about which takedowns did not receive human review, whether users tried to appeal the takedown, and reported incidents from Facebook and Instagram users that were not acted upon.
5. Allow independent researchers and stakeholders to review blocked or removed content and all data related to such content removals, subject to data protection and privacy requirements. This good-faith gesture will allow external oversight of moderation mechanisms to vetted researchers and independent stakeholders with relevant expertise to provide additional oversight of redress mechanisms and the fairness and effectiveness of appeal mechanisms, particularly for historically marginalized groups, and work to rebuild trust with those groups.

 Urgent action is required from Facebook to examine its complicity with the Israeli government’s apartheid and ethnic cleansing policies. We urge you to reply to this letter publicly and engage with us immediately. 

* Facebook under fire as human rights groups claim ‘censorship’ of pro-Palestine posts

* Science and technology in Israel (Wikipedia)

Science and technology in Israel is one of the country's most developed sectors. Israel spent 4.3% of its gross domestic product (GDP) on civil research and development in 2015, the highest ratio in the world.[1] In 2019, Israel was ranked the world's fifth most innovative country by the Bloomberg Innovation Index.[2] It ranks thirteenth in the world for scientific output as measured by the number of scientific publications per million citizens.[3] In 2014, Israel's share of scientific articles published worldwide (0.9%) was much higher than its share of the global population (0.1%).[4][1] It also has one of the highest per capita rates of filed patents.[5]

Israel counts 140 scientists and technicians per 10,000 employees, one of the highest ratios in the world. In comparison, there are 85 per 10,000 in the United States and 83 per 10,000 in Japan.[6] In 2012, Israel counted 8,337 full-time equivalent researchers per million inhabitants.[1] This compares with 3,984 in the US, 6,533 in the Republic of South Korea and 5,195 in Japan. Israel's high technology industry has benefited from both the country's highly educated and technologically skilled workforce coupled with the strong presence of foreign high-tech firms and sophisticated research centres.[7][1]

Israel is home to major players in the high-tech industry and has one of the world's most technologically literate populations.[8] In 1998, Tel Aviv was named by Newsweek as one of the ten most technologically influential cities in the world.[9] Since 2000, Israel has been a member of EUREKA, the pan-European research and development funding and coordination organization, and held the rotating chairmanship of the organization for 2010–2011.[10][11] In 2010, American journalist David Kaufman wrote that the high tech area of Yokneam, Israel, has the "world's largest concentration of aesthetics-technology companies".[12] Google Chairman Eric Schmidt has complimented the country during a visit there, saying that “Israel has the most important high-tech center in the world after the US.”[13]