Palestine Online: how young peace activists can make their voices heard…and stay safe.
Palestinian are highly active social media users, whether they’re posting selfies or campaigning for the release of political prisoners: 36% of those living in the West Bank and Gaza are active Facebook users, while an estimated 51% are smartphone users, according to the Palestine Central Bureau of Statistics.
Social media has also been instrumental in the success of a number of campaigns in the last few years. For example, the #FBCensorsPalestine campaign launched in Autumn 2016 in protest at Facebook deactivating the profiles of local newspapers’ administrators — such as Quds News — and complying with hundreds of content removal requests by the Israeli authorities. Campaigners staged a ‘Facebook blackout’ on Twitter which reached 48 million users worldwide and resulted in the re-activation of some accounts.

Jailed for ‘incitement’
Yet a worrying trend has emerged of increasingly frequent violations of Palestinians’ digital rights: limitations on their rights to free expression, even resulting in arrests and detention.
An organisation called Amleh — the Arab Centre for Social Media Advancement — has been tracking Israeli detentions during the past year. They report that 150 Palestinians have been detained on basis of social media activity between October 2015 and Jan 2016, while in 2016 over 200 files were opened on suspects under the charge of ‘incitement’. Moreover, arrests come not only from Israeli forces but also from Hamas in Gaza and the PA (Palestinian Authority) in the West Bank. Human Rights Watch has therefore deemed the PA to be imposing a ‘culture of self-censorship’ on activists in the WB.

In legal terms, detentions are made possible by the continued use of ‘Administrative Detention’, a military detention programme that stands outside of the regular Israeli courts structure. This means no appeals process, no judicial oversight, and 6 month detention orders that can be rolled over — so no predictability in sentence length.
Reporting in Haaretz by John Brown and Noam Rotem (Hebrew) has concluded that detainees who have posted actively on social media are increasingly being charged with ‘incitement’. The level of proof required is quite low, and even supporting a Palestinian armed group online may suffice.
Staying safe

Yet a vibrant online presence is crucial to the work of young peace activists and campaigners in Palestine. Consequently, in the face of increased attention from the Israeli Security Agency — the technologically advanced Unit 8200 — it pays to take precautions to protect one’s privacy so far as possible.
To that end, Amleh have developed their ‘10 Commandments’ (video — English subs) for staying safe online, while Operation 250, an American counter-radicalisation organisation, has also published useful advice for young people to consider when posting and engaging on social media platforms. We note a selection of the advice below.
- Avoid easy tracking/surveillance by using a ‘blind’ browser such as TOR. While the ‘deep web’ has a reputation for being the preserve of drug dealers and hitmen, peace and human rights activists in China, Turkey and elsewhere have used the service to keep their organising and communications private. TOR bounces a computer’s IP address — the code that identifies you online — via numerous routers worldwide, allowing individuals to communicate with some privacy. That said, it has its limitations: it cannot completely cover the tracks of individuals being actively targeted by intelligence services.
- Restrict access to your social media platforms. In an era when corporations have been known to ‘mine’ users data for advertisers, this makes good sense for anyone. Change your name on Facebook. Tighten up the privacy settings to restrict profile access and post visibility. Check out the safety guides produced by Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, which are designed to safeguard against abuse and harassment as well.
- On the internet, there is no such thing as ‘gone forever’. If you post it, there’s always a risk it will be stored somewhere even after deletion, so think carefully before posting. One approach has been to delete Facebook accounts permanently and start again from scratch.
- Safe smartphone use. Make sure you are in control of your location settings/GPS to guard against being tracked. Again, this is by no means a defence against an intelligence agency actively seeking you out, but works as a good safeguard against passive surveillance. There are guides for iPhone and Android users out there.
- Keep software updated to safeguard against hackers, malware and ‘phishing’ attacks. Phishing is when hackers masquerade as legitimate websites — banks, email hosts — to gain access to personal information like banking details and passwords. Nowadays there is plenty of free antivirus software out there.
Click the links to follow Zimam’s work on Facebook (Arabic) and Twitter(English).
