A new generation of Palestinians is using social media to build unprecedented international support for Palestinian freedom. Israel is cracking down on them — while allowing murderous Israeli incitement all but free rein.
On June 11, Mohammad Kana’neh joined a few hundred Palestinian, Israeli, and international protestors at a weekly demonstration against settler expansion in Sheikh Jarrah, occupied East Jerusalem. Kana’neh is a Palestinian citizen of Israel and prominent leader of the Abnaa el-Balad movement, a secular Arab nationalist party. He stood under the hot sun and addressed the protestors in Hebrew. Kana’neh called for an end to Israel’s occupation “from Silwan to Sheikh Jarrah, from Acco to Gaza.” He then turned to the line of border police officers standing in a column facing the crowd, shouting at the officers to “get out of the army.”
Shortly after the protest dispersed, Kana’neh shared a video of his speech that another attendee had uploaded to Facebook; his post was reshared within hours by hundreds of other users.
Three days later, police officers arrested Kana’neh in Jerusalem.
According to a spokesperson for Adalah — the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, which represents Kana’neh — the police accused Kana’neh of provoking the soldiers. By sharing the video, police said, Kana’neh had committed a crime that has been attributed to hundreds of Palestinian activists and dissidents in the last several years: the incitement of violence.
As Kana’neh sat in detention for over two weeks, Israeli authorities combed through his old Facebook posts, dating back months and years. They padded his file with status updates ranging from innocuous celebrations of International Women’s Day to messages mourning the death of Palestinian political prisoners.
The Israeli prosecution team claimed that Kana’neh’s use of social media incited acts of violence and supported terrorism. As a result, he was detained for a month leading up to his trial on July 14.
Since the latest round of violence in Israel/Palestine this May, activists have observed an upsurge of incitement cases against Palestinian users. The proliferation of these charges results from growing, and largely peaceful, resistance to Israel’s occupation on social media platforms.
Palestinian activists broadcast scenes of American-born settlers taking over their family homes in East Jerusalem, coordinated an unprecedented general strike across the region, and shared experiences of living under siege in the Gaza strip with the world. The dissemination of these images of violence on a platform better known for Gen-Z dance memes led political pundits to nickname the events of May the “TikTok Intifada.”
The unprecedented visibility of Palestinian rights activists came with an intensification of online surveillance and censorship. As activists found new ways to gather online, police often used the counterterrorism law as a crowd-control tactic, intimidating those gathering in digital spaces and penalizing prominent activists for making creative use of these platforms. Incitement charges aim to force many users like Kana’neh out of public view altogether.
Incitement has become an increasingly common charge since 2016, when Israel passed an updated counterterrorism law. The law broadened the legal definition of the term to encompass not only speech that “directly calls for violence,” but also speech that “expresses support for terrorist acts,” with or without a resolution to carry them out.
While social media has served as a breeding ground for extremism across the region, since the mid-2010s, Israeli police have relied on a broad definition of “support.” A Palestinian user who posts a verse from a poem with the word “resistance” in it, for example, can be charged with the same crime as another who calls for lethal attacks to be carried out.
When facing charges, Palestinians may be held for months without access to a lawyer who can tell them what they are being accused of, according to Rabea Eghbariah, a lawyer for Adalah who has worked on similar cases. They are barred from speaking to the press, accessing the internet, or sharing information regarding their cases. The threat of this ordeal intimidates other Palestinian users into silence.
Digital Double Standards
Even though Palestinians are shut out of digital spaces, social media networks have provided a platform for Jewish Israeli extremists to coordinate and carry out violence. As mentioned previously in Jacobin, between May 6th and May 21st, 7amleh, or the Arab Center for Social Media Advancement — a Palestinian digital rights advocacy organization — tracked 183,000 instances of incendiary speech and incitement to violence against Palestinians by social media users in Israel/Palestine, amounting to a 15-fold increase in racist hate speech.
Between May 10th and May 21st, right-wing militias — composed of both militant settlers and young adherents of the Jewish supremacist ideology Kahanism—used online platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram, and Facebook groups to coordinate attacks on Palestinian citizens of Israel in cities like Bat Yam, Haifa, and Lydd. On Facebook threads and through encrypted chats, they picked out Palestinian-owned businesses to target, discussed what weapons to use and where to obtain them, and coordinated the places and times where lynch mobs would convene.
“We could see the attacks being planned,” said Alison Carmel, 7amleh’s international outreach coordinator, recalling finding “thousands of accounts calling for death to Arabs, for real violence.”
The ease with which independent watchdogs like 7amleh found the meeting points of online extremists raises questions about how the authorities missed them. J., a Jewish Israeli activist who tracks right-wing extremist groups, and who requested anonymity due to threats of retribution from extremists, described the militias as largely composed of Jewish Israeli youth who often lack basic digital security skills. Many are easily identifiable by their legal names and phone numbers, she said.
“They don’t even try to hide things like gun sales,” J. said. “They know the authorities won’t target them.”
“All of the groups are open,” agreed Ori Kol, the founder of the Israeli media watchdog Fake Reporter, an Israeli disinformation and extremism watchdog group. Fake Reporter even approached Israeli authorities in May, at the height of the violence, and offered to help them crack down on the online communities coordinating attacks on Palestinians. The group combed through social media networks and messaging threads, sharing screenshots of chats with authorities, including some that showed the legal names and phone numbers of armed extremists.
But according to Kol, the police refused to act on the reports of premeditated violence being planned, allowing lethal attacks to take place in spite of ample warning.
Though these users’ behavior fits the legal definition of incitement — and, indeed, some went on to commit actual violence — authorities have pursued only a handful of cases against Jewish extremists in the wake of the attacks. As Eghbariah puts it, “There are provisions for Jews and provisions for Arabs. Very few [Jewish Israelis] are actually incarcerated for these kinds of things.”
Police arrested upwards of two thousand Palestinians during the latest round of violence, filing 185 indictments; only thirty Jewish Israelis were among those indicted.
“I want to believe that [the authorities] didn’t understand the severity of what was going to happen, or couldn’t keep tabs on each group, but it was so easy to document,” Kol said. “It takes a concerted effort not to monitor this stuff.”
This May, 7amleh indexed five hundred cases in which Palestinian users reported that social media companies had violated their digital rights, including by flagging or removing their posts and banning their profiles. In part, this occurs because tech giants rely on algorithms that may flag words like “shahid” or “resistance,” even if they appear quoted in a poem or song lyric with no reference to violence, or confuse a user’s name —for example, “Qassam”— for the name of a militant organization, such as the Qassam brigades.
Nadim Nashif, the executive director of 7amleh, has described Palestinian social media users as being “doubly moderated” by both Israeli authorities and the companies’ AI, which is coded with an implicitly anti-Palestinian bias by design.
7amleh has responded by working to repeal the companies’ decisions, pushing for the reinstatement of tens of thousands of censored profiles, tweets, and photos. But social media platforms are ill-equipped or unwilling to respond to such requests. Repeals go unanswered, and requests for meetings are unmet. 7amleh produces an annual report that monitors anti-Palestinian hate speech online, but its findings haven’t seemed to influence the behavior of the tech companies.
“We keep seeing more of the same, if not things getting worse,” Carmel told me.
Kana’neh emerged from detention on July 14, a month after he was arrested. The Jerusalem Magistrate Court ordered he remain under house arrest, barred from accessing the Internet, conducting interviews, or speaking before any audiences. He remains confined to his home in Northern Israel as the prosecution appeals the decision and return him to prison.
Even as users like Kana’neh are stifled, Palestinians refuse to be intimidated into silence. Despite a wave of targeted arrests and discriminatory indictments this past May, a new generation of Palestinians has leveraged social media to win unprecedented international support for the Palestinian cause. This generation seems to be dominating social media, even in the face of intensive surveillance and platforms that are biased against it.
As Carmel put it when we spoke last month: “We know that Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter won’t bring about total liberation. We know that sometimes they do the opposite. But they also provide some of the most important tools out there for getting our message out.”
This post was originally published on Jacobin.