Palestinian Youth Activism in the Internet Age

Online and Offline Social Networks after the Arab Spring

Albana S. Dwonch

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780755643769
• eBook ISBN: 9781838600662
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Since the Arab uprisings of 2011, Palestinian youth movements have formed unofficial and leaderless networks of political activism, using the internet to mobilise and bring together three generations of Palestinian activists. This book focuses on three key case studies that have marked a turning point in the development of youth-organised and grassroots Palestinian politics: the 15 March movement in Gaza, the Palestinians for Dignity movement in the West Bank, and the Prawer movement of young Palestinians in Israel. Drawing on extensive fieldwork composed of interviews with leading Palestinian activists in the West Bank and Gaza and detailed analysis of social media patterns, this book offers a fresh reading of Palestinian youth and their central online and offline role in popular protests against both Israeli and Palestinian power structures.

1

Introduction

No one expected or saw their protests coming. Nobody warned them how rocky and messy it would get once they plunged from the safety of their social media networks into the streets of Gaza and the West Bank and even inside Israel. Despite the rapid diffusion of the inspiring images of the Arab Uprisings in 2011, in a fast-paced world networked by the Internet, Palestinian expectations of any form of massive youth revolts seemed depressingly low. One way or another, their odds to come together and protest were close to none.

Overwhelmingly, in this period, the “Oslo generation”—young Palestinians born around the historical period of the Oslo Accords of 1993—appeared depoliticized, demobilized, fragmented, politically alienated, and economically marginalized (Sayre and Botmeh, 2010; Dhillon and Yousef, 2009; Khalaf and Khalaf, 2011; Christophersen, Høigilt, and Tiltnes, 2012; Hoigilt, 2013, 2015; Dana, 2015; Casati, 2016). Consistently, these studies highlighted the cynicism, despair, and hopelessness of these young Palestinians, locked in their segregated geographic areas and trapped between Israel’s military occupying regime and the deepening division between Palestinian factions in the West Bank and Gaza. Endless and ominous studies and surveys conducted between 2009 and 2013 pointed to the gloomy prospects of a disillusioned group of youth, whose emotional bond with their traditional leaders was dissipated and replaced instead with a bitter sense of betrayal by their authoritarian parties and formal political movements (Sharek, 2009, 2011, 2013; al-Shabaka, 2011, 2015, 2018, 2019; FAFO, 2012, 2013; AWRAD, 2012, 2015, 2016; ASDA’A Burson-Marsteller, 2017).

Notwithstanding this bleak political background and loads of insurmountable contextual constraints, a rising tide of Palestinian youth-led activism and protests surged in the Palestinian territories and inside Israel between 2011 and 2013. It first started on their social media networks (SMNs), where groups of young Palestinians, inspired by the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, shared their own great expectations online. They called on their peers to join them in their Palestinian revolution against the division of the two main Palestinian political parties, Fatah in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza.

On March 15, 2011, at various sites in the West Bank, in the Gaza Strip, and even inside Israel, vast numbers of young Palestinians took to the streets with a core demand, never embraced so publicly before: “The people want the end of the division,” referring to the political division of the West Bank, ruled by Fatah, and the Gaza Strip, controlled by Hamas. From there, a sustained series of seemingly isolated protests followed: In November 2011, young activists of the West Bank were the coordinators of another successful campaign, “Palestinian Freedom Rides,” whose images were instantly diffused via the Internet across global networks, exposing the expansion of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank and the military checkpoints that prevent West Bank Palestinians from crossing into Jerusalem. In September 2012, a growing network of activists coordinated massive protests in Ramallah, Hebron, and Nablus against Palestinian Authority (PA) economic policies. Images of Palestinian Security Forces (PSF) violently beating and cracking down on activists went viral. In January 2013, the initiative of Bab al-Shams (Gate of the Sun), wherein young Palestinians erected tents and caravans, simulating Palestinian settlement on Israeli-occupied land, caught the Israeli authorities by surprise. It took them three days to dismantle the tents and arrest the activists, but by that time this activity was hailed as the most creative youth initiative seen in the past decade.

Lastly, in June to July 2013, thousands of young Palestinian-Israeli citizens living inside Israel, waving Palestinian flags, and wearing checkered black and white keffiyeh rose up to protest Israel’s government plan to remove about 40,000 Bedouins from their lands in the Negev desert. Through coordination via digital networks, solidarity protests were simultaneously organized in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. Similarly, images of Israeli police brutally cracking down on activists were posted and shared instantly through social media pages of the activists participating in the demonstrations.

Against a predominantly dark narrative of Palestinian youth activism in the past decade, this persistent wave of youth protests and new forms of activism are quite striking. Even more remarkable is the fact that these politically unaffiliated activists willingly exposed themselves to tear gas, rubber-coated bullets, skunk water, severe beating, and imprisonment in both Israeli and Palestinian jails.

In this book, I aim to explain this paradox of supposedly depoliticized, distressed, and demobilized Palestinian youth rising up in demonstrations. While examining the dynamics of these youth demonstrations and protests, I ask this central question: In the face of these seemingly insurmountable obstacles and to the detriment of their own personal safety, why and how did these young groups come together to effect change in their lives, as is evident in a sustained chain of protests? This book answers this question by studying their mobilization modes and the practical and concrete ways that digital networks such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and blogs affected their new forms of activism. A series of online and offline protests that seemed both chaotic and unorganized and yet somehow recurring frequently, with similar protesting themes and venues, were coordinated by a consistent network of activists. These actors and these movements surprised those who praised them for injecting hope, enthusiasm, and novelty in the fatigued modes of Palestinian mobilizations as well as those who criticized them for their various shortcomings, most obvious of which is the lack of results and a long-term strategy.

This study addresses this question, through a bottom-up analysis of the online and offline evolution of a series of Palestinian youth protests, led by leaderless and independent Palestinian youth groups between 2011 and 2013 in the occupied Palestinian territories and in Israel. These mobilizations were coordinated and announced primarily on social media networks (Facebook, Twitter, and blogs) and then materialized into street protests. They were led by masses of youth unaffiliated with established political parties who were distrustful of their current leadership. I initially focused on such movements, because despite their similarity and their occurrence in tandem with other protest movements in the Middle East at the time, they barely left a mark on the ongoing narrative of the historic period widely known as the “Arab Spring.”

However, when moving beyond the online content analysis of this collection of protests between 2011 and 2013 and tracing the offline evolvement in their separated geographic areas in the Palestinian territories, my attention quickly shifted beyond the context of the Arab Spring where these movements originated. My attention was drawn to the compelling and courageous stories of the activists involved in these protests, their new forms of activism initiated on their digital networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, and the formational dynamics of the Palestinian youth movements in the age of the Internet. By “formational dynamics,” I mean a detailed account of the online and offline actions of these activists and their evolving experiences from the digital networks, where they first expressed dissent, to the offline challenges of street protests where they demanded change; from the easy start and instant success in creation of small groups and opening their group Facebook pages to the long struggle to agree on one common demand and then breaking up their groups again; from the multitudes of young Palestinians “liking” and “sharing” ideas and stories of activism in their digital platforms to the real numbers of young Palestinians taking to the streets to protest oppression, occupation and injustice. Such stories of online and offline activism appear unconnected on the surface, but when studied more closely show that they are actually intertwined in a myriad of unexpected ways. Together they give us a glimpse of the complex realities of the everyday political organizing of these Palestinian youth groups in the age of the Internet. These dynamics between online and offline contexts constitute, I believe, one of the central fields for social movement studies in the coming decades.

Research questions

This book zooms in on the interplay between the personal life stories of these individual activists, the digital networks that connected them across territorial fragmentations and military borders and the contentious political realities that shaped their mobilization processes and influenced the evolution of these protests in Gaza and the West Bank in Israel. It sheds light on the motivations that led groups of Palestinian youth to search for alternative ways of mobilizing, while simultaneously tracing the pathways that led to disconnect from Palestinian governance, and on the challenges of influencing the course of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

The study answers these three empirical questions: (1) What internal and external factors determined the transformation of certain actions initiated on digital networks into street protests led by these youth groups in Palestine and Israel? (2) To what degree did these youth networks and their newer forms of activism affect the more traditional mobilization modes, as implemented by official parties and conventional organizations in each separate geographic area? (3) What prevented these activists from moving beyond specific events and initiatives and from developing a sense of a common purpose and shared commitment in order to affect longer-term political change? These questions intersect closely with literature in the fields of communications and social movements, which I will review below, after I proceed with an outline of case selection, methodology, and chapter organization.

The book contends that the series of social media-fueled protests in the period of 2011–13 signaled a turning point for Palestinian youth activism, from collective uprisings affiliated with official parties to a multiplicity of leaderless movements developing outside of the mobilizing structures of formal political organizations. Unlike the historic activism of Palestinian youth in the first and second intifadas, these new and networked movements occur as cycles of confrontations with both the current political systems in the West Bank and Gaza and Israel’s military occupation of the Palestinian territory.

The book demonstrates that the decade-long crippling division between the two main Palestinian factions, Hamas and Fatah, further deepened the disconnect and significantly accelerated the pace of withdrawal of youth from party-affiliated activism. This rupture became publicly visible in the aftermath of the 15 March movement, wherein young independent Palestinians rose against the ongoing bitter political rivalry between the two main Palestinian factions, Fatah and Hamas. In response, both parties used similar tactics to infiltrate, co-opt, and arrest these youth crowds, demonstrating the common repressive nature of both political systems in the West Bank and Gaza.

A second common theme of the mobilizations analyzed here, is a search for a renewed strategy of non-violent resistance against the Israeli occupation. This search hinges on the fusion of online youth activism networks and offline grassroots movements. Such an approach seeks to rebuild community trust and empower leaders of a variety of forms or movements on the ground, as opposed to the traditional leaders sitting in their offices. In their quest for an alternative path of freedom, justice, and dignity, these activists have abandoned the grand formal strategy for national liberation as represented by their parties and replaced it instead with intentionally quick and disuptive cycles of protests that are aimed at unsettling both Israel’s military control and the domination of repressive Palestinian factions. This dramatic shift in the targets of their protests is tied to the influence of the Arab Spring in the political aspirations of these young activists. The way young Arabs rose against their corrupt institutions and authoritarian regimes, demanding political change, left a deep impression on the young Palestinians’ hearts and minds. For the first time in the rich history of Palestinian youth activism, young Palestinians publicly rebelled against their own political parties. By turning against their divided leadership, while simultaneously resisting Israel’s occupation, they introduced the notion that the Palestinian endeavor must be engaged on two parallel fronts: internal and external.

My second argument is that despite Palestinians’ everyday experience marked by territorial fragmentation, military borders, and internal political divisions, social media played a crucial role in allowing youth to overcome these obstacles, connect online, share information, tips, and specific time frames in simultaneously organizing these impressive youth mobilizations across borders. A significant majority of my interviews with activists directly involved confirmed this conclusion. They were able to share content and information about their actions instantly and raise awareness about their protests through their ties with global networks of action. Through their digital networks, they were able to expand, maintain, and strengthen ties across borders and lines of division in Israel and Palestine. SMNs and increased social media literacy among Palestinian youths enabled these protest movements to move from the margins of Palestinian society to its center. As we will see over the course of this book, uses of social media among Palestinian activists are almost as distinct as their venues and modes of mobilizations in their separate geographic territories in Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, or Israel. However, when authoritarian actors attempt to appropriate these new forms of activism and execute them using existing modes or top-down leadership and heavy organizational resources, the dynamics of these movements change and their impact on new forms of youth mobilizations diminishes.

It is true that, to date, most of these forms of actions have been contained and have not managed to change the internal political systems of the parties, nor have they altered the broader dynamics of Palestinian politics or the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Nevertheless, despite their failure to visibly affect the broader dynamics of these politics, my findings lead me to believe that this series of youth-led protests marked the onset of an independent and effective network of activists, increasingly aware of their power to organize outside of their controlling structures. As a result, a growing and experienced pool of leaders may be able to transfer their successful examples and experiences from these waves of protest from their informal youth networks to larger and more visible networks of actions, such as the non-violent popular resistance in many villages across the West Bank and the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement.

Finally, issues of researcher’s objectivity may come into question and are discussed in the methodology section of this book. However, it should be noted here that my academic interests regarding new social movements (NSMs) and new forms of youth activism in the era of the Internet emerged in the context of my previous work career in the international development field in the Middle East, between 2003 and 2010. During one of the periods analyzed in this book, between 2006 and 2011, I was living and working in Israel and Palestine. During this period, through my work as a youth mobilizer for an international humanitarian organization (Mercy Corps) and as a result of frequent work travels to Gaza and across the West Bank, I had close contacts with some of the activists that participated in these movements. Upon my arrival in Israel and Palestine to conduct fieldwork for the purposes of my doctoral dissertation, they were crucial to network me with a new generation of activists whom I did not know personally.

Case studies

Gaza Strip: The forgotten revolution

No one predicted the explosive outcome of a seemingly random and insignificant event in the Gaza Strip in November 2009. The event was the closure by Hamas, the ruling authority of the Gaza Strip, of “Sharek,” a local and small independent youth organization. Analysts and researchers lightly referred to it as an example of the increasing restriction on Gaza’s civil society and the ongoing political rivalry between the two main Palestinian factions, Hamas in Gaza and Fatah in the West Bank (Sayigh, 2010; Brown, 20...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Series Foreword
• 1 Introduction
• 2 New Social Movements in the Internet Age
• 3 The Rise and Fall of the Arab Spring
• 4 Gaza’s Forgotten Revolution
• 5 At a Crossroads in the West Bank: In Search of a Lost Strategy
• 6 Between Old Demands and New Protests: Stop the Prawer Plan Movement—a Case Study of Palestinian Youth Activism in Israel, 2011–13
• 7 General Conclusions
• Notes
• Appendix
• References
• Index
• Copyright