Digital Jihad

Palestinian Resistance in the Digital Era

Erik Skare

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781783607877
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A new and innovative form of dissent has emerged in response to the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Dubbed "electronic jihad", this approach has seen organized groups of Palestinian hackers make international headlines by breaching the security of such sites as the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, AVG, Avira, Whatsapp, and BitDefender. Though initially confined to small clandestine groups, "hacktivism" is now increasingly being adopted by militant Palestinian parties, including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, who have gone so far as to incorporate hackers into their armed brigades. Digital Jihad is the first book to explore this rapidly evolving and still little understood aspect of the Palestinian resistance movement. Drawing on extensive interviews with hackers and other activists, it provides a unique and fascinating new perspective on the Palestinian struggle.

PART I

HEADING FOR THE MILITARY–DIGITAL COMPLEX

1

THE RESISTANCE DEVELOPS

Palestinian hacktivism and electronic jihad cannot be seen in isolation from the Palestinian resistance movement itself. Instead, it should be considered as the digitalization and development of an already existing resistance – based on the necessities and challenges facing people under a persisting military-technological occupation.

Of course, to define “resistance” is not a simple task. Not only because the term contains qualitatively different means and strategies such as armed/non-violent and active/passive resistance, but also because the term is politically charged. That is, politically charged as far as it implies legality, contrary to the term “terrorism”, which implies illegality. Also, the Palestinian resistance movement’s approach to a future statehood and the means to achieve it has been historically conditioned and oriented according to what the Palestinians themselves have regarded as possible. Thus, the resistance and its goals have changed several times throughout its history.

We should not get trapped by the normalizing narrative of a conflict between “equals”, a conflict where Israelis and Palestinians are simply two neighbors who just cannot seem to get along. It is first and foremost expressed through one of the words which, perhaps, appears most frequently in this book: “occupation”. Israel not only disputes the notion of the illegality of the occupation but also that an occupation even exists. However, international law, despite its at times obvious flaws, has to be applied to any ongoing conflict. Thus, when using the term occupation, I am referring to UN resolution 242 declaring the occupation of the Palestinian territories to be illegal and that the Israeli army must be withdrawn immediately, and to UN resolution 194, which states the Palestinian refugees’ right of return. These are undisputable human rights.

Last, I also refer to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) deeming the wall and settlements as illegal and in breach of international law. Thus, as a professor at the University of Oslo emphasized in a seminar: “No doubt one has to be objective, but if you point out that Israel is breaking international law, you are not being subjective – you are referring to an objective fact.” So when I refer to the Palestinian resistance, I am referring to a people’s use of violent and non-violent means to end or change a particular kind of political situation such as an occupation. The term “occupation” also denotes an objective reality: that is, the ensuing rights of the Palestinians within that context – including the right to resist. It is precisely this resistance that has developed according to the local and global situation, with the associated challenges that the resistance has faced. From the Cold War to the fall of the Berlin Wall; from the Oslo process to the “War on Terror”.

Of course, the goals of the Palestinian resistance have not been limited to directly forcing Israel to end its occupation, but also aim to make the international community aware that there actually is such a thing as a Palestinian people with a lost home.

When we analyze this resistance, it must be based on the notion that human beings, and our way of organizing, are historical products formed by the contradictions of society at large and within the resistance movement itself. This means that the issues raised and the strategies proposed by the Palestinian resistance through different periods of time are not historical abstracts. Ellen Meiksins Wood’s assessment of Western political thought may be useful:

To understand what political theorists are saying requires knowing what questions they are trying to answer, and those questions confront them not simply as philosophical abstractions but as specific historical conditions, in the context of specific practical activities, social relations, pressing issues, grievances and conflict.¹

Thus, the account of the history of the Palestinian resistance is by virtue an account of a social history. My intent here is not to give the reader a full account of Palestinian history. Rather, I wish to present a glimpse of the wider and longer threads that run through it in order to understand how Palestinian hacktivism fits in as a continuation: From the fidā

ī and symbolic violence, the shahīd and non-violence, and subsequently the istishhādī and emergence of electronic jihad.

THE FIDĀ

Ī: “I WILL DIE AS A WARRIOR – UNTIL MY COUNTRY RETURNS”

Before the establishment of Israel in 1948 – through what several Israeli historians, such as Ilan Pappé and Benny Morris, have argued to be the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians² – the region had already seen organized protests and campaigns against the colonization of the homeland through boycotts, demonstrations, armed resistance, general strikes and graffiti to name a few. However, in 1955 – following a period of shock and apathy after the nakba (the catastrophe) – the Palestinian refugees began to organize themselves in commando units.³ It was the beginning of a new era of resistance and military campaigns against the Israeli state – in which the only perceived way of liberating Palestine was through armed means.

The armed campaigns were mainly small-scale attacks conducted from Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan against Israeli military sites and settlements – also called pinprick guerilla tactics, given the name from the small hole made by a needle ‒ used by the Palestinian resistance in order to frustrate and exhaust a superior Israeli army, and also sometimes inciting excessive reprisals.

As many of the operations resulted in the death of the fighter, they were branded as fidā

iyyīn (the ones who sacrifice themselves). The campaigns of the fidā

ī were, however, not limited to pure military campaigns but contained within them the notion of

umūd (steadfastness). For example, the fidā

ī would in many cases harvest the crops of their former farms and retrieve their livestock.

During this time the Palestinian resistance created several cultural perceptions, with the fidā

ī as a cultural icon, the klashīn (the Kalashnikov) as a symbol of pride and the Palestinian songs of “revolution, resistance, sacrifice, return and self-reliance”.⁴ There was thus a consistent secular-nationalist notion in the narrative of the fidā

ī in accordance with the prevailing ideology of that time, secular Arab socialism/pan-Arabism.

It should be mentioned that the fidā

ī who died in battle would still be considered a martyr, yet, as the Palestinian-American anthropologist Nasser Abufarha points out, although the military campaigns to a large extent were an act of sacrifice, that did not necessarily include a religious dimension as it would later on.⁵ Rather, “In the Palestinian context the perception of fusion between the human sacrificer and the land is more prevalent than fusion with divine life, especially in cultural representations, although the latter also exists”.⁶

Nevertheless, although they faced a superior opponent in the Israeli state, it is hard to underestimate the sheer optimism in the narrative of the fidā

ī, where a future victory and the liberation of Palestine seemed inevitable. Partly, the optimism of the fidā

ī was linked to the fact that the liberation of Palestine through armed means was not something limited to the Palestinian cause, but rather a phenomenon in the global development of decolonization. This period of time saw the armed struggle against colonialism in Vietnam (1955‒1975) and in Algeria (1954‒1962), to mention just two, and in the majority of cases the former colonies achieved independence. The Palestinian resistance studied these different armed anti-colonial movements in detail. They were the embodiment of Frantz Fanon’s thesis: “Decolonization is the veritable creation of new men. But this creation owes nothing of its legitimacy to any supernatural power; the ‘thing’ which has been colonized becomes man during the same process by which it frees itself.”⁷

This is not to say that the campaigns of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and its fidā

iyyīn were perfect. On the contrary, the movement managed to get into conflict, first with King Hussein of Jordan as in the beginning he resisted the idea of the PLO establishing itself in Jordanian-occupied East Jerusalem, and feared that the Palestinians would later on attempt to overthrow him and take over Palestine.⁸ Later, in 1964, he would accept the claim after pressure from Nasser.

The March 1968 victory at Karameh in Jordan, then head-quarters of the PLO’s dominant faction, Fatah, where the Palestinians, with decisive aid from the Jordanian military, managed to fight off 15,000 Israeli soldiers, and further entrenched its legitimacy, did not help. For example, as a result of Karameh, the Palestinian organizations strengthened their positions in the Palestinian refugee camps and members of Fatah and the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) established themselves in the camps of Wihdat, Baqa’a, Sulh, al-Husn, Jerash, Zizia in the north and outside of Tufila, Shubaq and Karak in the south.⁹ Subsequently, there were several clashes between the Palestinians and Jordanians, and in November that same year, three of the PFLP’s training camps were bombed by the Jordanian monarchy.¹⁰

It all culminated two years later in 1970, in what would be known as Black September. First, the Palestinian guerillas attempted to assassinate King Hussein, an attack which he barely survived, and then the PFLP hijacked three airplanes that were forced to land in Jordan; shortly after Yasser Arafat declared Irbid District of Jordan a liberated zone.¹¹ If decolonization creates new men, there is apparently no guarantee that the same men will not be overcome by bravado. The repercussions of Black September, which lasted from September 1970 until July 1971, led to the loss of thousands of Palestinian lives.

As the Palestinian resistance was expelled from Jordan and moved to Lebanon, the “pinprick” operations of the fidā

ī decreased. However, the tactics and the establishment of fidā

ī bases in their new host country created tensions with the Lebanese population, which started to consider the PLO and the rest of the Palestinian resistance as a threat to the stability of the country. The fact that the majority of Palestinians are Sunni Muslims and Lebanon had, and still has, a principle of power distribution along religious and sectarian lines did not make it any easier. In 1982, as a result of the war in Lebanon, the PLO – humiliated and disarmed – moved to Tunisia, where it would remain irrelevant for a decade. The final sacrifice of the fidā

ī had been made.

COUNTERING THE SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE

In retrospect, it is important to keep in mind that the goals of the Palestinian resistance were not limited to the military defeat of Israel. We should not forget that the aftermath of the nakba happened in a period when a majority of the Western wo...