Palestinians Turn to Facebook In Fight Against Occupation
Despite a spike in social-media usage, Palestinian activists still face challenges translating online activism into mass mobilization, writes Linah Alsaafin.
A recent report on social media in the West Bank and Gaza Strip found that 40% of the Palestinian population there are active on social-media sites, most notably Facebook. This ranks the two territories as the highest in the Middle East region.
Hanin Taha, a social-media specialist who works with the Spark Media company, said that the annual rate of increase for Twitter users in Palestine in 2012-2013 is the highest of the Arab countries, at an astonishing 232%.
The exponentially increasing rate of social-media users, especially those on Twitter, arose from the need for an alternative discourse away from the mainstream-media narrative when it came to the Israeli occupation. The popular resistance protests in the West Bank garnered more worldwide attention due to activists live-tweeting and updating from the ground about the arrests, injuries and, more rarely, deaths of protesters at the hands of the Israeli army.
Ola Tamimi, a 24-year-old Palestinian blogger from Hebron, says that online activism must be distinguished from on-the-ground activism, lest protests and resistance be solely attributed to modern social technology.
