Tweets from Gaza show Israel other side of war
July 25, 2014
“I want to survive, and if I don’t, remember that I was not a Hamas man or a fighter. I wasn’t used as a human shield, either. I was home.” This tweet came from a young Gaza resident the night of July 23, as the Israeli air force was bombing Gaza. It caught the attention of Orit Perlov, a researcher at the Institute for National Strategic Studies (INSS) and an expert on analyzing Arab societies through social networks. Perlov was quick to retweet it and even posted these words of despair on her Facebook page. She wanted to expose the Israeli public to a different perspective. But most of the Israeli responses were not empathetic. One suggested that the despondent young man organize his friends and launch an Arab Spring against Hamas.
In an interview with Al-Monitor, Perlov says, “This is one of the sadder tweets I’ve come across. It reflects despair and hopelessness. After all, what do they have in Gaza? 45% unemployment, intermittent power and water supply and now a third war within six years. It’s a society seeking to survive. I call it ‘Gaza Ghetto’ because that’s how they feel, and I don’t argue with people’s perception of themselves.” Such descriptions of the difficult climate in Gaza emerge from the social media all the time, and Perlov constantly monitors them.
She recounts, for example, that “The Gazans distinguish among eight different types of Israeli bombings. There’s a bomb that starts with a shriek and then a boom — that means it fell far away. If you hear a boom, it fell nearby. There are small shells that fall before the big shell, like a kind of warning. They don’t hide, of course, because they have no shelters. Anyone reading the tweets from there will do so with a heavy heart.”
Since the start of Operation Protective Edge, Perlov has increased her presence on the networks in Egypt and Gaza. That way she manages to gain insights and interesting assessments of how Hamas is conducting itself, many of them different from those expounded by experts and pundits in the Israeli media. As she explains in a recent report she compiled for INSS, Perlov has been looking at the networks for answers to several questions, among them why Gaza’s residents, most of whom opposed to Hamas, don’t take to the streets to demonstrate or rebel against its rule.
Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/07/orit-perlov-social-media-palestinians-gaza-mahmoud-abbas.html#ixzz38gI2VUSd
