Israel's Tangled Web?

The instagram picture of a Palestinian boy in the crosshairs of an Israeli sniper's gun has done the internet rounds now largely thanks to Electronic Intifada:



Here's a blog post at The New York Times's The Lede which sets out how use of the internet isn't quite turning out to Israel's advantage:

Before the 20-year-old Israeli sniper who uploaded the photograph was able to delete his Instagram account, Mr. Abunimah and other bloggers copied itand the snapshot was published on news sites in Israel and around the world— dealing another self-inflicted blow to the Israeli military’s effort to use the Web to burnish its image.

After a spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces told reporters that sharing the photograph was “a severe incident which doesn’t accord with the I.D.F.’s spirit and values,” the young man also deleted his Facebook account, where he had posted images of himself using his sniper rifle as a comic prop.

A screenshot from the Facebook account of Mor Ostrovski, a young Israeli soldier.

The Israeli veterans’ group Breaking the Silence, which collects testimony from soldiers who have served in the Palestinian territories first occupied by Israel in 1967, posted a screenshot of the photograph on Facebook side by side with a very similar image “taken by another Israeli soldier in Hebron in 2003.”

Breaking the Silence, via Facebook

But the bit I found most interesting was this about zionist tampering with Wikipedia:

As The Lede reported in 2010, the battle between supporters of Israelis and Palestinians is even waged on Wikipedia entries about the history of the conflict. That year, Naftali Bennett, a rising political star and a leader of Israeli settlers living in the occupied West Bank, explained that he was training a group of about 80 activists to edit Wikipedia entries to make sure that information in the online encyclopedia reflected the worldview of Zionist groups. For example, he said, “if someone searches ‘the Gaza flotilla,’ we want to be there; to influence what is written there, how it’s written and to ensure that it is balanced and Zionist in nature.”

"Balanced and zionist"?  Now how do they do that?