Blood letters spell out the words "Israeli Massacres" and link to the image of a cringing Palestinian boy.
A website away, Jewish settlers in Hebron offer grim accounts of nightly gun battles. The settlers display pictures of a murdered schoolteacher and snapshots of a teenager's Bar Mitzvah with the caption "The Ben-Yizhak Family Celebrating 13."
During the 12-week Intifada, or Palestinian uprising, the Israeli government, the Palestinian Authority and advocates from both sides have accelerated their use of the Internet to rally supporters, bypass the traditional media and win the daily propaganda war.
"Now, every time there is an event, a huge amount of material is generated very fast," said Professor Barry Rubin, a scholar at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies in Israel. "This was unthinkable 10 years ago, even five years ago. ... It has only happened in the last year."
Incidents, such as Israeli hackers pinning the Israeli flag and national anthem on the militant Islamist group Hizbollah’s web page in October, are the fruit of informal networks that have been hatched thanks to the Internet's speed, lack of censorship and ever-multiplying number of websites, e-mail lists and computer users.
"It's like when people started making movies. First, they were copying theater and then they realized we can go outside, travel through time, and have a cast of thousands," Rubin said.
The number of Internet users in the Palestinian territories has leaped from less than 1,000 in 1994 to 50,000 today. Israel has an estimated one million Internet users.
At the Israeli foreign ministry, Internet information director Ori Noy updates his government site three to four times per day as opposed to only once or twice daily prior to the violence. Site visits have jumped from 150,000 to more than 400,000 per month.
Noy describes the site as engaged in a "battle of images."
The ministry has posted a memorial page with photos and biographies of Israel's 39 dead during the Intifada. "Everyone is trying to show only the Palestinians have suffered from violence but this is not the case," Noy said.
The ministry exhibits incendiary statements by Palestinian officials from the Arab press and pictures of attacks on Jewish settlements.
"There are cases where we feel the international media is biased against us," Noy said. "The truth is not always interesting, but the truth is the truth and this is what we're trying to establish."
The Intifada has posed its own challenges to the Palestinian Authority. While viewing the Israeli government's Web sites as superior, the Palestinians are relying heavily on links to humanitarian and rights groups' Web sites. "There has been a shortcoming among the Palestinians at reaching the media with their information," said Wassim Abdullah, the technical consultant for an ongoing redesign of the Palestinian Authority's media services.
The failure to offer a dynamic response during the Intifada led the PA to decide to create a round-the-clock media center which is expected to open in January, said Sam'an Khoury, the center's director.
The Palestine Media Center will monitor news and have spokespeople on call. The Web site will offer audio and video links and be able to cybercast news conferences.
The Israeli government's performance during the Intifada "showed us in fact how all this misinformation was being circulated and that we lacked a constant interlocutor with the public," said Khoury.
Abdullah credits private Palestinian Internet sites with publicizing the Intifada more effectively than the PA.
"Many Palestinians have been active to counteract Israeli propaganda and the people operating are not just Palestinians in the territories but Palestinians at large," Abdullah said.
Adam Hanieh, a 28-year-old graduate student at Al-Quds University in Ramallah, is one such person, running a page called the "September 2000 Clashes Information Center."
He argues that the current activity completes four years of cyber work by Palestinians who first published a site called "On the Ground in Ramallah" after major clashes between the Israeli military and Palestinians in September 1996.
"People from outside are now using information from here about the number of people killed. They can tell you about what happened in Bethlehem at 10 pm last night," Hanieh said.
Along with regular reports on the fighting, his site posts a list of pro-Palestinian protests around the world, circulates petitions and publishes names of hospitals and schools in dire need of money. The PA home page has set up a link to the site.
"Over the past few years, we've developed a network of people supporting Palestine," he said, estimating that hundreds of thousands of people are on various pro-Palestinian e-mail lists.
"The Internet has the effect of bringing people together who couldn't otherwise get together. A protest for Palestinians in South Africa -- you might see a glimpse of it on the news if you are lucky, but now you can see reports and photos online. It's a way of sharing ideas about campaigning."
A world apart but just a click away, a Jewish settler in Hebron holds a similar view. David Wilder, the Hebron settlers' webmaster, touts the Internet as a means to let people glimpse life through "our eyes."
"It's a very fine tool because it's uncensored," said Wilder, who sometimes updates his Web site three to four times a day. "We can post what we believe is the truth." -- NICOSIA (AFP)
© 2000 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
