Report: Israelis incite against Palestinians every 66 seconds on social media
Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour (right) seen with MK Haneen Zoabi in Nazareth Magistrate’s Court after the former is sentenced to five months
Middle East Monitor reports
The report – which was conducted by 7amleh: The Arab Centre for the Advancement of Social Media and distributed by Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network – found that, in 2018, Israelis posted “inciting content” every 66 seconds, up from every 71 seconds in 2017.
In addition, one in ten social media posts against Palestinian citizens of Israel denied Palestinian identity, contained hate speech or calls for violence such as rape and murder, the Jerusalem Post reported yesterday, citing 7amleh’s findings.
The report also noted that, “in total, in 2018 there were some 474,250 inciting posts against Palestinians on Israeli social networks,” the main catalyst for this being the controversial Nation-State Law.
The law, which was passed in July last year, declared Israel the “historical home of the Jewish people” and stated that “the right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people”. This effectively rendered Israel’s some 1.8 million Palestinian citizens, as well as the country’s myriad minority populations such as the Druze and Armenians, second class citizens….
Family and friends greet Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour upon her release from prison on September 20, 2018
“Israel is no stranger to cracking down on pro-Palestinian social media content. Just one prominent example is the case of Dareen Tatour, a Palestinian citizen of Israel from outside Nazareth who was arrested in 2015 for a poem she published on Facebook…Tatour was sentenced to five months in prison for “incitement to violence” and “supporting terrorist organisations”, eventually being released in September 2018. Earlier this month Tatour was partially acquitted of incitement, with the Nazareth District Court reversing her conviction. Tatour’s lawyer, renowned human rights attorney Gaby Lasky, hailed the acquittal as “a victory for the freedom of artistic creativity and democracy and a stop sign for the government that persecutes, censors and silences artists and artists who do not think like them”.
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