Israel: A first, blogs and bloggers in war time

The place where we are right (Ha-Aretz)
By Ofri Ilani



Like most sectors of Israeli society - apart, perhaps, from the General Staff forum - the Israeli blogosphere was caught unprepared for the war that has broken out in Lebanon. On Sunday morning, when Beirut was already half-destroyed, the inhabitants of Haifa were sitting in reinforced rooms and the reporters for the press had spent Thursday night on the border, it appeared that most of the writers on the Internet had not yet logged on to their computers. An examination of selected Israeli blogs showed that they are still producing Internet humor of the standard sort, which revolves around topics like Kylie Minogue, Oshri Cohen and bombs that children make out of Pepsi and Mentos. The real bombings and bombardments seemed to have been taking place somewhere else.By the end of that day the picture had changed. Nearly everyone who wrote a new post related in one way or another to events. At this stage the writers already had to decide what to do with a keyboard, an Internet connection and a loyal following of readers when the situation all around was becoming entirely not normal. The current attack is the first large war-like event with which the Hebrew Internet has had to deal since it emerged and formulated for itself a certain kind of identity.While the traditional media move quickly into battle procedures, it has taken the Internet time to accustom itself. In t he meantime it appears that it is ceding center stage to the military correspondents from the radio, the newspapers and the large news sites. Nevertheless, one sense is most prominent - denial. By definition, virtual space tends to be a bit cut off, and it operates on a plane of existence that is parallel to the real world. The immediate connection, at the distance of a link or a download, to more tranquil parts of the world inevitably leads to a certain sense of disconnection. Even when they related to the events, many of the writers chose to focus on ironic comments from the margins of the news, or small disagreements with their big brothers from television. Ido Kenan's Room 404 (http://room404.net) brought a collection of "war flakes" - advertisement that take on ironic meaning in the current context ("Are you still at home?" asks the Israel Electric Corporation ad, inviting readers to its visitors' center); and Yuval Dror from "Word Processor" (www.popup.co.il) collected the error releases from the Israel defense Forces Spokesman's site and the strange reports by Army Radio reporter Hadas Steiff, who in a broadcast from the northern border stated that the army was "shooting something over the Lebanese border."

Other blogs looked as though they had been nationalized by the security forces, and started talking in a tone reminiscent of the IDF spokesman. The breezy civilian cosmopolitanism of veteran Net foxes, who in normal times identify the server as their primary homeland, is cracked quite quickly when the cannons roar. "This Is Absurdistan" (http://snipurl.com/tclf) warned of "Israeli surfers in the service of Hezbollah who are running to "foreign sites" like Flicker (flicker.com) and publishing there the locations where Katyushas fall. Hezi Sternlicht, the proprietor of the blog "Hapositzia" at "Reshimot" (http://snipurl.com/tddu), declared that "we are our own biggest enemy" and attacked the media (especially Haaretz). Is the role of the Israeli Internet community really "to do good for the country," as blogger Yehonatan Klinger says? In the nature of things, a dramatic event like a war leads each individual blog writer, like everyone else, to ensconce himself in his political stance. Fortunately, however, only few of them have found that answering Klinger's call is the most appropriate way to use the medium in their hands. Ultimately, enlisting in the state's public relations machine is a role that even nationalist newspapers do not take upon themselves, at least not outright. At a time when the public discourse is inundated with inflamed cliches, some of the bloggers at Reshimot have gone over to writing in short lines. Sami Shalom Chetrit (www.notes.co.il/sami) published a poem called "Speedy Jew" about a wine-loving Israeli pilot, who "caresses the head of the missile, as though it were the neck of a bottle of Chardonnay." Eti Topaz (www.notes.co.il/eti) made do with Yehuda Amichai's poem "The Place Where We Are Right," a place where "flowers will never / grow in the spring," which "is hard and trampled / like a yard." Is shutting oneself into a reinforced space, albeit hard and trampled, the most effective thing that can be done on the Internet? Some of the bloggers have suggested one of the most important resources on the net: access to other voices. "The Sting" (www.haokets.org), Yossi Dahan and Itzik Saporta's social blog, which defines itself as "a refuge from the strangulation and limitation of the public debate," has offered references to the Lebanese newspaper The Daily Star (www.dailystar.com.lb). From there, according to Dahan, "It is possible to begin to understand how all this looks from the other side, and not via cartoonish descriptions by the local experts of the soul of the population of the region, the various Guy Bechors and Ehud Yaaris." For those who prefer to read Hebrew, the blog has published a letter from Beirut that was written on Friday by a Lebanese woman named Rasha, who writes from a cafe in the western part of the city about the horrible days in the shadow of the bombardments. "To those who inquired how I am by e-mail, I wrote this morning that I am not in danger, and that it appears that the targets are only sites of the Hezbollah and its supporters. Now I am sorry that I typed that. They will worsen the attacks," she writes, adding: "I am 37 and to tell the truth I am afraid. The sound of the airplanes frightens me. I am not protesting. There isn't a drop of struggle left in me." And Corinna the author (www.notes.co.il/corinna), one of the veteran writers at Reshimot, filled her blog with black flags, placing adjacent to one another the national anthems of Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Israel. In conclusion, she added: "Jewish soul, Iranian, Lebanese, Syrian or Palestinian soul - until when will you be shrouded in darkness, a tool for realizing the supreme value: land."