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On Nov. 24, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Google, YouTube and some other social networks agreed to fight incitement posted on their pages.

Israel uses a number of measures to counter the postings, most notably by creating around 5,000 fake Facebook accounts, Quds Press reported Oct. 29. Those who operate these accounts are fluent in English and Arabic, and their mission is to hack into and shut down Palestinian pages by submitting reports to the Facebook administration. Israel also has arrested of a number of Palestinians during the past three months on charges of inciting to kill Israelis in their Facebook posts.

the Authority for Palestinian Prisoners' Affairs reported the Israeli army has detained 27 Palestinians on charges of incitement since October, due to their activities on social networks

there are Israeli pages in Hebrew that call Palestinians terrorists, among other bad names, but they are not being closed down

The history of cinema in Gaza dates back to the 1940s, noted Khalil al-Mozayen, who directed a documentary called 36mm about the decline of cinema in Gaza.  "After 1948, war and refugees came to Gaza," Mozayen told Al Jazeera. "UNRWA [the UN's Palestinian refugee agency] began showing Arabic cinema in the refugee camps. Before the film, they'd broadcast messages telling people to drink milk and clean their teeth. The project enjoyed a lot of popularity." In the 1950s, Mozayen said, businessmen started to open cinemas. But after 1967, "religious groups started broadcasting messages against cinema", he said.

Al-Nasser Cinema was closed after the 1967 war, only to be reopened a year later upon the request of the new occupying authorities, the Israelis.

"At that time, we could no longer bring films from Egypt; we brought films from Israel. The cinema started showing Chinese, Indian, and European films," Khazendar said. "It was then that people began to stop going to the cinema. It became associated with the 'bad people'."

Gaza has produced notable film directors, such as Rashid Masharawi and the Nasser brothers, known as Arab and Tarzan, who have pursued their careers outside of Gaza

as a Jordanian, I was part of what I personally believe to be the final generation that actually gave a damn what the government did or did not do. Our relationship with the state was like our relationship with a television – a one-way communication channel, where we are on the receiving end no matter how much we yell at the screen. And that was that

Like everyone else, I have no idea how this conflict will end. But I know that the Web will undeniably play a leading role – and that’s not something anyone could’ve imagined back in 1948. As yet another cycle of violence is upon us, that role is worth studying, and it’s that role that I find myself paying attention to the most.

One striking difference between the Israeli state books on the one hand, and the ultra-Orthodox and Palestinian books on the other, is their willingness to engage in self-criticism. For the Israelis, this is an evolution that began in the late 1990s, after many historians began to re-evaluate early Israeli history, and a left-wing member of the Knesset became education minister. Israeli state textbooks began to admit that some Palestinians left their land within Israel because they were expelled. And they began to make reference to the Arabic name for Israel’s War of Independence in 1948: the Naqba, or Catastrophe. They also began ask Israeli Jewish students how they would have felt about Zionism if they’d been in the place of the Palestinians. There is still far less of this in either the ultra-Orthodox or Palestinian books. For example, the Palestinian texts don’t deal in any significant way with the Holocaust or its relationship to the founding of Israel.

just how politicized the teaching of history and geography has become for Israelis and Palestinians—with both sides at times quite literally wiping each other off the map. Not that Israelis and Palestinians are alone on this score. Think of Cyprus, where for decades Greek and Turk Cypriotes did not consider themselves part of a single people, or Northern Ireland, where even the name used to describe the territory continues to be highly charged. (Is it a province? A state? A region?) The process of ending such misrepresentations, the authors of the study find, is therefore “exceedingly difficult and requires deliberate and courageous effort.” It also takes time.

Palestinian textbooks are still in their first generation

Sociologist Sammy Smooha of Haifa University, who conducts an annual survey of Arab and Jewish relations, says that the goal now should be to write textbooks that do more to expose each side to the other’s narrative. “You have to engage with the other side’s arguments in a serious manner and not just build up a straw man in order to break it.” Eyal Naveh, a professor of history at Tel Aviv University and the author of several textbooks for middle-school and high-school students, agrees. “If you ignore it, it’s as if it doesn’t exist,” he said.

a book called Side By Side that included a “dual narrative” of all major events in the region since 1917, through the Second Intifada in 2000. Naveh calls the book “a successful failure:” Though it had been lauded by the international press and continues to sell abroad, the book was banned by both the Israeli and Palestinian education ministries. Naveh now believes that getting such a textbook to become part of the Israeli and Palestinian curricula is “impossible.”

Breaking the Silence is being picked on for cynical political reasons. For Israeli Jews, there is no cow more sacred than the IDF. A clear majority, including this writer, served, are serving or will serve in the armed forces, just like their parents, children and even their grandchildren. When Defense Minister Lt. Gen.  (res.) Moshe Ya'alon declares that the members of Breaking the Silence are traitors, he means that they betrayed all Israelis. This is not an argument about occupation, ethics or Israel’s international standing. It's about our lives. Ya'alon was the commander-in-chief of the military, a respected authority on the matter.

The tacit conventional wisdom since the start of the so-called “knife intifada” is based on Talmudic teachings: “If a man comes to kill you, rise early and kill him first.” Or in common parlance, neutralize him first. Israeli politicians have called for people to do just this when confronted with a possible terrorist. There are even Jews who have already ascribed a broad interpretation to this order. Anyone coming to kill you, in their interpretation, may be a Jew willing to hand over territory to non-Jews. Assassin Yigal Amir, for instance, shot Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin after rabbis and politicians incited against him and his peace policy. Netanyahu himself took part in a demonstration at which a Rabin cutout dressed in a Nazi SS uniform was held aloft. Today, in his dressing down of the organization, he is dressing Breaking the Silence in the uniform of a kapo.

“Patriots” who beat up Palestinians for kicks on city streets and set a bilingual school on fire have already started sending threats to Breaking the Silence activists and their families, including their elderly grandparents. If, God forbid, anyone is hurt, Netanyahu, Ya'alon and Yesh Atid Chairman Yair Lapid will rush to issue “sharp condemnations” of the criminals. They will surely not forget to attack those spreading incitement, but they might forget or ignore their own past contributions.

The best rap and metal in the region succeeds because it manages to avoid both the kind of “extreme consciousness of doom” that leads to aesthetic nihilism, hyper-stylized violence and other forms of artistic “idle chatter,” while also avoiding the kind of surrender to the culture industry which leads even the most well-intentioned of mainstream artists to “collaborate with culture as its salaried and honoured nuisance” rather than challenge it directly from the margins.

the ultimate function of immanent criticism: to enable a positive synthesis, or irreducible hybridization of identities. Such identities can not be subsumed under any dominant ideology or political and economic narrative and therefore cannot serve to reinforce them

in the Middle East and North Africa region, in the years leading up to the current revolutionary moment, the growing popularity of metal and rap music represents a return of the aura to local music scenes. Both Benjamin and Adorno believed that a remnant, or perhaps better, specter of the original aura remained within works of art even in the mechanical/industrial age. This spector becomes visible in the kind of critical art represented by the groups discussed here, contributing to the continued “excessiveness”, “aesthetic deviance”, and “pointing elsewhere” towards cultural difference and a different future that characterize the best exemplars of the music

As Moe Hamzeh, leader of one of the most talented and successful Arab rock/metal groups, Beriut's The Kordz6, explains, while Arab rock or rap artists obviously want to be successful, the relative lack of interest in the two genres by Rotana and other Arab media conglomerates has been a blessing from an aesthetic perspective. It has saved them from the inevitable fate of all commercialized popular music, whether American hiphop and hair metal to Arab video-clip driven pop. At the same time, the lack of commercialization has made the public performance of the music, usually in small group settings or festivals geared specifically to fans of the genres, the crucial means of creating audiences and building solidarity among their communities of fans.

singers and rappers were actually smiling as they performed their music. And so were the crowds surrounding them. This is likely not the vibe Adorno imagined would surround the kind of immanently critical music he felt was necessary to wake people up to the false consciousness they had been mindlessly inhabiting. But it points to a crucial problem with Adorno’s musical aesthetic, at least form the standpoint of reception. The more abstract, atonal, and devoid of recognizable harmonies or rhythmic pulse a piece of music is, the harder it will be for it to inspire a large number of people. Once people are actually on the streets protesting rather than in their smaller subcultural gatherings, they need something catchier and more uplifting to sing along to than brutal vocals and rapid fire rhymes

Adorno did not think much of the aesthetic and political potential of folk music, which he tied both to nationalist and fascist sentiments. In its then present-day form (rather than traditional-historical form), he believed it to foster little more than a “pseudo-folk community,” particularly in its cultural and aesthetic historical trajectory in Germany. But in Egypt as in the United States, the music has played a more critical political role in struggles for political freedom and social justice.

the band’s popularity is inseparable from its dual role as a voice of protest and a regenerator of traditional styles of music that recently were in danger of disappearing completely because of a combination of market forces and government censorship

What the kind of joyful hybridity exemplified by the production style of Armada Bizerta and myriad other rap groups around the Arab and larger Muslim worlds (and across Africa) reveal is that even within one genre of music, such as hip hop, talented artists can create innumerable sonic tapestries to match, and help shape, the national mood—from dissonant anger to joyful creativity—as the political and cultural situation on the ground changes. Their flexibility is key to their function as the kind immanent critique Adorno and other critical theorists hoped would be able to “reliquify” the “congealed” ideologically bounded identities imposed by authoritarian regimes on their citizens

The joyful aesthetics of groups such as Amarda Bizerta, Emel Mathlouthi, Ramy Essam, and other artists at the heart of youth-inspired revolutions challenges Adorno’s belief that critical music in the age of mass reproduction and consumption has to be, essentially, hard to listen to in order to make the listener think and perhaps even motivated to take some form of action. It seems that while in the pre-Revolutionary period, when cultural expression was still heavily policed, this indeed was the case—thus the power and popularity of genres like metal and hardcore rap. But with the explosion of political, cultural, and artistic energy of the protests a new aesthetic dynamic was born that, at least as of the time of this writing, remains quite powerful. As important, by drawing people literally closer together, the music brings them closer to its critical and transformational aura, closing a circle that was broken, according to Benjamin, with the mechanical reproduction and commodification of musi a century ago

It remains to be seen whether Americans and Europeans, so used to providing the “original” music and culture which others have long sampled, will prove as adept as the “new generation” of Arab revolutionaries in adapting the tools and ideas of others to create their own cultural, political, and economic hybrids. But if the experience of the last year is any indication, without doing so there is little chance of the current wave of protests across the West producing the kind of large-scale transformation now underway, however problematically, in the Arab world.

"I don't think it's a matter of Israel's propaganda machine's own success or failure that is causing this amount of misunderstanding among general publics, mostly in the West," he said. "The misconstruction and confusion are largely caused by the absence of Palestinian and pro-Palestinian voices -- in fact reasonable and objective voices altogether -- when it comes to the conflict in Palestine, from mainstream US media."

It is up to us to cultivate an abiding distrust for speech when the speaker refuses to stand behind his or her own words – that is, by using one's own name.

it is essential to preserve anonymity (in special circumstances), even if we discourage it, while simultaneously improving trust.

What we should all fear is what too many in power want to see: the end of anonymity entirely. Governments, in particular, absolutely loathe the idea that people can speak without being identified. It will always be possible to create and disseminate anonymous speech with adept use of technology, but governments and their corporate handmaidens are working hard to make it much more difficult – and I fear there will soon be widespread laws disallowing anonymous speech, even in America. We should not allow them to succeed.

He gets to decide, for instance, that Peter Beinart (J Street-aligned liberal Zionists) and David Frum (respectable #NeverTrump neoconservatives) should represent the poles of acceptable Jewish discourse. Meanwhile, the emerging generation of American Jews who supported Sanders, and who in many cases feel totally alienated from Zionism, are shut out. Goldberg’s project is to define the center, both for politics in general and for Jews specifically. And as that center buckles and shifts leftward, it’s worth reevaluating the macher who for so long has set the terms of debate.

The story of Jeffrey Goldberg is one of hypermasculinity, nationalism, and careerism, a steady ascension facilitated by the right friendships and the right positions at the right times. Along the way he has drawn many harsh critics, none of whom have successfully held him back. But his disproportionate influence on the conversation and his vigorous policing of Jewish communal politics merit a closer look.

After enduring antisemitic bullying as a suburban child, he fell in love with Israel on his first visit at age 13.

At 20, he dropped out of Penn and made aliyah. As an Israel Defense Force volunteer during the First Intifada, he worked as a guard (or “prisoner counselor,” as he later insisted) at the overcrowded Ketziot prison camp, which was condemned by human rights groups at the time for violating the Geneva Conventions. There, he witnessed a fellow guard beating a Palestinian prisoner for talking back. In Goldberg’s account, he tried to stop his friend but then helped cover the incident up (“‘He fell,’ I lied”).

The odd human rights violation, pointless imperial war, or botched hire notwithstanding, no one can deny that he has done well for himself, and it seems likely he’ll be shaping the national conversation for years to come. But in the Jewish world, Goldberg wields perhaps even more influence than outside of it, and by patrolling its borders he defines a narrow center of opinion antithetical to dissent.

If there is any justice, Goldberg’s career will be remembered primarily for a long, award-winning reported piece from Iraq that ran in The New Yorker in March 2002, at the height of the post-9/11 jingoistic fervor, which informed that magazine’s readership that Saddam Hussein had both an active WMD program and ties to Al-Qaeda. Goldberg endorsed George W. Bush’s catastrophic war of choice in an article for Slate later that year, in which he wrote, “I believe that the coming invasion of Iraq will be remembered as an act of profound morality.” He was hardly the only high-profile journalist to help launder what turned out to be false intelligence into the mainstream media, but whereas Judith Miller was pushed out by the New York Times in 2005 and has since become persona non grata in liberal elite circles, Goldberg’s status and influence have only grown.

palpable distaste for Diaspora Jewry features frequently in Goldberg’s writing

a conservative minority of us has accepted a faustian bargain with Trump’s white supremacist base in order to support the right-wing coalition in Israel

Goldberg is not part of the ascendant right. Rather, he is perhaps the single most representative figure of the liberal Zionist establishment in all of media, voicing the anxieties of a rapidly collapsing order. And with at least the passive approval of an elite network, Goldberg has spent years passing harsh, biblical judgment on both Jews and gentiles who dare to weigh in on issues related to Israel, from authors to organizations to U.S. presidents.

Goldberg started out as a police reporter but achieved greater renown as a national security correspondent, with dispatches from Gaza, Cairo, and Iraqi Kurdistan in the months before and after 9/11. This period is crucial to understanding Goldberg’s influence—he had already become one of the most widely read reporters on the Middle East at precisely the moment when the Washington establishment became single-mindedly focused on terrorist and extremist threats from the region. This gave him an outsized role in shaping liberal elite discourse, with outsized consequences.

it fit in perfectly with Goldberg’s longstanding project to deny the very obvious influence of pro-Israel advocates over U.S. politics.

Obama successfully pandered to Goldberg, who noted, “speaking in a kind of code Jews readily understand, Obama also made sure to mention that he was fond of the writer Leon Uris, the author of [the 1958 Zionist pulp bestseller] Exodus.”

In 2009, Goldberg referred to “the rather circumscribed universe of anti-Zionists-with-Jewish parents”, neatly ostracizing Jews he disagrees with from the tribe

For Goldberg and the tribe he leads, a reactionary gentile who unapologetically supports Israel is preferable to a progressive Jew who expresses hesitation, discomfort, or outrage.

an epically sleazy hit job

Goldberg has spent most of his adult life in affluent Northwest DC, so it would be absurd for him to directly question the legitimacy of American Jews, but he has had no such reservations about European Jews, and especially the largest such community, the Jews of France. In 2015, he wrote a long reported essay in The Atlantic entitled, “Is It Time for the Jews to Leave Europe?”, accompanied by a 20-minute video conversation with Leon Wieseltier and James Bennet, in which he concluded, “I am predisposed to believe that there is no great future for the Jews in Europe, because evidence to support this belief is accumulating so quickly.”

Goldberg represents what, at least until recently, was an influential set of attitudes among mainstream Jewish liberals. But his approach seems exhausted, unable to respond to the scale of the disaster Jewish liberals now confront, from the ultra-orthodox, pro-settlement coalition firmly in charge of Israel to White House-approved antisemitism in the U.S.

superficially curious and open-minded about big ideas, yet forever bound within a narrow establishment consensus averse to channeling any kind of populist anger

to whatever extent my own Jewish identity has been stunted, I blame Jews like Goldberg. Of course I don’t blame him personally or exclusively, but he’s representative of, and has worked hard to reinforce, a set of attitudes that have made institutional Judaism and Jewish communal identity seem unattractive or unattainable. I’m certain I’m not alone in feeling this way. Membership in non-Orthodox synagogues is in steady decline, as is American Jews’ attachment to Israel, especially among millennials. Jewishness as defined by Goldberg is not our community’s future; it isn’t even our present

Goldberg embodies the worst contradictions of American Zionism: on the one hand, the phony machismo, the insistence that Israel is the bedrock of a meaningful Jewish identity, and the morally bankrupt defense of Israel’s routine violence against its Arab subjects; and on the other hand, the smug, comfortable, coddled daily existence of the Beltway elite

It’s taken me well into my thirties to grasp that there is a Jewishness to be located between the synagogue-attending, aggressively Zionist establishment that Goldberg presents to the most powerful people on Earth as definitive, and the superficial bagels-and-Seinfeld gloss on basic American whiteness that often seems like the only alternative. Jewishness can be righteous, confrontational, progressive, maybe even cool. It doesn’t have to be defined as a religion, a nationality, or a vaguely embarrassing set of quirks; it can be a way of asserting one’s humanity and moral fervor as America, Israel, and the world descend into a crude parody of fascism.