Social Media In The Israeli Political Context

This book addresses the social and political landscape of Internet usage in Israel, and studies the formation of a networked information society in the "hi-tech nation". As Israel is considered a highly technologically developed country, it could serve as a model to assess and compare the performance and prospects of the Internet in other countries as well. Chapters address a range of issues, including the diffusion of the Internet to Israel, religion and the Internet in the Israeli Jewish context, Internet-based planned encounters between Israeli-Jews and Palestinians and between Jews and Arabs in Israel, online journalism and user-generated content, Israeli public relations online, Internet usage by Israeli parliamentarians, parties and candidates, as well as audiences, and the facilitation of personalized politics through personal sites of politicians. This book was originally published as a special issue of Israel Affairs.

Israel's occupation has been transformed in the social media age. Over the last decade, military rule in the Palestinian territories grew more bloody and entrenched. In the same period, Israelis became some of the world's most active social media users. In Israel today, violent politics are interwoven with global networking practices, protocols, and aesthetics. Israeli soldiers carry smartphones into the field of military operations, sharing mobile uploads in real-time. Official Israeli military spokesmen announce wars on Twitter. And civilians encounter state violence first on their newsfeeds and mobile screens. Across the globe, the ordinary tools of social networking have become indispensable instruments of warfare and violent conflict. This book traces the rise of Israeli digital militarism in this global context—both the reach of social media into Israeli military theaters and the occupation's impact on everyday Israeli social media culture. Today, social media functions as a crucial theater in which the Israeli military occupation is supported and sustained.

Israel's occupation has been transformed in the social media age. Over the last decade, military rule in the Palestinian territories grew more bloody and entrenched. In the same period, Israelis became some of the world's most active social media users. In Israel today, violent politics are interwoven with global networking practices, protocols, and aesthetics. Israeli soldiers carry smartphones into the field of military operations, sharing mobile uploads in real-time. Official Israeli military spokesmen announce wars on Twitter. And civilians encounter state violence first on their newsfeeds and mobile screens. Across the globe, the ordinary tools of social networking have become indispensable instruments of warfare and violent conflict. This book traces the rise of Israeli digital militarism in this global context—both the reach of social media into Israeli military theaters and the occupation's impact on everyday Israeli social media culture. Today, social media functions as a crucial theater in which the Israeli military occupation is supported and sustained.

Using Israel as a case study, this book examines teachers’ approaches to Controversial Political Issues (CPI) in the classroom. The book focuses on the democratic responsibilities that teachers face in an era where social media use is ubiquitous, and polarization and fake news are increasingly common. Presenting original research on the topic and developing a pedagogical framework for dealing with controversial issues in a sensitive and effective manner, this accessible volume highlights social-emotional learning approaches and considers a broad definition of CPI to include issues of racism, religion, political differences, multiculturalism, and Jewish–Arab relations. Using the results of an in-depth research project foregrounding personal experience, the book explores situational accounts of teachers from a diverse range of subject disciplines and different minority–majority group settings to present comparative evidence from European contexts. Offering concrete suggestions for ways of dealing with controversial political issues and volatile remarks that are grounded in research, this timely book will be highly relevant for researchers, students, and educators in the fields of social studies, democratic and peace education, citizenship education, race and education, and educational politics.

All public relations emerges from particular environments, but the specific conditions of Israel offer an exceptional study of the accelerators and inhibitors of professional development in the history of a nation. Documenting and analyzing the contribution of one profession to building one specific nation, this book tells the previously-untold story of Israeli public relations practitioners. It illustrates their often-unseen, often-unacknowledged and often-strategic shaping of the events, narratives and symbols of Israel over time and their promotion of Israel to the world. It links the profession’s genesis – including the role of the Diaspora and early Zionist activists – to today’s private and public sector professionals by identifying their roots in Israel’s cultural, economic, media, political, and social systems. It reveals how professional communicators and leaders nurtured and valued collectivism, high consensus, solidarity, and unity over democracy and free speech. It investigates such key underpinning concepts as Hasbara and criticizes non-democratic and sometimes unethical propaganda practices. It highlights unprecedented fundraising and lobbying campaigns that forged Israeli identity internally and internationally. In situating Israeli ideas on democracy in the context of contemporary public relations theory, Public Relations and Nation Building seeks to point ways forward for that theory, for Israel and for the public relations of many other nations.

How can irregular political situations, which impact the lives of millions, become normalized? Specifically, within the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, how can 50 years of Israeli control over the Occupied Territories become accepted within Israeli society as a normal, possibly even banal phenomenon? Conversely, how can such a situation be estranged from daily reality, denied any relation to who "we" are? This volume explores these questions through the lens of two central discourses that dominate the Israeli debate regarding the future of the Occupied Territories: 1) Occupation Normalization Discourse, which portrays Israeli control of the territories as a "normal" part of life; 2) Occupation Estrangement Discourse, which portrays this situation as distant from Israeli reality. In addressing these discourses, the authors develop a new methodological tool, Dialectic Discourse Analysis, which examines discourse as a process of perpetual positing and synthesis of oppositions through the discursive construction, differentiation and mediation of self and other. Through this approach, the authors illustrate that these discourses are dialectically constituted in opposition to one another, feeding off one another, each enabling the other to exist. This dynamic has resulted in a fixed discourse, preventing any progress towards a synthesis of oppositions.

A state-of-the-art account of what we know and do not know about the effects of digital technology on democracy.

Behind Media Marginality examines the considerations and decisions that have resulted in the distorted and negative media coverage of minority groups in the Israeli media. Author Eli Avraham looks closely at media portrayals of those living in the geographic margins of Israeli kibbutzim, Jewish settlements in the West Bank, development cities, and the Israeli-Arab community from the 1960s through the 1990s. Through quantitative and qualitative analysis of newspaper articles; interviews with reporters, editors, and government spokespeople; and statistical and demographic data, Avraham isolates and explores five factors that influence the way the media covers these social groups: the group's characteristics and location, their proximity to foci of power, their social-political environment, the media's policy toward covering the group, and the group's public relations strategies in response to coverage. An analysis both of media operations and of Israeli society, this book provides important insights into the role of the media in the formation of national identity.

In this pathbreaking study, Amal Jamal analyzes the consumption of media by Arab citizens of Israel as a type of communicative behavior and a form of political action. Drawing on extensive public opinion survey data, he describes perceptions and use of media ranging from Arabic Israeli newspapers to satellite television broadcasts from throughout the Middle East. By participating in this semi-autonomous Arab public sphere, the average Arab citizen can connect with a wider Arab world beyond the boundaries of the Israeli state. Jamal shows how media aid the community's ability to resist the state's domination, protect its Palestinian national identity, and promote its civic status.