An activist using the Web to report from "on the ground" during the violent September 1996 confrontations in the West Bank reflects on the empowerment offered by the Internet and the realities of its global nature.
The Palestinian-Israeli conflict has always taken place primarily in a "warzone" where words, not bullets, are used as ammunition. When live ammunition does enter the conflict, their voices are quickly "put into context" by the slick Israeli propaganda machine. "If we opened fire," it smiles, "we had no choice." "If they opened fire," it sobs, "now you see what our efforts to achieve peace are up against."
On Wednesday 25 September 1996, as Palestinian protesters and police across the West Bank and Gaza Strip were met with live ammunition, helicopter gunships and tanks, a group of Birzeit University staff and students rolled out a vehicle of our own, our site on the World Wide Web, for us a new vehicle of communication still developing into its role at the university after only three-and-a-half months of service.
In Ramallah, as Israeli soldiers killed unarmed Palestinian demonstrators, we photographed them doing it. As Israeli spokesmen emphasised that their troops were "only" using "rubber bullets", we took photographs of injured people's faces and of the plastic-coated steel bullets that tore through them. As Israeli soldiers cheered, danced and gave each other "high fives" when they shot demonstrators in the head with live ammunition, we stood quietly and watched as witnesses. As Palestinian Police finally opened fire on Israeli soldiers, who had been shooting both Palestinian civilians and policemen from inside Palestinian territory, we noted the context. As helicopters shot up civilian homes, we collected the fragments of the 20mm explosive bullets they used. In the hospital, as the floors we walked on became stained with blood, we collected statistics on the injured, dead and brain dead. Then we went to work. It's amazing what you can do with a flatbed scanner, a 486 computer and a modem.
There were problems with our experiment, but overall it went pretty well. In the fast-food, fast-paced world of international media, people responded with relief and gratitude to our daily, in-depth and local summaries. Visitors encountered personal testimonies of those who were there and over 80 photographs depicting the events. They could review statements issued by local and international organisations, and link to other Palestinian websites with information on the conflict.
Within ten days, twice the number of people that usually visit the university website each month visited our special website - "On the ground in Ramallah - Reports from a town become battlefield". By the end of two weeks a total of 3,000 people had submitted around 15,000 requests for documents and 10,000 requests for photographs from our webserver. Some of these people then forwarded the textual information around the Internet via e-mail.
Strangely enough, the real difficulties faced in the project were not limited to those associated with the obvious psychological stress of witnessing excessive violence or the ever present threat of injury to our writers and photographers, although many other journalists did get injured. Rather, difficulties in our "battle" stemmed from the technical side of things.
Running a highly-accessed website obviously requires human resources, as well as fast, efficient and appropriate equipment, neither of which we have in abundence. Marking up all the text into a Web-ready format and letting people know when new material was posted on the site was a mammoth task. Scanning the photographs alone took several hours, not to mention the challenge of finding someone to develop them in the midst of a 4-day commercial strike.
There are many voices claiming that the Internet will change the world by changing the way we communicate with each other and democratising access to information. William Gibson, author of several futuristic novels about how computers and society interact, told Newsweek recently that, "The Internet is global. And I think that people who grow up on it will have a better chance of growing up globally. If you facilitate the global exchange of information, things will be more difficult for your average dictator or demagogue...I do have a faith that if this technology becomes completely ubiquitous, it will do more good than harm."
Yet who is really facilitating this technology? Palestine has just 40 websites [editor's note - 9 months later, when this article was written, the number is over 80. In May 1999, the number has topped 200], three quarters of which were put together with limited resources and unlimited ingenuity, a necessity resulting from the suffocation of the economy, education and training by an on-going military occupation.
The biggest challenge facing the emerging "global" on-line community, located primarily in the North, will be how to make it truly global. At the moment, two separate tracks of progress exist which threaten to make the Internet nothing more than an electronic club for the exchange of information between rich nations.
The average country in the South can read more on-line information about itself that originates from the North than from within its own borders. The South is capable and eager to define its own reality in cyberspace but it is not going to be able to achieve this in the near future. In the end, inclusion or exclusion comes down as usual to money. The slow pace of the North's funding of information technology projects in the South is more likely the result of a lack of awareness than any conspiracy theory. All the glittery "dancing baloney" appearing on European and North American websites to attract the attention of the bored Web surfer, certainly appears at this end of The Download Time to testify to ignorance of the situation of those of us for whom the phrase "finite resources" will be an acquaintance for many years to come.
So who will be bold? Who is prepared to address the biggest challenge, that of inclusion in the information technology revolution? Who will step forward to enable local institutions to release the Internet"s "permission to narrate" to the South? Who will equip and arm the millions with an unparalleled opportunuty to communicate as equals? The battle may already be lost in this decade. The question is, can the /war/ still be won?