War of Words: Virtualizing the Israeli –Palestinian Conflict on Facebook in Times of Crisis

Abstract

This study examines political expressions on Facebook following politically charged events in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Using content analysis, we compared 539 randomly selected Facebook comments written by both Jewish and Palestinian Israelis as responses to three major political incidents which sparked heated discussions and exchanges of ethno political insults between the two groups on social networks. For each of these incidents, we categorized the comments as either offensive or friendly. After analysing the comments, the percentages of comments posted by Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Israelis in each category were compared. Sixty-six per cent of all comments were categorized as offensive, of which forty-four per cent were posted by Jewish Israelis and twenty-five per cent by Palestinian Israelis. These findings reflect the tense and fragile relationship between Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel and highlight the role of social network platforms such as Facebook in unleashing extreme political opinions which may not surface