The Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy has launched an app aimed at recruiting online propagandists to counter the exposure of its human rights violations against Palestinians.
Unlike, say, the Norwegian government’s Visit Norway app, Israel’s ACT.IL, a joint project with the IDC Herzliya academic center and two American pro-Israel advocacy organizations, the Israel American Council and the Maccabee Task Force, provides a platform where pro-Israel users defend the country against a “new lie” reportedly posted online “every two minutes,” according to the app’s official website.
So, what does a test run of the app demonstrate?
A remarkably amateur tool that calls on users to undertake “Missions” (29 at the time of writing) to earn points. The “Missions” range from enticing users to support Israel by liking a comment on Facebook or supporting the Israeli Wonder Woman ( 10 points) to emailing UNESCO’s Director General to stop their bias toward Israel (30 points).
By promoting pro-Israel content online, ACT.IL hopes to spread the word. In one example, the app propagates an inaccurate account of the June 1967 war as a “miraculous story…that finally granted Israel defensible borders and returned its holiest sites.” In another, users are asked to the share a tweet by artist Courtney Love calling Palestinian-American feminist activist Linda Sarsour “a vile disgrace.”
No one wins prizes for collecting points beyond bragging rights, which demonstrates the app’s ineffectiveness. In a nutshell, ACT.IL is an echo chamber of pro-Israel ideologues whose sharing of militant pro-Israel articles is unlikely to convince anyone who isn’t already on board.
Several glitches are immediately apparent. ACT.IL’s developers want to encourage pro-Israel postings but they are forced to contend with users posting against their agenda, which has led to censorship as editors quickly deleted offending posts. Comments posted below “Missions” and user-generated “Discussion” feeds not only allow for critical activists to participate in the app’s conversation, but also open the floor to exposing Israel’s illiberal nature.
In an exchange in a discussion feed labeled “Israel” that was initiated by a user who wrote that as an African he’d like to visit Israel’s holy sites someday, another responded to the would-be tourist that “we Jewish people have a strict policy against Goyish immigration into our Holy Land.” The latter’s characterization of Israeli immigration law, especially the Law of Return, was entirely accurate. Just ask a Palestinian refugee seeking to exercise her right of return. Shortly after the comment was posted, ACT.IL deleted both the inquiry and the response.
ACT.IL has also deleted the occupation. One of the app’s introductory videos features a young man leaping to Israel to visit Tel Aviv’s gay pride parade. Having had such a good time in Israel, the stand-in online warrior is encouraged to post positive images on his social media and combat the “lies” spread about the country. And, this, we’re told, is why ACT.IL was born. The video is meant to be informative and playful, but it’s unintentionally comical and instructive about the myopic worldview that characterizes Israel’s propaganda vanguard.
ACT.IL, and its parent organization 4IL, operates according to the belief that Israel has only a perception problem. Such a failure to reckon with the status quo, and why so many people find it objectionable, suggests that ACT.IL will inevitably fail to inspire many to support Israel because of the ongoing reality of occupation that ACT.IL conspicuously omits. ACT.IL’s developers might not view the corollary denial of Palestinian rights as a problem, but there’s no app for erasing a half a century of military occupation and apartheid.
ACT.IL markets itself as a student initiative, and while the app may target Jewish-Americans, this is a heterogeneous group with various political and social positions and perspectives. A growing number of Jewish-Americans have better ideas than enlisting as propaganda trolls for an occupying state. At last week’s Celebrate Israel Parade in New York, Jewish-American activists repeatedly blocked the parade’s route to protest the unjust treatment of Palestinians. ACT.IL might provide an easy outlet for strident supporters of the Israeli occupation to go on one-click “Missions,” but no app, however, can match the moral fortitude of activists marching for equality and justice.
