Who remembers the Google Wars website that was doing the viral rounds a few years back – a mildly amusing, non-scientific snapshot of the search-driven, internet world we live in?

It lives on at www.googlebattle.com where you can enter two search terms, say ‘Lennon vs. McCartney’ or ‘Left vs. Right’, and let the internet pick a winner by the number of search hits each word gets.

As we reported here – the virtual world has become a real battleground in the ongoing Gaza conflict – with all sides deploying significant resources.

For Israel – where hasbara or PR has often been frowned upon as unnecessary pandering to international opinion that never turns in Israel’s favour anyway – the second Lebanon war underlined the need for a coherent media and PR strategy coordinated at the centre of government.

The post-mortem of the month-long war with Hezbollah in 2006 - known as the Winograd Commission - recommended a centralised approach to hasbara to avoid spokesmen from different ministries, the army or the police telling different or conflicting stories to a voracious local and international media.

Notwithstanding the fact that the head of the new National Information Directorate did not make it to a scheduled interview with our reporter on the story above  – as my colleague Dan Williams reported here the strategy certainly seems to be working for domestic consumption.

Sources inside the Israeli government have said they are generally happy with the way the strategy has worked internationally as well despite growing international calls for a ceasefire and increasingly angry protests around the world.

The media strategy has been backed up by zero tolerance within the military and security establishment for anyone going “off message” - field commanders or political insiders who seemed to relish leaking tid-bits to their favoured reporters in 2006 are now keeping mum.

And while the virtual media war has raged – with pro-Palestinian websites like electronicintifada.net or Hamas’ own website http://www.palestine-info.co.uk/en/ ratcheting up the rhetoric alongside their Israeli foes – many in the traditional media (or dare I say MSM) complain that they have been totally defeated by Israel’s media strategy which has prevented them from entering Gaza or a ‘closed military zone’ neighbouring Gaza.

The world’s press has been herded on to a hill-top 2 kilometres from the Gaza Strip - where Israeli political and military spokespeople wander among the satellite trucks and live positions ‘briefing’ journalists with the official view of what’s going on inside Gaza.

As much as the protagonists have been duking it out in the virtual world - online media now has the clout to shape the way war stories are told and delivered.

The most surreal example of this is probably Joe the Plumber - yes, that Joe the Plumber of US election campaign fame - who has been engaged by pro-Israeli US website Pajamas Media to file reports from Israeli towns under Hamas rocket fire.

Joe’s basic premise seems to be that the media is inherently biased against Israel and journalists have no business being in the war zone anyway.

While you might not agree with his point-of-view - Joe is an example of the sort of do-it-yourself journalism with a strong voice that has been empowered by the Internet.

Read these two accounts - one from my colleague Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza and this one from another Gaza journalist - and I think you’ll agree that reporting from inside a warzone is important, journalists should be there and the combatants should facilitate rather than threaten this effort.

And by the way - in case you were wondering - a GoogleBattle between Israel and Palestine gives Israel a decisive victory. IDF vs. Hamas, though, has Hamas edging it.

PHOTO CREDITS

Photgraphers take pictures of Israeli tanks. REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun

Massive explosion in southern Gaza town of Rafah. REUTERS/Ibrahim abu-Mustafa

By Dan Williams

A Reuters investigation into how the Israeli domestic intelligence service Shin Bet is tackling threats from Jewish ultranationalists has raised intriguing parallels with Britain’s handling of the sectarian “troubles” in Northern Ireland.

Radical Jewish settlers who might turn to violence in a bid to wreck Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking are, increasingly, the quarry of the Shin Bet’s shadowy “Jewish Division”, whose operatives draw on a range of spying and interrogation tactics.

But a question remains over whether the Shin Bet, criticised internationally for its treatment of Palestinian suspects whose rights are limited under Israeli martial law, is less likely to get rough with Jews.

Such differential doctrines potentially recall Northern Ireland, where for decades British authorities had to tackle both Catholic republicans seeking a united Ireland and rival Protestants loyal to London.

A former top official with MI5, the British counterpart to Shin Bet, told me recently that when sectarian strife erupted in the province in the late 1960s, republicans were generally seen as the main threat to Britain, with the assumption that it was their violence that provoked loyalist counter-attacks.

Of further concern was the fact that the Provisional Irish Republican Army was targeting British targets abroad, while the loyalist paramilitaries were more localised.

“But when loyalists started, for example, buying weapons on the (British) mainland and abroad, we took that very seriously and certainly didn’t regard them as more ‘friendly’,” the MI5 veteran told me. “They were quite dreadful thugs.”

Street violence in the ancient port of Acre over the past few days has traumatised a town that has promoted itself as a multicultural tourist hotspot, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and rare model of integration between Israel’s Jewish majority and the Arabs who make up a fifth of the population.

It has provoked an outpouring of reflection on the place of Arabs within Israel, on the nature of Israel as a Jewish state and on its broader relations with the Arab world, not least with the Palestinians in the occupied territories.

The word “pogrom” has  been bandied by both sides after rioting broke out at the start of the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur.

A term for attacks on Jews in 19th and early 20th Russia - the kind of attacks that drove the Zionist push for a Jewish state in Palestine - it has been heard rather frequently here of late.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert may have started the trend by using it in condemning an attack by Jewish settlers on a Palestinian village in the West Bank

Members of the Israeli parliament, both Jews and Muslim Arabs, have used it in recent days to describe what happened in Acre, apparently after a local Arab man drove his car into a Jewish neighbourhood on Yom Kippur, a 24-hour dusk-to-dusk fast during which observant Jews pray and abstain from all work, including using machines, like cars.

Jewish youths attacked the driver. Arab residents then rioted, damaging cars and shops, and Jews set fire to two Arab homes and damaged nine others.  

The hapless driver has since apologised and appealed for unity. His public show of humility in Israel’s parliament, however, provoked angry scenes and calls from some Jewish lawmakers for his arrest. They got their way when he was detained this week, prompting outrage from Arab members of parliament.

And for many commentators, the damage has been done. Gideon Levy of Israel’s left-leaning Haaretz newspaper found “a little Bosnia in the making” during his visit to troubled Acre.

Yigal Sarna on Ynet described it as a “the war of poor against poor”, with tempers fraying as the local economy slows.

The Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, which refused to accept that Israel should exist, said there was more violence to come.

Among Israelis, all too aware of Jewish history, there was also anxiety, as this blogger said in demanding “Where is the government” after Jews in Acre were, in his view, victims of a “pogrom” by their Arab neighbours.

The rightward-leaning Jerusalem Post condemned Jewish youths for their part in the violence but also said the behaviour of Acre’s Arabs who shouted “Death to Jews” disgusted it.

The paper’s condemnation of “vigilantism” by Jews, however, drew angry responses from some readers.  One, who signed himself “Terry” went so far as to write “Stop being so PC … Simply put, no Arabs, no riots.”

He advocated boycotting Arab businesses “and eventually population transfer”. He concluded: “Let them holler “Death to Jews” somewhere else.”

Gulf News in Dubai, in common with many Arab commentators, sees a failure of Israeli policy and worrying trends for the future.

 ”The disturbances in Acre also come as proof of the failure of Israeli policy in assimilating or integrating the Palestinian population, treating them instead as second-class citizens,” it wrote in an editorial, raising the spectre of worse to come.

Ehud Olmert, who is still serving as caretaker prime minister while his successor Tzipi Livni tries to forlm a coalition, called for dialogue and said peaceful communities were being held “hostage” by small groups of extremists on either side.

Across the sealed and hostile northern border in Lebanon, home to some 400,000 Palestinian refugees from what is now Israel, The Daily Star was critical of his government’s policies, saying Israel “routinely runs roughshod over Arabs”. It urged a new approach so that Jews and Arabs could live together. Not such a radical idea, the paper suggested as it contrasted the sufferings of Jews in Europe down the ages with the relative harmony that Jewish communities long enjoyed in the Arab world.

Julie Gal, an Israeli who made a film about the killing of 13 unarmed Arab citizens by Israeli police in 2000, told Ynet in an interview that Israel’s Arabs were right to feel justice was not equal - after years of halting investigation into the case, all the police involved were exonerated this year. “We search worldwide for those who commit hate crimes against Jews, - as we should, but here at home 13 fellow citizens are killed and we have to beg the authorities to investigate and then they find no one guilty?” Gal told the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper.

The answer, Gal felt, may lie in the schools and doing more to overcome the gulf of mutual ignorance and mistrust that divides Arabs and Jews.

Like much else that is being spoken of in the wake of the violence, that is a long-term solution. And for many, even such long-term solutions are hard to make out, even as rival views of short-term answers assert themselves loudly.

Israel could do better in integrating its Arab minority economically, as commentator Akiva Eldar wrote in Haaretz. “But,” he concluded, “No money in the world will turn an Arab/Palestinian public, be it Muslim, Christian or secular, into an organic part of a country that defines itself, based on the nationality of the majority, as a Jewish state.”