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Gizmo
Guest
-Rachel Shabi, The Guardian, 15/4/02The Independent Media Centre (IMC) in Palestine was just a few days old when, on
April1, the Israeli army launched Operation Protective Wall, its latest and most intense
incursion in the the West Bank. Hours later, the IMC - a web-based alternative news
network - had turned into a hectic newsroom, information source and coordination point, all
rolled into one. From then on, the work if its four volunteers, holed up under curfew in a
Bethlehem office, was watched around the clock, all over the world.
While professional news sources initially drew blanks on the details of the latest conflict,
IMC Palestine was feeding repors live from the streets of Palestine onto the internet.
“We`ve had press from all over the world calling for contacts, interviews, statements - the
works,” says Sarah Irving, a 26-year-old researcher from Manchester (England), one of
four IMC volunteers. “The office has turned into press central, all four phone lines going
24/7.”
The centre was able to direct meda requests for eye-witness interviews from conflict areas
in Ramallah, Nablus, and Bethlehem. Within days, IMC Palestine had set up a ‘bleeper’
system that paged news alerts to a three-page list of media correspondents on the ground
and faxed updates to the major news bureaux based in Jerusalem. By April 4, its website -
updated hourly - was receving 350,00- hits, and by later that week around 600,000.
Pivotal to this extraordinary information flow is the operational ethos of the ‘indymedia’
global network of alternative news, to which the new Palestine centre belongs. Websites
such as IMC typically comprise two sections: the first, written by volunteers, is a summary
of the second, a ‘breaking newswire’, fed by a system of open publishing. Effectively such
a system means that anyone with access to the internet can, through a relatively un-techie
process, load text, picture, audio, and video news onto the wire. Run, literally, by the
people, for the people, indymedia centres around the world (80 sites spanning 6 continents)
attempt to democratise the process of news reporting. Their message is: “Dont hate the
media; be the media.”
Months prior to launching, IMC Palestine had supplied the local community, already cynical
about western media bias, with information on how to be a part of this ‘global media
revolution’. Thus, from the onset of isral`s military action, scores of medics, lawyers,
independent journalists, peace activists, human rights groups and friends or families in
contact with those trapped inside conflict areas were on the case - publishing directly to the
site, or phoning reports through to the IMC centre.
As Israel intenfied its attack and denied media access to the conflict areas, the IMC
Palestine website was able to report of the most gruesome details of the attacks, It was the
first to confirm that palestinian women and children were being used as human shields in
front of tanks; that the Israeli army would declare an end to the curfew and then shoot at
Palestinians emerging onto the streets; that houses were being bulldozed with people still
inside them, that dogs were eating human corpses. Numerous eyewitness reports phoned in
to the site declaring that a massacre was taking place. One phone message from the refugee
camp in Jenin stated simply: “Help us, we are going to die, please help us.”
Of course, any freedom is subject to abuse and an open-to-all reporting system is no
exception. “Any news, we follow it from its roots,” says Bilal Slemeh, 25, Palestinian IMC
volunteer and a sociology student at Birzeit University, Volunteers to IMC`c worldwide
monitor their own newswires and ‘hide’ postings deemed racist, sexist, otherwise
oppressive, or just plain irrelevent (advertising or party political sloganeering).
“People have been posting threats to members of the international peace group and their
families,” says Heather Guyton, an Arab-American volunteer living in Bethlehem. “We’ve
had people spamming us, sending racist and abusive multiple postings. That’s one of the
reasons why we had 24-hour monitoring of the site, because it takes loads of time to take
that rubbish down.”
Both IMC Palestine and IMC Israel websites were, Guyton adds, temporarily shut down by
a “Zionist hacker”, until the indymedia global network of “geeks” rushed to the resuce in
cyberspace. The centre has also recieved numerous crank calls, mostly from Israel but also
from the UK and the US. “It can get very depressing,” says Irving. “We’ve had people
accusing us of being anti-semite, neo-nazi holocaust deniers, or calling to say ‘Why dont you
f*ck off and die with your suicide bomber friends?’”
There are countless other headaches too, not least the constant fear of attack from the
Israeli army, whose tanks and personell carriers often take pot shots at the building. With
it`s 20 Palestinian volunteers stuck at home under curfew, the IMC office was staffed by
three internationals - and Selemeh, who not as his home in Deheishe win the West Bank
when the attack began. Trapped together under curfew in the centre (of Bethlehem), with
reserves of food, energy and patience running low, the four had to organise quickly in
response to their increasing significance as a news source.
The centre`s shaky net connection collapsed completely wafter the Israeli army raided the
offices of Palestinian Online, the local internet service provider. But the global IMC
network had its own unique back-up: while the Palestinian site administrators were offline,
the newswire, being fed directly by its users, kept reporting. Moreover, international peace
volunteers in Palestine phoned live reports back to IMCs in their home countries, where
volunteers could update their native sites and in a tidy loop, crosspost the latest details back
to the Palestinian newswire. Now back online throug a single laptop with an Israeli net
connection, the Palestinian centre can report only in English - the laptop isnt
Arabic-enabled.
IMC Palestine: www.jerusalem.indymedia.org