NEW YORK — On May 12, a message appeared in a new
WhatsApp channel
called “Death to the Arabs.” The message urged Israelis to join a mass street
brawl against Palestinian citizens of Israel.
اضافة اعلان
Within hours, dozens of other new
WhatsApp groups popped up
with variations of the same name and message. The groups soon organized a 6pm
start time for a clash in Bat Yam, a town on Israel’s coast.
“Together we organize and together we act,” read a message
in one of the WhatsApp groups. “Tell your friends to join the group, because
here we know how to defend Jewish honor.”
That evening, live scenes aired of black-clad Israelis
smashing car windows and roaming the streets of Bat Yam. The mob pulled one man
they presumed to be Arab from his car and beat him unconscious. He was
hospitalized in serious condition.
The episode was one of dozens across Israel that the
authorities have linked to a surge of activity by Jewish extremists on
WhatsApp, the encrypted messaging service owned by Facebook. Since violence between
Israelis and Palestinians escalated last week, at least 100 new WhatsApp groups
have been formed for the express purpose of committing violence against
Palestinians, according to an analysis by The New York Times and FakeReporter,
an Israeli watchdog group that studies misinformation.
The WhatsApp groups, with names like “The Jewish Guard” and
“The Revenge Troops,” have added hundreds of members a day over the past week,
according to The Times’ analysis. The groups, which are in Hebrew, have also
been featured on email lists and online message boards used by far-right
extremists in Israel.
While social media and messaging apps have been used in the
past to spread hate speech and inspire violence, these WhatsApp groups go
further, researchers said. That’s because the groups are explicitly planning
and executing violent acts against Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up
roughly 20 percent of the population and live largely integrated lives with
Jewish neighbors.
That is far more specific than past WhatsApp-fueled mob
attacks in India, where calls for violence were vague and generally not
targeted at individuals or businesses, the researchers said. Even the Stop the
Steal groups in the United States that organized the Jan. 6 protests in
Washington did not openly direct attacks using social media or messaging apps,
they said.
The proliferation of these WhatsApp groups has alarmed
Israeli officials and disinformation researchers. In the groups, attacks have
been carefully documented, with members often gloating about taking part in the
violence, according to The Times’ review. Some said they were taking revenge
for rockets being fired onto Israel from the Gaza Strip, while others cited
different grievances. Many solicited names of Arab-owned businesses they could
target next.
“It is a perfect storm of people empowered to use their own
names and phone numbers to openly call for violence, and having a tool like
WhatsApp to organize themselves into mobs,” said Achiya Schatz, director of
FakeReporter.
He said his organization had reported many of the new
WhatsApp groups to Israeli police, who initially took no action “but now are
starting to act and try to prevent the violence.”
Micky Rosenfeld, a spokesman for the Israeli police, said,
“Police are tracking social media and monitoring movements on the ground.” He
said that while Israelis have been involved in some attacks, they were largely
“protecting themselves” against attacks by Palestinian citizens of Israel. He
added, “Police investigations are continuing.”
Israeli security officials said law enforcement authorities
began monitoring the WhatsApp groups after being alerted by FakeReporter. The
police, Schatz said, believed attacks by the Jewish extremists were inflamed by
and organized on the WhatsApp groups.
One official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, added
that the police had not seen similar WhatsApp groups forming among
Palestinians. Islamic movements, including Hamas, the organization that
controls the Gaza Strip, have long organized and recruited followers on social
media but do not plan attacks on the services for fear of being discovered.
A WhatsApp spokeswoman said the messaging service was
concerned by the activity from Israeli extremists. She said the company had
removed some accounts of people who participated in the groups. WhatsApp cannot
read the encrypted messages on its service, she added, but it has acted when
accounts were reported to it for violating its terms of service.
“We take action to ban accounts we believe may be involved
in causing imminent harm,” she said.
In Israel, WhatsApp has long been used to form groups so
people can communicate and share interests or plan school activities. As
violence soared between Israel’s military and Palestinian militants in Gaza
over the past week, WhatsApp was also one of the platforms where false
information about the conflict has spread.
Tensions in the area ran so high that new groups calling for
revenge against Palestinians began emerging on WhatsApp and on other messaging
services like Telegram. The first WhatsApp groups appeared May 11, Schatz said.
By May 12, his organization had found dozens of the groups.
People can join the groups through a link, many of which are
shared within existing WhatsApp groups. Once they have joined one group, other
groups are advertised to them.
The groups have since grown steadily in size, Schatz said.
Some have become so big that they have branched off into local chapters that
are dedicated to certain cities and towns. To evade detection by WhatsApp,
organizers of the groups are urging people to vet new members, he said.
On Telegram, Israelis have formed roughly 20 channels to
commit and plan violence against Palestinians, according to FakeReporter. Much
of the content and messaging in those groups imitates what is in the WhatsApp
channels.
On one new WhatsApp group that The Times reviewed, “The
Revenge Troops,” people recently shared instructions for how to build Molotov
cocktails and makeshift explosives. The group asked its 400 members to also
provide addresses of Arab-owned businesses that could be targeted.
In another group with just under 100 members, people shared
photos of guns, knives and other weapons as they discussed engaging in street
combat in mixed Jewish-Arab cities. Another new WhatsApp group was named “The
unapologetic right-wing group.”
After participating in attacks, members of the groups posted
photos of their exploits and encouraged others to mimic them.
“We destroyed them, we left them in pieces,” said one person
in “The Revenge Troops” WhatsApp group, alongside a photo showing smashed car
windows. In a different group, a video was uploaded of black-clad Jewish youths
stopping cars on an unnamed street and asking drivers if they were Jewish or
Arab.
We beat “the enemy car-by-car,” said a comment posted
underneath the video, using an expletive.
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