Suddenly, his face appears on the screen. Big glasses and a small, white beard, the charismatic leader wears the famous black turban of the Sayyed Shiites, the descendants of the Prophet. At the very moment, around a thousand people stand as one, raising their fists in an expression of victory. From the many speakers in the immense amphitheatre, reverberates an intoxicating military chant. The video of this speech is telecast live, they tell me, transmitted through the internet. The speech is also reproduced on a dozen blogs and the websites Al Manar and Al Nour, the two main media in Hezbollah. It is very rarely that Hassan Nasrallah, general secretary and military commander—one of the most wanted men in the world—addresses thus, live, to all the officers of the Party of God, gathered in a conclave.
To gain access to this secret meeting on 9 May 2013, I had to establish my credentials. For many weeks, many requests for accreditation were submitted to the press service of Hezbollah, an office called ‘Media Relation of Hezbollah’, which is located in the Haret Hreik area, also known as Dahieh, or simply the ‘southern suburb’ in Beirut. Without success. And then, on the very day of the event, I got a call from the press service of Hezbollah which requested me to go to the Centre of Lebanese Art—as the letters spell out on the board at the entrance—in an area called Rehab, in Bir Stock Hassan in south Beirut. This is a zone which is predominantly Shiite, even though it is very close to the Palestinian camps (Sunni) of Sabra and Shatila.
The compound of the ‘cultural centre’ is discrete, but surrounded by great concrete walls, more than 3 metres high with a massive gate, which seem to be armoured and, in any case, insurmountable. All around, members of Al Indibat, the special police of Hezbollah, are patrolling. On the day that I visited, the gate was open and men with arms, many of them wearing earpieces, carefully went through the entrance. I gave my name and they confirmed that I was allowed to enter. Strangely they knew my middle name, which does not appear on any press pass or visiting card, and which I had not communicated. I am searched meticulously, without any animosity, the reception being very cordial. After a bit of waiting, they take me to the second basement, and from there, through a long underground corridor of several hundred metres, to ultra-modern offices. I cross rooms filled with computers, television studios and meeting halls. Many bloggers are busy and put articles and images online on al.manar.com.lb, one of the official sites of Hezbollah. I am the only westerner that day to have been allowed to enter this bunker, and everybody endeavours, all the while monitoring me, to facilitate my visit.
Deep underground, I am now guided to a gigantic conference hall. It is almost entirely empty. The seats are new and the amphitheatre is equipped with the latest technology, including a completely robot-operated aerial digital camera—a Super Scorpio Towercam, 10 metres high, made by the brand Crane. This camera is operated from the ground through a 12-metre telescopic pole by a cable man. On the control screens I see the spectacular images that are produced, with travelling and 180-degree panoramic views.
Slowly, the hall becomes full. The women, most of them veiled, sit on the left-hand side of the amphitheatre, and the military personnel, visibly non-commissioned, sit in the first row, the only people to face the hall and not the stage. I am told that all the members of parliament of Hezbollah, its elected representatives and some of its military chiefs are there, often accompanied by bodyguards (the military branch of Hezbollah is considered to be a terrorist organization by the European Union since the summer of 2013).
By 6 p.m., the hall is packed and the speech begins, punctuated by warm applause and entertaining music. On stage, near the yellow flag of Hezbollah is the Lebanese flag amidst sprays of white flowers. The latter is easily recognizable; it carries at the centre, in green, an assault rifle resembling the AK-47 surmounted by a verse from the Koran in red and the slogan ‘Islamic resistance of Lebanon’. While no Western journalist, or even Lebanese Christian or Lebanese Sunni is present, representatives of the Iranian media and Lebanese Shiites are present, sitting in the last row. Sajida Shahine, a journalist for the Hezbollah site, Al Manar, translates the speech for me.
Officially, the evening is dedicated to the twenty-fifth anniversary of the party’s radio station, Al Nour, but the speech by the Hezbollah prime minister, in person, and that of Hassan Nasrallah, through the internet, goes beyond this simple celebration. The military commander of Hezbollah chose this setting to talk of media. With firmness, he pays his tribute to the ‘work of resistance’ of the journalists of Al Nour and Al Manar, the radio and television channels of Hezbollah respectively, which ‘are not in contest with the journalists of other media, because they are defending a cause’. Punctuating his speech with smiles, so as to appeal, but also with military salutes and strong criticism he shouts out with great violence. Nasrallah says, ‘The other media are liars. We are not looking to be number one in “breaking news”—we have a different agenda. It is a psychological war with Israel, and we are a resistance movement.’ (The Al Manar blogger assures me, like everybody else, that the general secretary talks ‘live’ and from ‘a sure spot of several hundred metres’, but I have my doubts on this point. I would rather believe it is a recorded video.)
As Hassan Nasrallah speaks, all the journalists who surround me relay his words on the internet in minute detail. This is where the Al Manar and Al Nour representatives come in, and also the bloggers from the portals Alahed News, Tayyar, Al Akhbar, Al Mayadeen and even the Iranian Al Alam. In the newsroom, not far off, people are also busy duplicating the words of the Shiite leader on dozens of websites and satellite channels, including YouTube where the best excerpts of his speeches are immediately posted on different accounts. His words are also amplified on Twitter and Facebook. Translators produce an English version of the speech for the English sites of Hezbollah (the French and the Spanish versions will follow soon after). ‘Hezbollah communicates in seventeen languages,’ says Ms Rana, head of the press service of the Party of God, in French, with a kind of pride.
The digital war of Lebanon
In the course of many interviews, during three sojourns, with its managers in south Beirut and south Lebanon, I was gradually able to take stock of the media and the digital network installed over the years by Hezbollah. At the heart of the system are the official sites. Firstly, Al Intiqad (alahednews.com.lb) which may be considered as the speaking platform of Hezbollah and is led by Hussein Rahhal, ‘the digital man’ of the Party of God. It is available in four languages (Arabic, English, Spanish and French). ‘It is the authorized site of Hezbollah, which we refer to,’ explains Leila Mazboudi, one of the editors-in-chief of Al Manar. ‘Al Manar (almanar.com.lb), on the contrary, is more independent. It is an Islamist satellite television channel, essentially in Arabic, accompanied by a very reliable site where we develop the web editions of the channel in many languages,’ she adds.
Wearing a veil, speaking French, Mazboudi met me at Al Saha, a chic restaurant in the southern suburb of Beirut. ‘It is necessary to understand that the military branch of Hezbollah is totally separate from its political branch. We, for example, have no contact with the military. We have never seen them. We don’t even know where they are. We only talk of politics.’ (According to other observers, however, Al Manar appears to be a channel of the military branch of Hezbollah.) The headquarters of Al Manar was bombed fifteen times during the second war of Lebanon in 2006. It is located in Dahieh, in south Beirut, the showcase district of Hezbollah. Walking in these ‘model’ streets, I receive a good overview of the actions of the Party of God’s: massive effort to rebuild the Shiite area, implementation of free social services, multiplying the number of schools, charity associations, hospitals and, of course, mosques. It is not really Islam, or Jihad or even the ‘resistance’ that appeals to the people—it is the social and community mobilization of the field, coupled with an anti-corruption discourse. (This waad or the promise of reconstruction has already cost €300 million, of which a third is borne by the Lebanese government—something Hezbollah often forgets to recall.)
The media and the digital are among the priorities of Hezbollah. During the war, Al Manar continued to broadcast, and now, the official building, completely razed to the ground by the Israeli army, is being reconstructed (the television broadcasts from a different region in the city in a temporary building, to which I journeyed, but was not allowed to visit). A new tower of fourteen storeys on Al Arid Street will soon be inaugurated with ‘very sophisticated means’, says Ali, the head of the site, and Hezbollah member. A dozen workers are busily engaged in front of me, even as the crane is moving dangerously. Many floors on the building will be reserved, I am told, for Al Manar, the project being very modern. I ask Ali if he is afraid that the station will be destroyed again. ‘We are not afraid. If they bomb us, we will retaliate. We are ready. We will fight.’
Other than the very official Al Manar, sites such as Al Mayadeen and Al Akhbar are more independent, while still remaining faithful to the Hezbollah sensibilities. ‘We have some common denominators with them, but they don’t officially represent Hezbollah,’ clarifies Leila Mazboudi, while continuously wielding her smartphone. It is a Samsung, not an Apple. ‘I could have chosen an iPhone. When it comes to technology, we don’t have a national preference,’ she says, all smiles. I insist: ‘What is the common denominator?’ Leila Mazboudi: ‘Let’s say that we have the same objective of resistance against the American Zionist project.’
Opposite the headquarters of Al Manar: a souvenir shop. At the centre of the Shiite area of south Beirut, I meet Mahdi, a young pro-Hezbollah Lebanese man, with his beard of three days, baseball cap with the green logo and a Hugo Boss hoodie. He is a seller at Dar Al Manar, a boutique selling all the cultural products of the Party of God, located on Al Arid Street, therefore right opposite the headquarters of the station. In the shop, there are CDs and DVDs of the important speeches given by Hassan Nasrallah and the music of ‘military resistance’. The Party of God has even created TV serials, which in the Arab world are known as the ‘Ramadan series’ (or mosalsalts). Mahdi shows me one of those, called Vanquisher or the Renaissance of Arms (Al Ghaliboun). Two video games are also launched by Hezbollah, Special Forces 1 and Special Forces 2, which closely resemble, even in name, a game model created by the Electronic Arts studios in Los Angeles: Battlefield 2-Special Forces. ‘In one of these games, the Americans killed the soldiers of Hezbollah. So, we do the opposite in the remake or the sequel—it is the soldiers of Hezbollah who kill the Americans,’ comments Mahdi, unshaken. In another version of the game (whose content I was able to verify), a Shiite combatant’s mission during the Lebanon war is to kill as many Israelis as possible. More recently in 2012, Hezbollah launched its new video game called Al Redwan, in memory of its military chief Imad Mughniyah, killed in a car bomb blast in 2008. (Hezbollah said that Israel was responsible for this act, but the Hebrew state denied being behind it. As for the European Union, it considered Mughniyah a terrorist.) In the game, one can replay the military missions led by Mughniyah and of course avoid being killed by the ‘Israeli occupant’.
During our many conversations, Mahdi, the seller, admits that these video games are not very successful, even here in the Shiite area of Beirut. The shop, which I visited three times, is almost always empty. ‘The young people prefer playing Call of Duty or the real Battlefield, because even if games like Special Forces or Al Redwan are better from a political point of view, they are light years behind when compared to the gaming quality of the American games. And as there is no way to change the Hezbollah uniform, what we do is play the same games as everybody else, but instead of choosing, for example in Battlefield, the US camp, we fight on the side of the Chinese or the Russians, against American invasion,’ says Mahdi, through my translator. And in the game Generals, very popular in the Middle East, young Arabs often choose the uniform of the Global Liberation Army (GLA), a Muslim terrorist group. Another frequently used technique is ‘customization’ or the addition of ‘features’—in the game Generals-Zero Hour by Electronic Arts, one can easily customize teams and play under one’s own flag, explains Mahdi. In the shop, the Al Manar channel is visible on two flat screens. And on a small computer with a slow internet connection, the young salesman shows me that we can access these Islamist games online, through special sites. On shiatv.net, it is even free, which shows that such video productions are more tools of propaganda than projects with commercial aim.
Personally, Mahdi is interested especially in American TV shows which he downloads on his computer, particularly Prison Break. And he asks me to suggest a series with ‘women, beautiful and young’. We talk of Girls and Glee. Later, sitting in Al Jawad Restaurant, two feet from the Al Manar shop, the young man confides in me that he votes for Hezbollah and that he is evidently Shiite Muslim, but would rather not work in this shop. ‘It’s my father who makes me do it,’ accepts Mahdi. ‘I am not that political. I am here against my wishes.’
It takes a good hour on the road, towards the south of Lebanon, to get to Mleeta. On the way, one passes through many Sunni areas, with huge portraits of the former prime minister of Lebanon Rafic Hariri, assassinated, and through the Shiite zones where the yellow flags of Hezbollah flutter in the wind, often accompanied by photos of Hassan Nasrallah and his eldest son Muhammad Hadi, killed by Israeli bullets in south Lebanon. All the faiths are intertwined here, sometimes barely separated by a road or an area, not forgetting the followers of the Amal movement—pro-Syrian, pro-Shia but anti-Hezbollah—who display, here and there, portraits of their leader, Nabih Berri. Beyond the city of Saida, it is necessary to have a double pass, from the Lebanese army and from Hezbollah, to go through the checkpoints and then through the villages and the mountains, to get to this symbolic place of Islamic resistance.
Mleeta is a resource centre, a museum and a propaganda machine of the glory of Hezbollah. One can see in the military tunnels, used by the soldiers of the Party of God, an impressive collection of Israeli weapons seized from battles. ‘You can take pictures, we have nothing to hide,’ clarifies Adriss, a civilian who takes me on a tour of the area. On the wall, there is a very detailed organization chart of the general staff of the Israeli army, unit by unit, with the names of all its commanders, as though Hezbollah would like to show that it knows its enemy inside out. From a small observatory, we see the line of demarcation, the buffer zone between Lebanon and Israel, where the blue helmets of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) are deployed, the Israeli border being only some 40 kilometres away.
In the offices of Mleeta, I am shown how the pro-Hezbollah web platforms, blogs and Facebook pages are managed. There is a site for the general public, almost a tourist site (mleeta.com), and many Facebook pages which pay tribute to the memory of the Hezbollah martyrs, as well as a more politically bent web address (moqawana.org.lb) which is only accessible in Arabic. ‘It is one of the information sites of the Resistance Army,’ comments Adriss. I ask him if he is not afraid that all the internal communication of Hezbollah would be heard by Israel. He makes me understand that the Party of God uses its own telephone and internet networks for its military branch, more secure and independent than those used by the Lebanese public and the official government in Beirut. According to many sources, this network was created by Hassane Laqees, architect of the secret technological network of Hezbollah, financed by Iran (Laqees was killed in late 2013 in Beirut).
‘Hezbollah is a very centralized organization. They are very efficient in terms of online propaganda. When it comes to transferring the message instantly, on dozens of related sites, to their military and political executives, they are unstoppable,’ assures Diana Moukalled, who manages the website of Future TV. (Moukalled is a Shiite but works for the pro-Sunni media group of Hariri, in whose headquarters I meet her.) ‘The problem with these centralized organizations is that they have a problem with blogs and social networking,’ says Moukalled. ‘Rigid hierarchies don’t go hand in hand with good web management. When it’s time to be cool and funny, and show independence of spirit and participate in a conversation, one cannot be waiting for the arrival of the communications officer. So, there are no blogs and there are very few independent accounts of Hezbollah. And we have never seen them be funny.’
This opinion is shared by the journalist Kassem Kassir, a moderate close to the Islamic ‘resistance’ with whom I speak in Beirut. ‘As the name indicates, the Party of God has a language of a political party. It works alright on TV and radio. But this kind of message is not at all adapted to the internet. Hezbollah likes to spread its messages in a propagandist spirit, but this is not the internet mentality. When people post comments, it disturbs them. Interactivity, Facebook, blogs, social networks and conversations, all of this is not in their DNA. At the moment, there is not a single major personality of Hezbollah on Facebook or Twitter. Internet and social networking are not very compatible with the communication policy of Hezbollah.’ (In their defence, it is possible that a Facebook or Twitter account of Hassan Nasrallah or any other leader of the Party of God would be closed at the request of the American government.) The friends of the Shiite party have understood the problem. They have created, in the recent years, new media such as Al Mayadeen, Al Akhbar and The Angry Arab blog. ‘Al Mayadeen is Hezbollah without the veil,’ says Diana Moukalled. Former head of the Al Jazeera office in Lebanon, the famous journalist Ghassan Ben Jeddo, a ‘complicated’ half-Sunni, half-Christian Tunisian, married to a Shia woman of Iranian origin, heads this satellite television channel as well as an ultra-modern website (almayadeen.net). ‘It is a general public media which is clearly pro-Iranian and pro-Hezbollah, if we judge them by the cover. But it is very sly and very well made. They want to compete with Al Jazeera and they have a lot of money,’ says Moukalled. ‘The media clearly supports the resistance, but the women in it are not veiled. They have employed columnists of all beliefs, including the secular ones. This has been their clearly taken stand, particularly of Ghassan Ben Jeddo, in favour of the Hezbollah coalitions during the elections,’ explains the journalist Kassen Kassir, for his part. Ben Jeddo is a figure who creates as much controversy as he does fascination with many Christians and Sunnis; he is the ideal face of the traitor in subjugation to Iran and the official Syria. He was, when he headed Al Jazeera in Lebanon, one of the only journalists in the world to have interviewed Hassan Nasrallah, the general secretary of Hezbollah. (Despite many requests, Ghassan Ben Jeddo didn’t wish to be interviewed for this book.)
The site Al Akhbar (literally ‘news’) is just as efficient, in another genre. ‘We are leftist, liberal, but it is true that the Israel–Palestine conflict is essential for us. We are resolutely against Israel,’ says Pierre Abi-Saab, the editor-in-chief of Al Akhbar, in impeccable French. This friendly intellectual who is of Maronite Christian origin tells me about the course that brought him to defend Hezbollah (and cease being Christian), when I meet him a few times at the Bread Republic café near Hamra Street in west Beirut.
To him, the main subject is Palestine. All political matters are conditioned to defend the Palestinian people and to build resistance against Israel. ‘I build my entire reasoning around this,’ says Abi-Saab. Unsatisfied with the compromises proposed by the Lebanese Christians or even by the pro-Hariri Sunnis, he gradually swayed ‘in the name of justice and socialism’ to the side of pro-Hezbollah Islamic resistance. And he started working for the Al Akhbar newspaper and site. According to Diana Moukalled, his frontal contender from Future TV, ‘Al Akhbar is extremely powerful online. It is the cleverest initiative conceived by the Hezbollah entourage. They give an impression of being liberated, open and independent, especially in all secondary subjects, like culture and morality. They are modern when it comes to women and surprisingly even pro-gay. They show a very “Lebanonized” face. But the moment it comes to a major political subject or a question about Syria or Iran, their editorial gives room for no doubt. They stick to their Hezbollah side.’
‘Al Akhbar is the angry Left that does not hesitate to fool the Lebanese people,’ storms Hanin Ghaddar, one of the editors-in-chief of the site Now. A beautiful brunette, secular Shiite, Ghaddar today is very anti-Hezbollah, even though I meet her in south Lebanon, in Saida, 30 kilometres from Beirut, where she was born in a pro-Hezbollah Shiite family. ‘Hezbollah created or supported a galaxy of media from quasi-military sites like Al Manar to general public sites like Al Mayadeen or Al Akhbar. And even though the media and the official accounts alone are supposed to represent them officially, it is a very good strategy. And what is more interesting, these sites are located outside Lebanon and even outside the Arab world, often in the United States!’ adds Ghaddar. She admits that all media in Lebanon belongs to a party or a religious persuasion and says that she would like her site Now (now.mmedia.me/lb/ar) to succeed in being truly independent. ‘Lebanon is an identity. At Now, we are clearly pro-Lebanon. We are linked to no party, and we belong to a private group. It is very original in the digital landscape of the country. For all that, we are not independent or neutral. We make choices. We are essentially secular and stand for a secular Lebanon. That is also original! So, given that Hezbollah was created, financed and managed from Iran, it is evident that we can’t be pro-Hezbollah.’ The Now audience is ever increasing even though this pure player depends on Google News and Facebook for access to its articles. ‘Most of the time, the Lebanese read our articles on Facebook; it is a particularity in the Arab world,’ says Ghaddar. The site, which claims to be a Middle Eastern equivalent of Slate, belongs to the millionaire Eli Khoury, a Maronite Christian who bought it from the Hariri family. It is also supported by a few American trusts. On the premises of Now, which I visit in Beirut, I see some forty journalists designated to writing in English and Arabic, among a total of seventy permanent staff.
Other internet sites have considerable influence in Lebanon, such as tayyar.org belonging to General Michel Aoun, a Maronite Christian leader allied with the ‘resistance’ and therefore with Hezbollah. Likewise, the site belonging to the LBC channel (lbcgroup.tv), whose political line is ambiguous, flirting with Aoun, caters to a large number of audiences. ‘The competition from satellite channels strongly increases on their websites. We find the same denominational divisions but they are exacerbated on internet,’ explains Jessy Abou Habib, at the headquarters of LBC located north of Beirut.
Not far from here, MTV defends a whole other line (Murr Television has no link whatsoever with the American MTV). With its programmes for the young, essentially made up of talk shows and mainstream entertainment, MTV is simultaneously Christian and very anti-Hezbollah. Deliberately, MTV does not hesitate to provoke the Muslims with its brazen shows, it is a very liberal discourse and an expression of femininity without taboo. And of course, its website (mtv.com.lb) goes further than the channel. ‘We are not prudes, it’s true. Because the internet allows to show everything. At the same time, there is not much to be done about the frightened virgins. Everybody has seen everything online. There are no more limits to be respected because these limits have already been crossed,’ laughs Jad Yammine, head of the MTV site. The web battle is the continuation of the political war through other means. And here, at the headquarters of MTV and its imposing studios, in a northern suburb of Beirut, is a Christian bastion, where everybody is viscerally anti-Hezbollah.
It is also the case of Roland Barbar, the programme director of Future TV (pro-Hariri), whom I interview in the channel’s bunker at the centre of Beirut. After having crossed a wall overprotected with concrete and barbed wire, under the attentive monitoring of the Lebanese, and passing through many control points, I find myself in the Sunni bastion. From the office of Barbar, in a mezzanine made of glass, one can see the newsroom of the channel, huge and ultra-modern. Aware of the media power of the Sunnis, does he tend to underestimate the power of the Shiites? The powerful man of Future TV does not believe in the digital capacity of Hezbollah and tells me why, in perfect French, ‘The internet is built essentially by independent entrepreneurs. But Hezbollah is built on a paternalist model which has known a certain success by increasing assistance programmes, such as hospitals and social services. It is contradictory to what internet everywhere is, and what is more, it is contrary to what the Shiites in general stand for in the region, that is, traders, businessmen and entrepreneurs. Hezbollah could never understand that.’ According to him, this ideological bent would explain the small number of sites and the weak network of start-ups that are pro-Hezbollah, ‘whereas they exist for Christians and the Sunnis’. Barbar admits, however, that Hezbollah has a great capacity to adapt, and conscious of the importance of the internet, the party is likely to start a ‘true digital war of Lebanon in the years to come’. Besides, he concludes, ‘it has already started’.
‘Welcome to Gaza’
I have just crossed into the frontiers through the Egyptian terminal of Rafah and I receive an SMS in Arabic: ‘Welcome to Gaza’. It is signed: Jawwal.
For Palestinians, the Rafah terminal is the only point of passage possible between the Gaza Strip and the world outside. Along with the North Korean border, this one is reputed to be among the most difficult to cross in the world. Since the fall of President Mohamed Morsi it is practically watertight. As for foreigners, including Egyptians, they can nearly not use it (I went to Gaza twice, the second time being the summer of 2013, that is, before the war in the summer of 2014: the following pages therefore, show the situation as it prevailed before this new conflict).
The access is, of course, easier for diplomats, journalists and humanitarian workers. Nevertheless, I needed to submit a request to the Egyptian embassy in Paris three weeks before to obtain a special pass from the Egyptian government to cross the Rafah frontier. And then, a similar request had to be submitted to Hamas, which governs this Palestinian territory, in order to get a visa to enter the Gaza Strip. The requests are often refused by the Egyptians (Hamas sees the entry of Western journalists with a favourable eye) but sometimes, at the last minute, the green flag is shown by the embassy of Egypt. This happened to be my case—on the eve of my trip to Cairo. Cost: €40.
It takes six hours of travelling by road from the Egyptian capital to get to the frontier post of Rafah. It is a dangerous area. A dozen military checkpoints exist between the principal town to the north-east of Sinai, El Arish and Rafah. Mafiosi Bedouin commandos, associated with drug trade, illegal sale of arms and kidnapping, are active in the region. On the eve of my arrival, in the summer of 2013, a foreign tourist was kidnapped and killed; many policemen met with the same fate, all the more so as the Camp David peace treaties between Egypt and Israel, drafted under the patronage of Jimmy Carter in 1978, decrees that Sinai must be demilitarized, giving the pirates all the time to arm themselves against the dysfunctional military.
All around the frontier post of Rafah in the desert of Sinai are oblong dunes of sand, small shrubs, palm trees and a few cacti. An imposing metal gate blocks the road—the end of the journey for many. Only those duly accredited get through. A patient crowd: rejected people, Bedouins of Sinai wearing the thawb, who exchange shekels, the Israeli money used in Gaza, for Egyptian pounds; taxi drivers waiting for potential clients; Bedouins offering their services to help people go through the frontier ‘through the tunnels’ in case one is rejected in the official way. Upon going through the metal gate, one must walk 100 metres before entering a huge hangar-like structure where, again, around a hundred people wait patiently. One must then stand in a queue at the counter called ‘Passport Dept’ to submit their passport, and then wait. This can take between one and three hours. So, the passengers in transit, Palestinians for the most part, get busy: they eat the rudimentary biscuits bought at a small counter or drink the unpalatable Nescafé. All the women are veiled, without exception. Some, fewer in number, wear niqab, revealing only their eyes. Some children scream, others play. Here a newborn is changed on a plastic chair, there, a man faints due to the heat—a few people try helping him and give him some water (no doctor or fireman steps in to help).
The calmness, patience of these Palestinians is striking to me. At one point, an Egyptian agent, helpful and respectful, comes to see me and asks me to fill a form reserved for journalists in which it is written that I take responsibility for my entry to Gaza, that I know all the risks and that the Egyptian government will not be held responsible if anything happened to me; I sign the paper. The agent disappears and I wait another hour. He comes back at last, with my passport stamped with the seal ‘Exit via Rafah’—the admission that allows me to cross the Egyptian border.
At the end of the corridor named ‘Travel Direction’ a bus, mandatory for all, awaits. We wait another thirty minutes for the bus to fill up and start (sometimes, as I would see when I return, this can take up to five or six hours more). We don’t go very far. After about a hundred metres, an imposing brick wall, about 4 metres in height, and huge metal gates block the passage. Everywhere, barbed wire, and a number of armed soldiers placed on guard duty; a tank is also posted at the entrance, but, as they tell me, it is also demilitarized. A second black gate to be crossed, on the Palestinian side, and here I am, on the Gaza Strip.
In a second, the Vodafone network of my Egyptian phone ceases to work. The network is very well configured. The bus goes another 100 metres and then stops. Attached to the back of the bus, I see a trailer. It contains hundreds of suitcases and big bags. The boot of the bus is not enough to transport the belongings of the Palestinians in transit. It is the first time that I see a trailer attached to a bus.
New procedure, this time with a Hamas policeman. Courtesy interrogation. I must give the name of my official Palestinian ‘sponsor’ and the sponsor must come in person on the other side of the frontier post to furnish the accreditation letter from Hamas, explain the reasons for my visit and fill in a new form. Finally, I am the last passenger in transit to leave the customs office.
Five hours after having arrived at the Rafah post, I can now definitely cross over and also exit through Rafah. The city is divided into two. On one side, we are in Egypt and on the other side, in Palestine. It is 2 p.m. And Jawwal, the mobile phone operator in Gaza, takes over from the Egyptian Vodafone in a second. ‘Welcome to Gaza’.
Jawwal has a semi-monopoly in the Gaza Strip. It is a company based in Ramallah, which belongs to the group of companies owned by the Palestinian millionaire Munib al-Masri, which dominates the telecoms in the region, with the landline (PalTel), the mobile (Jawwal) and internet (Hadara). According to the Oslo peace treaty, all telephone and fibre-optic cables must go through the Israeli frontier post of Erez, so that the Hebrew state can control all the communication that takes place within the Gaza Strip. One time, this cable officially deployed from Erez was accidentally cut by a mechanical shovel and Gaza didn’t have internet for days. Another time, during operation ‘Cast Lead’ in 2008, Tzahal, the Israeli army, deliberately shut off internet in Gaza.
‘The Israelis can listen to any conversation and read any email. When it comes to communications, they are marvellous,’ says Mohamad Meshmesh, the editor-in-chief of Al-Aqsa TV, one of the main media of Hamas. The cost of mobile communication is very cheap in Gaza and internet access is generalized, both in cafés and in homes. Paradoxically, the Palestinians of Gaza enjoy a network of much better quality than the one available in Egypt, not to mention Sinai. In the many shops dealing in mobile phones in Gaza, there are phones at affordable rates available for Palestinians. These devices, and most other authorized consumer products, come from Israel through the commercial frontier post of Kerem Shalon, to the south-east of the Gaza Strip. There, close to Rafah, I saw the uninterrupted line of trailer trucks, forced to empty all their goods on the ground for a vigorous inspection, change drivers and even vehicles (because trucks coming from one side cannot exit from the other). Tons of goods, including phones, tablets and computers of different brands, are thus allowed to legally cross the border through this corridor on every working day. All that does not take this normal route goes through the ‘tunnels’.
‘The media and the websites are linked to parties, it’s like that,’ admits Mohamad Meshmesh, with whom I speak at the media headquarters of Hamas. From the outside, the building does not look like anything special. The Al-Haj Amin Al-Houseini street, at the north of the town, is not even paved, it is a dirt road. Conspicuous with their transmitting antennae over 20 metres in height, the buildings are banal, located in a nondescript villa, that is not even bourgeois, with two dusty garages on the ground floor. We arrive at the first floor, after a cursory check, and we go through a glass door. Everything changes. The cheap and dirty concrete disappears under a luscious carpet. The oppressive heat of the floor below is dispelled thanks to fantastic air conditioning. The dusty staircases are replaced by a working lift. Carboys of filtered water, everywhere. Flowers too, pretty and fresh, but rendered ugly, in my eyes, due to their presentation in the form of decorative sprays.
Hamas, Islamic Jihad or Fatah—in Gaza, as I would see, all media and websites depend on their political parties. Here, there is the official radio, Voice of Al-Aqsa, dedicated websites, community managers for social networks and a little away, the Al-Aqsa TV channel—the main media of Hamas (Hamas is officially considered a terrorist organization by many countries, including France and the European Union, and primarily the United States).
For a dozen years, especially since its electoral victory in Gaza in 2006 and its authoritarian taking over of the Gaza Strip in 2007, Hamas has developed an exceptional media and digital presence. Many times, its television transmitters and radio stations were bombed, its internet sites disconnected. The TV channel of Hamas was even entirely pulverized during the Israeli ‘Cast Lead’operation, forcing its journalists to work from secret underground offices. But today, the senior official of Hamas whom I interview affirms that he has nothing to hide, which diverges from the obsidional culture that one attributes to this Islamic party, close to the Muslim Brotherhood. After a formal interview Mohamad Meshmesh allows me to visit the media premises of Hamas, room after room, floor after floor. He offers me guava juice and Turkish coffee.
Walking around freely, I am struck by the professionalism and the courtesy of the thirty journalists that I meet. They are all men. They are busy in the studio, in the control room, in the editing booth or the digital ‘war room’, on the second floor. Internet is a priority for Hamas and they show me official and the unofficial sites, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, a true array of broadcasting tools—propaganda of Hamas?
‘The Israelis can do anything. They can bomb us down completely, if they want, or only destroy our transmitters, or just interfere with our satellite. They can even take long-distance control of our programmes and broadcast instead their own messages,’ laments Mohamad Meshmesh. He adds, ‘They can also log on to our sites and publish on our Facebook pages, as if they were the administrators.’
For its communication purposes, Hamas has developed an important tool: the Kassam Forum. I visit the office that manages this public discussion and exchange space—many ‘moderators’ take care of the forum. ‘They are not moderators, they are radicals!’ tells me a manager of Fatah, the enemy party. Preferring to be anonymous, as he lives in Gaza and fears retribution, he adds, ‘The problem with the Hamas forum is that it resembles anything but a forum. There is no exchange. One must be a member to access it and the moderators validate only the content that conforms to the party propaganda. The unwanted comments are removed. All this is not done in a subtle manner. This communication is all the more unilateral as it is not done live. (Indeed, the Hamas forum appears to be asynchronous and not spontaneous, as is generally the case with chats.)
When I question some bloggers and moderators of Hamas, I get to understand that an important part of their work is indeed to prevent the infiltration of ‘unwelcome’ people (the adjective obviously denotes Israelis, and also the members of Fatah). To thwart these enemies, they increase precautions and identities. ‘I have twelve email accounts on Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, etc.,’ says one of them. Sometimes, certain accounts of Hamas are peremptorily closed by the American internet giants, for example, the suspension of the English account of Brigades al-Qassam (@AlqassamBrigade) by Twitter. ‘Double standards,’ said Hamas, indignantly.
On the wall in the corridor, I see a photo of two Hamas journalists killed by the Israeli army. A little later, while exiting the lift, as I come back to the first floor, a young man politely asks me which country I come from. On learning that I am French, he encourages me, smilingly, to ‘become Muslim’. ‘Shut up’, says another man, anxious to appear tolerant.
Hamas is not known for its tolerance. Other than its attacks on Israel, international human rights organizations attribute many extrajudicial executions of Palestinian opponents. In Gaza, Hamas imposed a strict control on ideas, culture and morality in an already very conservative society. For having expressed their reservation on its actions, hundreds of militants and journalists of Fatah, the ruling party of the West Bank, were arrested, interrogated, sometimes, according to the many reports of Human Rights Watch and International Red Cross, even tortured and executed.
Due to the lack of authorized print media, Fatah depends on the internet since the victory of Hamas in Gaza. It has created a reliable chatroom, the ‘Fatah Forum’, very decentralized, with 500,000 members (according to what was communicated to me by one of the heads of Fatah). The forum is fiendishly efficient and coordinated by a dispersed network of anonymous administrators, difficult to censor. ‘My brother was in prison for twelve days because of the Fatah Forum. Hamas wanted to make him talk just to know the names of the administrators,’ explains Atef Abu Seif, former head of media for Fatah, who still lives in the Palestinian camp of Jabaliya to the north of the Gaza Strip. He continues, ‘But it’s very sophisticated. Nobody knows who manages the forum and the server is certainly abroad. However, if you admit to being a member of a Fatah site, Hamas will make you suffer six months of prison at the very least.’
The forum, as well as the many Facebook pages, allows the members of the Palestinian Nationalist Party to communicate with each other, and with Ramallah, the capital. Generally, the Facebook pages are more local than the forum. There is an official Fatah account on Facebook for every ‘manteka’ or geographical district in the political machinery of Fatah. There are thus four mantekas à Jabaliya and therefore four Facebook accounts, a dozen in Gaza West and fifteen in Gaza East, a total of 100 in the Gaza Strip. One can find here information on meetings, the current events of the areas and deaths. ‘The moment Hamas finds on our Facebook pages messages that are hostile to them, they shut us down,’ says Atef Abu Seif.
At the same time, Fatah has established a very original system of direct communication through SMS. Using the numbers of the members or simple supporters, it sends out mass SMSs.
Centralized and—probably—managed from Ramallah, the system works well under Jawwal, the Palestinian mobile operator. Each distribution list has thousands of phone numbers and even in the event of a small unexpected emergency, all the sympathizers of Fatah are alerted. To prevent the arrest of the administrators of these lists, they use anonymous SIM cards that are not officially declared by the dealers of Jawwal in Gaza. Many managers of these distribution lists were however arrested by the Hamas police, receiving up to three months in prison. The radical Islamic party also just prohibited all undeclared SIM cards that some people in Gaza humorously call ‘veiled SIMs’.
‘Hamas prohibits us from gathering, we don’t have mosques where political discussions traditionally take place, and it prohibits us from communicating with each other. So, we count on Facebook and mobile phones,’ says Atef Abu Seif. However, though the Gaza branch of Fatah is technologically advanced, it has lost its credit with the local youth. ‘Fatah is old. Its political personnel and its ideas have aged. We need new ideas. However, as a joke, when a Palestinian says he has no party, no ideas and no conflicts, we tease him saying that he votes for Fatah. We need to change that,’ admits Atef Abu Seif. Writer and student, Abu Seif has retired from his political life for the moment and tells me he no longer belongs to the official network of Fatah.
Contrary to what one outside the Gaza Strip might imagine, the political tensions don’t bring Palestinians into conflict with the Israelis. Though the Palestinians are united against the Hebrew state, they are violently divided when it comes to the question of managing Gaza. The censure imposed by Hamas in the name of resistance, its refusal of political diversity, the many arrests—and recently, the adoption of a new law against co-education—are grave threats to democracy, the state of rights and social life in Gaza. On the West Bank, Fatah was accused of the same actions against members of Hamas.
Each, in particular, follows its own agenda. For Fatah, the ‘liberation’ of Palestine is, officially, the only priority; but critics have long been active in denouncing inaction and the mafia drift and financial embezzlement of the party run by Mahmoud Abbas. For Hamas, the agenda is to further press the Sunni Islamist agenda in general and that of the Muslim Brothers in particular. The ‘liberation’ of Palestine falls under the framework of a larger combat, financed by Qatar, the ‘brother’ parties, yesterday by Syria and Lebanese Hezbollah and today again maybe by Iran and probably till its downfall by Mohamed Morsi’s Egypt. Hamas subordinates the interests of Palestinians on its foreign strategies and rejects all offers of peace formulated with Israel, by refusing the birth of two states, Israel and Palestine—as many ideas as terrorist fights. Finally, when it comes to Islamic Jihad, its Iranian financing imposes on it a more international agenda, for example, if Israel intervened against Iranian nuclear weapons, the Jihad would surely attack Israel from Gaza, in retaliation, which Hamas would undertake with great discipline. Thus, Fatah, Hamas and the Islamic Jihad have in common the objective of national ‘liberation’, but are in discord over almost all other subjects.
With his head tonsured, wearing small glasses, Wael Fanona has an indelible mark on his forehead, from praying, when the head touches the ground—a sign of great piety. He is the media director of Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip. I meet him on the seventh floor of an office building in the Gaza city centre. From his windows, left open on all sides, there is an excessive flow of air, serving as cheap air conditioning and making things fly about. On the shelves lie, a number of degrees, a flag of the Jihad, and a charcoal sketch portrait of the founder of Islamic Jihad, Fathi Shaqaqi (murdered in Malta by Israeli Military service). ‘Most of the people working here are not members of Islamic Jihad. The media belong to our political party which is very different from our military branch,’ clarifies Wael Fanona. I find this man with his calm, his patience and his courtesy, striking (later I would learn that he was arrested at the age of twenty-four by Israel and was in prison for twenty-three years; he was among the prisoners exchanged for the freedom of the soldier Gilad Shalit in 2011).
From the windows of the building, I contemplate the city of Gaza, immense, luminous, and ebullient. Its inhabitants love life and are in search of normality, despite the power cuts (electricity is available for an average of eight hours a day, in rotation among the different zones), water scarcity, blockades and the intermittent bombardments. In Gaza, a representative of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (for Palestine refugees) (UNRWA) would tell me of his having an absurd impression of a never-ending war during which the Israeli army spends all its time destroying, with bombs financed by the Americans, Palestinian installations financed by Europeans.
And then, there is the censor. ‘It’s true, I am not a Jihad member, not even a supporter. But there is no work for journalists in Gaza, outside of the parties. So I work here,’ explains a blogger for Islamic Jihad, on the morrow in a café (he prefers to be anonymous considering his words and for fear of retribution). He also tells me that, in his work, he must follow very precise directions. On the internet, on blogs and on Facebook, the whole structure of Jihad is controlled and hierarchical.
On the third floor of this building of Islamic Jihad is the Al Quds TV, the satellite TV of the same party; on the seventh, Al Quds Radio and the websites. Elsewhere, on each floor that one must climb on foot as the lift is broken, I see press agencies and, on the roof, the transmitters. ‘In November 2012, during Operation “Pillar of Defence”, the Israeli army succeeded in destroying all our transmitters with a surgical strike, without actually destroying the building,’ says Wael Fanona desolately, both angry and amazed at this technological prowess. Abd Alnasar Abo Oun, a famous journalist of Al Quds who takes part in the interview, takes out his smartphone and shows me the video of the destruction of the transmitters, as though to confirm this information. ‘The man who took this video lost a leg in the process,’ says Abo Oun.
Internet appears to be a solution to deal with the bombing. Broadcasting in Hertz is expensive and the antennae are visible. Sharing photos and sound clips on the internet goes unnoticed. ‘It is the priority for Islamic Jihad,’ says Abdallah, a digital journalist working here. The competition with Hamas also takes place online. ‘We probably have more liberty than the Hamas media,’ says Wael Fanona, who admits to having a ‘fairly good’ relationship with the brother party. But in passing, Fanona asks me jealously if the Hamas studios are better than theirs.
Little before my arrival, the Islamic Jihad, seemingly to broadcast its contempt for the current ceasefire orders issued by Hamas, launched a micro offensive against Israel from Gaza: a dozen Al Quds rockets—equivalent to Qassam du Hamas rockets according to the Jihad—were fired from Gaza, doing very little damage, but provoking an immediate retaliation from Tsahal. Four strategically important places of the Jihad were briefly bombed by Israel on the following night. This is the current story and everybody in the newsroom talks to me of these recent developments.
For an hour, I visit the media premises of the Islamic Jihad. The number of internet journalists comes as a surprise; the fact that they are young is surprising too. They are managing the Facebook pages of the party (as well as the independent pages of their administrators, which includes managing their Twitter feeds). Elsewhere, they are developing applications for iPhones and Android. In every room, I see a dozen computers, and often a Koran can be seen on the table or on the shelf. At the entrance to the premises, there is a prayer hall. The studios, and it’s a fact, are less beautiful than those of Hamas, rudimentary, but the atmosphere is as disciplined and studious. On the wall, I cannot miss the photo of Hassan Shakora, an Islamic Jihad journalist. He is wearing a turtleneck pullover in the picture. He was twenty-four when he was killed by the Israeli army.
From outside, it resembles small hangars with plastic hoods for the rich and small greenhouses with plastic sheeting for the poor. One has the feeling of being in an aerial world, open to every wind that blows, while it is in fact a completely underground world. The tunnels defy all human laws and yet they are the quintessence of the spirit of survival. ‘A brilliant idea’, according to the blogger Mahmoud Omar.
‘Around 2 million people are treated in an unacceptable way in Gaza. The Palestinians have no right to live “on the ground” so they move “underground”,’ adds Mahmoud Omar (a Palestinian from Gaza whom I interview in Cairo who often travels between Gaza and Egypt). Near the city of Rafah, to the south of the Gaza Strip, there are hundreds of tunnels which lie beneath the Egyptian frontiers. The numbers vary between 500 and 800, according to different sources. Those that I visit, to see how laptops and mobile phones circulate, are situated in a suburb of the town, but the others are more to the west (and rarely to the east). They are between 100m and 300m in length and are found at a depth of 3m to 7m. Sometimes, they are found, at the risk of collapsing, one below the other.
To access these tunnels, one needs permission from Hamas which manages, from Gaza, this well-organized trade. The tunnels have nothing anarchic about them. ‘It is a well-developed commercial industry which reports to Hamas,’ confirms the Palestinian film-maker Khalil Muzayen. And indeed, I speak with the Hamas agents managing the crossing point and I learn from them that they pay taxes—in Gaza, there is, within the Hamas government, an official ministry called ‘borders and tunnels administration’. Hamas presides over the tunnels and takes its tithes.
Other than the ‘private’ tunnels, which allows the products unauthorized by Israel to cross into Gaza, there are also secret tunnels, better protected and dug deeper in the ground, which helps Hamas to stock up. It is through these tunnels that the computers, mixing consoles and all the technical equipment necessary for the functioning of the sites and studios of Hamas are transported (according to what Mohamad Meshmesh, the head of Hamas tells me). Weapons too? Nobody confessed to this and I did not see them, but their underground transportation is an open secret.
The tunnels also play the part of normalization. Refrigerators? Washing machines? They are transported by the hundreds every week. Construction material? Bricks? Cement? There are specialized tunnels for these. Cars? Some tunnels, wider, are actual routes that vehicles may take. For the tunnels are not just used for the transport of forbidden products, they allow a trade of cheap goods—cheaper than those that go through Kerem Shalom, the legal, tripartite frontier post for commercial purposes between Gaza, Israel and Egypt (it is located at the extreme south-eastern part of the Gaza Strip, near its namesake kibbutz).
‘The telephones, tablets and the computers coming from Israel are of good quality but are quite expensive. To get cheaper devices, one must get through the tunnels,’ says Ahmed Shawa, a young Palestinian selling phones and tablets in the Jawwal Shop, at the junction between Palestine Street and Shohadaa Street in Gaza.
A while ago, a young express delivery company, a kind of Palestinian Fedex called Yamama Delivery, in a stroke of advertising genius, offered to make swift deliveries of Kentucky Fried Chicken to Gaza from Egypt through the tunnels. Guaranteed success.
‘In Gaza, you can call taxies and ask them to take you to the tunnels. There is a company which offers “services available twenty-four hours a day”! We even joke about the possible options to go out: the frontier or the airport.The airport means the tunnels! It is so much faster!’ says the blogger Mahmoud Omar in jest. He has crossed the frontiers through the tunnels many a time. ‘Fifteen dollars. That is the price,’ he affirms.
However, according to the times and the political events, the Egyptian army enforces a strict buffer zone which strongly limits access to the tunnels. Recently, the new government in Cairo also had a dozen of them destroyed and listed Hamas as a terrorist organization. As the Rafah post is also regularly blocked due to unforeseeable risks, Gaza goes back to being, for its 1.7 million inhabitants, with no tunnels and open borders, with its promise of penury and despite its vital internet network, a vast prison.
‘Can the Iranian citizens read your Tweets then?’
Ramyar sells mobile phones in the Grand Bazaar of Tehran. It is not the only one. In the street where I meet this young Iranian, all the shops sell mobiles. (Some names, places and situations were modified in this section about Iran.)
The Grand Bazaar is an incredible caravanserai where 300,000 people work and where 600,000 customers trade every day. Everywhere, there is hustle and bustle. Everywhere, they sell and swap. It is not as beautiful as the souk in the old town of Jerusalem or the one in Damascus, but it is bigger. With its size and atmosphere, it gives one the impression of being in Khan Al Khalili, the souk in Cairo; with its strict segregation of sexes, it resembles the Al Thumairi souk in Riyadh.
Inside, on the streets, it is a succession of colours and smells: spices, dry fruits and pastries. All the shops have a speciality; instead of splitting up, they assemble together to trade; it is the opposite of a shopping mall. Here are the belts, and there the facecloths. Further down are hangers and then coats. There is a street just for cheap books in English, such as hundreds of copies of Longman dictionaries (these copies are illegally reproduced in Iran). In another, I see mountains of watches—Rolex, Breitling, Dolce & Gabbana—all of them forged. In the souk, a Rolex costs $50; in the northern areas of Tehran, it costs $5,000.
Fatemeh, a medical student, veiled, is my interpreter while I converse with the telephone vendors dealing with mobiles. Modern and good Muslims, they are moderately pious but have downloaded on their mobile phones all the necessary applications. ‘It renders the phone halal,’ grins Ramyar, one of the mobile traders. Even before the advent of internet, cellphones were to Iranians the first major revolution. ‘Without mobiles, parental control was almost absolute. Girls, for example, could talk to nobody because their fathers controlled the landlines at home and thus monitored all the conversations. The moment every young person bought a mobile, the fathers lost control over their calls,’ says Ramyar who earns his living thanks to this revolution. The statistics of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) confirm that 75 per cent of the Iranian population has a mobile phone and that this percentage climbs up to 92 per cent among the upper classes; thirty million Iranians also have access to internet out of seventy-five million people. ‘Here, everybody uses applications like Viber, Skype and WhatsApp which allows one to make calls freely on a smartphone. SMSs and Bluetooth are also very important as they give the option to communicate even without talking! The young get a lot of autonomy, especially girls,’ says Ramyar. He shows me on the Viber application of his own phone the unending list of contacts and the many conversations he has with his friends and ‘many girls’ whom he calls ‘my girlfriends’. Strangely, not one of the feminine faces that appear on the display picture of the contacts is veiled.
‘We are very liberal when it comes to women,’ says Ramyar smiling, and reminds me that ‘Iran is not Saudi Arabia’. He alludes to the fact that women cannot drive in Riyadh even when accompanied by their husbands, while they can in Tehran. Ramyar finds this situation absurd but still jokes that ‘it makes the roads safer’, inviting a hostile look from my interpreter Fatemeh who evidently finds it normal that a woman can drive her car. (Since my stay in Iran, a video went viral: Manal Al Sharif, a Saudi computer engineer and militant feminist filmed herself while driving on the roads of Riyadh and posted the image on YouTube and Facebook. Going viral, the video was denounced as a ‘provocation’ by the regime and she landed herself in prison for some days.)
In a small shop in the bazaar of Tehran: a computer. Connected to two speakers, it continuously plays music from an iTunes account overflowing with Iranian hits imported from Los Angeles as well as English numbers. One of the traders consults his page on Cloob, the Iranian equivalent of Facebook which has had lukewarm success. Ramyar explains that Cloob falls greatly short of the possibilities offered by the American social network but has the advantage of being less filtered. Especially, it is entirely in the native Farsi which helps its use. ‘But Facebook is also in Farsi,’ objects another seller who does not give me his name.
Iran, firstly, is a country of blogs. The blogosphere is exceptional and they call it a true ‘blogistan’, describing the community of Iranian bloggers. They are estimated to be around 700,000 in number. ‘The bloggers can be censured, stalked, arrested, but they are difficult to identify because they are hundreds of thousands,’ says Mohsen, a blogger whom I meet in a suburb of Tehran. He is at the heart of the Iranian counter-society and the singer of an underground music group which is banned and seriously punished. ‘Blogger and rocker: I chose to rush in headlong,’ says he, smiling. (I will learn later that Mohsen had just served three years in prison.)
Initially little focused on the digital, the Iranian regime brutally understood the risk with the ‘green movement’ in 2009. Three million people risked their lives and braved the police on the streets of Tehran—an event that went unnoticed, if one thinks about it. For the Mullahs, it erased all doubts that the reason behind this unusual mobilization was a ‘foreign conspiracy’ orchestrated on the internet with videos on YouTube and Twitter. One recalls that the State Department of the American government asked Twitter to put off the maintenance of the site, which would have rendered the site inaccessible during the ‘green revolution’ in order not to obstruct the protestors. (This point was slightly debated, but in 2009, the number of Iranians with the ability to access Twitter through a smartphone was undoubtedly limited and it is unlikely that this social network would have had real impact on the ground. On the contrary it was decisive in mobilizing the Iranian diaspora in the United States which explains why most of the Tweets were in English and not in Farsi.)
The fact remains that internet surveillance was implemented in Iran in 2009. The parliament (Majlis) announced allocating €380 million to implement a good system of internet surveillance after the Chinese model. An internet police was created, named FATA, a special unit of the Islamic police of Iran.
I do a test in Tehran. I type the word ‘sex’ into Google and I am immediately redirected to a page which suggests me to buy the Koran. Sometimes, the ridiculousness of it all trumps the efficiency. I notice thus that the name of a former American president is frequently banned in Iran: Dick Cheney. The word is automatically deleted.
‘The censor is blind and clumsy,’ emphasizes Mohsen the blogger. He says that the police are the first people to use anti-filters to access illicit content. ‘The government filters and everybody else unfilters,’ he summarizes. In any case, I observe that all the internet cafés I visit in Tehran almost always offer computers with anti-filters, and they are even sold in establishments. ‘The best anti-filters are Russian!’ says the manager of an internet café located between the Carpet Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art near Tulip Park.
Prudence however is not out of place. A hunt for bloggers started in Iran. One of them, Sattar Beheshti, thirty-five, very active on Facebook, was arrested by the Iranian cyber police and tortured to death in late 2012. A United Nations report confirmed in the same year that internet journalists and activists were arrested due to their online activity. The swing towards social networking there did not accelerate. Some bloggers I met in Tehran use, for their safety, social networks and instant messaging (MSN, GTalk, BBM, WhatsApp and Yahoo Messenger), against which the censor has been fighting many battles of late, even though Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are officially blocked. Many of the speakers asked me which among Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail provided surest service from the point of view of confidentiality. Yahoo is viewed unfavourably since its cooperation with the Chinese censor, Hotmail incites no opinion and Gmail is currently seen, thanks to its relocating from continental China to Hong Kong, as the most trustworthy inbox. (Running the risk of being spied on by the Americans does seem to worry the Iranian bloggers.)
‘My real life is just like a Facebook page,’ explains Mohsen. ‘I have friends I agree to meet or not, according to a certain degree of confidence. A great deal of prudence prevails. A newcomer who does not share his friends with me: a danger. Friends always call other friends.’ Most of people he ‘likes’ on Facebook, bloggers, and fans of his rock concerts form a little crowd that constitutes his ‘family’.
‘Music is the most prohibited culture in this country,’ explains Rasoul, drummer for the same group. ‘Only traditional music and a few sentimental male singers are allowed in Iran. These are artists belonging to the system who have the right to their style and who can find a job as music teachers. Everything else is prohibited and falls under underground counterculture. Rock music, Iranian rap and especially live concerts are completely prohibited by the regime.’ He pauses and looks at me. ‘How can they ban rock? How can they ban practically all music?’
With a nod, I let him know that I, like him, am flabbergasted. He continues, ‘However, in Tehran, I am able to go out every evening, go to garages, improvised rooms and one time, I even did a secret concert at night in a nursery school! It’s enough to be in the network.’ What can happen to him? ‘Destruction of my drums and two days of prison, in the worst case, seventy-four whiplashes,’ says Rasoul. And adds, ‘Mp3, iTunes, MySpace and YouTube changed everything. The audio cassettes were already very helpful to the young to get music, but now they don’t need to keep them. Now everyone knows our songs even though we are banned and are supposed to remain underground.’
Internet has changed the deal. A rock musician like Omid, who sings in Farsi, is known by all Iranian youngsters though he is banned in Iran and lives in Los Angeles. Thanks to downloads and Mp3 compilations on CDs, he is an important star in Iran, as I could see on many evenings. The Mp3 phenomenon and iTunes have practically, if not legally, abolished the censor of music in Iran, already ruined by audio cassettes. And when I visited ‘Tehrangeles’ in California—the nickname of Westwood in Los Angeles where more than 800,000 Iranians live—I discovered the countercultural support base of Iran. It is an entire sub-culture, with specialized food, Muslim cafés and Iranian rock concert halls, not to mention twenty-five satellite TV channels transmitted in Farsi from California to private satellite dishes in Iran.
Even today emancipation in Iran takes place through networks with foreign names: Hot Bird, Eutelsat, Türksat and in a smaller way through ArabSat, NileSat and AsiaSat—foreign satellites accessible from Iran.
It also takes place through internet. The Iranian censor must confront the American counter-censor. Thousands of young exiled Iranians in Tehrangeles, anti-Mullah, ‘nerds’, digital-savvy or working for start-ups, invent real-time software to thwart censorship in their motherland. Never running out of ideas, not counting their hours, they take advantage of the time difference to ‘unblock’ the internet. ‘The moment a site is blocked in Tehran, alternative solutions and proxies are implemented by the Iranian Americans in Los Angeles or San Francisco, which would then restore the site, so that it will be active again the next day. This is our product support for the Iranian internet,’ confirms Mohsen, fascinated and grateful. Happy to undo the Islamic revolution, these immigrants even show zeal, and unlike their co-religionists back in Iran, they take very little risk. Some escaped the regime because they were threatened for political reasons, others left Iran by choice, if one may say so, for economic reasons. The bloggers often belong to the first category, whereas the heads of start-ups, who often have dual citizenship belong to the second. What brings them together: nostalgia for the faraway country, dreamed of more than actually lived in, which follows, even when one lives in Tehrangeles, thanks to internet. Along with Dubai and Istanbul, California constitutes the support base of free Iran, like Miami which represents in a way a free Cuba.
Sometimes, the Persian internet community receives unexpected messages of support. When the new Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani joined Twitter by opening an account (@HassanRouhani), he was welcomed with a message, less than 140 characters, from the founder of Twitter in person, from California. Jack Dorsey (@Jack) tweeted: ‘Good evening, president. Are the citizens of Iran able to read your Tweets?’
Amir is an artist and a graphic designer whom I meet at the Web Café, a trendy place in Tehran underneath an alley near Imam Khomeini Street, south of the city. At first glance, the building, of Islamo-Stalinian architecture, takes one by surpise. Once inside, the underground nature of the place, both literally and figuratively, leaves no room for doubt. A rock band rehearses the classics of the counterculture, all of them banned in Iran: Blowin’ in the Wind by Bob Dylan, Imagine by John Lennon and What’s Going On by Marvin Gaye. The words ‘picket lines and picket signs’ written about police brutality, long hair and war resonate within the small café. The clients, a mix of men and women, don’t pay any attention but Amir is fascinated by this musical liberty. He tells me, as a connoisseur, that Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix, No Woman No Cry by Bob Marley and Sympathy for the Devil by the Rolling Stones are the only ones missing. I agree, adding to the list Changes by David Bowie and maybe the Jim Morrison number, When the Music’s Over. Amir eats cheesecake. ‘Everything’s gonna be alright,’ he says, quoting a famous line by Bob Marley.
The café is famous and it has three smoke-filled rooms where one can have drinks (but none alcoholic) and inexpensive dishes of the day. The Wi-Fi is free. A group of students watch the video of Telephone by Lady Gaga on YouTube in which lesbians are in power and heterosexuals end up in prison! All around me, girls, resplendent with ideas, accessorize their veils to their taste using hoodies and daring colours. And the lipsticks and the jewels! Never mind that the diamonds are real or not (they are not), but all this extravagance is as seductive as is allowed by the Islamic law. A watch and make-up—they are visible, even when one is wearing a veil. And underneath their well-fitted coats, they are even wearing the same ripped jeans as Kurt Cobain.
In reality, the Iranian government dreams of a ‘civilized East’ as opposed to a ‘decadent West’ and dreads, more than anything, contamination by Western culture. ‘They know very well that that’s what young Iranians dream of,’ judges my interpreter Fatemeh. ‘From rock to cinema, TV, internet and sexual liberty, the regime observes every day the well-pronounced effects of this modernity in Iran itself.’
(This clash of civilizations is not enough to explain the absurdity of the pain inflicted upon the 6 Iranians for having simply sung Pharell Williams’ Happy in 2014. In their video, filmed with an iPhone and posted on YouTube under the title Happy in Tehran, there they are, happy, dancing on the terraces and the rooftops of Tehran. Shared on Facebook and Instagram, the video went viral, attracting the attention of the moral police. With the three girls not wearing their headscarves, compulsory in Iran, it became a cause for arrest, but the severity of the punishment—six months in prison and 91 whip lashes—caused an international stir. Young Iranian-Americans from Tehrangeles proclaimed their distaste, while Pharrell Williams himself said he was filled with dismay at the incident and that he was “beyond sad” (in a message posted on Twitter). The Iranian President, Hassan Rouhani was forced to step in and call for clemency, in a message posted yet again on Twitter: “#Happiness is our people’s right. We shouldn’t be too hard on behaviours caused by joy”. The punishment was finally reduced to a suspended jail sentence.
Definitely, the Shiite theocratic dictatorship is so strict that it does not allow, in the young, opinions other than to rebel against arbitrary rules, perceived as feudal. ‘The Islamic revolution is dead in opinion. What can it give to young Iranians? The cult of the martyrs Ali and Hossein who have been dead for more than a thousand years? The expectation of the twelfth Hidden Imam? It is laughable,’ says Amir. In Iran, in the face of this sectarian theocracy, a counterculture prospers far from the precepts of the mullahs. For want of public liberties, the young invent private liberties—and they have adopted mobile and internet. I measured the force of these aspirations everywhere, underground of course, groping around, but inexorably working at an amazing reorganization of ideas and values. The regime may crack down, punish or kill, but it has no control over this evolution which feeds off a deeper driving force—an exceptionally young demography (65 per cent of the seventy-five million Iranians are younger than thirty-five years), high level of education, especially among women, a sizeable middle class, the omnipresent new technology, a dynamic internal economy which makes Iran an emerging country, and what can be called difficult to define in words but so perceptible in Iran, the spirit of time and evolution of mentalities.
Let us not exaggerate. Here, the outside observer must take care not to overestimate the role of internet and the influence of this counter-society. All dictatorships have their nomenklatura. All authoritarian regimes have their underground division. Their sinecures and their prebendaries. Is it specific to Tehran with its golden elite, unbridled and digital-savvy, an epiphenomenon outside the system, not pertaining to the rest of the country, or is it a fundamental movement, massive, bringing together the youth, a harbinger of the future of the Iranian society? That is the question and on its answer depends the future of the ‘Islamic Republic’ of Iran and the tension between the religious and the secular figures even in its name.
Many of my interlocutors in Iran told me that the Iranian regime, rattled by the force of contestation in the elections of 2009, was in the process of moving towards the Chinese model. It will be forced to make concessions in connection to economy, internet, culture and mores to save what can be saved: the political. It would make allowances.
Others on the contrary are convinced that the regime is hardening at present and that it is becoming a pure police dictatorship. Henceforth, internet would be subjected to excessive monitoring. ‘What is certain is that the people and the government are walking away in two different directions,’ says Fatemeh, who is yet optimistic. She is no longer afraid of the ‘pasdaran’ (the guard corps of the Islamic revolution) or of the ‘bassidji’ (the morality police who ensure that the veil is worn and who fight against the ‘social immoralities’). She thinks that the digital and the counterculture show the course of the story. This underground and online life constitutes a true civil society. This counter-society is hidden, but also represents the reality of the Iranian society. In real life. Amir adds, ‘It is no longer the counter-society. It’s the real society. It is Iran.’
An internet ‘halal’
The Al Azhar University Campus in Cairo is situated at several hundred metres from the spot where the Egyptian president Anouar El Sadate was assassinated. A moving memorial recalls him, at the heart of Nasr City, a big suburb to the north-east of Cairo.
At the entrance of the university, small traders sell watermelons and newspapers. The access to the university is strictly regulated, but once authorized, one can navigate in this colossal complex, which houses fifty buildings, in a car. One of them is known under the name of ISNU. It is the Information System Network Unit—the heart of the Sunni Muslim internet.
‘Al Azhar is an elite university and represents the highest place of Sunni theological learning. Its jurisprudence and fatwas are followed to the letter everywhere. The Great Imam of Al Azhar is the supreme chief of Sunni Islam in Egypt, and therefore, in principle, throughout the world,’ confirms Ashraf Mohamad, an engineer who takes me around the campus. The university, whose name in Arabic means ‘splendid’, was constructed in the tenth century, right next to the mosque of the same name, at the city centre of Cairo. With its four dominating minarets and three splendid domes, Al Azhar is part of the country’s heritage. It is venerated by Sunni Muslims around the world to whom the university delivers both masters and fatwas. It is however not the temple of radical Islam—the Azharian institution, on the contrary, represents a moderate and mainstream Islam, far removed from the Islamism of the Muslim Brotherhood, and even further from unorthodox branches such as Salafism or the Saudi Wahhabism. The university is famous in the Muslim world, which helps it attract many foreign students. This success had to be counterbalanced—in order to fulfil its missions— and Al Azhar had to open a bigger, modern campus in Nasr City, close to the Ministry of Defence. The historic seat at the heart of Cairo now seems like a simple showcase, the main campus being in the suburbs.
Mohamed Hosny is the administrator of the ISNU of Al Azhar. He oversees about forty laboratories, which constitute the heart of the network, and with great kindness, making small hieratic gestures, he takes me to visit them. On the first floor of the building is the head of the system: a Siemens supercomputer, which takes up an entire room whose windows are masked by thick green curtains to protect it from light, while loud but efficient air conditioning protects it from heat. Hosny responds to all my questions, going as far as to giving me the brand of the router (Juniper) and switch (Foundry)—both of them American. The campus functions on a closed circuit, around a local area network (LAN), even if it allows access to internet from ten other servers.
One of the flagship programmes of the university was named the Al Azhar Online Project. Launched in 2005, financed by funds from the Dubai Emirate, it aims to render accessible, after digitization, the collection of rare manuscripts of the university, the essential documents of the history of Islam. In parallel, a hotline was installed to answer the practical questions of Muslims confronting modern life—they may contact the theological university through phone or email to ask any question, and a response is guaranteed in forty-eight hours. In the end, Al Azhar saw itself entrusted with a new mission, in the late 1990s, of a religious censorship of Egyptian electronic media.
Going through the campus, I discover rooms of e-learning, a Centre for Software, another for hardware and, at the end of a long corridor, an incredible repair room where I see, stacked up, masses of mismatched computers—as if in this holy place, one hoped to restore old computers instead of replacing them. Coming out of the digital rooms, I see three men who are praying, crouched on beautiful mats into which little compasses are sewn, to indicate the direction of Mecca.
While the ISNU of the Al Azhar University seems well developed, I am not so impressed with the package. The whole technological system put in place seems hardly effective, and its computer resources, dusty, hardly state of the art. Attending some of the classes—a Koran lesson, an English lesson and a computer lesson—on the ancient campus as well as on the new one, I met the ‘Religion students’ with no pen and paper, some of whom were asleep, lying on the benches, and archaic clerical professors who drone on with general indifference. They enter, they exit, they speak on phone. Nobody listens. Even the mosques inside the university, the adorned misery of the East, are colourful but built carelessly. Here and there, chairs, new ones, are not even entirely rid of their packaging. And in one of the computer labs of the campus, I see a small sign with the slogan ‘Are you a digital native?’ At Al Azhar, contrary to what one may often say, the answer is not exactly in the affirmative.
A ‘halal’ internet? To get a clearer idea of what an online ‘umma’ is—the community of Muslims online—one should turn towards other horizons. And have confidence in entrepreneurs more than in governments. In Egypt, as in the Muslim world in general, the bosses of start-ups increased the number of sites and applications adapted to Islam.
In P.S. Caffe, on the island of Zamalek—an opulent and Bohemian area in the middle of Cairo—Wi-Fi is free of cost. A small group of about a hundred are here, who, like me, look with stupefaction at the images of the second Egyptian revolution live on flat screens (I was there on 30 June 2013 during the grand anti-Mohamed Morsi demonstrations). Many are also following the news on social networking sites using their smartphones. They compare the Saudi channel Al Arabiya which takes the side of the ‘street’ and Al Jazeera, henceforth hated, which supports Morsi and confirms thus its proximity to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Though the clients here are rich, westernized and hugely anti-Islamist, each of them has downloaded on his smartphone many ‘halal’ applications, as Mohammad says. This communications student recommends iQuran to me, a very popular app which provides access to the Koran (the basic version called iQuran Lite is free of cost, the developed version costs €1.79 on App Store). As I am a foreigner, Mohammad offers to download an application where the Koran is available in different languages, which is formally prohibited, as one cannot, in theory, translate the Koran (The Quran Majeed app is free, with its enriched version costing €3.59 on App Store.) These different electronic versions of the Koran have been downloaded many million times. Mohammad has also signed up for a free subscription through which he would receive every morning, in time for the first prayer, an SMS with a verse from the Koran. He shows me the recent messages he has received. Those that he seems proud of.
During Ramadan, that Mohammad observes scrupulously, more specific applications are available. Thus, Ramadan Times is an app available on iTunes which helps one know the exact time for breaking the fast, wherever one may be (since sunrise and sunset vary from place to place, the application is geo-localized). A number of other tools allow customization—or ‘Islamification’—of smartphones and internet, says Mohammad. For the coming Ramadan, the student has chosen to learn English and he shows me an application which would help him improve his vocabulary. I am surprised at this pagan activity. ‘Every year, for Ramadan, I fix certain goals. It is a moment of self-introspection, of effort and new projects. I am on holiday with my family and I have nothing to do all day. Instead of watching the Ramadan shows, like everybody else, I chose to accomplish certain tasks. This year, I want to take online courses and improve my English.’
Ismail has joined us. He orders a mango drink—there is no alcohol in P.S. Caffe—and a shisha. He seems proud of his Samsung Galaxy 4S, which comes pre-installed, thanks to the operator Vodafone-Egypt, with a Koranic compass pointing at Mecca, a small Islamic digital metre which helps calculate the number of verses recited (digital Misbaha) as well as a geo-localized application indicating the time of prayer five times a day (Adhan) and supplication (Du’a). Though he is not really religious, Ismail has also downloaded a version of the Koran recited by the famous Sheikh Ahmad Ajami (Holy Quran, free on Google Play for Android phones). ‘The advantage of this version is that we can download the suras, one by one if we wish and listen when we are offline and also share them on Bluetooth,’ says Ismail. Looking at the application, I see that it has the function ‘Stop playing when somebody calls you’. ‘It is more respectful,’ stresses Ismail, ‘to momentarily stop reading the Koran when you receive a call.’
Halal or no, these applications are considered by the Islamists to be disrespectful to the Prophet. Some imams have even launched fatwas against the use of Koran verses as mobile ringtones; others wanted to completely ban the internet and the new technologies. But the popular practices care not for these diktats as Sunni Islam is a clergy-less religion, unlike Shia Islam. The Muslims listen to the views of imams but answer only to God, which favours personal interpretations. As smartphones become generalized in the Arab world, the supposed ‘halal’ applications and gadgets keep increasing. But each creates a custom-made Islam.
Little affected by the authoritarian precepts of the religious establishment, Zac, another student, plays the ringtones of ‘Prophet’ on his mobile phone. He has assigned them to his mother and his father, opting for an extract of a song by Rihanna for his friends. Moreover, he introduces me to the site Anghamo, a kind of Spotify for the Arab world. The application bearing the same name, available in English and Arabic, gives access to all the stars in the Middle East, from the Egyptian superstar Amr Diab to the Iraqi superstar Majid, George Wassouf from Syria, Abu Bakr Salim and Mohamed Abdo from Saudi Arabia (on the cover of the album that one can stream, they both are wearing keffiyeh), and also the Tunisian singer Latifa, the Syrian Assala and Elissa from Lebanon.
The P.S. Caffe is now jam-packed. A furniture shop, less than a metre away, just closed and the bar manager extended the terrace in front of this shop, doubling the size of his trade. Smoking cherry-flavoured shishas, sipping iced smoothies and eating Americanized pastries—chocolate muffins—Ismail, Mohammad and Zac now debate the internet. The pretext is the scope of the ongoing demonstration against the Muslim Brotherhood: did social networking pave the way for the mobilization of the forces? Everybody affirms to having received dozens of alerts on their phones and that they have seen the petitions against Mohamed Morsi on Facebook. They have no doubt that the mobilization was accentuated by technical means. ‘But the mainspring is the downfall of the Muslim Brotherhood which was incapable of running the country and which wanted to monopolize all the power,’ explains Zac.
The conversation turns towards the digital. They now talk of Maktoob, the Arab portal (bought by Yahoo)—Mohammad finds it useful for his emails because it is all in Arabic, but Ismail thinks that its service is bad and therefore prefers Hotmail and Gmail. They also talk of ArabNet which links the Arab geeks and Diwanee, a site based in Dubai, which links Arab women. A small dispute ensues concerning GPSs which have an indicator for Mecca by default in some taxis in Egypt—Zac makes fun of drivers who add totems and Korans at the front and the back of the cars for protection in case of accidents, ‘but they never wear their seat belts’.
The three Egyptians also talk to me of proselyte sites, such as IslamOnline (islamonline.net). Based in Qatar and launched by the Al Jazeera superstar of Islamic tele-prediction, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi (an Egyptian exile known to be close to the Muslim Brotherhood), the site offers to answer all the questions asked by Muslims about living in modernity while still being faithful believers. In the section ‘Ask the Scholar’, users can post a question and receive a response. Millions of people are influenced by his opinions and his fatwas, whether published on Al Jazeera or on IslamOnline. (Yusuf al-Qaradawi is a controversial figure—great defender of Palestinian suicide bombers, enemy of the United States for its invasion of Iraq and a proponent of jihad against France for prohibiting the wearing of Islamic scarves in public schools; but critical of Al-Qaeda for their ‘counterproductive’ attack of 11 September—there he decided to be an interpreter of a progressive Islam, especially with regard to women.)
The Muslim Brotherhood, with their actions, have not been as brilliant as they have been with their opinions. But, Mohammad predicts, they ‘will remain very influential’. And he adds, ‘thanks to internet’. Before the fall of Mubarak and since that of Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood has proven that it is capable of being powerful online. The main site (ikhwanonline.com) also has an English version (ikhwanweb.com)—they are the two main links of Islamic information. ‘The Muslim Brotherhood is used to living in secrecy and today again, they are undergoing the test of marginality—it is therefore very well prepared to work online. It has created in particular a digital advocacy group that participates in Facebook conversations. They are really “trolls”! Sometimes, it sends a thousand requests to block a Facebook account under false pretexts. Facebook does not always check, and just like that the account of an Egyptian democrat can be closed down, in the name of pornography, whereas there was nothing of the sort in his conversation!’ explains Randa Abu El Dahab. I meet this famous blogger at Estoril, a Nasserian restaurant in downtown Cairo, where one can yet again come across old, socialists who are against the Muslim Brotherhood, and the old-fashioned, pan-Arab nationalists. According to her, the engineer and millionaire Mohammed Khairat Saad el-Shater arranged and heavily financed the online presence of the Muslim Brotherhood (in July 2013, after the second Egyptian revolution, this Islamist leader was arrested and imprisoned).
Other observers are less convinced by the power of the digital strike of the Muslim Brotherhood. And blogger Mohammed el-Gohary points out that the Brotherhood was not even capable of controlling the web when it was at the height of power between 2011 and 2013. ‘It understood nothing about internet. It didn’t even know how to block the most vicious of sites under the opposition. For example, it filed a case against a blogger who was quoted on Twitter. He was immediately cleared by the court—it couldn’t even see the difference between being on Twitter and being mentioned on Twitter.’ According to him and according to other experts, the Muslim Brotherhood is a party that is too centralized and too rigid in its communication to be totally at ease with the internet. Interactions, comments, liberty of bloggers, even when they are Islamists, are not tolerated easily by the party. Having long functioned illegally (and yet again today), it had created a culture of secrecy, a very strict sense of hierarchy with a need for vertical control of information. This authoritarian model of allegiance and submission does not fit the horizontal and non-hierarchic nature of internet. El-Gohary however admits that the Brotherhood was capable of anticipating the influence of the internet and the role of Facebook in the Arab countries by the end of the first decade of the millennium; that they adapted themselves to the secrecy, increasing the number of websites rather than the offices and ‘followers’ rather than the employees. But they did it tactlessly, in the old way, under the propaganda mode, by attacking people and spreading rumours. It was nothing new: they already did that with their newspapers. The only thing that they haven’t understood is that we have the means now to organize a counter-attack online and refute all their false rumours immediately. That’s why the intellectuals who criticize the internet for false rumours are wrong—the rumours already existed before in the press. But now, it is possible to denounce them, easily.
After the green revolution in Iran in 2009, at the time of the Arab revolutions in 2011, some voices were raised to question the pertinence of the democratic mobilizations influenced by the internet. On the Iranian case, the American journalist Malcolm Gladwell parodied, in a famous article in the New Yorker titled ‘Small Change: Why the Revolution will not be tweeted’, the activists ‘who, before, were defined by their causes; and who today are defined by their digital tools’. According to him, internet and social networking create ‘weak ties’ between simple ‘acquaintances’, whereas for real mobilization, one needs ‘strong ties and connections’ and true ‘friends’. Therefore, he denounced the ‘social media evangelists’ and the ‘cyber-utopists’ who confound the lazy activism of Facebook for real mobilizations which necessitate hierarchic organizations. Facebook would be a good tool to ‘participate’ and build a network, but not to ‘act’. According to him, there is no question of a ‘Facebook Revolution’ or a ‘Twitter Revolution’. Published in October 2010, the famous article by Gladwell was almost entirely contradicted a few weeks later by Mohamed Bouazizi, a young ambulant vendor of fruits and vegetables whose self-immolation in Sidi Bouzid, sparked one of the most extraordinary demonstrations in recent years, first in Tunisia and then throughout the Arab world. And it is indisputable that the videos posted on YouTube and Facebook played a decisive role in the ‘Arab Spring’, a revolutionary wave that shook the Arab world in the winter of 2010.
For all this, though the pessimistic thesis of Gladwell does not stand the test of facts, it is nevertheless true that the internet plays a very ambivalent role in its rapport with democracy. In Morocco, for example, I met pro-regime bloggers, lesser soldiers of the authoritarian monarchy who spend their time denouncing democratic bloggers, trying hard to drown critical information under an avalanche of misinformation, and who resort to spreading rumours and slander. Such personalities can prove that a blogger is not necessarily on the side of progress or even ‘good’.
Similarly, in Algeria, I could observe how the department of information and security succeeded in infiltrating into forums to spread rumours through allied sites and control the internet under the pretext of fighting against terrorism. Many bloggers were arrested. And some sites, connected with security services can be found to be even more noxious. ‘Echorouk is a populist newspaper and site, very conservative, whose mission is to pollute the public space and the digital space,’ confirms, in Algiers, Faysal Matawi, editor of the concurrent paper, El Watan.
In Ramallah, in the West Bank, one of the most celebrated journalists of the Middle East, Walid Al-Omary, heads the Palestinian office of the channel Al Jazeera. He too defends the internet while also being mistrustful of it. When I interview him there, he tells me that he implemented, to simultaneously cover the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, an ‘archaic and ultra-modern’ information system. In order to be the first to be informed of all the events that happen in the ‘territories’ without being victim of the innumerable rumours, he created ‘a network of reliable correspondents in every city, who are themselves linked to dozens of volunteer informers’. They all communicate with each other through SMS, Facebook and internet. ‘We have both the speed of internet and the journalistic control of news thanks to reliable sources. Because of this system, it was possible to cover from within the territories, the second Intifada in 2000 and the war of Gaza in 2008-09.’ He was also the first to discover that the death toll in the Palestinian camp of Jenine, during the Israeli intervention of 2002, was well under the number provided by the inhabitants ‘even though there were sixty-three deaths, which is already a lot,’ adds Al-Omary.
A last witness is provided by the co-founder of Nawaat, the Tunisian site which symbolizes, even today, the Tunisian revolution. Riadh Guerfali is happy, when I interview him in Tunis in early 2014, with the new constitution of the country which guarantees, in its Article 32, access to the internet, which he says is the ‘first such clause in the world’. Three years after the fall of Ben Ali, Guerfali continues to think that the internet was decisive but that it was in the first place ‘a tool’. ‘It was not the internet as such that led to the revolution, it’s this uncontrolled part of the internet which led to the acceleration of the story.’ At No. 42, Bab Bnet Avenue in Tunis, I attend a gathering for the training of new Nawaat bloggers—Guerfali and his associate Malek Khadraoui are in the process of recruiting young collaborators for their ‘militant collective blog’, as Khadraoui calls it (and he tells me that all the articles on it have the ‘creative common’ licence). Although the energy of the revolutions seems far away and the site needs some new blood to survive, it still has 700 authors. Leaving Guerfali and Khadraoui, I chance upon a large poster in the entrance hall of Nawaat—a magnificent portrait of Mohamed Bouazizi.
One sees in every country its particularities. The Egyptian blogger Mohamed El-Gohary resumes the debate, ‘Speaking of an “internet or Facebook revolution” with regard to Arab countries is certainly improper. At the same time, mobilization took place faster in Egypt thanks to Facebook, YouTube and especially due to SMS. The social networks have been catalysts. They accelerated a dynamic which was not created by them. To summarize, one can’t say that Facebook made revolution happen, but one can’t say that it didn’t either.’ Without new technology, the e-revolutionary Slim Amamou, the collective blog Nawaat and the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi would not have led to the fall of the Tunisian regime; without the Facebook group ‘We Are All Khalid Said’ created by Wael Ghonim, head of marketing at Google, aged thirty-one, in homage to a young Egyptian assassinated by the police, the regime of Mubarak would probably not have fallen as fast; without the cyber activists of the Tamarod organization—supported by the army—and their petition on social network, the regime of the Muslim Brotherhood would not have disappeared in a few days from Tahrir Place in Cairo in 2013. It is difficult to ignore the emancipative virtues of the Web.
To that one must add the demographic factor, which has its consequences on net usage. Around 60 per cent of the population of the Middle East and North Africa is below thirty years of age today: 61 per cent in Egypt, 58 per cent in Morocco and Algeria, 60 per cent in Saudi Arabia, 64 per cent in Jordan, 72 per cent in the Palestinian territories and 52 per cent in Lebanon and Tunisia. Connected and digital-savvy, these new generations speed up the adoption of the internet in the entire Arab society. The progression of the internet is almost exponential in all these places and access to it currently surpasses 50 per cent of the population (with the exception of Iraq and Yemen), and beyond 70 per cent in the Gulf countries. The number of Facebook users is also very high, for example six million people in Saudi Arabia (out of twenty-six million inhabitants), and the numbers are very high also in the rest of the Gulf, Jordan and Lebanon.
Like others, blogger Mohamed El-Gohary points out however that though social networks have proven their efficiency in mobilizing crowds and to ‘make revolution’, they are a lot less useful in ‘constructing a political programme and helping to run a country’. Although YouTube and Facebook have proven their usefulness in starting up revolt, they are yet to prove that they can help institutionalizing democracy.
For their part, Hezbollah, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood have shown that the internet is compatible with all kinds of political power. It can be used by liberals as well as authoritarian regimes, offer a broadcast channel for terrorism as well as for peace, can be hijacked by jihad, but also by feminist militants and gay Arab activists. An instrument of liberation and repression—both these readings of the internet are equally true. According to the territories and the contexts, social networks can be for democracy or for dictatorship. These are double-edged tools, neither good nor bad in themselves, but they allow—which is already not that bad—interactivity, dialogue and open the door to new ‘conversations’.
On 30 June 2013, the evening of the biggest demonstration against Mohamed Morsi, which was going to lead to his fall, the Egyptian youth was very much present on social networks. All the people I interviewed on this particular night, at Tahrir Place, held a mobile phone. Each of them posted a message on Facebook, sent SMSs, uploaded photos on Twitter or tried to look up YouTube (the 3G access became very limited as the crowd gathered). It was an urban youth, mobilized, anti-Islamists certainly, but it was also an ordinary crowd, estimated on this evening to be twelve million people in Egypt. This mass revolt played—as observed since—into the hands of the army; and it finally paved way for the military and authoritarian regime of Marshall Abdel Fattah al-Sissi (who became President). The right to protest is again restricted. The freedom of press is seriously threatened. Not only were websites run by the Islamist opposition closed down and journalists close to the Muslim Brotherhood arrested and imprisoned, but bloggers and young revolutionaries were also targeted and arrested between January 2011 and June 2013. Restoration after the revolution? ‘There is no democracy in Egypt today’, says writer Alaa El Aswany, hopelessly, when I speak to him in his house on 6 October in 2015. He himself is prohibited from publishing in his own country, although he continues to write on his Twitter account, which has almost 2 million followers. Does the 2013 revolution in a way cancel out that of 2011 and the fall of Mubarak? El Aswany does not think so. The two events were, according to him, authentic mass movements propelled by social media. Internet played a crucial role in them although, unfortunately, power fell into the hands of a ‘wise dictator’, says El Aswany, hesitating over the word ‘wise’.
The expression ‘Facebook Revolution’ may be excessive, but it is undeniable that the mobile phones and the social networking sites were the deciding tools of these revolutions. True ‘Arab telephones’.
And on this evening, at Tahrir Place, among the vendors of water bottles, popcorn, hot sweet potatoes and mint tea, I noticed innumerable little stickers sold for 3 Egyptian pounds ($0.03). While fireworks lit up the sky, and everybody was singing and thousands of Egyptian flags were being brandished by the incommensurable crowd, I bought a few of these stickers. Paying homage to 1984, a novel by George Orwell, and making a thinly veiled allusion to the Muslim Brotherhood, they carried the slogan, ironically: ‘Big Brother is watching you’.