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An occasional column by Nigel Parry for Middle East International magazine.
Although the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seems to occupy more than its fair share of TV news time, it is old news that the two parties do not receive equal air time or treatment. On the Web, this fact broadly remains the same, with the websites of international media organisations tending to offer the same commentary as the broadcast version, enhanced by images, sound and video.
The most profound characteristic of the World Wide Web, that any resource is just one strand of a larger web, necessitates that webmasters seriously address the issue of which websites to link to and how to present these links. Most media organisations have opted for "related links" after each article, coupled with a profile and expanded selection of links from that country on a separate page.
This is one aspect which is radically different from television, as the "viewer" has the opportunity to follow links to information directly from the people in the news. Edward Said's "permission to narrate" can be a reality on the Web.
In practice, despite a few notable exceptions, the reality is that the same biases surface. CNN is a good example of this. Despite extensive coverage of the peace process, there is no listing for Palestine in its "Middle East sites" page (http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/meast/sites.html) although 18 other countries, naturally including Israel, are listed.*
In other words, the centrality of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict to the Middle East and the importance of the Middle East to the world is reflected in the amount of reporting, but the voice and world view of the Palestinian is no more present than on the television version of CNN.
Even the search engines and indexes of the Web are subject to political bias. In mid-1996, I found myself in an argument with Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com/) when I suggested that they add a regional category for resources in Palestine. Eventually, a compromise was reached and the 'regional' category "Palestinian Authority" was added. Yet, the addition of each new website seems to remain a process subject to the bias of the individual who adds it. In Yahoo! the Ramallah Online Travel Guide (http://www2.birzeit.edu/ramallah/) is listed in the category "Regional:Countries:Israel:Cities:Ramallah"**, despite having been launched over a year-and-a-half after the Israeli redeployment.
One of the key issues when assessing the worth of information is its source, and whether the source is actually present in the region would seem to be critical. Yet, most information on the Internet originates from the countries of the North, which means that you can read more information about the Middle East that is produced outside the Middle East by non-Middle Easterners. There are many sites about Palestine, for example, but few from Palestine.
A feature of the media status quo is to completely overlook these locally-produced Palestinian resources - some of which are excellent - and it makes sense to begin to rectify this balance by drawing attention to the definitive gateway to the Palestinian Internet, the Complete Guide to Palestine's Websites (http://www2.birzeit.edu/links/).
The Complete Guide is a category listing of the 117 local Palestinian websites, with reviews of each site. The annually awarded "Golden Olive Awards", now in their third year, point to the best Palestinian resources in terms of design, content and availability of the information elsewhere. Additional sections of interest include "Key Peace Process Links", a page with the best resources in and outside of Palestine categorised by final status issues, and a list of Palestinian e-mailing lists if you want to keep up-to-date with developments without spending hours surfing. The Complete Guide also has an associated e-mailing list.
Browsing through the relatively sparse "Business and Commerce" and "Industry and Products" categories of the Complete Guide, you will notice that Palestine is unusual in the Arab World in that commerce is not the impetuous for its venture onto the Web. An excellent resource about this trend in the Middle East and the developing relationship between Arabs and the Internet is the Georgetown University's Arab Information Project (http://www.georgetown.edu/research/arabtech).
It is expected that Palestine's atypical Middle Eastern Internet community, dominated by NGOs and the educational sector, will ultimately demonstrate more of a tendency for Palestinian businesses reach out to international markets. In the meantime, the proximity of the final status talks has encouraged Palestinians to take advantage of the freedoms of publishing in cyberspace, one place where there are no checkpoints.
by Nigel Parry
30 January 1998
MEI 567
*This later changed in March 1999, after I wrote a letter directly to Scott Woelfel, head of CNN Interactive. The full story of the saga is available here.
** At the time of posting this article on nigelparry.com in March 1999, just over a year after it was written, Yahoo! had finally moved the "Ramallah Online Travel Guide" into the new "Palestinian Authority" category: "Palestinian_Authority/Cities_and_Regions/Ramallah/City_Guides/" Since then, my attention has turned to other guide-led search sites, such as About.com and Netscape's Open Directory Project. Read about these sites here.