An NYT story about how Israelis are expressing themselves online about this current conflict to each other -- and to the Lebanese.
An excerpt:
After waking from her nightmare and leaving her bed in the family’s reinforced “safe room” to sleep in the living room, Miss Diss — as the 18-year-old identifies herself — tries to console herself in a recent posting.
“The day will come when I will get used to sleeping there,” she writes. “I have to get used to it.”
Until recently, Noamik, as the 13-year-old calls herself, was writing about shopping and her bat mitzvah. But in a newer posting, she mourned. “Benji was killed today,” she wrote, blasting Hezbollah. “I am not ashamed to say that I HATE them.”
In a country where many have Internet access and sharp opinions, communicating online with a mix of humor and fatalism has become an important tool of expression.
“It fits very well here,” said Tomer Baram, 30, who has run several forums and Web sites in Israel. “We are not an introverted nation. We let everything out.”
The experience mirrors the blogging phenomenon in Iraq, where civilians, soldiers and pundits post their own observations. One difference is that in Israel the technology is sometimes being used to communicate with the other side.
A comment from an Israeli soldier named Shachar appeared on a Lebanese blog after the fighting began saying: “Hey, I’m an I.D.F. soldier stationed on the Lebanese border. We can’t see all the bombing on Lebanon here from Israel (naturally we’re focusing on the bombs falling in Israel), so you’re pretty much updating me on what’s going on. I don’t want to start arguing about who’s right and who’s wrong, the final word is that it’s not right that civilians get hurt in the process on both sides. I’m sending you my best wishes from here, and hope that you and your family will be strong and be all right until this horrible situation will be over.”
Ami Ben-Bassat, 50, a journalist and author who writes about popular technology, was one of the first Israelis to make contact with Lebanese bloggers and post links to their sites on his own blog, “On the Edge.”
“We are beginning to understand that we have a mechanism that allows us to speak face to face without the establishment’s screening us from either side,” he said. “This is the first time the blogs have started speaking out so intensely.”