As we have seen multiple times in recent political events, international conflicts, activisms, and politics are not only shaped by actions on the physical field of war, office rooms, or on the street, but also in cyberspace, as can be seen in the recent allegations of Russian hacking to influence the 2016 U.S. election. Erik Skare's Digital Jihad is an excellent discussion of the history and development of Palestinian hacktivism, and how Palestinians have used it as a tool of resistance. This book would be useful for classes on resistance, activism, and conflict in the Middle East, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, youth movements, and cybersecurity and its impact on modern politics, and is appropriate for both upper-level undergraduates and graduate students studying the above topics, who do not need a computer science background to understand the text.
Skare begins his book with a description of a security clearance interview that he had with the Norwegian National Security Authority (NNSA), in which they ask him about his fieldwork and he refuses to divulge his sources, resulting in his clearance being denied. He then discusses the history of cyberattacks against Israeli websites, both by Palestinian and non-Palestinian Arabs, and the evolution of “hacktivism” as a form of resistance, tying it into the history of armed Palestinian resistance. The resistance of the Palestinian fidāʾi, who sacrificed himself for the land, and the resistance of the shahīd, who was seen as a martyr within a more religious context, are juxtaposed with each other, and both are compared with non-violent Palestinian resistance.
In this context, a history of the development of the Internet in the Arab world and its role in facilitating the Arab Spring is also discussed, and compared to the development of both the Internet and Israeli technology and surveillance apparatuses in Israel. This development of Israeli Internet technology, according to Skare, has led both to Palestinian dependence on Israeli technology infrastructures and to the development of hacktivism by the Palestinians as a way of presenting “the Palestinian narrative to an audience that otherwise might not be exposed to it” (50)—a strategy that was both further encouraged by the role of technology in circumventing censorship in the Arab world and by the high level of education and low level of employment in the occupied territories.
Skare's book focuses on hacktivist teams in Gaza, particularly Gaza Hacker Team, which he has communicated with over email. Citing email correspondence with Gaza Hacker Team and his examination of their websites, Skare describes Gaza Hacker Team as seeking to transcend partisan Palestinian politics, and instead construct themselves as part of Palestinian popular resistance—an antiestablishment attitude informed by the “current hacktivist ethos” (74), deploying cyberattacks as a form of “psychological warfare” (78). As a result of Gaza Hacker Team's conceptualization of itself as part of this popular resistance, the discourse of the team combines both secular nationalist and Salafist elements without clearly belonging to either camp.
Skare then discusses how both Hamas and Islamic jihad have employed hacking as part of their warfare against Israel, and theorizes the reason that virtually all Palestinian hacker teams reside in Gaza is because of both the nature of the Gaza blockade, in which Israeli soldiers surround, but do not enter Gaza, and Israeli surveillance of Palestinian internet activity in the West Bank. He also talks about Palestinian ambivalence about the efficacy of hacktivism as resistance, in which some claim that because hacktivism is “disconnected from the real world” (139), it is not necessarily effective, and others that claim that it is a useful form of popular resistance. He concludes by discussing the potential for hacktivism to transcend borders as a form of collective popular resistance, and to internationalize conflicts that previously would be taken up solely by state actors and armed groups.
Digital Jihad provides a solid analysis and discussion of a form of Palestinian activism and resistance that is currently seriously underresearched in the field of Middle Eastern studies. The interviews that Skare conducted with Gaza Hacker Team and others are unprecedented, and his interrogation of Palestinian resistance vis-à-vis hacktivism provides fresh insights into the nature of how said resistance has been constructed. Furthermore, his discussion of the complex relationship between Gaza hacktivism, Salafism, and the role of the Gaza blockade and Israeli disengagement in promoting hacktivism as resistance in Gaza is an important contribution to discussions of the role of Islamism and the impact of said blockade in Gaza.
While Skare has steered away from being overly technical in his book, it perhaps would have benefitted from an appendix discussing the more technical aspects of Palestinian hacktivism for interested readers. In discussing the political situation, Skare also occasionally becomes polemical without clearly grounding his polemics in the subject matter of the book, and alternates between providing basic information on the conflict and assuming the reader knows a great deal—a clearer explanation of the relationship between Hamas and Islamic Jihad for readers unfamiliar with them, as well as how hackers use the Qurʾan and hadith to argue “for the use of electronic warfare” would be particularly beneficial for undergraduate and non-specialist readers (89). Additionally, Skare does not discuss the role (or lack thereof) of the TOR network, an important tool in providing anonymity to activists worldwide, in Palestinian hacktivism, or the reasons why he chose not to discuss the TOR network in his book. That being said, Digital Jihad is a groundbreaking work that offers fresh and important insights into not only the role of cyberattacks as a form of Palestinian resistance, but into how conditions in Gaza have shaped the resistance itself.
