Attempts by Facebook to shut down a “Third Intifada” page backfired on Tuesday, with more than 7,000 Palestinians immediately signing up for three new copycat pages.
The original “Third Intifada” page, which had acquired almost half a million “fans,” was closed down earlier on Tuesday just days after Israel contacted Facebook to complain over comments on it which it said called for “the killing of Israelis and Jews.”
Shortly afterwards, a replacement Facebook page was set up which quickly racked up more than 6,000 fans, but by Tuesday evening it too had disappeared, a correspondent said.
The original page, created on March 6, called for a third intifada, or uprising against the Israeli occupation, to begin on May 15 — the date marked by Israel as its official independence anniversary, but marked by Palestinians as the Naqba — or catastrophe.
By March 23, the page had won about 230,000 fans and caught the attention of Israel, with Israeli Public Diplomacy Minister Yuli Edelstein penning a letter to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, urging him to shut down the page over its “wild incitement.”
“On this Facebook page there are posted many remarks and movie clips which call for the killing of Israelis and Jews, and the ‘liberating’ of Jerusalem and of Palestine through acts of violence,” he wrote.
Within a week, its supporters had more than doubled to nearly 500,000, but on Tuesday, Palestinian surfers who had joined the page said it had been closed down.
There was no immediate response from Facebook.
Within hours, at least three other “Third Intifada” pages had been set up, one of which had quickly gained nearly 6,000 fans, with the number growing rapidly, but by mid-evening there was no trace of it.
Two other sites were still active, one called “The Third Palestinian Intifada — publish it as much as you want to pray in Jerusalem,” which had nearly 2,000 members, while a second page had garnered little attention.
The first intifada began in December 1987 with rock throwing, protests and civil disobedience. It lasted until the 1993 Oslo peace accords. A second and far more bloody intifada broke out in 2000 and eventually ran out of steam five years later.
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