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"What do the world’s most popular board game and most popular online social networking site have in common? Both have run into trouble over the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Facebook, the ubiquitous networking site that has both users and employers scrambling to learn as much as possible about people’s personal lives, recently angered Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank when they found that Facebook located their settlements in “Palestine”.
And when Hasbro, the company behind the Monopoly board game, in February announced it was planning a global edition and would allow people to vote online for their favourite cities, it unwittingly kicked off a worldwide effort to have “Jerusalem, Israel” included.
While the two companies took different approaches to resolving what threatened to become public relations disasters, their dilemmas illustrated what some consider a new era in the battle between Israelis and Palestinians. Last week, right-wing Israeli hackers embedded the Israeli flag, the Israeli national anthem and the symbol of the Kach Movement, an ultra rightist Israeli movement that advocates the forcible expulsion of Palestinians from all of lands once known as Palestine, on three websites associated with Palestinian rights.
“These are symbolic struggles that mimic the fundamental basis of the larger struggle – one over legitimacy: what you call the land and how you write the history,” said Ali Abunimah, founder of the Electronic Intifada website."
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