Introduction

During the time I spent in Palestine, I visited the Al-Quds University campus in Abu Dis on several occasions. Detached from Jerusalem as a result of the stage-two construction process of the separation wall in 2003, campus activities are often disrupted by Israeli raids and subsequent violent confrontations with Palestinian students. In the course of my latest visit in March 2017, the campus atmosphere appeared to be one of apparent calmness in the aftermath of a recent storm. Burnt tyres, tear gas canisters and stones lay scattered on the road facing the main entrance. Israeli-armoured vehicles and soldiers oversee the campus from the top of a nearby hill. After numerous Israeli raids over the preceding weeks, the usual vibrant and noisy atmosphere of the campus seemed restored. Clumps of students crowded around the steps of the main building, some of them campaigning and putting up PFLP's (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) red flags for the upcoming student elections.

Situated within the grounds of the campus is the Abu Jihad Museum for Prisoner Movement, a museum that narrates Palestinian prisoners’ testimony through the exhibition of pictures, letters, poems and artworks. Within the walls of the museum are located the memories of seized and tortured bodies, experiences that often escape mainstream narratives of the conflict. The museum, financed by the Arab Fund in Kuwait, has few visitors: students, in fact, seem to prefer hanging out in the sun rather than being reminded of the too-familiar violence of the Israeli occupation. This thought immediately brought me back to a past conversation with a young Palestinian hacker, conducted just a few metres away from the museum and the area of the clashes, in 2013. While narrating the successes and vicissitudes of the latest attacks on Israeli cyberspace, the conversation often deviates to make space for the recurrent argument that, after all, engaging in cyberwar concedes to be part of the struggle without being violent and allowing for the alleviation of a personal risk of physical violence.

This argument appears to be consistent with mainstream scholarship on the topic. In fact, cyberwars are generally considered not to be violent because they lack those physical and corporeal elements that define war in a traditional sense.