Palestine’s Virtual Borders 2.0

In 2003 the Palestinian state received official recognition on the Web before it was established on the ground. The delegation of the.ps Country code Top level domain (CcTld) to the Palestinian Authority and its inclusion in the UN list of recognized countries and territories created an official Web-space in which a Palestinian state operated side-by-side with other sovereign states. Yet with the rise of Web 2.0 applications, the official representation of the Palestinian state partially disappeared. This study focuses on the shift in the spatial representation of the Palestinian state on the Web, from an officially acknowledged national Web space, followed by its partial disappearance in Web 2.0 spaces, to its reconstruction as a user-generated space. It examines Palestine’s virtual borders on various Web 2.0 mapping platforms, along with the listing (and non-listing) of Palestine as a country in the registration procedure of popular Web 2.0 applications. It shows that on most mapping platforms the Palestinian Territory is underrepresented, and that the country’s official representation on the UN list of recognized countries and territories is often omitted or modified on social media sites’ registration forms. After analyzing the geo-politics of social media’s drop-down country lists, this study argues that Web 2.0 spaces are unofficial Web-spaces, in which official representations of countries are not determined by diplomacy or approved by international institutions, but rather by interaction between commercial platforms and their users. Faced with the partial disappearance of their homeland, Palestinian users both in the Palestinian Territory and in the Diaspora thus become placeless participants of Web 2.0 spaces. They attempt to reclaim the virtual representation of their home country as a sovereign Palestinian state by protesting, uploading, tagging and generating content on Web 2.0 platforms. On platforms such as Facebook, Blogger and Google Maps, user activism and user-generated content has led to a spatial transformation from the country’s non-listing and non-placement, to its official inclusion. Finally, this article makes a contribution to the theorization of political Web spaces by arguing that the Palestinian case complicates current views on relationships between the Web and the ground. Unlike the common perception that the virtual is grounded in the real, the over-representation of a Palestinian state in official Web spaces, in parallel with its underrepresentation in unofficial Web spaces, and users’ treatment of virtual spaces as real spaces, indicate that these realms actually tend to merge, at least in the case of contested Web terrains and unsettled struggles for self-determination.