I did not post about this earlier, and many readers have probably heard about toot’s newest multi-author blog: Toot for Gaza and Beirut. The blog is becoming quite busy, with a number of people signing on to become authors and a good number of comments. There are feeds from various Arab and International news sources as well as special Flickr photo pool.

One post that caught my attention today was from a someone who says is a “Zionist Jew” and who declared is “looking for dialogue“:

I am Jewish and a Zionist. I would like a dialog. I have been reading your website and I am impressed by the honesty of your views, although I don’t agree with them at all.

The media dimension of this war is more intense than ever. The first major Arab/global crisis in the ‘age of the Arab blogosphere’ was, in my opinion, the ‘cartoon war’ earlier in 2006. But this is the first Arab-Israeli war in the age of blogs. Al Jazeerah is calling it ‘The Sixth War’. It has introduced something called ‘The Voice of the People’ where it allows for comments from normal people around the Arab world but also from Israelis.

The ‘voice of the people’ matters. And with blogs, chatrooms, discussion forums, email blasts and SMS, electronic media is becoming a major outlet for that voice.

Today I read an article on Al-Arabiya that reported on orders given by the Israeli foreign ministry to its embassies around the world to be active online in presenting the Israeli point of view and to energize Jewish activists in Europe and the US to the same end.

That’s another sign that the web matters in this war.

I will keep it at that.

Check out Toot for Gaza and Beirut.