A Call for Apple To Remove ‘Third Intifada’ iPhone App

Could we be approaching the iPhone intifada? Israeli lawmaker Yuli Edelstein seems to fear so.

An iPhone app offers Palestinians and Palestinian sympathizers real-time news about efforts to spark a third intifada. The ThirdIntifada was released last week, seemingly to replace a pro-uprising page that Facebook removed in March.

Edelstein, who is Israel’s minister of Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs, today wrote to Apple, urging it to stop distributing the app. “Upon review of the stories, articles and photos published by means of the application, one can easily see that this is in fact anti-Israel and anti-Zionist,” he wrote, stating the obvious. “Furthermore, as is implied by its name, the application calls for an uprising against the State of Israel.”

Given the app’s “ability to unite many toward an objective that could be disastrous,” he asked Apple “to instruct the immediate removal of the application in question and thus continue the tradition of ‘Apple’ applications dedicated to purely entertainment and informative purposes and not serve as an instrument for incitement to violence.”