Biased articles, prejudiced behavior of editors and administrators, and the tendency to delete articles related to Israel—these are some of the elements of English-language Wikipedia’s anti-Israel bias as alleged by Dr. Shlomit Aharoni Lir in a report produced for the World Jewish Congress and presented at the UN headquarters in Geneva.
One of the articles analyzed by Aharoni Lir is the page on “Comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany.” Speaking at the Struggle of Narratives conference about post-October 7 Wikipedia put on by BaShaar – Academic Community for Israeli Society, Aharoni Lir said that Israel is the only country with a page devoted to comparisons between itself and Nazi Germany. “There’s no page like that for Syria, not for North Korea, and not for other totalitarian states,” she said.
The page about “Nazism in Palestinian Society” was deleted from English-language Wikipedia on October 24, 2023.
According to Aharoni Lir, the very existence of a page comparing Israel to Nazi Germany serves to single Israel out and to normalize the comparison.
Aharoni Lir said that terminology used to describe Israel on Wikipedia is generally negative. “It’s devoid of the context of the threat to Israel,” she said. “There’s a discussion about actions of this sort or the other that Israel did, but there’s no context why Israel acted as it acted, and the context of the battle for our existence here doesn’t appear.”
One of the most jarring aspects of pages related to Israel is the “see also” section that lists related articles. Links to apparently related pages about the history of Nazi Germany, genocide recognition politics, and victimology all “lead to very negative understanding of Israel, in a way that can have significantly impacts on the people consuming this knowledge,” Aharoni Lir said.
She also analyzed the page “Palestinian genocide accusation,” noting that the page mostly uses the word “accusation” when discussing claims against Israel rather than the more neutral term “allegation.” “There’s not a lot of space in the article for the Israeli perspective or Israeli claims, and the impression is created that these are well-founded accusations,” she said. “The tone creates a sort of indictment of Israel, and the sources and links to other websites also aren’t balanced.”
That page also lacks context of the violence committed against Israelis, the threats faced by Israel, or the rationale behind Israeli military actions, presenting Israel as the sole aggressor in the region. A sidebar at the top of the article connects the page to other articles about genocide under a heading featuring a photo of a pile of human skulls. The English-language Wikipedia page about Hamas, on the other hand, does not describe the organization as a terrorist group, and the fact that eight countries and the European union recognize it as such is mentioned only in the fourth paragraph.
“Although criticism of Israel in the context of the encyclopedia is reasonable as long as it is based on valid facts and research, a consistently negative description with no positive points may indicate bias,” Aharoni Lir wrote in the report. “From a systematic examination of a large number of articles related to the conflict, it can be concluded that the bias of the content against Israel is evident in problematic articles that present Israel as a colonialist apartheid state without balancing those characterizations with additional perspectives or providing adequate context.”
In addition to the bias against Israel in many Wikipedia articles, many articles relating to the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas on October 7 have been proposed for deletion, Aharoni Lir said. She described this deletion campaign as an effort to downplay the seriousness of the crimes committed against Israel. In some cases, appeals for deletion were made simultaneously on several pages. A simultaneous vote was held about deleting the articles on the attacks on Netiv HaAsara, Nir Yitzhak, and Holit, as well as the article on Inbal Rabin-Lieberman, the security coordinator of Kibbutz Nir Am.
Some articles, such as those about the attack on Moshav Yakhini and the use of decapitation by Hamas, were deleted or turned into sections of larger articles. In other cases, the terminology used to describe certain events was changed, as in the case of the article “Holit massacre” being renamed “Attack on Holit.”
In interviews with Israeli Wikipedia editors who are active on English-language Wikipedia, Aharoni Lir learned that many pages that are biased against Israel have been locked for editing only by seasoned Wikipedia users with a history of more than 500 edits. This practice makes it difficult for some Israelis to edit articles about topics about which they are particularly knowledgeable.
The Israeli Wikipedia editors described a general sense that the English-language Wikipedia community is pro-Palestine. They mentioned facing excessive criticism, struggling to fit into the community, and in some cases even dealing with active hostility. They described a group of Wikipedia editors anonymously leading the website’s anti-Israel charge.
Aharoni Lir, herself a seasoned Wikipedia user and a researcher of gender bias on Wikipedia, provided a list of recommendations to ensure neutrality on Wikipedia. Her recommendations include developing best practices around neutrality, requiring that Wikipedia administrators use their full names, providing anti-bias training, developing stricter guidelines for acceptable sources, using AI tools to detect bias, and encouraging Wikipedia users to report suspected bias.
