I thought about writing “Zionists” instead of “Israel” in the title, but that would’ve been inaccurate: There are a lot of Israeli citizens on Facebook who are definitely not Zionists – like filmmaker Udi Aloni, who joined the Palestine network, Lod-based hip-hop group DAM (ditto) and the many MCCPI’s (Middle Class Christian Palestinian Israelis) who, interestingly, do tend to join the Israel network – but probably as a statement of fact, rather than ideology.

Anyway, the point is that Facebook is really huge in the holy land right now.

According to Jeff Pulver, the Israeli presence on FB has increased from around 18,000 in June to nearly 160,000 in mid-November. In a country with a total population of less than 7 million, most of whom don’t speak English beyond a basic conversational level, that’s huge. It’s also, like, a growth rate of 86.71 percent, which puts Israel at number two in Facebook growth, after Turkey (why Turkey, I wonder?). For comparison, FB penetration is currently growing at around 7.24 percent in North America.

Israelis are much into the Internet and tech trends in general, and social networking specifically. Which, as Idan noted in a recent chat (online, of course!), is a bit weird because Israel is so small that we all know one another offline already, so why bother duplicating the experience online? I can think of a few answers to that question: first, FB is a fast and efficient method of keeping up with social and professional events; second, it allows everyone to see how many cool friends one has – which, in turn, makes one feel cool by association; third, it allows you to re-ignite friendships you regret having let drop out of laziness; fourth, via the networks you can create an international circle of like-minded friends that you might not otherwise meet; and fifth – for me, at least – it’s been a great method of staying in touch with Middle Eastern friends who live behind the regional equivalent of the Iron Curtain.

For example, while clicking through Gal Uchovsky‘s 969 (!!) friends, I noticed that he has quite a few male gay Arab friends who live in countries that are not currently counted amongst Friends of Israel. Gal and his life partner, Eytan Fox, have made some of Israel’s most successful and popular films – like Yossi and Jaeger, Walk on Water and, most recently, The Bubble - about a doomed love affair between an Israeli man and a Palestinian man who meet while the former is serving his annual reserve duty at a checkpoint in the West Bank.

This week, Gal wrote about Facebook in his column for Time Out Tel Aviv (page 130). Apparently, actor/heart-throb Yehuda Levy, who starred in Yossi and Jaeger, sent him a friendship invitation. Naturally, Gal accepted immediately.

Yehuda Levy

Except that Gal’s new friend wasn’t really Yehuda Levy. He was a poseur. A fake. A wannabe friend-of-Gal. Gal outed him by asking him what they’d bought in Christiana when they attended a festival in Copenhagen. Naturally, the fake Yehuda couldn’t supply the correct answer. From Gal’s column:

“When I understood that I was the Israeli Sherlock Holmes I immediately ratted the guy out. I wrote a post on my wall, my super wall and my open wall, in order to inform everyone on Facebook that the new Yehuda Levy who’s asking everyone to be his friend is not the real Yehuda Levy. And in order to make an even bigger party, I wrote an insulting post on the guy’s profile. Naturally I immediately ended our short friendship.”

Gal goes on to speculate about why Facebook has become the latest, hottest online social networking application in Israel (mostly for the same reasons I listed above). He notes that he has made a lot of gay Arab friends lately, and that they have brought him up to speed on gay life in Lebanon, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. (“Beirut sounds almost like Tel Aviv. As far as Riyadh is concerned, better you shouldn’t know.”).

Jonathan Klinger thinks that the number of Israeli FB members will top out at about 500,000, because only about 10 percent of Israelis are sufficiently proficient in English – which is, of course, a very sad (but accurate) commentary on the Israeli education system. On the other hand, the FB application does allow writing from right-to-left without messing up the formatting, so perhaps FB will catch on with Israelis who don’t know how to write so well in English. Already, a lot of Israelis (including moi) are writing wall post in Hebrew, or starting groups in Hebrew.

But how long will FB remain popular in Israel, where trends come and go faster than you can replace worn-out Crocs? My gut feeling is that we’ll all move on to the next hot site in a year or so. There’s already a bit of a backlash over FB – grumblings about the plethora of adverts and junk posts, concerns about the amount of personal information we’re required to give up in order to sign up for various applications. For now, though, it’s fun.