Interestingly, the American perspective is not the only one offered in political video games. A Syrian publishing house, Dar al-Fikr, has designed a video game on the Palestinian uprising called UnderAsh. Set in current-day Israel the protagonist of UnderAsh is not a heavily armed soldier with full artillery available, but a 19-year-old named Ahmad.

The website includes Ahmad’s story, that of a hero "born during the Israeli invasion of South Lebanon… he belongs to Jerusalem." He is devoted to the Palestinian resistance. In the scenes available Ahmad is depicted throwing stones and firing machine guns at Israeli tanks, as well as praying at the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem and being imprisoned in an Israeli jail.

UnderAsh has received a flurry of attention and elicited controversy.

Some have hailed it to be what it claims on the game’s web site — "A call to justice," and "a new form of history book …letting others understand what’s happening in Palestine." Others, such as Middle East Realities, have denounced it as "disgusting propaganda."

Syria launches Arabs' first video game, on Intifada
Saturday, 23 Feb, 2002 - Syria
DAMASCUS (AFP) - To turn Arab children away from American video games featuring US soldiers killing Iraqis and Afghans, a Syrian publishing house has designed a video game on the Palestinian uprising, or intifada.

The new game is called Underash, and its hero is a young Palestinian stone- thrower, Ahmed, fighting Israeli soldiers and settlers.

"We seek to counterbalance the poisonous ideas conveyed by American video games to our children," said Hassan Salem, executive director of the project at the Dar al-Fikr publishing house.

"Our primary aim is educational; we want the new generation which doesn''t hear the news to learn about the Palestinian cause," he added.

It took a year and a half to complete the Underash project, which is the first Arab three-dimensionnal video game.

"We used the same technology employed in the Western games featuring wars against Arabs and Moslems," said Khaled Fudda, a member of the design team.

Nada, a women buying Underash, said "I was shocked when my son told me the game he was playing was to kill Saddam Hussein," the Iraqi president.

Some 10,000 copies of the new game have been sold since it reached the Syrian market a month ago, carrying a price tag equivalent to eight dollars.

Dar al-Fikr expects major export contracts once Underash is authorised in other Arab states.

Fudda said the game can also be downloaded via Internet, but "Israelis destroyed the site several times and we had to rebuild it."

The game consists of six phases, starting with Ahmed trying to reach Jerusalem''s Al-Aqsa mosque, Islam''s third holiest site, dodging Jewish settlers'' bullets and throwing stones at Israeli soldiers.

Once he reaches the mosque compound, Ahmed has to evacuate injured Palestinians, grab the rifle of an Israeli soldier and expel the soldiers from the site.

In other phases, Ahmed tries to infiltrate a Jewish settlement and raise the Palestinan flag, and to sneak into an Israeli army weapons storage facility. He is caught and he tries to escape.

The final task is in southern Lebanon. Ahmed takes part in a Lebanese guerrilla attack against an Israeli radar position, during which the soldiers are killed and the facility destroyed.

The game designers stressed that Ahmed "is only attacking the occupation forces, soldiers and settlers, never the civilians."

"We aspire to peace, we are simply telling the story of a people uprooted from his homeland, whose children are killed," said the owner of Dar al-Fikr, Mohammad Salem.

Palestine in pixels

One of the strengths of the virtual world is that in its shady corners and hidden deeps there is space to challenge convention and tilt at the dominant world-view.

That's the aim of the developers of newly-released Underash, a Syrian computer game based on the Intifada. Apparently motivated by horror at the number of US games with Arab baddies, Underash, a 3-D 'stone-em-up' lets you take control of Ahmed, an Intifada hero. Ahmed, as well as standing up to checkpoints and settlers, can stroll around a virtual version of the Haram Al-Sherif mosque, an excitement many of the game's players are probably denied in real life. The game designers say they abjure violence, except in the context of resisting aggression.

It is easy to sneer at computer games as the silly embodiment of someone's teenage fantasies. Which they are. But at least in Underash the silly fantasy is not the product of someone else's teenage morality; this one's all our own.

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