"In many places Israel is blocked. At times the entire .co.il [Israel domain] is blocked. Users connect through proxy servers and reach us that way," said Tzahi, operator of Israel-baseds Domina.co.il. Nir Shahar, who manages the Israeli porn website Ratuv, which means "wet" in English, said that his company produces adult scenes that have typical Israeli themes featuring female soldiers, female Mossad agents and policewomen. The most popular video clip among Arab surfers, "Code Name: Deep Investigation," is described as "a parody dealing with [a recent espionage] affair with agents investigating the affair using erotic means."
"In the past several months we see an increase in traffic from countries that have no diplomatic ties with Israel, including Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Egypt," Shahar said. When Shahar added an Arabic-language version of the site, he received thank you messages from Arab surfers.
"Many of them asked if the female soldiers really serve in the IDF," he said.
"We get hundreds of hits from surfers that live in countries where porn is prohibited," said Gil Naftali, owner and operator of another Hebrew-language sex site, SexV. "We don't have an Arabic version because users log in to watch photos and video clips that require no explanations."
According to site statistics, last month Sexv.co.il received more than 2,000 hits from Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia. The average time a Saudi surfer spends on SexV is 17 minutes, 23 seconds.
Data also show that 10 percent of the visitors to Israel's Domina site are Arabic speakers. "That is because we offer content in their language," site operator Tzahi said.
For Tzahi, offering Arabic language content is in the service of commerce, not peace.
"Israeli and Arab surfers do not communicate on the website. Ideology? No, it's purely business," Tzahi said. "Porn will not bring about peace but at least we get some money out of our enemies' pockets."
