Abstract

The advent of social media has afforded marginalised and oppressed communities with platforms to broadcast themselves to the world, allowing narratives to be reshaped and reimagined in highly visible spaces. Considering the concept of Palestinian Internet, encompassing both Palestinians in the occupied territories and in the broader diaspora, this paper aims to explore ways in which online networks harness the affordances of social media to create social change. By exploring playful activism, shared subjectivities, and the act of remembering contested pasts online, this paper points to the way in which these actions raise awareness, educate new audiences, and challenge and reshape harmful representations, while serving as strategies of decolonisation that work toward a liberated and free Palestine beyond the constructs of nation and borders.

Introduction 

Over the last two decades, social media has played an increasingly significant role in mobilising people around human rights issues, sharing perspectives directly from marginalised groups. On participatory platforms such as Instagram, digital story telling tools have emerged whereby Palestinians in the occupied territories and the broader diaspora have been able to share their subjectivities while being subjected to an oppressive occupation, where the “broadcasting power and open space of new media” becomes “a powerful tool in deconstructing colonial narratives” (Shehadeh, 2023). The advent of such spaces for activism online have been a significant development in the Palestinian struggle for justice and recognition since the 1948 al-Nakba (the Catastrophe), which involved a violent partitioning of the state into modern day Israel, and the ethnic cleansing and forced removal of thousands of Palestinians. This history leaves a legacy of violence which persists to this day, especially evident in this current moment as the world bears witness for the sixth consecutive month, to the genocide in Gaza. While looking to Palestine and drawing on relevant literature, this paper will consider how online networks harness the affordances of Instagram to raise awareness, educate new audiences, and challenge and reshape harmful representations. Furthermore, by connecting the plight of Palestinians to Indigenous struggles beyond its borders, these networks harness “strategic multimodal storytelling to commemorate contested pasts outside state channels” (Davidjants & Tiidenberg, 2021).

Playful activism: Food Blogging from Gaza

The forced migration and involuntary exile of Palestinians from their homeland has led to a global diaspora constituting a transnational community. This emerges online through a conceptualised Palestinian Internet, rooted in the “remote and fragmented Palestinian nation” reuniting “through websites, chatting and emailing” (Aouragh, 2011). It brings together online networks of Palestinians in the occupied territories and broader diaspora, united in “desire to narrate and disseminate the Palestinian experiences which are rooted in 1948” with a “shared aim of a national home and the political demands for the right of return (haqq al-‘awda)” (Aouragh, 2011). Creating and sharing content that promotes Palestinian culture online has played an important role in reshaping perceptions in the dominant discourse of the global north, which frequently positions Palestinians as the angry Arab-Other, conflated with crisis, turbulence, and terrorism. These depictions are inherently bound up in serving the interests of Western nations and the maintenance of power in geopolitical relations. Recent developments across the evolving landscape of participatory platforms have seen users harness the affordances of platforms such as Instagram to increase Palestinian visibility to new audiences to humanising affect.

On Instagram, food is a powerful currency for attaining viewer attention. It is a universal language which can offer a window into culture, history, and identity. Food blogger, Hamada Shaqoura, had predominantly posted food and restaurant reviews around the Gaza strip up until late 2023. He showcased local cuisine to an audience of followers, stitching his videos together with hashtags in Arabic and English. In the wake of October 7^th, Shaqoura’s content shifted gears. He recently went viral for his stylised cooking videos, making meals out of food aid packages while displaced near the Egyptian border in Rafah (Shaqoura, 2024). By tapping into the conventions of trending cooking videos, Shaqoura harnesses humour by satirising the format as he prepares food for groups of internally displaced people — gone is the curated kitchen, O-ring lighting, and cutaway to an idyllic backyard view, typical of popular cooking accounts such as @juliusroberts or @itsbennyblanco. Shaqoura employs popular conventions that do away with narrated voice overs in favour of capturing the ambient soundscape of the kitchen in action, subverting the trend to use food as a mode to disseminate the realities of daily life for Gazans. Shaquora uses food to insist that Palestinians and Palestinian identity exists. This form of “playful activism” works to spread a political message among audiences who “potentially had no previous interest (and probably not even knowledge) about Palestine, fostering both the humanization of Palestinians and building a new solidarity network” (Cervi and Marin-Llado, 2021).

As discourse in Western media remains inherently aligned with the maintenance of global north supremacy, participatory platforms play an increasingly significant role in countering traditional news media narratives. By affording users the ability to broadcast the “raw event” (Bødker, 2016) happening on the ground in real time, online networks share subjectivities which work to counter mainstream media narratives, centring voices that have been systematically omitted and erased.

Broadcasting the “raw event”: Subjectivities Online and Countering Mainstream Media Narratives

Mass media maintains an agenda-setting influence, in the sense that what is included or omitted in news media has power to shape discourse and public perceptions. Shehadeh (2023) highlights that “the power to see, to create images, and to control images is a crucial aspect of the struggle for cultural survival and political self-determination” (Shehadeh, 2023)”.

As a registered nurse and health management student, Canadian-Palestinian Ahmed Kouta travelled to Gaza in 2023 to finalise his master’s thesis at Al-Shifa Hospital. Since the outbreak of military aggressions in 2023, Kouta remained at the hospital to help with the overwhelming number of sick and injured. Kouta has remained in Northern Gaza, sharing videos of daily life while trapped in this area. He captures the “raw event” (Bødker, 2016) of the devastation on the ground in his documentation, such as the daily content in which he captures the process of eating his daily lemon, the only food he has been able to resource since aid to the North was blocked. In November 2023, he shared the moment of returning to the house he’d been sheltering in after a short time away, only to find it destroyed by an airstrike. Most recently, he walks through the remains of Al-Shifa hospital, examining the scene after its destruction by Israeli military (Kouta, 2024). Kouta transforms into citizen journalist, leveraging Instagram’s stories and reels features which afford “visuality, scalability, and interactivity” (Davidjants & Tiidenberg, 2021), to share his subjective experience, a perspective that is typically omitted from Western news media. Broadcasting the “raw event” (Bødker, 2016) serves to cultivate a sense of authenticity in the current media landscape, where audiences are increasingly media literate, and traditional news media platforms are inherently bound up in serving their own interests, the interests of those in power, functioning to maintain the status quo. Online networks, in this case factions of Palestine Internet and solidarity networks, work to disseminate and bolster this content through the digital stitching mechanism of hashtags, engaging through shares and likes, and remixing and reshaping content by inserting features such as translated subtitles to reach a wider audience. It is through digital platforms that Palestinian users can offer alternative images of life under Israeli occupation and critique one-dimensional approaches to Palestinian and Arab representation. The reality of the attacks on Gaza are captured here through emotive subjectivity, while capturing the “raw” event (Bødker, 2016) without the politically and economically invested framings of mainstream media.

Such content has worked to mobilise communities across the globe while highlighting hypocrisies of Western media, as networks organise, protest, and disrupt business as usual. Such solidarity is particularly evident in the connected Indigenous struggles by commemorating contested pasts in highly visible and accessible spaces, both online and offline. Highlighting histories of al-Nakba and the following years of destruction and dehumanisation, histories otherwise ignored, erased, or undermined, function as a strategy of “memory activism” (Kuo & Jackson, 2023).

Connecting Indigenous Struggles: Commemorating Contested Pasts

Histories of exile and violent oppression in one’s homeland is an all too familiar story to Indigenous populations across the globe. It’s important that histories are not forgotten or erased, and in this sense “remembering becomes central to both witnessing the past and developing a sense of possibility and responsibility in the present.. ..memory is an important tool in political resistance, cultural education, and social movement efforts” (Kuo & Jackson, 2023).The events of 1948 are contested in Israel as a celebration of Independence and the establishment of the state. The process involved a violent removal of the Indigenous Palestinian population, a detail that has been left out and reshaped in the collective national Israeli narrative. The Nakba has continued to be a little-known history to many outside of Israel-Palestine, where the narrative of Israeli independence adopted in mainstream media side steps these details. By connecting the plight of Palestinians to broader Indigenous struggles, networks harness “strategic multimodal storytelling to commemorate contested pasts outside state channels” (Davidjants & Tiidenberg, 2021).  Just as settlers arrived to Australia declaring it a terra nullius, so too was Israel founded on the Zionist claim that Palestine was a land without a people, for a people without a land. Through remembering histories beyond the settler-colonial narrative, and in connecting Indigenous perspectives — whether through publishing digital art, sharing clips from documentaries, or amplifying oral histories from the events of al-Nakba –online networks harness affordances of Instagram to resist dominant narratives which work to silence and erase their experiences. These tools educate and inform broader populations in both online and offline spaces. An example of this can be observed in the LANDBACK movement (Landback, 2021) and how it is engaged with on participatory platforms to promote the Palestinian struggle alongside broader Indigenous struggles for liberation, sovereignty, and self-determination.

LANBACK has a legacy of “organizing and sacrifice to get Indigenous Lands back into Indigenous hands”, with the aim of “working towards true collective liberation.. ..to envision a world where Black, Indigenous & POC liberation co-exists” (Landback, 2021). The sharing of digital artwork online has proven an effective means to promote the LANDBACK movement and educate audiences about the connection between different Indigenous struggles and decolonisation, amplifying ignored histories from marginalised and oppressed groups. The “Land Back” motif featuring the Palestinian and Australian Aboriginal flags side by side, has become a widely adopted image in both online and offline spaces since displayed at an Invasion Day rally by Rihab Charida (Charida, 2023). The image was remixed by Australian illustrator Matt Chun, who shared a modified version on Instagram, created using watercolour while featuring the words “Land Back” in English and Arabic. Chun gave unrestricted access to the drawing and design elements as a free download (Chun, 2023). This image was widely shared, not just online, but continues to appear in offline spaces such as protests and community pickets. Movements for Blackfulla Palestinian Solidary, Tamils For Palestine, and Māori-Palestinian Solidarity are just some of the examples of how different Indigenous groups have united in response to the Palestinian struggle, remembering their contested histories in the name of liberation and decolonisation for all.

Conclusion

Online networks harness the affordances of Instagram to raise awareness, educate new audiences, and challenge and reshape harmful representations. Social media has played a pivotal role in platforming the silenced voices of Palestinians, serving as a vehicle to share the histories and culture of Palestine, both prior to colonisation, and during the ongoing struggle of life under brutal occupation. In this way, Palestinians can counter harmful narratives about Palestine and Palestinian identity, and supporters are able to amplify their content.  Through harnessing playful activism, sharing subjectivities, and remembering contested pasts, online networks comprising a conceptualised Palestinian Internet do decolonial labour to work toward liberated futures for all. 

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