Osama mousa

A Palestinian-Syrian activist residing in Canada. He has master degree in International Humanitarian Affairs.

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‘’Who writes his story inherits the land of words and reigns the whole meaning’’. Mahmoud Darweesh

Ownership of a narrative is crucial for any cause that aims for greater and more equitable justice. A clear and attractive narrative serves to illustrate the cause and generate the solidarity it needs to succeed. 

In recent weeks, we’ve witnessed a great transformation in interaction, coverage, and solidarity with the Palestinian cause. One of the main contributors to that is the involvement of tens of thousands of young people in commemorating the Nakba – when more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes. 

Sharing our narrative with the world balanced the scales of the limited and biased coverage of the events in Palestine. This time, the Palestinian narrative did not only strike a chord in the Arab world — it spread across the world, encouraging hundreds of thousands of people to take to the streets and join demonstrate solidarity with the palestinian cause.

Credit for this goes to Generation Z (people born in 1997 and onward). This generation’s effective and exceptional efforts in using popular social media platforms to inform people around the world made a huge difference. They created lasting cracks in the wall of the biased discourse often found in many countries of the economic North, like Canada and the United States.

Outperforming and embarrassing traditional media 

Starting in May of this year, the events in the occupied East Jerusalem, spurred by Israeli courts’ attempts to forcibly evict 28 Palestinian families from their houses in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood, began to escalate. Social media coverage of these events quickly followed, led by Arab social media influencers, then by international influencers. 

Their posts encouraged and inspired hundreds of thousands to join them in posting and tweeting the hashtag #SaveSheikhJarrah on their Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts. Within days, the hashtag was trending globally.

One Palestinian journalist residing in Canada, Mona Hawa, was one of the most prominent people posting. By doing this, Hawa abandoned the traditional media methods she had experienced for years. 

She adopted new methods of covering news by using her Instagram account to host dozens of established influencers and activists from Palestine, exponentially multiplying her account’s reach. Hawa established a bridge with what was happening on the ground in the occupied territories, and opened a window to the world for many local Palestinian journalists and citizen journalists. Their live streams from locations including Haifa, Led, the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah, and later from Gaza, were witnessed around the world in real time.

This exceptional innovation in news coverage enabled individual stakeholders on the ground in Palestine to share updates from the field that directly reached hundreds of thousands of people globally, providing dozens of hours of live, unfiltered coverage.

Social media platforms proved to be one of the main sources of news and information for a large segment of people tracking the events in Palestine from around the world. It released audiences from the need to wait for traditional and international agencies to decide what could be heard and learned about events and news from faraway parts of the world. This is especially unique, given that western media agencies once again ignored news from Palestine until military actions and bloodshed had escalated. 

Meanwhile, activists and citizen journalists active on social media provided alternative sources of news and information without being subject to the many computations or complexities of editorial and broadcast policies or donor pressure. Some or all of these factors contributed significantly to decisions on how and when mainstream media outlets would cover, or ignore, the latest developments in occupied Palestine. 

For example, CBC Canada’s constant insistence on appearing neutral — without delving deeper into details and motives regarding day-by-day developments on the ground in Palestine — prompted more than two thousand academics and journalists to sign a statement directed to the state-funded Canadian network to provide fairer coverage of the events.

A generation with resilient tools

Generation Z is characterized by its agility, and a distinctive ability to interact with the events it becomes witness to. They are well trained to learn and use new digital tools and techniques in the digital space. What’s more, they’re often able to use simplified, spontaneous and clever language allowing them to reach a diverse audience not limited to their own communities. 

Let’s look at some examples. One young Egyptian woman, Iman Askar, used traditional Western folk music, in the form of a sea shanty, to sing a minute and a half summarized story of a hundred years of Palestinian history. Her song quickly reached tens of millions of viewers in only two days, using her personal Instagram and TikTok accounts. Funny enough, her success became a mainstream media story in the following days. 

The phenomenon of our younger generation using social media platforms to spread messages of social justice has gone beyond the process of simply sharing news, photos, videos and hashtags. Their creativity as content creators has evolved to a stage that is now virtually equivalent to the work of television producers. While covering ongoing developments in Palestine, many young people were able to produce evidence-based content, sharing resources and documents to do so. They found creative ways to illustrate large volumes of information on the history and theory of topics that ranged from settler colonialism, to Palestinian rights, and human rights violations. Their content put forward factual evidence of discriminatory practices and ethnic cleansing in occupied Palestine, backed with UN resolutions and reports on human rights related to  the Palestian cause which had been published over the years.

A young Palestinian-American, Sobhi Taha, garnered hundreds of thousands of views for his content, which was shared and republished on hundreds of social media accounts, constructed to center dialogue on this issue around the voices of the oppressed. This allowed an alternative narrative to reach the average American, and English speakers in general.  This kind of reach and access to information has contributed to liberating news consumers from the constraints of governments, states and lobbies.

New generations of people of colour have proven their ability to address complicated topics that affect their communities and communicate them to others. They’ve also shown they are able to condense large amounts of information, terminologies, and global international experiences in order to present them in unconventional formats, away from the complexities and limitations of the textbook, the academic metaphors,  or educational curriculums. In doing so, they are making the case for intersectional struggles which aim to overcome barriers such as race, color, language, religion, geography, and time zones. 

Most Generation Z masters the English language, not as the language of a nation or a specific group of people, but as an effective means of communication. This contributed to the way in which the Palestinian narrative was able to have such an exceptional reach world wide, outside of its usual Arabic-sepaking audience. Similar phenomena were seen in other recent events where issues like authoritarianism, gender, feminism, ethnic cleansing, racism and inequalities were addressed outside the frameworks of official or mainstream media. 

Examples include coverage of the protests in Russia last year, penetrating the blackout over the existence of Uyghur camps in China, repression events in Hong Kong, the Black Lives Matter movement, feminist demonstrations in Argentina, and of course the tens of thousands of fake reservations made by teenagers to attend one of Trump’s Tulsa Rally, leaving the former US president with the embarrassment of delivering a speech to empty seats.

Getting out of the Ghetto

In Canada, Arab and Muslim people are officially considered to be so-called “Visible Minorities”. These minorities are often encouraged by Canadian politicians and governments to express themselves and actively contribute to the social, economic and political life of Canada, particularly around election season. 

This approach has increased in recent years especially when trying to address the injustices experienced by Indigenous and Black people living on Canadian soil. Nevertheless, concrete Canadian policies towards issues of injustices, systemic racism and discrimination still have a long way to go. Naming the Palestinian cause as a land and people under occupation seems to be shocking and uncomfortable to many in Canada. The media and other stakeholders in the public sphere give the impression of describing what is happening to Palestinians without digging deeper into the roots of injustice, and without articulating clearly enough the Israeli violations of human rights and international laws regularly taking place. 

The injustices experienced by Palestinians matter very much to the majority of Arabs and Muslims in Canada, estimated between one and one and a half million people. By ignoring them, the Canadian government, media and officials are drawing an intellectual red line of expression when it comes to Israel. However , this freedom of expression ghetto vanishes with the politicization of younger generations and their involvement in intersectional struggles. The tools of struggle are constantly evolving. Today’s youth are increasingly intolerant of any perceived forms of discrimination and injustice, and won’t align themselves with practices such as colonial settlement, occupation, ethnic cleansing, authoritarianism, or ignoring climate change, and as for the generations that will come after them.