Israel unquestionably has the military advantage in its ongoing conflict with Hamas. But in the fight to control the public narrative of the conflict, Israel’s edge seems to be slipping.

In previous rounds of conflict, the Israeli government was often able to capitalize on its widely followed official social media channels, as well as statements by leaders, to help shape the narrative in its favor, portraying itself as a nation unjustly under attack with the sole goal of defending itself.

But this time around, Palestinians speaking out against the Israeli occupation and its overwhelming military bombardment of Gaza have had far more success in telling their side of the story on social media — eroding Israel’s edge in the battle of perspectives and gaining a rapt audience in the US.

From making solidarity videos on TikTok to using Twitter to organize international protests to posting videos to Instagram showing Israeli airstrikes on Gaza, Palestinians and those around the world sympathetic to their plight have made social media a central weapon in the narrative fight against Israel. Those weapons are deployed on many fronts: using different platforms to target multiple audiences — in the region and around the world — while also using apps to coordinate actions among themselves.

The majority use it to counter the Israeli government’s claims and promote a pro-Palestinian narrative, though some take to social media to praise the actions of Hamas.

“It’s like a TikTok intifada,” said Michael Bröning, executive director of the German think tank Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung’s office in New York, using the Arabic term used to describe previous Palestinian uprisings.

Social media played a central role in past Israel-Gaza wars, where clips on YouTube and messages on Facebook and Twitter aimed to report events in real time. But the emergence of new platforms like Telegram and TikTok have allowed more — and younger — people to engage with this flare-up online. And now that social media platforms are a key delivery system for news consumption, many on the apps can experience the complexities of the region in real time, muddying the usual easy storylines.

“There is a penetration of the mainstream narrative,” said Marwa Fatafta, a Berlin-based policy analyst at Al-Shabaka, a Palestinian-focused think tank headquartered in New York City. “People are able to see with their own eyes, without being censored, what’s going on minute by minute.”

But Palestinians have also found the proliferation of social media to be a “double-edged sword,” in the words of two experts. Far-right Israeli Jewish mobs have reportedly coordinated attacks on Israeli Arabs via the messaging app Telegram, for example, and lies hyping the Palestinian “threat” have spread wildly on WhatsApp. “Palestinians are coming, parents protect your children,” read one message.

“We’re getting more unfiltered perspectives from the Israeli side,” said Emerson Brooking, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council think tank in Washington, DC, and co-author of LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media. The ultimate result is that “it’s not two sides presenting their perspectives. It’s much messier and much less centralized than it was before.”

That messiness has allowed Palestinian voices and their stories to emerge during the crisis while weakening the usual monopoly the Israeli government has on messaging. It’s an asset Palestinians don’t want to lose.

“We’re the weak ones. Social media — our cameras and our videos — is one of the only means that we have. They have the weapons and the laws and the infrastructure,” said Inès Abdel Razek, advocacy director for the Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy. “Palestinians just want to explain why this is happening and contextualize.”

Palestinians are winning the online war against the Israeli government

The online activism of Mohammed El-Kurd, whose family in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah is slated for eviction from their home by right-wing Israeli settler organizations, made him an instant celebrity. A poet, he’s used his facility with words and social media — namely Instagram — to make his case against Israeli occupation and for the residents of his area.

Now, news organizations around the world ask him for interviews, providing him a platform to make his case — and that of Palestinians more broadly.

“It’s not really an eviction, it’s forced ethnic displacement, to be accurate, because an eviction implies legal authority,” he told CNN last week, describing the attempt to evict his family from their home in Sheikh Jarrah. “While the Israeli occupation has no legitimate jurisdiction over the eastern parts of occupied Jerusalem under international law, it also implies the presence of a landlord.”

The day after his interview, Israeli forces removed him from Sheikh Jarrah — a moment captured on social media.

The rancor from Israeli authorities may have stemmed from the fact that El-Kurd managed to distill the Palestinian position on a sensitive issue in American media, where the Palestinian plight is heard less often than the Israeli one.

Meanwhile, Palestinians in Gaza keep uploading videos showing their experience under bombardment. One TikTok video from last week, which has been “liked” over 4 million times, purportedly shows Gazans running after an airstrike. Another popular TikTok video featured images of crying Palestinian children and the destruction of a high-rise building after an Israeli attack.

It’s not just images of suffering that dominate Palestinian-focused TikTok, though. Beauty bloggers like Miryam Beauty are posting videos in which they paint their face the colors of the Palestinian flag, a way to show support for that cause without having to say a word.

These uploads allow Palestinians battling with police in East Jerusalem, withstanding Israel’s attacks in Gaza, and watching the conflict from afar to speak with a common voice. “Palestinian sentiment has been awakened and unified,” said Fatafta. “There’s a new sense of identity and new sense of understanding and solidarity with Palestinians.”

There’s another reason for the Palestinian success online, American University’s Thomas Zeitzoff told me, namely that their plight against state violence reminds many in the US of the Black Lives Matter movement. That’s led progressives in Congress, for example, to explicitly link what they’re seeing online to the fight for racial justice at home.

“We must recognize that Palestinian rights matter. Palestinian lives matter,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) wrote last week in the New York Times.

Celebrities, who tend to avoid sensitive global conflicts, have also waded in. Two of them are Gigi and Bella Hadid, supermodels whose father is Palestinian. Gigi posted to her more than 66 million Instagram followers last week that “You cannot pick & choose whose human rights matter more.”

It seems that celebrities and politicians lifting Palestinian voices have brought the issue into the mainstream. The US fashion Instagram account @diet_prada posted a cartoon asking its nearly 3 million followers to “Stand with the oppressed” — and calling Israelis the “oppressors.”

Of course, that narrative still has to compete with pro-Israel content on social media platforms. The problem for Israel is that, when it comes to official government accounts, at least, attempts to sway the conversation to the pro-Israel side often ending up doing just the opposite.

Israel’s social media game is weak right now

Israeli government accounts on Twitter, Instagram, and elsewhere, which have millions of followers, make it easy for the official line to reach an audience. But that’s not always a good thing.

Take this thread post from the state of Israel’s verified Twitter account, which includes rows and rows of nothing but rocket emojis — 12 full tweets’ worth.

Once you get to the bottom of the thread, it becomes clear that the emojis are meant to represent all the rockets Hamas has indiscriminately launched into Israel, threatening and killing the nation’s citizens.

But in the midst of a conflict that has also seen an overwhelming Israeli aerial bombardment of Gaza, seeing the country’s official Twitter account tweeting nothing but rows and rows of what at quick glance can also look an awful lot like warplanes struck the wrong chord with many on social media, including some who perhaps didn’t bother to scroll all the way down to the tweet explaining the thread.

Others simply objected to what seemed like a blatant attempt to focus solely on Hamas’s actions devoid of any context. Some of the responses were brutal:

It was far from the first time an official Israeli account stepped in it.

An Instagram post from the Israel Defense Forces’ official account showed two stacked photos of a high-rise building in Gaza. The first, labeled “Before” in Hebrew, showed the building standing tall. The second, labeled “After,” showed the building as a pile of rubble. The text accompanying the images extolled the IDF’s “significant achievement” of destroying yet another multi-story tower in Gaza, which it said was “used by terrorist organizations.”

Here, again, though some supporters praised the post, many people were disgusted by the bragging tone.

“[E]very time i think there’s a limit to the sheer joy someone can take in human suffering, the IDF social media manager bursts through,” one Twitter user wrote.

And then there’s Gal Gadot, the Israeli actress famous for portraying Wonder Woman, who tweeted that while “Israel deserves to live as a free and safe nation, Our neighbors deserve the same.”

Gadot disabled comments on the tweet for all the vitriol she received, with some claiming the former Israeli military soldier was putting out “propaganda” for her country. Still, this was a far more measured comment than what she wrote in 2014 during the last time the Israeli government fought against Hamas.

“I am sending my love and prayers to my fellow Israeli citizens,” she wrote on her official Facebook page at the time. “Especially to all the boys and girls who are risking their lives protecting my country against the horrific acts conducted by Hamas, who are hiding like cowards behind women and children.”

So even when celebrities weigh in or official social media account take a more straightforward approach and attempt to show the plight of Israeli citizens living under constant rocket attack from Hamas, the results often fail to stir the same level of sympathy and outrage simply because Israel’s overwhelming offensive and defensive military capabilities — including its powerful Iron Dome system, which intercepts a huge percentage (though not all) of the rockets Hamas fires — creates a vast disparity in the number of deaths and injuries suffered on both sides.

As of Thursday, the death toll was over 200 for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and over 10 in Israel.

With the ceasefire came relief. The shelling had stopped. People were visiting each other, feeling happy, Salwa Tibi, a Gaza program representative for CARE International, said.

Earlier this week, Tibi hadn’t been sure if she would see the next morning, or the morning after that, so heavy was the bombardment from Israeli airstrikes. This week, Tibi’s daughter, pregnant for the first time, gave birth in the hospital, Tibi’s granddaughter, Naya, entering the world to the sound of shelling for hours and hours.

The Egypt-brokered ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, the Islamic militant group that controls Gaza, ended the immediate violence, the most pressing need for a territory that had been besieged by Israeli airstrikes for 11 days.

Humanitarian aid groups in Gaza had been struggling to respond to a ballooning emergency. Fuel, food, water, and medicine are all scarce in Gaza. Israeli airstrikes have blown up roads and other critical infrastructure. And the violence had prevented humanitarian groups and workers from being able to reach the people most in need.

Gaza is no longer an active war zone, but the emergency hasn’t fully abated. Israeli airstrikes have toppled high-rise buildings and turned homes and apartments to rubble. Israel said it was targeting Hamas and its networks, including rocket launchers and tunnels, but those targets are often intertwined with schools, clinics, and residential buildings.

According to Gaza’s Ministry of Public Works and Housing, before the ceasefire, about 230 buildings containing more than 991 housing and commercial units were destroyed, with hundreds more severely damaged. More than 72,000 people were displaced in the past week, and about 56,000 — about half of whom were children — sought shelter in schools run by the United Nations Refugee and Works Agency (UNRWA).

Last week, no one had heard of Emily Wilder. Then she became the focus of a national campaign to get her fired. Days later, she was.

Things move fast. So there’s a good chance that days from now, the story of a rookie journalist who lost her job because of the way she used social media to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, will have faded from the discourse. Her firing will become just another bullet point in future stories about “cancel culture” on the right and left.

On the other hand: I have a hunch that the particular circumstances of Wilder’s narrative will have more resonance than your standard Outrage of the Week. Because it merges two storylines — the long-running, intractable standoff between Israelis and Palestinians, and the newer, intractable fight over fairness and objectivity in journalism that is being hashed out on Twitter and in Slack rooms and in the real world. What do fairness and objectivity in journalism really mean? And do those two ideas have to be linked at the hip? That is: Can you be fair in your reporting but abandon “the unreasonable and hideously stupid expectation that reporters must harbor no strong opinions about the things they care about,” as journalist Laura Wagner put it in Defector?

Answers that might have made sense a few years ago don’t seem to work anymore, so journalists, their bosses, and their readers are coming up with answers on the fly — and, in this case, failing miserably.

First, the chronology, as relayed by Wilder in press interviews and via Twitter:

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• Wilder, who graduated from Stanford in 2020 and had been working as an intern for the Arizona Republic, went to work for the Associated Press this month as a “news associate” in Phoenix, “helping edit and produce content for publication” — an entry-level job.
• On Monday, May 14, the Twitter account for the Stanford College Republicans circulated old tweets and quotes — commentary critical of Israeli policies and supporters, like calling Republican donor Sheldon Adelson a “naked mole rat” — from her days as a student activist at Stanford. Those were quickly recirculated by right-wing outlets like Fox News and the Federalist.
• Wilder says an Associated Press manager told her that the news organization would investigate her social media use, but that she shouldn’t worry. “The editor said I was not going to get in any trouble because everyone had opinions in college,” Wilder told SFGate. “Then came the rest of the week.”
• On Thursday, May 17, she was fired for violating the AP’s social media guidelines. Wilder said she asked the AP to tell her what specifically she’d done wrong but hasn’t received an answer. “I asked them, ‘Please tell me what violated the policy,’ and they said, ‘No.’”

The AP says it fired Wilder for violating the company’s social media policy while employed there — that is, not for tweets she made prior to getting hired — but wouldn’t spell out specific infractions. A rep passed along this statement:

While AP generally refrains from commenting on personnel matters, we can confirm Emily Wilder’s comments on Thursday that she was dismissed for violations of AP’s social media policy during her time at AP. We have this policy so the comments of one person cannot create dangerous conditions for our journalists covering the story. Every AP journalist is responsible for safeguarding our ability to report on this conflict, or any other, with fairness and credibility, and cannot take sides in public forums.

So we’re left to guess at Wilder’s supposed infractions. The most likely candidate is this May 16 tweet — posted the day before the Stanford College Republicans went after her — critiquing the way mainstream media covers the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

Which presumably conflicts with the AP’s policy that “employees must refrain from declaring their views on contentious public issues in any public forum.”

Wilder has also retweeted several other tweets about the conflict, and the AP says that “Retweets, like tweets, should not be written in a way that looks like you’re expressing a personal opinion on the issues of the day. A retweet with no comment of your own can easily be seen as a sign of approval of what you’re relaying … unadorned retweets must be avoided.”

But let’s be clear: Wilder was working out of the AP’s Phoenix newsroom, half a world away from its former offices in Gaza, which were destroyed this month by Israeli airstrikes. Firing her doesn’t “safeguard” the AP’s ability to report on the conflict in any way. All of this tweet-parsing is ridiculous and shameful. The most charitable explanation is that her managers really didn’t like a handful of tweets their new hire had made — which is something they could resolve without firing her. But firing her days after she became the target of a political campaign is an explicit capitulation, and a green light for other groups to target other journalists with similar efforts — which they most certainly will.

It’s worth noting that we still haven’t heard directly from anyone at the AP about its side of the story in any detail. In a memo distributed to AP employees this weekend, executives wrote that “much of the coverage and commentary does not accurately portray what took place,” but didn’t offer their own version of events.

But if the premise of the AP’s actions is that the appearance of wrongdoing is as important as the act itself, then the AP is the guilty party here: It’s signaled that it will throw its journalists under the bus at a moment’s notice if people on Twitter complain loudly enough. And while the AP has told employees it intends to have an internal “conversation” about its social media policy, my hunch is that it’s still going to be fundamentally uncomfortable with a point of view common among journalists in 2021 — which is that they have points of view, and pretending otherwise is dishonest.

Wilder’s firing is one inflection point in a complex and evolving debate about journalistic objectivity that’s usually addressed sideways, rather than head-on. It highlights the strain newsrooms in the US are experiencing as they try to figure out how to tell journalists what beliefs they can express publicly. And which ones they’re either not supposed to have or that they’re supposed to pretend not to have.

Consider: Last year, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, Americans on social media aligned, at least temporarily, behind the Black Lives Matter moment. There were few willing to defend the actions of the Minneapolis police officers who killed him or didn’t stop his murder. And social media services were bursting with people proclaiming their opposition to systemic racism and support for the Black Lives Matter movement — a movement that had been considered left-of-mainstream just a few years earlier.

That momentum swept up middle-of-the-road mega-companies, like Walmart and Amazon. And it definitely included newsrooms, including my own: Last June, Vox.com managers sent out a memo reminding us that Vox journalists aren’t supposed to participate in political rallies, and to “refrain from using hashtags associated with movements and organizations we are actively covering, or publicly endorsing them.” That said, the memo added: “Racism is not a ‘both sides’ issue, and employees are free to speak out against racism and inequality.” It was a major shift.

In the recent past, some mainstream journalists would announce, in public, that they didn’t vote because they didn’t want their work to be biased — or because they wanted to prevent anyone, ever, from accusing them of bias. And some of that thinking still, amazingly, exists. But it’s wildly out of step with the present moment, where debates about ideology and politics have been replaced with debates between facts and fiction.

Half of Republicans, for instance, believe that the Capitol Riot “was largely a non-violent protest or was the handiwork of left-wing activists ‘trying to make Trump look bad.’” And that’s a story that requires no work at all to understand — you have to work hard not to comprehend what happened on January 6.

But when it comes to Israel and Palestine, there’s nothing like that kind of clarity, even among people who generally see the world the same way you do: Declare your support for children killed by Israeli artillery in Gaza, and you may find your Slackmate or Instagram followers have a lot to say about Hamas rockets aimed at Israel, or about a spike in anti-Semitic attacks worldwide since the most recent conflict. Or, just as likely, you may hear an uncomfortable silence. And my hunch is that those responses may surprise a younger generation of journalists.

Israelis and Palestinians have been fighting for decades, but we haven’t seen much of the conflict unfold during the social media age that really started in the 2010s, years after the last full-scale intifada: People have certainly employed social media as a weapon in the conflict, but that was before social media was all-encompassing, and before algorithmic design brought stuff to you before you knew you wanted to see it. Which means there’s a generation of Twitterers, Instagrammers, and TikTokers fully accustomed to sharing their views and advocating for causes online, but who haven’t seen pushback from most of their peers or bosses before.

See, for example, a recent tweet from the New Yorker Union declaring support for Palestine by expressing “solidarity for Palestinians from the river to the sea.” After critics argued that the phrase was anti-Semitic — whether that’s true is also up for debate — the union deleted it.

Then again, things are changing. It used to be that mainstream American politics had room for just one response when it came to Israel and Palestine. Now some Democrats, at least, are willing to critique Israeli behavior instead of supporting the country’s actions without reservation.

So are some celebrities, though there are limits to how freely they can express that. Earlier this month, Mark Ruffalo, who has a starring role in Disney’s Marvel universe, compared Israel to South African apartheid. Now he seems to have either walked back that post or something else:

Which is a pretty good summary, maybe, of the mess we’re in right now: Americans have conflicting feelings about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but they aren’t quite sure about how to express that — and how publicly to do it. So of course journalists are in the same boat, but they’re also the ones who are often called on to pretend that they don’t have any opinion at all.

That might have worked in the past. But it certainly doesn’t now. Which is why Emily Wilder’s story may stick with us for a while longer.

The ceasefire announced Thursday between Israel and Hamas will hopefully end the worst of the violence that in the course of 11 days killed well over 200 people, the vast majority of them Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

In the narrowest sense, Hamas and Israel have both accomplished their immediate goals. Hamas got to portray itself as the defender of the Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem, where much of the unrest began in recent weeks, and prove its capacity to hit most of Israel with its rockets. Israel, meanwhile, can say it has degraded Hamas’s military capabilities, in particular the underground network of tunnels from which it operates.

Yet the ceasefire does nothing to address the underlying conditions that have fueled the decade-and-a-half standoff between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, nor the issues that sparked this latest round of fighting.

Living conditions in Gaza, long grim, will continue to deteriorate absent a dramatic change to the blockade that restricts most freedom of movement and goods; it has been in place in its current form, imposed by Israel and Egypt, since 2006.

Beyond Gaza, Palestinians continue to face a deeply fragmented, restricted political situation. Those in the West Bank live under a patchwork of authorities — the Palestinian Authority in urban enclaves, a mixed regime in other populated areas, and direct Israeli military control in about 60 percent of the territory where Israeli settlers also live.

In East Jerusalem, Palestinians are legal residents of the city — which Israel considers united under its sovereignty — but generally lack full citizenship. Inside Israel, Palestinian citizens, who make up about 21 percent of the country’s population, face structural inequalities and political marginalization.

And Israel, whose civilians remain under the threat of Hamas rockets and fearful of the group’s advances in weaponry, is no less likely to respond harshly in the future to rocket fire than it was at the beginning of May. The vast majority of Israelis view Hamas as an unrepentant enemy with no intention of pursuing peace with Israel, and believe it would use any easing of the blockade to further arm itself and threaten Israeli civilians.

With these conditions still in place, the series of events that led to this latest flare-up, though extreme, could easily repeat itself in some variation in the future.

It’s therefore worth taking a closer look at those specific events, and the conditions that produced them, in order to understand where the conflict might go after the ceasefire, and what the prospects are for some kind of resolution to the seemingly endless cycle of violence.

Three Jerusalem flashpoints converge

The city of Jerusalem has for decades been a major focal point of the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and both Israelis and Palestinians claim it as their capital.

But three specific sites in and around the old city of Jerusalem emerged as flashpoints in the weeks leading up to the recent outbreak of hostilities: Sheikh Jarrah, a neighborhood in East Jerusalem; the Damascus Gate, a northern entrance in the wall of the old city; and al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s third-holiest site, located on what is known as Haram al-Sharif (the Noble Sanctuary) to Muslims and to Jews as the Temple Mount (Har HaBayit), the site of the biblical Jewish temples.

Sheikh Jarrah

Sheikh Jarrah is an East Jerusalem neighborhood located just outside the old city that for weeks has been the site of mass demonstrations by Palestinians protesting the imminent evictions of six Arab families from their homes by Israeli courts, to make way for Jewish activists who claim ownership of the land.

The homes in question were built by the Jordanian government in the 1950s for Palestinian refugees from Israel, after Jewish residents fled the neighborhood during the 1948 war and found refuge in Israel.

Israeli law provides Jewish Israelis the chance to reclaim property lost during that conflict — including in Sheikh Jarrah. But it offers no reciprocal right to Palestinians, including Palestinian citizens of Israel, who lost their homes. In general, Israeli authorities and right-wing NGOs have been working for years to change the demographic balance of the city in favor of Jewish Israelis.

Aryeh King, a far-right activist who is currently deputy mayor of Jerusalem, told the New York Times last week that installing “layers of Jews” throughout East Jerusalem is specifically aimed at making its division impossible. “If we will not be in big numbers and if we will not be at the right places in strategic areas in East Jerusalem,” he said, then future peace negotiators “will try to divide Jerusalem and to give part of Jerusalem to our enemy.”

Naturally, the Palestinians who have lived there since the 1950s strongly oppose these attempts to evict them. The Sheikh Jarrah case has gone all the way to the Israeli Supreme Court, which was originally scheduled to announce its ruling on May 10.

That these looming evictions could spark wider unrest was entirely foreseeable. On May 4, Daniel Seidemann observed on Twitter that the two “radioactive” issues of Jerusalem and displacement, which are combined in Sheikh Jarrah, “go to the core of Palestinians and Israelis identity,” and warned they could prove explosive.

And sure enough, they did.

To avoid further inflaming the situation, the Supreme Court delayed its ruling the day before it was scheduled, but by that point it was too late. Demonstrations in Sheikh Jarrah already included violent clashes with police and extreme right-wing Israeli activists had come to provoke the clashes further.

Damascus Gate

Meanwhile, Damascus Gate, at the northern end of the old city, also became the site of recurrent protests and police crackdowns in recent weeks. During the month of Ramadan, Muslims in Jerusalem often gather on the steps surrounding the Damascus Gate plaza in the evenings as they break their fast.

But Israeli police limited such gatherings this year for fear of unrest, erecting barriers on the steps to prevent large gatherings. Many came anyway, and on successive nights throughout Ramadan, Israeli police drove them away using stun grenades and other heavy-handed tactics. The police then made an about-face, removing the barriers, but the images of ongoing clashes had already fueled tensions.

Al-Aqsa Mosque

The tension reached its apex in and around al-Aqsa Mosque. Starting in particular during Laylat al-Qadr, one of the holiest nights of Ramadan, and increasing in the following two days, Palestinian demonstrations there had joined those in Sheikh Jarrah and Damascus Gate, and amassed rocks and other simple projectiles in the mosque, in part in preparation for expected confrontations with right-wing Jewish activists who were scheduled to visit Temple Mount.

Israeli police, in a remarkable move — seen by many Israelis as an astounding error and by many Palestinians as a deliberate provocation — entered the mosque itself, during Ramadan, throwing stun grenades and making arrests. More than 200 Palestinians were reportedly injured along with 17 Israeli police officers, in images that reverberated across the Muslim world.

On their own, the Sheikh Jarrah evictions touched on fundamental Palestinian fears, evoking the legacy of the Nakba, the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the 1948 war.

Combined with the simmering tensions fueled by the Damascus Gate crackdowns and then images of a violent police raid on al-Aqsa, a central religious and national symbol, Palestinians across the West Bank, Jerusalem, Israel, and Gaza shared a sense of national and religious outrage.

And then Hamas got involved.

Unrest in Jerusalem turns into a war in Gaza

On the evening of May 10, Hamas issued an ultimatum to Israel to withdraw, by 6 pm, all police from Haram al-Sharif. This was a brazen move, meant as a show of force toward its far stronger enemy. And just after 6 pm, Hamas followed through on its threat, launching six rockets toward Jerusalem.

Up to that point, the younger, grassroots demonstrators in Jerusalem had dominated events, with the main Palestinian political factions — Fatah, the secular party that, through the Palestinian Authority, governs enclaves in the West Bank (though Israel remains in control of most of the territory) and Hamas — noticeably absent.

By launching these rockets, Hamas placed itself back at the center of events, attempting to co-opt Palestinians’ anger and portray itself as the defender of al-Aqsa, a Muslim symbol that Hamas, an Islamist movement, is keen to highlight.

Hamas’s rivalry with Fatah may have also played a role here. In January, the Palestinian Authority announced it would hold elections this summer for the first time since 2006. These would have included both Fatah, led by PA President Mahmoud Abbas, and Hamas, as well as other smaller Palestinian factions.

But on April 26, Abbas, fearing he would lose, canceled the elections. That left Hamas no political process through which it could gain power in the West Bank, and may have pushed it to seek other means to capture attention on the Palestinian national stage, showing its relevance and the irrelevance of Fatah.

Israel then responded to those rockets with more than 100 airstrikes on Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (another Islamist militant group active in Gaza) targets. Twenty-four Palestinians were killed, including nine children, though Israel claims that six of the children were killed by rockets fired by Palestinian Islamic Jihad that fell short of their target.

The following night, Hamas surprised Israel with its ability to launch large numbers of rockets to far greater effective range than in the past, putting most of the Israeli population under fire. A few rockets got through Israel’s Iron Dome defense system and hit Israeli cities.

The Israeli response was been massive and overwhelming, killing more than 200 Palestinians, including many civilians and more than two dozen children, in Gaza, where residents have little refuge; 13 Israelis were killed by rockets and missiles fired from Gaza.

This violence all takes place against the backdrop of a longer conflict that has seethed between Israel and Hamas.

In 2005, Israel withdrew its troops and settlers from the Gaza Strip, as part of its “Disengagement” from Gaza and the Northern West Bank. Hamas subsequently won the Palestinian elections in 2006 and took sole control of the Gaza Strip in 2007, expelling forces of the Fateh-led Palestinian Authority. Israel placed intense restrictions on the movement of people and goods in and out of the territory, and Egypt, which borders Gaza from the south, followed suit.

Since then, three devastating wars between Israel and Hamas and the crushing blockade have left Gaza in a state of deep humanitarian crisis (for more on the situation in Gaza, see this report we co-authored with Hady Amr and Ilan Goldenberg in 2018). The crisis was deepened further this year by the coronavirus pandemic.

The past year has seen efforts to improve the economic situation, especially in the energy sector, with support from the Palestinian Authority and Qatar, and with Israel’s and Hamas’s tacit cooperation, but the humanitarian situation and the prospects for about 2 million Gazans remained very grim even before the latest fighting began.

None of this will be solved by the ceasefire.

What happens now?

Recent weeks have blurred the lines used for decades to delineate this conflict.

Some aspects of the violence are horrifyingly familiar, of course: This is the fourth major conflict between Israel and Hamas since 2006, with Israeli strikes causing mass devastation in Gaza each time.

But in Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Israel itself, Palestinians who have long been divided by their physical geography and by the specific circumstances experienced in those different places are mobilizing in ways not seen in decades, including in a general strike on Tuesday that took place across all these territories.

The international perception of Israel’s role in this violence has also shifted, as solidarity with Palestinians grows among Democratic leaders and constituencies in the United States.

These changes mark a departure from previous conflicts, but they do not, in and of themselves, alter the fundamental dynamics between the main players.

Hamas remains entrenched in the Gaza Strip, in full control of the area but with little prospect of extending its power to the West Bank. Israel remains adamant, and is even emboldened, in its desire to block Hamas’s ability to arm itself — meaning that its blockade of the Gaza Strip will likely continue. And Palestinians continue to face varied forms of political fragmentation and discrimination in Jerusalem, in the West Bank, and within Israel, though in very different ways.

So while the fire may cease, the underlying conditions that sparked it remain unsolved.

There are no easy fixes in the short term, but a lot can still be done. The Israel-Hamas stalemate is deeply entrenched, but as we argued with colleagues in 2018, there is a chance to change it, modestly but meaningfully, through tacit understandings among Israel, the PA, and Hamas, with support from the US, Israel, Egypt, and the UN Special Representative in Jerusalem.

The broader context, detailed above, would require much more: a real shift of Israeli policy on the Palestinian issue writ large, and a Palestinian leadership able and willing to put its own affairs in order and to deal with Israel productively.

Kevin Huggard is a senior research assistant at the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. Natan Sachs is the director of the center.

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Marching in a recent Ithaca, New York, demonstration in solidarity with Palestine was one of the truly gratifying moments of my life as an internationalist.

Organized by Cornell University undergraduates, the protest against Israel’s latest, massive bombardment of the Gaza Strip and assault on Palestinians within and beyond Jerusalem proved that even in Ithaca — a sleepy college town in upstate New York — one finds some of the legions of civilians around the world who have mobilized against Israel’s brutal policies of occupation and collective punishment.

The Ithaca demonstration, which featured a rally on Cornell’s campus followed by a march to the downtown commons, was heartening for another reason: The crowd of roughly 300 included a generous smattering of Black and brown faces. Indeed, almost half of the participants were people of color, most of them students.

That a critical mass of young people was willing to openly support Palestinian freedom — a cause many progressive activists once viewed as a third rail — reflects the extent to which public discourse on this issue has shifted. Even in the US, the citadel of support for Israeli might, some mainstream news outlets now supplement conventional assertions of Israel’s “right to defend itself” with forthright themes of Palestinian liberation.

In some ways, the visible presence of African Americans in many pro-Palestine mobilizations of recent weeks, including rallies in New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, constitutes an equally remarkable cultural transition. While no wholesale pivot to the anti-imperialist left is underway, there are signs of a revitalization of some of the most vibrant traditions of Black internationalism.

It may be an exaggeration to suggest that the upsurge of mass resistance to white supremacy that propelled the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has also reenergized ideals of global solidarity among African Americans. But there can be no doubt that BLM, which some have dubbed the “American Intifada,” has driven to the center of Black political awareness questions of human rights and state violence — and principles of popular revolt — that are germane to Palestinian struggle.

Still, transformations of consciousness are never absolute. If Palestinian suffering is increasingly legible to some African Americans, especially those younger progressives who have radicalized the practice of domestic anti-racism, many remaining barriers must be overcome before Black solidarity with Palestine becomes a genuinely grassroots phenomenon in the US.

The Black Lives Matter movement reenergized Black-Palestinian solidarity

African American militants have long been among the staunchest allies of Palestinians. During the heyday of the US civil rights era, Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee all embraced the demand for Palestinian liberation.

After the 1960s and ’70s, the strands of African American-Palestinian solidarity waxed and waned. But those bonds were strengthened in recent years when new bouts of state violence led both populations to cultivate overseas support.

Some of the most powerful exchanges occurred after the advent of BLM as a mass movement in 2014. Palestinians played a crucial role in the Ferguson, Missouri, uprising that flared that year in the wake of the police killing of Black teenager Michael Brown.

Palestinian activists used social media to share with African American protesters tactics for dealing with tear gas attacks by militarized police forces — an experience with which many subjects of Israeli occupation are all too familiar.

In 2015, more than 1,000 Black organizers and intellectuals signed a solidarity statement condemning Israel’s lopsided war on Gaza and stranglehold on the West Bank. That year also saw the release of a stylish video titled “When I See Them I See Us” that featured African American figures, from activist Angela Davis to singer Lauryn Hill, highlighting the “similarities, but not sameness,” of Black and Palestinian subjugation and resilience.

BLM, which rejuvenated mass African American protest amid the bourgeois racial politics of the Obama years, also provided a new framework for fashioning Black and Palestinian affinities.

Progressive, youthful Black organizations, from the Dream Defenders to Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100) to the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, embraced Palestinian liberation as a core element of their global agenda.

Some members of these and other African American groups toured Palestinian territories as part of international delegations, then returned to the US to circulate accounts — overwhelmingly absent from Western reportage — of the barbaric conditions of life under Israeli occupation. Often, such travelers were struck by the warm hospitality of the Palestinians, who appeared eager to forge cultural and social links to Black America.

Meanwhile, African American thinkers such as journalist Marc Lamont Hill and author Michelle Alexander braved vilification to denounce Israeli practices of “apartheid” and “ethnic cleansing.”

Similar acts of solidarity unfolded during the recent, bloody siege of Palestinian civilian populations by the Israeli military. Groups such as Black Lives Matter of Paterson, New Jersey, have decried the wildly uneven violence unleashed on Palestinians in East Jerusalem, Gaza, and Israel, and have called on the US, which funnels $3.8 billion to Israel in military aid annually, to stop sponsoring the carnage.

Such expressions of kinship do not erupt spontaneously. Many of the latest manifestations of African American-Palestinian mutuality reflect the work of US organizations such as Existence Is Resistance that have designed political education campaigns to counter Western erasures and distortions of Palestinian socio-historical realities.

But to gain a fuller picture of African American outlooks, one must weigh such comradely efforts against deep dimensions of ambivalence. In truth, the Palestine issue generates no more consensus among Black Americans than it does among Americans more broadly.

Black people aren’t immune to the American ignorance of foreign conflicts

There will always be those African Americans who oppose, on ideological grounds, the right of Palestinians to self-determination and territorial restoration. Many such individuals belong to churches that propagate essentialist theories of “Judeo-Christian” values or otherwise promote Christian Zionist beliefs.

Some African Americans are simply accommodationists who refuse to challenge the foreign policy dictates of US elites. Others harbor real admiration for Israel, in some instances seeing the state as a model of uncompromising sovereignty and ethnocentrism that Black nationalists should attempt to emulate.

But the opposite of solidarity is not antagonism; it is indifference. Black people are hardly immune to the ignorance with which so many Americans view foreign, nonwhite populations. Victims of white supremacy, African Americans are nevertheless fully capable of internalizing and reproducing the racist, Orientalist tropes that have buttressed imperial ventures within and beyond the Arab world.

As members of a marginalized population, some Black Americans are loath to bear the social costs of open identification with Palestinians, a stigmatized group located thousands of miles away. In the end, many Black people may lack the desire or knowledge to contest framings of Israel-Palestine as a hopelessly intractable conflict rooted in ancient hostilities.

Nor has the compass of African American political conscience always pointed toward Palestine. Prior to the mid-1950s and ’60s, when events such as the 1956 Suez Crisis and the 1967 Arab-Israeli War underscored the imperialist nature of the Zionist project, many African Americans supported statehood for Jewish refugees. Like other Westerners, they tended to overlook the violent displacement of Palestinians that accompanied the creation of Israel in 1948.

Still, it is safe to say that African American perspectives on Palestine remain well to the left of those of the American majority.

Solidarity is never predetermined — it must be reconstructed by each generation

As demands for Palestinian liberation gain international momentum, buoyed by the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, the relative independence of social media, and the painstaking labor of countless activists, expressions of Black kinship with Palestinians may continue to expand.

But if they do so, it will not be the result of mere similarities between African American and Palestinian oppression. Connections, of course, do exist; both populations face conditions of “internal colonialism,” including racialization, dispossession, underdevelopment, and state violence. However, no perfect analogy exists between Black and Palestinian suffering. Parallelism alone cannot foster a sense of shared fate.

For African American camaraderie with Palestine to become a truly popular ideal, broad segments of the Black rank and file must recognize the global scope of white supremacy. They must see the need to form insurgent, international alliances across lines of color and culture. These principles must transcend the ranks of seasoned organizers, galvanizing those who lack firsthand experience with anti-racist and anti-imperialist campaigns.

The complexity of African American political aspirations suggests that such an awakening is entirely possible. The Black working classes have never equated their own freedom with the demise of formal segregation, or with the prospect of greater social inclusion within the apparatus of American empire. They have rarely let parochialism constrain their visions of a more just and egalitarian world.

I suspect that in the final analysis, many Black people can fully appreciate the Palestinian cause, a protracted struggle for land, autonomy, and cultural redemption that posits the total dismantling of domination as the horizon of human dignity.

Solidarity is never predetermined. It must be reconstructed by each generation. I draw hope, therefore, from the scattered evidence that, practically everywhere, an insurgent spirit is spreading.

During the recent Ithaca march, I spotted on the sidelines a cluster of young African American men. They appeared to be non-students — members, perhaps, of the town’s tiny, working-class Black community. They watched intently but did not join the throngs of chanting protesters. “Black and Palestinian liberation,” I shouted in their direction, and raised a fist. They said nothing. Yet one of them signaled his approval by wrapping me in a spontaneous hug.

Russell Rickford is an associate professor of history at Cornell University.

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