Livestreaming Genocide? – How Digital Media and Technologies Transform Social Movements in Solidarity with Palestine

Digital media have empowered people in organizing transnational activism without limits on time, space, identity, and ideology (Bennett, 2003; Castell, 2010; Howard & Hussain, 2013; Olaniran & Williams, 2020). Theories of social movements (McAdam, McCarthy & Zald, 1996; Meyer & Tarrow, 1998; Tarrow, 2011) explain how diaspora communities could transform regional resistance movements into transnational solidarity campaigns through the use of digital media (Kumar, 2018). For decades, Palestinians in Israel/Palestine and the diaspora have utilized digital media to amplify the effects of political activism beyond the borderlines (Kumar, 2018; Siapera, 2014; Shehadeh, 2023; Tawil-Souri & Aouragh, 2014). The genocide in Gaza since October 2023, which Palestinian writer Susan Abulhawa described as “the first livestreamed genocide in history” (Sanders & Al Jazeera Investigative Unit, Al-Jazeera, 2024), has further transformed the ways in which local and global social movements and collective actions connect and take place.

This proposed research will critically look at how changes in the narratives and the framing of the #FreePalestine movements across the globe transform and reshape online and offline social movement spaces and discourses. It seeks to illustrate the extent to which mediated visualities (Mirzoeff, 2018) are interconnected with the nexus of power, shaping the perception of humanity within the realm of Palestinian resistance and activism. This proposed research asks the following questions: How do the portrayals and representations of Palestinians become intricately involved in the visual politics of who is considered human, what it means to bear witness, and how one should respond in the context of humanity, and ultimately shape and transform movements led by diasporic Palestinians on the ground?