Confined Offline, Traversing Online Palestinian Mobility through the Prism of the Internet, Mobilities, 2011 (original) (raw)

Palestinian Virtual Networks: Mapping Contemporary Linkages

This working paper investigates the Palestinian diaspora in the context of transnational digital linkages. Mapping results confirm that the World Wide Web has revolutionized both the opportunities and the motivations surrounding community advocacy. Indeed, the Palestinian case is no exception; few communities have experienced such complex struggles for statehood in such a public display. For over 50 years, conflict has remained rooted in the identity of many Palestinians, and present-day diaspora networks are no different. Virtual activity largely focuses on current news and political affairs. In addition, mapping results indicate that advocacy is often expressed in the form of personal reflection blogging, ground protest mobilization and dynamic media outlets. The paper concludes by highlighting both the virtual and the physical impacts of networked linkages as beyond rooted struggles for statehood, narratives continue to evolve.

Digital Uprising: Palestinian Activism in the Cyber Colonial Era

This study investigated the evolution and effect of Palestinian digital activism within the setting of cyber colonialism, accentuating the extraordinary capability of digital platforms for political resistance. The ascent of digital media has introduced another time of for Palestinians, empowering them to conquer physical and political hindrances forced by the Israeli occupation. This examination dug into the essential utilization of social media and other internet-based platforms by Palestinians to document human rights abuses, mobilize global support, and challenge dominant narratives. It likewise inspected the double-edged nature of digital technologies, which act as devices for both empowerment and surveillance. Through happy examination, contextual investigations, and meetings with activists, the review features successes and challenges of Palestinian digital activism. The discoveries highlight the meaning of digital spaces in molding worldwide discernment and encouraging fortitude, while additionally uncovering the tireless dangers of restriction and cyber reconnaissance. The paper concluded with proposals for improving the adequacy of digital activism and recommended future examination bearings to additionally grasp its effect on the Palestinian struggle for self-determination.

The Palestinian diaspora on the Web: Between de-territorialization and re-territorialization

This article analyzes Web-based networks of Palestinian communities in Germany, France, Italy, Austria, Australia, the United States, Canada, Spain, Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. The findings show a thematic and demographic shift from organizations of Palestinian communities abroad to a transnational solidarity network focused on Palestinian rights and the Boycott movement. Although the Palestinian Territories function as the network’s strong center of gravity, analysis of the references reveals that diaspora and non-diaspora actors operate as two distinct but intertwined networks: while diaspora actors are unique in putting emphasis on community as activity type and on diaspora and the right of return as primary cause, non-diaspora actors are mainly dedicated to solidarity as activity and Palestinian rights and the Boycott movement as primary cause. Despite this, ties between diaspora and non-diaspora actors are stronger than among diaspora actors, which indicates that part of the dynamics of Palestinian communities is manifest not just between diaspora communities, but mostly between diaspora communities and civil society organizations in their host societies.

Cyberactivism and Digital Resistance in Palestine

In this paper I explore how uniquely Palestinians are using the digital world for grass-root non-violent resistance and activism. And I address the question of whether they jumped in to the bandwagon of the Arab Spring snowball of social media or they started earlier. Palestinians aptly thrive through the digital world, just like the last Kuffiyeh Company in Palestine, which represents a non-violent resistance dynamic, is thriving through marketing online. And like the last Olive Trees Palestinians tie themselves to. I also point how and why for two decades would cyberactivism, digital cameras, and citizen journalism be special to Palestinians compared to its neighboring countries. I do this by both interviewing and analyzing specific popular social network accounts, sites, and online activists who posses high outreach, both in English (targeting international crowds) or in Arabic (targeting more local crowds).

Palestine's virtual borders 2.0: From a non-place to a user-generated space

In 2003 the Palestinian state received official recognition on the Web before it was established on the ground. The delegation of the .ps Country code Top level domain (CcTld) to the Palestinian Authority and its inclusion in the UN list of recognized countries and territories created an official Web-space in which a Palestinian state operated side-by-side with other sovereign states. Yet with the rise of Web 2.0 applications, the official representation of the Palestinian state partially disappeared. This study focuses on the shift in the spatial representation of the Palestinian state on the Web, from an officially acknowledged national Web space, followed by its partial disappearance in Web 2.0 spaces, to its reconstruction as a user-generated space. It examines Palestine’s virtual borders on various Web 2.0 mapping platforms, along with the listing (and non-listing) of Palestine as a country in the registration procedure of popular Web 2.0 applications. It shows that on most mapping platforms the Palestinian Territory is underrepresented, and that the country's official representation on the UN list of recognized countries and territories is often omitted or modified on social media sites’ registration forms. After analyzing the geo-politics of social media's drop-down country lists, this study argues that Web 2.0 spaces are unofficial Web-spaces, in which official representations of countries are not determined by diplomacy or approved by international institutions, but rather by interaction between commercial platforms and their users. Faced with the partial disappearance of their homeland, Palestinian users both in the Palestinian Territory and in the Diaspora thus become placeless participants of Web 2.0 spaces. They attempt to reclaim the virtual representation of their home country as a sovereign Palestinian state by protesting, uploading, tagging and generating content on Web 2.0 platforms. On platforms such as Facebook, Blogger and Google Maps, user activism and user-generated content has led to a spatial transformation from the country's non-listing and non-placement, to its official inclusion. Finally, this article makes a contribution to the theorization of political Web spaces by arguing that the Palestinian case complicates current views on relationships between the Web and the ground. Unlike the common perception that the virtual is grounded in the real, the over-representation of a Palestinian state in official Web spaces, in parallel with its underrepresentation in unofficial Web spaces, and users' treatment of virtual spaces as real spaces, indicate that these realms actually tend to merge, at least in the case of contested Web terrains and unsettled struggles for self-determination.

Postspatial, Postcolonial: Accessing Palestine in the Digital

Social Text, 2020

This article centers two new media projects that imagine Palestinian decolonization, given the occupation of Palestinian land: news site Al Jazeera English’s 360-degree video tour of al-Aqsa compound in East Jerusalem and Palestinian grassroots organization Udna’s three-dimensional rendering of destroyed village Mi’ar. These digital texts reimagine Palestinian access to land as a community-driven and intergenerational project. In this analysis, access is formulated as a term that invokes the following: new-media analyses of the digital divide (or differential resources for obtaining new media across lines of race, nation, gender, etc.); disability studies’ notions of access as intimately tied to political power and infrastructure; and postcolonial studies’ criticisms of colonial access in tourism and resource extraction of the global South. The article brings together these discursive nodes to formulate an understanding of space that imagines decolonial futurity. This future-oriented political practice works toward a vision of Palestine determined by Palestinians, as opposed to limiting pragmatic wars of maneuver. This inquiry therefore is centrally concerned with the ways activists for Palestine employ immersive digital media to formulate and work toward an attachment to decolonial futurity that is both practical and utopian.

Performing Palestinian identity online: Resistance and reinvention

This textual analysis of Palestinian blog posts interrogates the expression of Palestinian identity online during and after the failure of the peace talks led by US Secretary of State John Kerry in 2013 and 2014. Results indicate an unyielding reinforcement of resistance narratives alongside a youthful reinvention of collective identity as the decades-long dream for an independent state fades. It also ponders how the online performance of identity allows the speakers to make the personal political as well as public for their audience and for one another.