Description
This paper investigates the mediation of the war on Gaza, drawing mostly on social media content and mainstream Western news coverage. It unpacks how the Palestinian solidarity movement reacted to mainstream Western media complicity and racialised bias in war coverage. It asks: With the outpouring of visual content documenting atrocity, how has the Palestinian solidarity movement represented the history of structural violence and colonisation in the region? I discuss the different ways that history has been summoned, both in its past and future iterations. History emerges through slogans, frames and visions that perceive and discuss the ethnic cleansing in Gaza through the Nakba (the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestinians). History is also futurized in calls for archiving for the future and insisting that Palestinians will find justice in future history. I conclude with addressing what these tactics reveal about the shelf life of “witnessing” as a post WWII moral and political framework to discuss atrocity.
