Media, Globalization, and the (Un)Making of the Palestinian Cause

Abstract

This article examines the Palestinian cause’s relationship to globalization: how it has been represented, mediated, and co-opted since the 1950s, and how it echoed rhetorically, politically, and ideologically by different groups; and how these resulted in both wider attention and obscurity. Particular moments of the Palestinian cause are highlighted, beginning with the movement’s circulation within third world liberation struggles and anti-imperial movements, which thrust the Palestinian struggle to prominence in contemporary history and across media platforms. By the 1980s, Palestine became deployed as an unresolved system of imperialism, and as media attention expanded the result was an abstraction of the struggle’s anti-colonial origins. This tension of attention and abstraction is discernible in contemporary solidarity movements on human rights and social justice. The article concludes that as the cause continues to gain universal traction, the core political issues are rendered distant and mediated spectacles.

Notes

¹ The Palestinian cause is not homogeneous. There have been and continues to be various and opposing views among Palestinians as to what the solution might be, how to approach it, who is to take the reins, and to what ends. Every movement changes tactics, reconfigures goals, accommodates itself to the predilections of key supporters, and echoes ideological changes in its era’s geopolitics. These internal changes fall outside the purview of my analysis.

² Palestinian population breakdowns are as follows: 1.4 million in Israel; 2.7 million in the West Bank; 1.8 million in Gaza; 3.3 million in Jordan; half a million in Lebanon; and about 650,000 in Syria (before the latest upheavals). Of these, approximately 5 million are “registered refugees.”

³ Globalization here is the movement of three inter-related processes: 1) the geopolitical contexts of the cause (dispossession of a nation, rise of pan-Arabism and revolutionary movements, Israeli occupation, intifada, “peace” process and state-building efforts); 2) ideological shifts in what has constituted global solidarity (national liberation, street politics, state-building, human rights, global justice); 3) changes in technologies and circulations of media.

⁴ The Declaration was, ironically from a Palestinian perspective, drawn in the aftermath of the Holocaust in order to prevent another mass-genocide. Signed in December 1948, it came in the aftermath of the displacement of more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland.

⁵ For example, the first exhibit in an American museum fully devoted to “Arab artists”—at New York’s New Museum in 2014—titled Here and Elsewhere, explicitly referenced Godard’s influence.

⁶ The Oslo Accords formalized the recognition between the PLO and Israel of each other. As an interim agreement, it institutionalized the Palestinian Authority as the legitimate representative of Palestinians in parts of the West Bank and Gaza; it did not, however, formally end Israeli occupation.