 Thank you so much for coming on a Friday afternoon. I know it's the end of the week and it's difficult, but thanks nevertheless. I'm sure some more people are trickling in, but we are going to start on time. So welcome to the Center for Palestine Studies, annual lecture. I am Dina Matar. I'm the chair of the Center for Palestine Studies for this year, and I've been a chair for the past six years, following on from the footsteps of Professor Gilbert Ashkar, who has done considerable work to support the Center and to support Palestine Studies and Palestinians in many ways. So the annual lecture began under the leadership of Professor Gilbert Ashkar, who's support and consistent principles on Palestine and all forms of pressure have never faltered. So special thanks for all your work, activism and support, and also I thank the other members of the Center for Palestine Studies Advisory Board, Dr. Nimmer Sultani and Professor Adam Hania, who's there, and in absence, Professor Isaac Derwaze, and also all members of Center for Palestine Studies and supporters. So CPS was formed in 2012 as the first intellectual space in the UK for the academic study of Palestine as one of the most pressing global concerns, a concern that has now been made visible to the whole world by the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing practices elsewhere. Previously, the format of this was lectured with one kind of senior academic speaking, but due to various considerations this year we had to change the format and we are going to have a panel of speakers, including myself, to talk about media and Gaza, which I think is one of the most important topics to talk about, but obviously one of the most important topics, and I'm sure that our discussion will bring out some aspects of media coverage of the genocide and issues related to that. Before I move on to introduce the speakers, which I'll do very briefly, I think we should mark International Women's Day and by remembering and speaking about the continuous struggle by Palestinian women, mothers, sisters, daughters, and their immense contributions to the liberation movement for a free Palestine. We also should remember and mourn all the women, poets, writers, artists, journalists, and aid workers who have been killed by Israel in Gaza over the past five months. We salute the women of Gaza for their struggle and resilience and above all for the humanity they have shown during the daily fight for their families' lives amid the horrific deprivation of food, safe drinking water, and healthcare that is being imposed on the people of Gaza. As activists gather on every platform, heartfelt and won by women's rights advocates following decades of struggle, we must raise our voices against military occupation and its violence. Our conversation joint lecture today, you know it's in the format of 15 to 20 minutes intervention, is titled Gaza Media Worlds Beyond Enclosures. Each speaker will talk for a while on areas related to media and communication, research, and also concerns, while also reflecting on the need to understand why media is central to politics, society, and culture, if not for its visibility, rights, and the law. So in terms of order of speaking, we will start with Dr. Khalid Haroub from Northwestern University in Doha. He is Associate Professor in Residence at the Faculty of Liberal Arts at Northwestern University in Qatar. He is the author of Hamas, A Beginner's Guide, which was published in 2006 and then republished in 2010. He also published other books, including Hamas, Political Thought and Practice in 2000 and edited Political Islam, Context versus Ideology in 2011. And he has been working on religious broadcasting in the Middle East, a book that was published in 2012. In Arabic, he is a well-known author, poet, novelist, if I may say, writer, columnist of all sorts, a jack of all trades, and he has published quite a lot in his native language. Dr. Helga Tawil Suri, our friend and colleague from New York University, is Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, and a Professor of Middle East and Islamic Studies and Director of Graduate Studies at New York University in New York. She works on issues to do with technology, media culture, territory, and politics in the Middle East with a particular focus on Palestine, Israel. Her work seeks to challenge the notion of an open and borderless world by looking at how technologies and their infrastructures, such as cell phones and the internet, impose new forms of borders and controls, and work in explicitly territorial and political ways. She is equally interested in thinking about how spaces and things that are overtly territorial and political, like borders, checkpoints, and identification cards, themselves function in cultural ways. Helga has published a wide range of peer-reviewed articles and invited chapters and books. She is co-editor of the 2016 book called Gaza as Metaphor, which she and I collaborated on, and we are currently in the process of finishing the editing process of another co-edited volume called Producing Palestine. Apart from working as a scholar and a writer and a researcher, she is also a filmmaker, right, and an artist. So Ejak, well, Ejin of all trade. Let's not think about gender differences here. So it comes to me. I am a professor of political communication and Arab media, and I'm the chair of the Center for Palestine Studies at SOAS. I work on the intersection of politics, communication, and culture. My first monogram is called What It Means to Be Palestinian is a composite narrative or a people's history of Palestinians before the Nakba to the Oslo Agreement in 1993. And I am currently trying to work on a sequel, bringing this composite narrative to the present, the format of which keeps changing all the time. So again, I have co-authored a book with Lina Khatib on Hezbollah, Politics and Communication, and again, co-editor with Helga on the books that I mentioned, and co-editor with my friend, Zahra Harb, of narrating conflict in the Middle East. So the format will be, again, as I said, 15 to 20 minutes, and we will be strict with the timing. I think we will start with Khaled and then me and then Helga, and you will find out why we did it in this order. This is a recorded lecture. At the end of our talks, we will have questions and answers, and we have some student ambassadors who go around with the microphones, and they will identify themselves when the time comes. But for the meantime, can you please join me in welcoming our speakers who have travelled a long way? Good evening, everyone, and thank you very much for coming again, as Dina said, on Friday evening, which is very precious in the post-colonial world. Well, thank you, Dina, again, for the very generous introduction, and thank you specifically for not finishing the other part of the metaphor, Jack of Oldt, maybe master of none. But, again, I have to express my gratitude for inviting me. This place is very dear to me, in fact. I used to give short courses on politics and Islam and the rest of it when I was in Cambridge, with the centre of Middle East. So I am very familiar to the landscape and the place, and really excited. Now, my talk is divided into two parts. One part is a broader perspective into what's happening in Gaza that I think and I hope could provide some fresh perspective, could be helpful. And the other part I will delve into the media component of the first part, which is the overarching one. When I try to put a title for myself and then for this talk about the remarks that I'm going to be discussing, I put the following, the Gaza genocide and ultimate manifestation of deep colonialism. And the whole notion and the whole maybe idea that I'm trying to discuss with you tonight is deep colonialism. And I think the sheer genocidal practices that we are seeing on a daily basis nowadays in Gaza need all of us to maybe re-examine, revisit our traditional, conventional ways of understanding what has been happening in Palestine over the past eight decades. This is a genocide. This is an event that goes beyond contemplation, beyond description. As we speak now, maybe when we finish this meeting an hour and a half, we will have at least maybe between 10 to 20 people died in Gaza. And this is happening live. So this is a living genocide. In every single case of genocide, I think that we have discovered in the academia and the media and the research, we have to go back and dig into evidence. How many people had died? What kind of evidence we have? The bodies, maybe the bones, the graveyards and this and that. We don't need this. In Gaza, this is happening on TV screens, streamlining on our mobile phones. So there is a uniqueness, which is a shocking uniqueness on the brutality of the event while the whole world is watching. And for five months, not only the scale of things, but also even the timeline is shocking. So I thought maybe we need some new perspectives. But I am trying here to connect part of my research and this is the subject of my coming book called Deep Colonialism in Palestine. Trying to re-understand what has been happening, the nature of colonialism in Palestine. And I thought, and this is the thesis of the book that we need, there has been multi-layered colonialism in Palestine. It started in the 19th century all the way through until this very moment. And this deep colonialism in fact is constituted of three layers. Three layers that have been functioning together from day one until now, playing different roles, but none of them cease to exist. And these three, we have three forms of colonialism in Palestine in my view and according to what I'm trying to discuss in the book. And now I am using this to understand the Gaza Genocide. The first form is imperial colonialism and the second one religious colonialism and the third one settler colonialism. We all know settler colonialism and this is maybe the common, let's say, description and understanding of what's happening in Palestine, which is very helpful of course, but I think it has become maybe insufficient to understand the entirety of the colonial project in Palestine. And when I combine these three, imperial colonialism, which means of course the imperial interests behind the great powers that have been supportive of the Zionist projects since day one. So you can look in Great Britain, France, the US and the rest of the suspected ones. That started maybe early on and it is still until this very moment. What we are seeing in Gaza is this very strong imperial interest in supporting the project. So it is still live and kicking, this imperial dimension of the colonial project in Palestine. So we cannot just simply say this is a settler colonial project. It is still at the core, imperial enterprise. So you have the imperial colonial element I think is still here and it helps us in understanding this massive support to Israel that we have witnessed from day one after October the 7th. October the 8th, American and European British militiaships were cruising to the Mediterranean, to the shores of Palestine from the second day. So this is one thing. So I think, and of course you can go back through the Cold War era at any point in time, you will see this element, the imperial component of the colonial project in Palestine functioning and operating very strongly without any slowness. The second one, and I am mentioning these ones not in a time ban or successive manner. In fact they started maybe at the same time and then they kept kind of moving on in parallel. So there is no again consecutive kind of manner or fashion in understanding, in linking these three forms of colonialism. Religious colonialism started even before the Zionist project in Palestine as we all know. We have the movement of the restoration of the Jews to Palestine and this is a purely Christian movement and it started maybe a century before even the idea of Zionism. So you have this thinking within certain Christian groups and churches believing that bringing or gathering the Jews, the Jews of the whole world to Palestine is a condition to the appearance of the Messiah. So this is a Christian endeavor, a Christian project. Herzl was not even born and the whole idea of Zionism. So when Zionism and Herzl came into being the land was so fertile to the idea. You had a century, a century of dozens and dozens of projects intensified in the mid-19th century with the British Council in Jerusalem and the American Council in Jerusalem believing strong believers in this and they thought their mission was not to serve Britain, not to serve America, it was in fact to serve this idea. The idea of bringing the Jews to Palestine so that we speed up the appearance of the Messiah. Now the same idea, this group has evolved, became even bigger, more influential and now until Mike Pence, who was the vice president of Trump, he was part of this movement. So you have the Evangelicals nowadays, Christian Zionist movements. They are the continuation of this. So from that one early 19th century until now you have this trust, the religious trust, support of Israel and the Zionist project all the way through. And then the third component which is, that is we all know, the settler colonial component and it started with the Jews now coming to Palestine supported by these great powers and having this and that kind of help from different. And then settling in Palestine. Before and then they became, even the whole settler colonial project became even more intensified and successful after the creation of Israel until this very moment now spreading into the West Bank and elsewhere. So you have the settler colonial component meaning I am having now these European Jews coming from Europe and settling in Palestine. The settler colonial perspective for me does not explain the entire in fact and the magnitude of the project and the success of the project so far. And nowadays what is happening, what protects the genocide in Gaza is these three components of colonialism. The imperial component, the religious component and the settler of course component. If you think if you pick any one of these I have to move because of the time. If you pick any one of these you can find loads of evidence. Again we all remember the statement that was said by the Blinken in Tel Aviv in the second day of October the 7th that I am here not as secretary state or secretary in America but as a Jew. And then you have so many statements in fact maybe one can write a book about statements coming from the religious the Christian Zionist constituency in America saying we have to support and anybody that supports Israel is the blessed by God and the rest of the discourse. Well I have I think wasted most of my time in this. So little has been left to the media component let me skip this and then come to the media thing which I think because of the because of the genocide in Gaza I think we as academics, researchers and activists we have ended up with so many questions at the conceptual theoretical level how can we approach these things. Now within this genocidal event we can identify genocidal diplomacy this back and forth nonsense time-wasting diplomacy this is a genocidal diplomacy that is meant to allow the criminal to continue with their murder in fact you have genocidal genocidal aid as well the whole provision of aid is so genocidal again just to provide and to extend you know the time and the space for Israel to continue with whatever they are doing on the ground and then you have genocidal media so the whole media thing is again and we don't need any evidence every one of us has their own anecdotes and stories about the media the role of the media, western media ministry of western media because you have some other medias that we have to respect and they have played great role against this media but I think we need to think in the global politics but also in academia in how we understand the world that within the genocidal media and against I speed up my remarks to finish I hope in time I think we can again identify some main features, main characteristics one of them is I call it strategic lying so lying is part of any warfare we know this but the strategic lying is far more deeper in depth and bigger in scale that I lie in your face I am telling you know the hospital was was ahli hospital or a shifa hospital was fired on by the Palestinians and we all see this on the TV that this is big lie so I keep lying and this lie is part of the narrative it flies and travels as part of the stories so strategic lying has been part of the media genocide I think and we can talk even maybe more about this. The second thing is I call it applying the titanic deception model and I teach this I invented this maybe for my students back in North Austin University media students so this is I don't know this is kind of attractive this is about titanic so about titanic I ask them all the main celebrities the main figures in the titanic guys anybody remember in the titanic Jack and Rose so Jack and Rose so the whole we spent the three bloody hours you know following you know what Jack and Rose are doing and in the back of the story back of the you can see hundreds of people you know nameless faceless people dying drowned in the ocean nobody cared about them nobody was scared about them we just were emotionally even black male to care about Jack and Rose now the whole issue about the hostages this is the modern Jack and Rose everybody talks about the hostages so I don't care about you know thousands even if they come to 30,000 Palestinians killed if you have 100,000 Palestinians injured and wounded these are the faceless nameless guys on the ship part of the furniture part of the scene but you know the most important element of the story is Jack and Rose so I think this dramatization of Jack and Rose against the rest of us is something deeply racist why do you give more value to the lives of Jack and Rose to than the value of the rest of the ship maybe we can accept this in novels and I don't know filmmaking because you have to personalize it and then you have to make a story okay this is fine maybe in drama but we should not accept this in real life we should not accept the titanic racist approach to be applied to real life the Sudanese nowadays who are killed in thousands in Sudan nobody cares about them these are human beings as well so I think we need within the media genocidal apparatus that we have been witnessing about as we can identify this racist approach totally the final thing and this is the good news Leena the final point which is this which hunting of the opponents so anybody who says otherwise this is the main narrative this is the story the sacred law is the story which is October the 7th and the hostages period so if you go beyond this then this is you are anti-Semite you are anti-Israel you are the long list and then by by this which hunting what I am achieving is spreading this chilling effect intimidation so that I target Deena then everybody else around Deena they will be scared and then they will take few steps back and this is what I want lowering the ceiling so this kind of attack to against Jalbir against this long list it is not meant to intimidate Jalbir he doesn't care anyway we know this but you have circles around him and wider circles they will think it twice if they dare to say the same thing that Jalbir has said so this is what is meant what is in fact has been targeted they targeted me most of my colleagues at the university they took one step back they said no I am not going to risk myself otherwise I will be put on the canary mission list or professors watch list whatever so all these lists the list of honor by the way but not everyone is ready to do that and then the drowning effect I call it the drowning effect they keep you busy in defending yourself and this is within the witch hunting process so instead of you engaged in the issue about Gaza and talking about Gaza and defending and whatever you are doing now you are engaged about defending yourself and saying this is not what I said this is another day they sent me I think at Texas university or something they removed one of my books that you mentioned on Hamas Hamas beginner's guide and it was on a display they had some I don't know book fair or something and then a group of Zionist students they said this is anti-Semite it was translated into seven books seven languages and highly I don't know received it's not apologetic of Hamas very critical academic book anyway and then I sent them a link said well you can find my book on Israel's national library so my two books on Hamas you can find them there and then the American and then they sent me long list of I have to answer what I said in the book wasting my maybe two three days of writing no I'm not going to answer these things call me whatever you like but the idea is to drown you with all these emails back and forth back and forth until there was I was hoping to tell you some another anecdote but I think I finish here and thank you very much thank you Khalid and I think my talk is not going to be very intellectual maybe trying to think about the concept of media worlds and trying to think about media worlds in relation to Palestinians in Gaza the world media worlds that we wanted to use today come from the title of a book an edited book by edited by Leila Boulogne, Faye Ginsberg and Brian Larkin a way back maybe about 20 25 years ago and in their edited book which is called media worlds anthropology of a new terrain we use that the term to refer to ordinary people's engagement with and use of media and to question the role and power of the media in the world from the perspective of those who use it consume it or produce media so it doesn't come from the perspective of the power elite so media worlds in a way as I understood it from that book refers to cotidian social processes of production consumption and they can be seen as spaces where ordinary people including those who are marginal talk back to power while engaging in self representation and self visibility in the context of a brutal war and in conditions of total destruction of the people their lives and histories the question that came to my mind was what do media worlds mean for Palestinians forcefully enclosed in ever shrinking places spaces of confinement and enclosures where there are silenced and rendered voiceless while simultaneously being subjected to Israeli genocidal and propagandist practices and language that violently intervene in the political and the social the representational and the discursive I found myself asking what are the media worlds of people in Gaza where their existence is at stake and then when their lives are reduced to bad lives how can we reflect on media worlds what they make possible or impossible what they tell us or what they don't tell us what happens to the potential of speaking and acting when destruction including the deliberate destruction of entire families is what Palestinians are experiencing in real life and so I asked myself what do these media worlds tell us about Palestinians experiences without ourselves reducing the people that we are talking about that is the Palestinians in Gaza to mere subjects of our inquiries and of our studies so I must point out at the outset that the talk here is suggestive and it's not conclusive it's just you know kind of talking but it's a kind of trying to think about media worlds in a different ways but I begin with the proposition that media worlds are real and imagined social and political fields of conflict and flux they are fields of conflict over voice, representation spaces, lives, propaganda disinformation and narratives media worlds are complex and interlocking and they are more so for Palestinians in Gaza who have to condemn I propose with three different and competing yet interlocking media worlds what I suggest is what might call the media worlds of mainstream western media that have been active in legitimizing Israeli violence against the Palestinians and promoting anti-Palestinian racism we have many examples of that I don't need to provide them even a cursory examination of the discourse of these media and the language that they use and you know people might ask what is mainstream media it's the what we call legacy media it shows that they repeat without questioning of the language that is used by Israeli officials and army personnel and they also propagate without scrutiny vicious Israeli PR campaigns aimed at dehumanizing Palestinians and legitimizing Israel's strategies and plans in fact a quick content analysis of media reporting shows the repetition of phrases for example Israel has the right to defend itself as constructed legitimizing discourse for any discussion without paying attention or discussing the consequences of exercising this right to ordinary Palestinians nor to the context in which it emerges or the fact that Palestinians are made invisible and nonexistent in this language what is overlooked is the fact that Palestinians have been and you know Khaled gave us a bit of historical background around imperial colonialism is that Palestinians have been subjected to a state of permanent war which Cameroonian philosopher and political activist Achille Membi sees as the defining principle of colonization and continued colonizing practices he says and I quote a fact remains though in modern philosophical thought and European political practice and imaginary the colony represents the site where sovereignty consists fundamentally in the exercise of power outside the law and where peace is more likely to take on the fact of a war without end unquote so in the media worlds of the mainstream western media and I must not generalize here the war against Gaza is mostly mediated through an overwhelmingly one sided Israeli perspective of the war and presented through the voices of Mr. Benjamin Netanyahu the IDF and the hostages and their families this type of mediation constructs Israel as a nation aggressor and victim but the strong linkages between the three mean that personal traumas of victims experienced during and after the attack of October the 7th are difficult to narrate separately from the catastrophic war which was said to be waged in response to an Israeli national trauma in the process Palestinians in Gaza have become less visible and their suffering risks being subordinated to government agendas which is a problem that has been exacerbated by the continued denial by Israel of access to Gaza access to western journalists in Gaza the shutdown of communication networks the killing of Palestinian journalists the censoring of social media posts and accounts all of which make it possible or extremely certainly extremely challenging to document, produce and importantly to respond our colleague at the LSE Lilly Shuliaraki notes media representations of war not only communicate the unspeakable horror of the battlefield but also ask us to imagine who we should be and how we should think and act in response to military violence but understanding how representations of suffering in Gaza act on us as spectators invoking our attention yet deflecting our gaze from other important realities can be helpful in thinking about what might be missing it might also help us consider where else we might look for answers that can guide our efforts to act in solidarity with all those affected by the war both near the battlefield and even I come to the second media that overvisibility of violence death and destruction that is kind of permanently on the screen the battlefield in this media world is mostly represented as Gaza though we know of course that the battlefield extends well beyond Gaza and that violence has been and continues to be an extraordinary important aspect of all Palestinian lives as Edward Said noted a long while ago in images, videos, commentaries and narratives these media worlds show us the personal social and political impact of the war and particularly the scale of Palestinian suffering the difference between this world and the first one is stark and troubling as it always has been it's not new that there is differences between the western and the Arabic media particularly in relation to Palestine and yet in this media world Palestinian narratives are tightly framed again by the dynamics of their excessive mediation mediation happens through imagery of the aftermath of IDF bombing campaigns decimated refugee camps houses and schools as well as overflowing hospitals filled with the injured and dying images of women wailing and desperate to find their shelter and crying for their offspring and over the dead mediation also happens through the various voices that speak on the Palestinian's behalf the elite that is the journalist, Middle East expert the authoritative maybe Anurwa Chief Executive and other UN NGO leaders witnesses, doctors and NGO staff working in locations where Palestinians have been forced to move to and of course the heroic Palestinian journalists on the ground these media narratives are overwhelmingly focused not unexpectedly on the scale of the catastrophe being experienced by Palestinians and as researchers have shown in privileging the spectacle of suffering when the drama of violence and humanitarian disaster is the overwhelming focus, context and personal voices can easily be lost Palestinians have certainly been invited to explain their grief and trauma but when their narratives are limited to trauma and loss the coverage also objectifies their status as an urgent quote humanitarian cause unquote in the immediate present rather than quote up in long term chronic violence perpetrated by a settler colonial state simultaneously the coverage can limit discussions of the effects of the war on Palestine's rich political, social and cultural fabric the destruction of which is a crucial aspect of the violence meted out against the Palestinians through practices of ethno-side domicide, edu-side and memory-side killing whole families so killing Palestinian memory finally this mediation also obscures the ways in which different Arab countries have used the war for their own purposes and their political agendas so the third media world is the media worlds of Palestinians in Gaza these worlds are ever shrinking online and offline worlds mobile phones, other services that they use to kind of communicate with the outside world these worlds are increasingly dangerous and surveilled they are heavily mediated as well these are shrinking worlds given the Israeli persistent practice of turning off communication at will and when it pleases and also suspiciously before it launches a big attack in which many Palestinians are killed these media worlds are controlled by the structural unequal features of social media platforms, algorithmic bias, misinformation and propaganda they are disrupted spaces too and yet these media worlds remain some of the very few spaces for ordinary Palestinians to communicate and talk to each other and for creating media with respective of disruptions as we see in the increasing personal stories of atrocities and survival in Gaza it is in these worlds that Gazans escape Israel's territorial and communication siege and it is in these worlds that Palestinians perform Palestinianness what it means to be Palestinians as an anti-colonial identity and it is in these media worlds that pro-Palestinian solidarity is performed as well as such at the very basic level these media worlds might provide some solace to Gazans and for us watching from afar as they show the people that much of the world's population even if not official representatives recognizes and supports Palestinian demands of political rights or perhaps more simply demands for life void of constant violence in these worlds we see what Abul-Ughud and the co-editors might have intended us to see and look at that despite the incredible destruction Palestinians are producing, talking, sharing, resharing and following and are being followed particularly we have the followers of the brilliant Palestinian journalist who have become household names and then so we have the from the voices of the journalist to the voices of the children of Gaza telling their stories to the mothers and women speaking of heroic attempts to find food and care for the wounded to the voice of Ziyad I don't know whether you've read Ziyad a 35 year old Palestinian who tells us of everyday lives in the rubble of what was once Gaza in his regular column in the Israeli garden newspapers when I see his writings more and more erratic in their appearance I am reminded of the words of thousands of others seeking to tell their stories and reminding us of the words of martyred intellectual and poet Refad Al-Arir who wrote before he was killed by an Israeli strike if I must die you must live and tell my story and I'm reminded of Edward Zaid who knew as much back in 1986 when he sought to wrestle with in with the fact that it is the Palestinians very existence and presence that matters in this equation and as he wrote and I quote to the Israelis whose incomparable military and political power dominates us we are at the periphery the image that will not go away every assertion of our nonexistence every attempt to spirit us away every new effort to prove that we were never really there simply raises the question of why so much denial of and such energy expended on what was not there could it be that even as alien outsiders we dog that military might with our moral claim our insistence that we would prefer not to leave not to abandon Palestine sorry it's a bit emotional so I've made it a point to actually start every talk that I give since October with a kind of preamble which is that Gaza is Palestine and is central to Palestine morally politically economically ethically I don't know historically and so on so even though we speak of Gaza as Gaza we should never forget that Gaza is also part of a much larger whole so I try to sort of play around with the title of the panel I think I'm talking about so I just sort of move things around and so the title that I'm proposing from my own sort of talk here is Enclosed Gaza Beyond Media so there've been I think two tropes that have been coming out of Gaza for the past few months the first is where are the brothers where is our kin where are the other Arabs the other Muslim nations who with the exception of Yemen are kind of nowhere to be seen or heard or felt not necessarily obviously in the realm of the popular but at least in the institutional or governmental support level the second trope that I think also kind of comes from the past few months is it comes from a sort of manifest belief in the power of what I'm going to call old media or legacy media or mainstream media or something like this which is let them see the horrors that the world is committing in the hope that us seeing these things is going to somehow change global opinion which would then ultimately change institutional governmental policy towards Palestine these are not new tropes these existed for example after 1982 in terms of Subran Shedila we heard them in 2002 we've heard them in 2014 after the bombardment of Gaza then and many many other examples throughout history I think it's time to move beyond these tropes and I think it's time instead to listen to a third thing that has been coming out of Gaza over the past 150 plus days and this has everything to do with our shared sense of exasperation fear, disbelief rage, sadness anguish, I feel like the adjectives at some point I don't even know how we feel anymore but anyways this trope this third new kind of trope is manifested in the images of despicable almost pornographic violence of bodies blown apart and emaciated starving children and it comes in phrases like this how many more killed and maimed babies will it take what number of killed will be enough what more could you possibly need to see okay and I don't know how much you've been watching things but this is something that's actually being repeated over the past few months and so if we listen I think this trope is actually telling us something profound what else is there to see if we've been listening to Gaza not just for since October but for the past few years Gaza's actually already pushed us beyond a point of language and beyond the point of representation Gaza I think has far exceeded the threshold of unlivability which is what the UN report back in 2012 had already predicted for Gaza so Gaza today really marks I think a point of revolution and when I say revolution here I mean a turning over a kind of fundamental shift in direction so you know Einstein's quip of is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result it's time for us to do something a little different right and so I'd like to propose that the answer to what else is there to see begins with beyond media so in asking us this question I think Gazans and Palestinians have actually recognized the limits of the representational and the limits of media and this I kind of want to suggest sort of further builds on a kind of another argument made over the last few months since October which is that there is no going back to the status quo on the ground and that I'm going to sort of then suggest that there's also no going back to the status quo on a mediatic level so the challenge ahead I don't think is more representation or better representation because that would be akin to doing more and more of the same thing and expecting a different kind of result the status quo being here and the representation in the media as we've largely approached it throughout the latter half of the 20th century and the early 21st century what I'm referring to as old media or legacy media or mainstream media we can refer to it by name the BBC, the New York Times the Wall Street Journal Agence France-Presse the list kind of goes on I can refer to it by technology or by medium, newspapers, broadcasting TV, cable and satellite news essentially the one to many model of media, a model that perhaps works for propaganda but not one that fits our needs of radical change, of revolution of turning over so if Ilan Pappe has been suggesting lately that this is the beginning of the Zionist project then I'd like to suggest that this is also the beginning of the end of media as we have historically known it another way to sort of put it is that if Zionism has partially been a public relations project then the media has also actually partially been an expansive colonizing territorial project and it's time to obviously move on and I think the landscape has already shifted and so let me say why, let me try to explain a little bit why I have this kind of conviction so starting in the 1960s throughout the 1970s and into the present moment us Palestinians have been obsessed with letting the world know that we exist and what our plight is about and we first kind of declared our existence spectacularly by which I literally mean as a spectacle by hijacking and blowing airplanes or as in the 1972 Palestinian cinema manifesto of the time would have it by holding a camera in one hand and a gun in the other. I'm not suggesting that these media sort of strategies or tactics necessarily ended but more that they kind of mark a particular sort of moment that do have continuities into the present. So then we can look at the 1980s as another kind of marker in which Palestinians come into the global frame no longer just as bless you as terrorists as terrorists as freedom fighters or as refugees but now as occupied peoples right so these are the images that we remember of mostly the sort of first in Tifada little kids throwing stones against a tank. The video one of the first kind of videos to go viral way before I don't know Instagram and all of these was the video of the breaking their bones policy which was a couple of soldiers sort of literally beating up the or beating the sort of shoulders and arms of a couple of Palestinian cousins or the woman in Beth Sahur holding these kind of yellow heel or yellow heels in one hand and throwing a stone with the other. We then meandered throughout the 1990s and 2000s towards kind of ill-fated state building and a scholar such as Lori Allen and Diana Allen and I think Dina also just sort of mentioned it we sort of been performing ourselves as kind of humanitarian victims and so I'd like to suggest that now the world already knows Palestine and Palestinians the world has seen what it is that there is to see our predicament is identifiable it is discernible which doesn't necessarily mean that it's endorsed which doesn't necessarily mean that it's endorsed not everyone agrees obviously but I don't think that anyone can claim ignorance anymore at this point those who are wedded to our annihilation and those who are obfuscating reality are doing so on purpose in the first camp are obviously the Zionist regime, Biden Christian evangelicals maybe Sunak although I don't really keep up with the UK news so much but maybe he's not in that first sort of group right? He is, okay great so you get it so those who are just kind of like yeah you know what we are ambassedly kind of claiming the end of Palestinians in the second group this group that's kind of obfuscating the sort of reality of what is actually happening sorry the Canadian government the nations the and Lockheed Martin extractivist corporations like British Petroleum because of the gas fields off of the coast of Gaza certain liberals which in the US we call peps right progressive except for Palestine and old media collectively I think all of these obfuscate for a variety of reasons pressure from external forces fear of losing funding or economic assistance war profiteering desire for capital accumulation through political normalization with Israel hatred a commitment to settler colonialism or certainly at least a fear for being held accountable as a settler colonial nation long histories of dehumanizing Arabs Islamophobia holocaust trauma in a way the reasons don't matter I think the structure does old media I think belongs to the same ecology as settler colonialism and I think we can add religious colonialism and imperial imperial colonialism building on Khaled so old media belongs to that same kind of ecology as these different kinds of colonialism and as racial capitalism they are all part of the same operating system if I can kind of call it that fighting for old media to for better representation is a bit like changing the channel when what we need right now is not to change channel but to completely throw the television set out and when I first it was really weird to hear Khaled I'd never been in his class but when I first thought of this I was thinking actually of the Titanic I was going to sort of make this metaphor but it didn't work in my head but it was like old media is the Titanic it has sunk it is sinking it's time to I don't know get on our paddle boards instead but I just didn't go there but anyways so we need a new operating system and perhaps I'm going to suggest that we might already have one at our disposal so allow me to give a quick example on October 28th 2023 Craig Machiber who was the director of the New York office of Human Rights for the UN posted his resignation letter on Twitter or X had he quit 50 40 30 years ago like say during the Rwanda genocide we would have had to rely on old media to actually tell us the story we would have had to rely on something like the New York Times which arguably had it been about Palestine the New York Times would have likely not published okay but in this contemporary moment and media landscape he let us hear him or at least read him directly of course there are filters but in many ways this kind of interaction is sort of more direct but also more mediated than ever and by direct I mean that we read exactly what he wrote and he shares with us exactly what it is he wants to share with us and by mediated it didn't matter where he was or as my kind of Palestinian grandmother would have probably said at the time he could have been in Timbuktu and we would have still kind of read his letter and so the point is that I and you can just click on the letter and read it directly and mediated and it is that it is mediated across temporal kind of geographic reaches across different screens that is part of it's sort of shared power okay so there is a sharedness that speaks to an affective commons information that extends across geographies of our colonial racialized capitalist present this is precisely why we see a swell of support and solidarity from various corners from South Africa from Cuba from the global south from Black Lives Matter from indigenous movements from those fighting for LGBTQ plus rights and gender equality anybody who sort of been previously subjected to colonizing violence from the Celtic football teams fans right to those committed to kinds of positions against oppression and dispossession of all kinds and especially I think the majority of Gen Z and below these are the same groups who by and large do not consume old media because they know of the complicity of old media we live instead in an individualized media environment each one of us increasingly consumes what we want often what we already agree with we generally know the big picture the general stories Israel's waging a horrendous war the US and most previous kind of advertising entities are in full support but the interpretation of these stories and the details of what we consume differ we have individualized media diets the posts that I like the memes that you refer to may not necessarily be the same anymore media is no longer a landscape of the same message to everybody but is really the production and the consumption of difference and this fragmentation I think is paralleled by Palestinian reality a people who are fragmented from each other and increasingly from their connections to home and the homeland and so if Gaza teaches us anything it's that we need to think about that which exceeds representation which exceeds old media which exceeds the constraints of the old operating system made up as it is of media of colonialism and racial capitalism we need to move beyond enclosure our task as media professionals as scholars, as diasporic Palestinians as people in solidarity is to accept that we are actually fragmented and that we have different individual kind of audiences if you want to speak that language so rather than seeing the media as something outside of us we really need to begin to recognize that ourselves as media we are the mediators our first challenge then we really think of ourselves as building a network and Gaza is the spark our job, those of us on the outside is to take these kind of incandescent particles and ignite the tender and spread the fire especially because our kin are being besotted and bombed into a condition of unlivability so it becomes our responsibility for those who are outside or beyond Gaza's enclosure to do so and asking in the midst of impossible circumstances what else could you possibly want to see our predicament is known our new media landscape and technological tools are at our disposal and they can be helpful we have to take the spreadedness the geographic expanse and our incandescent the geographic expanse and our incandescent and technological lack should transquest and incandescent we can because of the solidarity I think we have to kind of speed up because we're so in our own media environments and so it is our responsibility I think those of us outside of Gaza and outside of Palestine to use these tools as the building blocks to network Gaza, if you will as the site from which solidarity and political struggle can emanate. So to make Gaza the center again, not some distant place beyond enclosure. So we need to change direction. We need to reposition ourselves, those of us outside, as beyond media. So the world knows and the world has known. And so to quote Mochiber's letter again, he pleads at some point that we need to have the courage to abandon the failed paradigm of the past. He's referring to the UN and custodians of human rights and standards. But he may as well have been referring to the entire kind of outdated operating system. It is our task then to redefine what our roles are. And I think we might want to begin by putting into the dustbin of history these kind of tropes and inadequacies at this point. Of the 1960s, 70s, 80s, 90s, it is time to move beyond any kind of fantasies of pan-Arabism. It's time to move beyond Oslo. It's time to move beyond the enclosure of nation-states to move beyond also concerns of representation in old media. To keep focusing on these is really a distraction. What did Khaled call them? I can't remember. We're kind of drowning in distractions if this is what we end up sort of focusing on. And we need to ultimately move beyond this kind of territorial trap. We know that Palestine and Palestinian-ness is so much more today than the lives between the river and the sea. It is a supra-national geographically-spread and richly diverse entity, a series of individuals of different media producers and media audiences. It is time for a new Palestine Liberation Network as opposed to Palestine Liberation Organization. So PLN maybe instead of PLO. But one that embraces the fragments, the differences, the distance, and the mediated. As such, it should, again because of what is happening to our brothers and sisters who are made to survive and die in a condition of unlivability, it should come from us. And what I mean by us here is multi-fold. Palestinian fragments, the 2.1 million inside, like inside of Israel, as well as the 3 million in the West Bank and Jerusalem, as well as the millions in Jordan and Lebanon in Egypt, in Chile, in Brooklyn, in London, in I don't know, XYZ, right? But us is also everyone in solidarity, irrespective of creed, of religion, of citizenship, gender, sexuality, and so on. And it is up to all of these us's to transform that spark of Gaza into revolution, into kind of transformation and change. We are the medium, we are the kind of dialectic knot that can untie these forces of enclosure and that can move us beyond media. I think we have some of these tools already at our disposal, or maybe dispersal, as a better word, to build the infrastructure of a Gazan or a Palestinian world-making. A world-making that has already recognized that the horrors committed are not just on Gaza and on Palestine, but on human consciousness and our collective futures. Thank you. Can you hear me? Yeah, yeah. Okay, so we have about 20, 25 minutes for questions and answers, or maybe we can have a discussion amongst us.