End of the Year Issue
Mariam Mahamid
November 6, 2025
In Palestine, memory has always been a form of resistance. Today, it lives not only in embroidery and heritage, but on digital screens across the world. Across Gaza, the West Bank, and the Palestinian towns inside Israel, a new generation is documenting life, loss, and love in "real- time" — transforming social media into a living archive of survival.
When mainstream media misrepresents or erases Palestinians voices, young creators step in to fill the silence. Through platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, they reclaim the narrative — one post at a time. From Bisan Owda's heartfelt stories and Plestia Alaqad's field reports in Gaza", to Muna El-Kurd documenting displacement in Sheikh Jarrah, and artists like Tamer Nafar and Nadeen Khoury using performance to challenge silence — each of them adds a fragment to Palestine’s digital memory. Even creators such as Marwan Halabi keep the Palestinian dialect and humor alive online, showing that even humor can be a form of resistance. Together, these voices form a patchwork of truth — connected by hashtags instead of threads (traditional Palestinian embroidery).
For many in Gaza, sharing the truth is an act of immense risk. Saleh Al-Ja’frawi, a young content creator, used to post brief videos capturing daily life between airstrikes — snippets of hope amid chaos. His camera became his way of coping and communicating with the world. When he was killed while filming, his final posts turned into memorials: fragments of a story that will not fade. Even after his death, his account remains — a reminder that in Palestine, to document is to resist.
According to Access Now’s 2024 report "Gaza, Genocide & Big Tech", major social media companies have repeatedly removed Palestinian content, shadow-banned accounts, and labeled eyewitness reports as "sensitive"or "misinformation." The stated reason for many of these removals is that the posts contain explicit or graphic imagery — footage of bombings, the wounded, or scenes of destruction.
Yet these images are often the only proof of what is happening on the ground. As a result, Palestinians documenting the war face a constant dilemma: how to show the reality without violating platform policies. Many creators blur images, crop videos, or use symbols and coded language to avoid deletion. In doing so, they expose the paradox of the digital age — that the same platforms built for visibility can also enforce invisibility.
This digital erasure mirrors the physical destruction on the ground: while bombs silence cities, algorithms silence witnesses. Yet, Palestinians continue to post, rebuild, and remember — proving that resistance survives in every upload.
Palestinian heritage has always depended on acts of remembrance. Where previous generations preserved identity through tatreez, such as traditional Palestinian embroidery, today’s youth are doing so through images, captions, and live streams. Today’s youth are doing so through images, captions, and live streams. The method has changed, but the purpose remains the same. According to "Digital Activism in Perspective: Palestinian Resistance via Social Media", social platforms have become “virtual spaces of protest” where storytelling and collective memory merge. Projects like "Visualizing Palestine" and the "Palestinian Museum Digital Archive" extend this tradition into cyberspace, transforming data and memory into visual testaments of truth.
Palestine’s digital activism carries the same spirit of remembrance that once lived in thread and fabric. In colonized societies, memory itself often becomes a way to survive — a quiet act of resistance passed from one generation to the next. As historian Pierre Nora wrote in 1989, these "sites of memory" are spaces where people preserve identity when physical places or traditions are lost.
For Palestinians, the internet itself has become one of these sites — a shared space where loss and belonging coexist in every post. Each photo, voice note, or caption becomes a modern heirloom passed from one timeline to another.
Yet telling these stories online comes with its own battles. Palestinian content is often restricted or deleted by platforms that claim neutrality. Reports from Amnesty International and the Meta Oversight Board reveal how algorithms systematically suppress Palestinian voices, echoing what researchers call "systematic digital repression." As scholar Miriyam Aouragh wrote in 2008, this represents a new kind of "everyday resistance on the internet," where activism becomes embedded in daily digital life.
Yet the community finds ways around it — mirroring posts, translating captions, saving content before it disappears. Every repost becomes an act of defiance, every share a heartbeat of persistence.
As noted in "Social Media’s Key Role in Palestinian Activism for Gaza", the online sphere now serves as both a newsroom and a memorial wall. This convergence between memory and technology mirrors the old forms of preservation — when tatreez carried stories across generations, and now when data carries voices across screens.
Digital resistance doesn’t end when the Wi-Fi is cut off. It lives in conversations, in art, and in the quiet insistence to remember. These young Palestinians aren’t just documenting conflict — they’re preserving humanity. Their feeds may scroll endlessly, but their stories root deeply.
Beyond the posts and the algorithms lies something more enduring: a collective determination to exist. Each act of sharing, archiving, or even mourning online becomes a declaration of identity. For Palestinians, visibility itself is survival — an assertion that their stories cannot be deleted, even when their accounts can. This persistence transforms technology into testimony, and testimony into truth.
Just as every stitch of a tatreez once carried a story, every pixel now carries a memory — a thread of continuity between past and present. Through both fabric and fiber optics, Palestinians continue to prove that resistance is not only about struggle, but about the refusal to be forgotten.
Photo Source: Raw Pixel, Creative Commons