"Communication, Culture & Critique"

Chakravartty, Paula; Chávez, Karma R; Matar, Dina

doi: 10.1093/ccc/tcag012pmid: N/A

In this introduction, we argue that the political, socio-economic and ethical ramifications of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the complicity of institutional actors require a radical rethinking of the “facts” of colonial genocide as against the narrative of a liberal democratic international order. We offer a broad survey of the extant state of discussions about Palestine in the field at large and then turn to anti-colonial thinkers including the foundational work on the discourse and narratives of colonialism by both Aime Césaire and Edward Said, which informs how we might meet the current moment. As the world’s first livestreamed genocide fades from view and is replaced by growing concerns about the increasing power of big tech-enabled fascism and new wars of empire the introduction and the issue as a whole attempt to intervene in what the field and the Western media have taken for granted, arguing that Palestine offers its own communicative epistemology.

Hassein, Nabil; Almenara, Maria Paz; Fattaleh, Nadine

doi: 10.1093/ccc/tcag002pmid: N/A

As a legal scholar, Prof. Erakat exposes the political nature of international law. Rather than thinking of law as fixed, she points us to its malleable deployment both in the service of settler colonial expansion and in the work and struggle for liberation. For many years, but especially since October 2023, Prof. Erakat has been an indispensable and clarifying voice within a media ecosystem that regularly marginalizes Palestinian perspectives and normalizes Palestinian dehumanization. Her regular appearances in news outlets like CNN, Al-Jazeera, and Democracy Now help us situate the incomprehensible violence we are all bearing witness to within a much longer history of occupation. In this interview, conducted in October 2024, Prof. Erakat describes her experiences navigating hostile mainstream U.S. media environments and building alternative spaces for anti-colonial communication and political struggle.

Tawil-Souri, Helga

doi: 10.1093/ccc/tcaf057pmid: N/A

Gaza’s “live-streamed genocide” is more than the circulation of images about genocide, but an infrastructure whose foundation is bits. Bitification is introduced as the process of the material transformation of the conditions of existence into digital data whose value to Israel’s settler colonial project become operational, manipulable and discardable. Palestinians and Palestine are continuously disassembled, reassembled, and processed into digital data, whether for purposes of killing or media consumption, in all cases effacing and abstracting that Palestinians are human beings and that Palestine is a real territory. The connections between Israel’s algorithm-dependent warfare and surveillance regime, along with social media algorithms that both suppress and allow Palestinian content, are related through the shared logic and process of bitification.

Bishara, Amahl

doi: 10.1093/ccc/tcag008pmid: N/A

Israeli violence against Palestinian journalists and journalistic institutions has made this the deadliest war for journalists in the 20th and 21st centuries. During the genocide in Gaza, Israel has killed, imprisoned and starved journalists. This multifaceted violence carries with it layers of significance. It terrifies journalists left alive and suggests that Palestinians can be forced into silence. In the face of this outright and semantic violence, Palestinian journalists insist that they will continue their work. They continue to cover war even as Israel kills their family members and colleagues, and they live broadcast their grief and perseverance. In turn, Palestinian society witnesses and honors their work as acts of truth telling and confronting Israeli occupation. In the face of Israel’s attempt to demolish the possibility of the Palestinian voice, Palestinians insist on the importance of Palestinian journalism.

Yunis Varas, Bernardita M; Dweik, Sarah Cathryn Majed

doi: 10.1093/ccc/tcaf058pmid: N/A

The keffiyeh, an extension of Palestinian lived experiences, spread in use since the genocide in Gaza accelerated in October 2023. We expand previous understandings of it as merely a symbol, exploring the keffiyeh as an anti-colonial medium communicating a Palestinian identity, which is inherently anti-colonial. Its anti-colonial qualities are reinforced in how forces of empire silence and criminalize the keffiyeh’s use. Through studying moments of the keffiyeh’s use and responses to it, we demonstrate how the keffiyeh mediates our anti-colonial Palestinian identity and resistance to Zionism. Through this study, we encourage further investigation into this Palestinian medium to better understand Palestinian meaning-making processes and our collective anti-colonial fights for liberation. Stop the genocide, Free Palestine!

Echchaibi, Nabil

doi: 10.1093/ccc/tcaf056pmid: N/A

It has become impossible to identify with a field and academic institutions that refuse to answer a basic call of human decency: to denounce an ongoing genocide. What else must we, as scholars and educators, do to convince all of us to speak up, to liberate us from the sentence of silence in the face of unspeakable tragedy? Everything I have learned under the banner of research, ethics, and justice has been muted in Palestine. Seventy thousand people massacred in Gaza, 1,100 university students killed, 193 professors murdered, all 12 universities demolished, 220 journalists eliminated, and yet some still wish to debate this horrid devastation of life. This article is not a call for recognition. It is a requiem of the university as it abandons its conscience. It is an elegy for an institution with no moral credibility. This breakup letter marks a painful realization that our marginalization and dehumanization are well-rehearsed within institutions eager to flaunt intellectual virtue, humanism, and analytical lucidity. Yet again we charge genocide:

Xaka, Victoria Netanus

doi: 10.1093/ccc/tcag001pmid: N/A

This article advocates for the role of deep, careful, and strategic listening within a broader media context of silencing critical discourse on Palestine, especially within higher education. Institutions of higher education, despite coveted claims to intellectual freedom and scholarly inquiry, effectively reproduce the very mechanisms of misinformation, censorship, and ideological control that scholars of media and communication purport to critique. Drawing from personal experience teaching in the field of communication studies, and calling for a form of understanding that is globally resonant, the author insists that there are intentional ways in which a listening practice can be cultivated in service of anti-colonial ambitions and towards an abolitionist imaginary.

Tanous, Osama; Asi, Yara; Hammoudeh, Weeam; Mills, David; Wispelwey, Bram

doi: 10.1093/ccc/tcag013pmid: N/A

A main feature of the Israeli genocide in Gaza has been the systematic destruction of the healthcare system. The Israeli military has methodically generated conditions that drive disease, disability, and death, while simultaneously dismantling the capability of the health system to respond. Despite a purported emphasis on issues such as health equity and social determinants of health, many influential medical bodies across the world have failed to condemn these attacks on healthcare, let alone take meaningful steps for advocacy and accountability. To interrogate this state of affairs, we undertook a descriptive analysis of selected academic articles in medical journals. We explore how anti-Palestinian racism operates to dehumanize Palestinian healthcare workers and Palestinians generally, hindering meaningful institutional solidarity. We find that, through various tropes, violence against Palestinians is widely obscured, overlooked, or even justified. We argue that the framing and curation from health journals contributes to the Israeli military’s ability to continue the targeting of healthcare infrastructure without consequence, in essence manifesting a permission structure for mass atrocities.

Stein, Rebecca L

doi: 10.1093/ccc/tcaf055pmid: N/A

From its outset, the Israeli war on Gaza was understood by many Israeli Jews as a battle over image evidence that they risked losing—in large measure, they believed, due to the threat of the Palestinian media ecosystem, streaming genocide to global publics in real time. Drawing on a set of diverse case studies, this article examines the myriad ways that Israeli state and mainstream media institutions, influencers and ordinary citizens, endeavored to manage, control and supplant the perceived threat of the Palestinian viral image of Israeli state violence. All engaged in a range of visual tactics and pedagogical strategies to change the international view of Gaza and to keep Palestinian victims out of the Israeli frame: all were efforts to unsee Gaza and, in the process, an attempt to persuade global audiences to unsee a genocide. This article foregrounds the ways that Israeli visual practices—which tethered the images and visual literacies of the AI age to longstanding colonial ideologies of denial—have played a key role in supporting and sustaining the genocide.

Al-Ghazzi, Omar

doi: 10.1093/ccc/tcag010pmid: N/A

This article examines the converging roles of legacy news media and official political speech in enabling genocide to take place in Gaza. Drawing on BBC coverage as an example, I explain how dominant Western media relied on a cacophony of silence and noise to amplify state narratives. This repertoire is characterized by selective omission of context from coverage, the policing of words, mainly the word genocide, and the inflation of a “war on terror” narrative and its merger with colonial language about the savage enemy. The effects of this strategic politics of silence and noise are in enabling impunity in committing war crimes, undoing of witnessing as a 20th-century framework with its rhetorical claims towards a universal “never again” modality, and taking a sharper authoritarian turn in Western media’s reporting conventions.