Social media helping Palestine change narrative

Social media has been a key tool in changing the narrative about Palestine as it has allowed Palestinians to tell their stories and their plight under Israeli occupation, a Palestinian diplomat said on Wednesday.

Abdullah Abu Shawesh, who is the ambassador of Palestine to Nigeria, said before the advent of social media, the traditional media unfairly reported Palestine.

“It’s social media that makes the difference to us,” he told journalists in Abuja. “Our people used to be killed before and nobody will talk about it. We did not succeed in telling our story until the last 15 years when we have had social media.”

“This helps us as Palestinians very much and this is very important. The social media gave us the ability to tell our story, to tell the world at least and show some videos about what is happening right now and in the past in Palestine.”

Mr Shawesh accused Western Media of bias in the reportage of the Israel-Palestine crisis including the current war that started on 7 October after Hamas militants attacked Israel, leading to the death of about 1,200 people.

Israeli retaliatory attacks in Gaza have killed over 20,000 people, the majority of them civilians. Over 90 per cent of the two million population of Gaza have also been displaced due to the Israeli attacks.

“Palestine is not asking the world to support them. Rather, all we are saying is for the media to be fair to us and give us a chance to tell our side of the story.

“It’s very important to note this because the data coming from the Western media is not fair. And the majority of their reporting is completely biased,” he said.

At the Wednesday event hosted by the Nigerian Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs (NCSIA), the diplomat also said that the Palestine government will continue to condemn the Israeli attacks in Gaza and the West Bank.

He said Israel was the biggest loser in the ongoing war as the original plan of Israel was to exterminate Palestine. Yet that is “unachieved and can never be achieved,” he said.

Unfortunately, we lost a lot in this war, Mr Shawesh said, “But the big loser is Israel because when the war started they declared two main goals: to eliminate or completely eliminate or neutralise the Palestinian fighters and the second is to liberate the hostages and they did not succeed till now.”

He added that since 7 October when the current war started, Israel has not been able to get any hostages released through violence, noting that it is time for the Israeli forces to end the violence and engage in discussions to end the decades-long Israel-Palestine crisis.

Mr Shawesh added the world, including Western countries, is beginning to side with Palestine as shown by the United Nations Secretary General’s repeated call for a ceasefire.

The United Nations General Assembly and the United Nations Security Council have passed resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. But each time, the resolution is vetoed by the United States of America, one of only five permanent members with such a veto.

On Wednesday, Mr Shawesh said, “Israel will surely regret its action in the coming years.”

PREMIUM TIMES reported how the ambassador earlier described the ongoing war in Gaza as “an unfolding textbook genocide on Palestine” in which many Western countries are complicit by providing military, financial, and political support to Israel.

“The world beginning from the United States to the rest of those who turn a blind eye to the Israeli atrocities should wake up to the fact that all humans are equal. And justice is the best guarantor of peace,” he said.

The current war in Gaza, which has seen the death of almost 20,000 people including journalists and aid workers, started on 7 October after Hamas launched what has been described as the largest attack against Israel in years.

However, the ambassador said, what happened on 7 October was not the beginning of the conflict. He said the root of war can be traced to 106 years ago or as far back as 3,000.

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“I would like to say that what happened on 7 October was a genocide but it is not the beginning of this. Nobody is talking about what happened on 6 October. They (Israel) killed seven Palestinians for nothing. Between January and 6 October, 152 Palestinians were killed. But none of the media captured that,” Mr Shawesh said.

War Crimes

Human rights organisations have accused Israel of war crimes as an overwhelming majority of the over 20,000 Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks are civilians, two-thirds of them women and children.

In its defence, the Israeli army has accused the Palestinian militant group, Hamas, which has governed the Gaza Strip since 2007, of using civilians as human shields.

Speaking on this, Mr Shawesh acknowledged that Hamas use “civilians as human shields” but “there is still no justification for killing innocent children and bombing hospitals.”

“If Israel respects the rule of law and human rights, why are they still committing war crimes against innocent Palestinian civilians?”

Mr Shawesh was asked if Palestinians were willing to surrender and vacate their land for the sake of peace.

“We are the owners of these lands and we are not going anywhere. They succeeded in expelling most of us from our historical land, the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, and many of us became refugees in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Egypt, West Bank, and Gaza. I, myself, was born as a refugee in a refugee camp in Gaza.”

“About 78 per cent of Israel is the historical land of Palestine. But that’s not the issue now. What we want now is the ability to build our state in only 22 per cent of what was our historical land Palestine. This is very important because otherwise, how are we going to talk about our history,” he said.