Producing Palestine: The Creative Production of Palestine Through Contemporary Media
The Western imagination of Palestine has undergone many transformations. Today, the image of Palestine presented to us carries not only the weight of history but a warning about the future. What unfolds there is not just a story of occupation, but a harbinger of what may lie ahead.
To see Israel’s genocide in Gaza as an isolated horror would be a mistake. Every empire perfects its cruelty abroad before turning it inward. The tools of domination—surveillance, propaganda, dehumanisation—are tested on the colonised, then refined for use at home. What begins in Palestine rarely ends there. Political violence does not merely strip its victims of humanity; it “decivilises” the perpetrators of that violence.
It is in this sense that Palestine has become a test for the world’s conscience. As the genocide in Gaza unfolds in plain view, its representation has taken on a global significance no less than that of South Africa under apartheid. When it was seen as an affront to humanity, apartheid South Africa was forced to abandon its political project of racial supremacy. As the last remaining settler-colonial state, Israel—and the question of Palestine—has, in the same manner, become a test of our collective conscience.
The fate of Palestine is inseparable from the moral and political fate of the world itself. But the story does not end there. Producing Palestine turns our attention to the many other ways Palestine is made and remade—through art, media, technology, scholarship, and everyday acts of imagination. The struggle over Palestine, the book suggests, is not only about land or representation. It is also about how meaning, memory, and identity are made and remade.
Edited by Helga Tawil-Souri and Dina Matar, Producing Palestine asks what it means to imagine a nation subjected to colonial violence. The editors bring together artists, scholars, and cultural workers who, in different ways, keep creating Palestine through media, art, memory, and technology.
At its core, Producing Palestine examines the creative labour required to sustain Palestine, not only as a physical place but as an idea, a culture, and a political horizon. The editors describe this work as “a series of overlapping active processes: the experimentation and experience that take place through cultural, mediatic, and technological modes of action.” To “produce” Palestine, they explain, is not a matter of documenting a stable reality but of engaging in “an enlivened and enlivening praxis that engages ‘producers’ and ‘readers’ of different kinds.” In other words, the act of producing Palestine is participatory and dynamic, involving everyone who makes, interprets, or even imagines it.”
The book is organised not into traditional chapters but into “cases,” each a distinct act of creation, “written, drawn, traced, collaged, juxtaposed, layered, unflattened, or otherwise.” This structure invites readers to move through the book as though exploring a living archive rather than following a linear argument.
The strength of Producing Palestine lies in its expansion of what political production can mean. Across its cases, “producing” becomes an ongoing effort to keep Palestine alive through words, images, technologies, and everyday acts that preserve memory and assert identity.
Some of the book’s most striking pieces reveal that the same tools once used to control Palestinians are now shaping the wider world. In “Terra ex machina,” Hagit Keysar, Ariel Caine, and Barak Brinker explore modern technology’s creation of a new kind of wall around Jerusalem—one that is invisible but very real. Using a drone, they expose what they call a “geofence”: a digital barrier embedded in drone software that blocks flight over certain areas, such as the Haram al-Sharif.
By attempting to “crash” their drone into this unseen boundary, the authors make the invisible visible. Their experiment exposes a hidden technology that reshapes the city itself—deciding who may see, what may be recorded, and which perspectives are erased.
In “Becoming al-Mulatham/a,” scholars Nayrouz Abu Hatoum and Hadeel Assali explore how young Palestinians use TikTok to remake symbols of resistance in everyday digital life. They focus on Abu Oubaida, the masked spokesperson for Hamas’s military wing, whose carefully managed media image has been taken up and transformed by ordinary users. On social media, the figure of the al-mulatham/a moves beyond official propaganda to become a shared symbol of pride, humour, and defiance. Through songs, memes, and short videos, people build what the authors call a “counter-archive”: a living record of Palestinian resistance that turns platforms built for surveillance into spaces of memory, and connection.
Viviane Saglier’s “Vertical Visions of the Nakba” traces the ways maps and digital imagery, once tools of conquest, have been reclaimed as means of remembrance and return. She draws on film and participatory mapping projects such as Palestine Open Maps and iNakba to show how layers of photographs, satellite views, and oral histories build what she calls a topography of return. In this view, “the land itself becomes an archive”: each image, contour, and memory adds a stratum to a collective record that keeps dispossessed places alive. Mapping becomes less an act of representation than one of re-connection—turning digital space into a site of resistance and shared memory.
Stephen Sheehi’s “Forging Revolutionary Objects” explores how ordinary things—a spoon, a stone, a kite, a pen, a poem, a song—can become tools of liberation when people use them collectively and invest them with memory and meaning. He recounts the 2021 escape of six Palestinian prisoners from Gilboa prison, who dug their way out with nothing more than a spoon. That small act of defiance turned an everyday utensil into a symbol of ingenuity and the refusal to accept the limits of what is possible.
As the story spread through murals, songs, and social media, the spoon gathered what Sheehi calls a techné of liberation: an everyday object charged with shared meaning and collective will. It suggests that liberation is not the product of advanced weapons or technology, but of imagination and the capacity to make resistance out of whatever materials are at hand.
Together, these stories show that Palestinians are turning the same tools used against them into ways of fighting back. Drones, maps, social media, and art can each be used to build new forms of resistance. Producing Palestine reminds us that creating, remembering, and sharing are powerful ways to stay human in a world that often tries to take that away.
Producing Palestine reminds us that imagination is not an escape from reality but a way of remaking it. Through art, memory, writing, and everyday creativity, it shows how people keep alive the dream of freedom and dignity, even as the world around us is built to deny it.
