As Israeli airstrikes pummel Gaza, the reaction from Arab capitals has been muted and protests scattered. But the voices on social media have been loud and clear.

1. ‘Social Media Is the Mass Protest’: Solidarity With Palestinians
Grows Online
As Israeli airstrikes pummel Gaza, the reaction from Arab capitals
has been muted and protests scattered. But the voices on social
media have been loud and clear.
Published May 18, 2021Updated May 19, 2021
The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
A bomb falling on Gaza City on Monday.Hosam Salem for The New
York Times
CAIRO — The video traveled at 4G speed, leapfrogging across
international borders, social media platforms and social justice
movements: a young Palestinian woman in the East Jerusalem
neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, shouting in furious English at a Jewish
man, “You are stealing my house!”
“If I don’t steal it, someone else will steal it,” he retorts.

2. Within days — as Israel bombed the coastal territory of Gaza,
Palestinian militants there launched rockets at Israel, and Arab and
Jewish mobs faced off in Israeli cities — the video had rocketed from
young Palestinians’ social media feeds into the Arab diaspora, then lit
up the internet, kindling outrage around the world.
The cellphone video joined a profusion of pro-Palestinian voices,
memes and videos on social media that helped accomplish what
decades of Arab protest, boycotts of Israel and regular spurts of
violence had not: yanking the Palestinian cause, all but left for dead a
few months ago, toward the political mainstream.
“It feels different this time, it definitely does,” said Amani Al-
Khatahtbeh, 29, the Palestinian-Jordanian-American founder of
MuslimGirl.com, whose posts on the topic have been ubiquitous across
social media over the past week. “I wasn’t expecting this to happen so
quickly, and for the wave to shift this fast. You don’t see many people
out on the streets in protest these days, but I would say that social media
is the mass protest.”
It used to be that when Palestinians were under fire, protests would
follow in the streets of Arab cities. That potential for combustion forced
Middle Eastern and Western leaders to keep a wary eye on the
temperature of what was called the “Arab street.”
This time, a week into an Israeli bombing campaign that has killed 212
Palestinians in Gaza, the reaction from Arab capitals has been
muted and protests small and scattered, generating little pressure on
Arab governments to move to resolve the crisis.
Instead, solidarity with the Palestinians has shifted online and gone
global, a virtual Arab street that has the potential to have a wider impact
than the ones in Middle Eastern cities. The online protesters have
linked arms with popular movements for minority rights such as Black
Lives Matter, seeking to reclaim the narrative from the mainstream
media and picking up support in Western countries that have
reflexively supported Israel.

3. While core support for Israel remains broad and deep in the United
States, a growing number of Democrats appear comfortable applying
more skepticism to one of the United States’ closest allies, and are
pressuring President Biden to do the same. Even if there are signs of a
shift among some Democrats, backing for Israel still has strong
bipartisan support, bolstered by Jewish and evangelical groups with
influence in Washington.
The most remarkable sign of the evolution came this weekend, from
Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey and the chairman
of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who for years has prided
himself as one of Israel’s most unshakable allies in the Democratic
Party.
On Saturday, he said he was “deeply troubled” by the Israeli airstrikes
that had killed Palestinian civilians and targeted a tower that housed
media organizations, including The Associated Press.
His comments came as a group of more progressive Democrats
intensified their criticism, including Representatives Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, the first Palestinian-American
woman elected to Congress.
As images of Sheikh Jarrah, destruction in Gaza and police raids on Al
Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem have barreled from Palestinian online
platforms including PaliRoots and Eye on Palestine across Instagram,
Twitter and TikTok, they have united a new generation of Arab
activists with progressive allies, some of whom may not have known
where Gaza was two weeks ago.
“Stand with the oppressed,” @diet_prada, an American fashion-
criticism Instagram account cum social justice megaphone, wrote to its
2.7 million followers, in one of three posts over the last week
highlighting Israeli actions against Palestinians.
Palestinian activists say they aim to seize control of the narrative from
media outlets that they say have suppressed their point of view and
falsely equated Israel’s suffering with that of its occupied territories.
They refer to Israeli policies as “the colonization of Palestine,” describe

4. its discrimination against Palestinians as an apartheid regime, and
characterize the proposed eviction of Palestinian families from the
Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, which helped set off the current conflict,
as an “expulsion” and part of an ethnic cleansing campaign.
Even the word conflict, which they say inaccurately suggests a dispute
between equals, is under siege.
Social media has allowed them to change — or, in their words, correct
— the story. Some posts literally take a red pencil to text from
mainstream outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington
Post and CNN, crossing out headlines and substituting other words.
Users also accused Instagram and Facebook of bias when they started
deleting posts about Sheikh Jarrah and Al Aqsa, prompting the
platforms to apologize, blaming a technical issue.
“Because we were able to escape the gatekeepers of mass media,
because we were able to escape the likes of The New York Times,”
said Mohammed el-Kurd, 23, the brother of the woman in the Sheikh
Jarrah video, “we were able to reach the world.”
Tweeting and posting to his hundreds of thousands of followers almost
exclusively in English to amplify his reach, Mr. el-Kurd said the events
of the past week, starting with the Sheikh Jarrah tensions shown in the
video, made the Palestinian argument instantaneously accessible for a
global audience.

5. A Palestinian protester throwing back a tear gas grenade during clashes
with Israeli troops at a checkpoint on Monday near Nablus, West
Bank. Alaa Badarneh/EPA, via Shutterstock
“The situation is quite simple, right?” he said in a phone interview from
Sheikh Jarrah, where he had returned from studying poetry at Brooklyn
College to help his family fight their eviction. “Somebody came and
stole my home with the help of the army and police, and when you step
out of that, that’s the entire story of how Israel came to be.”
Israel’s Supreme Court is weighing the claims of a Jewish organization
that has legal title to the Sheikh Jarrah property and wants to evict the
Palestinian tenants, who also claim ownership. Palestinians see
the eviction case as part of the historical displacement of Palestinians,
including current Israeli efforts to remove Palestinian residents from
certain parts of Jerusalem, which they say violate international law.
But social media has little patience for nuance. The supermodels Gigi
and Bella Hadid, whose father is Palestinian, have posted ceaselessly
about Palestinian suffering over the last week, with Bella Hadid writing
in one post: “You are on the right side or you are not. It’s that simple.”
Perhaps an even more telling measure of the online fervor was the
backlash awaiting the singer Rihanna, who, under normal

6. circumstances, can do no wrong in fans’ eyes, when she condemned
“the violence I’m seeing displayed between Israel and
Palestine!” drawing accusations that she was equating the two sides’
actions and the consequences. Sample reply: “You sounded like ‘all
lives matter.’”
So far, the dead have been disproportionately Palestinian. Twelve
people in Israel have also died, killed amid rocket fire launched by
Hamas from Gaza or Jewish-Arab mob violence.
There have been some street protests. Thousands have marched in
Jordan and Iraq, and small demonstrations took place in Lebanon as
well as in Morocco, Sudan and Bahrain, three of the Middle Eastern
countries that agreed last year to normalize relations with Israel.
Protests have also broken out in Western cities including Los Angeles,
New York, Atlanta, Berlin, London and Paris.
But Egypt, where political parties, professional associations and
student unions have historically organized some of the region’s largest
pro-Palestinian demonstrations, driving tens of thousands out into
Cairo’s streets and squares, has been quiet.
That may have to do with fatigue with the Palestinian issue, Egyptians’
preoccupation with their own problems or the Egyptian government’s
systematic suppression of organizing and protest. (Egyptian authorities
arrested two Egyptian coordinators of the anti-Israel Boycott,
Divestment and Sanctions movement two years ago, accusing them of
terrorism, and they remain imprisoned.)
Online posting, however, is still an option.
“The Palestinian cause is in our hearts,” said Yasmeen Yasser, a
dentistry student from Alexandria, Egypt, who has been posting about
Gaza on Twitter. “This is what we were raised with. And now it’s
becoming more and more an international issue.”
Sabah Khodir, an Egyptian-American who helped lead an online
campaign against sexual assault and harassment in Egypt last year, said

7. the online movements of recent years had primed people to embrace
the #FreePalestine hashtag.
“Because Black Lives Matter has happened, because Stop Asian Hate
has happened, because Me Too has happened,” she said, “you have a
lot of minorities and a lot of oppressed groups speaking out.”
Many, from the Hadids to longtime activists, are making the linkage
explicit. On a recent episode of his podcast, The Breakdown, Shaun
King, a leading Black Lives Matter activist, said that Palestinians
“experience a brutality from police and the military very much akin to
what African-Americans experience in the United States.”
To be sure, the connections existed long before this month. Malcolm X
visited Gaza in 1964, when it belonged to Egypt, and the militant wing
of the civil rights movement he represented harshly criticized Israel
over its Palestinian policies. The American Indian Movement threw
itself behind the Palestinians in the 1970s.
After the police shooting of Michael Brown in 2015, Palestinian
activists offered protesters in Ferguson, Mo., advice on tear-gas
protection. The wall separating the West Bank from Israel bears a giant
mural of George Floyd, the Black man murdered by a police officer in
Minneapolis last year.
“There’s an instinctive sense of solidarity,” said Michael R. Fischbach,
a professor at Randolph-Macon College in Virginia who wrote the
2018 book “Black Power and Palestine.” “People from marginalized
communities are going, ‘Wow, I could be the one on the other side of
the fence. I could be the one looking down the barrel of the gun.’”
The main difference between then and now, Mr. Fischbach said, is
velocity. While newsletter screeds against Israel took months to spread
in the 1960s, today’s reposts and retweets are piling up by the second.
“This time — call me naïvely hopeful, but — for some reason the world
seems to have an appetite for change these days,” @sufra_kitchen, an
Instagram account that explores Middle Eastern food, wrote.

8. “Whatever it is, please pay attention this time, because we all have been
looking the other way for far too long.”
Nada Rashwan contributed reporting from Cairo, and Nick
Fandos and Catie Edmondson from Washington.