Omar Zahzah
Truthout / April 19, 2026
Palestinian digital autonomy has been constrained by settler colonialism bolstered by neoliberal privatization.
An outgrowth of the counter-revolutionary Oslo Accords, the Palestinian internet digitally encapsulates the contradictions of anti-colonial resistance in the neoliberal era. As such, the internet today is both an instrument for collective interconnection to Palestinian revolutionary history and struggle as well as a site of suppression and surveillance. As Miriyam Aouragh writes in Palestine Online: Transnationalism, the Internet, and the Construction of Identity, the introduction of the internet “excited many Palestinians,” and the “motivation most often heard for many of the internet projects was resentment at the pro-Israeli/anti-Palestinian coverage in the mainstream media.” Sociopolitical factors such as the violent crackdowns and restrictions on movement imposed on Palestinians by Israel during the Al-Aqsa Intifada (2000-2005) greatly influenced the frequency and nature of Palestinian internet usage during this period, as many Palestinians turned to mobile telephones and email to keep abreast of developments around the Intifada, and communicate the reality of their conditions to an outside world whose experience with Palestine was more often filtered through unsympathetic media outlets.
Yet these newfound possibilities were paradoxically paired with restrictions from the outset. First, “the fusion of technology and politics” that emerged in the context of 9/11 “challenged the necessity and potential of ICT [Information and Communication Technology].” Following the Oslo Accords, many Palestinians living in the West chose to return to Palestine to go into development; many of them were ICT specialists, and as such, they played a crucial role in building out what would become the contemporary Internet industry in Palestine. Some of these returnees set up the Palestinian IT Special Interest Group (ITSIG), believing ICT to be a “central component of the Palestinian economy.” While this was “not strange,” Aouragh notes, given that “at the time hype about the internet partly overlapped with utopian ideas about virtual reality,” digital autonomy was precluded from the outset. For all of the newfound possibilities in interconnection and communication the internet made (and would continue to make) possible,
Despite the ‘free’ and ‘magic’ IT, Palestinians could not set up an internet backbone that was actually autonomous … The infrastructure of the Palestinian IT sector could only be partly realised because the underlying colonialist logic in Palestine dictates that ISPs must provide bandwidth and connectivity through Israeli companies. Hence, when deconstructing the materiality of the internet in Palestine critical analyses become crucial.
After Oslo, ICT was the fastest growing portion of the economy, and the Palestinian Authority (PA) privatized the telecom sector. In January 1996, the sector was transferred to PalTel (short for Palestinian Telecommunications Company), a private company, and the penetration of the internet in Palestine increased, while evolutions in computer technology resulted in computers becoming more affordable, which ensured increasing social diffusion of the internet in addition to geographical spread. Prior to PalTel’s coordination of the network infrastructure, private investors had already set up ISPs offering internet services. The ostensible distinction was that preceding linkages had to go through Israeli territory, while PalTel provided a “data-communications network blanket.” Yet it soon became clear that Onderkant formulier
all providers, including the official and so-called independent, PalTel, were roaming through Israeli companies. In reality there was no fully Palestinian-controlled and independent technological infrastructure. Despite PalTel, and later Hadara, presenting themselves as autonomous communication services, they depend on the benevolence of Israel. The truth is that to go online the occupied had to tap from their occupier. A further look into this awkward situation revealed that its fate had already been sealed by the Oslo agreements.
The refinement of communications technology has always posed challenges to Israel beyond its total control. This was true even in the context of hegemonic media: In 1982, reporters were able to broadcast the horrors of the Israeli-facilitated Sabra and Shatila massacre in Beirut before networks could exert a censorious influence. This was unprecedented, and necessitated the refinement of an alternative Israeli PR strategy that remains operative to this day: to downplay atrocities for which undeniable evidence made possible by new technologies exists. Therefore, new communications technologies and media could play an unexpected role in undermining Israeli impunity. The iconic photographs of brave Palestinian children throwing stones against Israeli tanks during the First Intifada gave way to the footage of the Israeli Occupation Forces’ murder of Muhammad al-Durrah during the Second Intifada, which in turn give way to Instagram reels and TikTok videos that today document Israel’s latest genocide against the Palestinian people.
Nevertheless, Israel’s interest in allowing Palestinians to have internet connectivity — and thus connect with one another as well as the outside world — was because Israel retained the ability to monitor (i.e., surveil) Palestinians and profit from Palestinians paying for internet service. The formalization of Palestinian internet did not constitute a new paradigm as much as a slight reconfiguration of a broader dynamic. Our current convergence of Big Tech censorship with Zionist settler colonialism seems less novel when we realize that, from the outset and in its physical infrastructure, Palestinian digital autonomy was constrained by settler colonialism bolstered by neoliberal privatization. The ICT industry in Palestine grew as new technologies made immediate dissemination of the on-the-ground realities of the Al-Aqsa Intifada possible, an important distinction compared to the communicative conditions of the 1987 Intifada. Indeed, the Al-Aqsa Intifada was crucial to the formalization of Palestinian digital activism and resistance.
In 2005, Israel ostensibly “disengaged” from the Gaza Strip, but in fact “technologized” its occupation; the nominal turning over of the telecommunications sector to the PA, its subcontracting to PalTel under the Oslo II Accord, and the subsequent privatization of Palestinian digital space in fact allowed Israel to tighten its occupation and siege of Gaza while reducing military manpower through digital surveillance. At the same time, Israel used Gaza as a “testing ground” for the latest military grade weaponry. Indeed, part of the staggering achievement of the launching of Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7, 2023, was the tactical sophistication with which the Palestinian resistance broke through what was reputed to be one of the most surveilled sites on the planet, dealing an irreversible blow to Israel’s reputation as an impregnable military tech titan.
Terms of servitude
Emerging from the Oslo Accords, the internet and the platforms of Web 3.0 became vehicles for refuting Oslo’s discursive depoliticization. Yet over time, many of the companies responsible for the platforms that hosted anti-colonial/post-Oslo Palestinian perspectives began to reinforce Zionist settler colonialism through targeted censorship. Cleverly repurposed, networks and platforms born out of regimes of militarism, imperialism, settler colonialism, and surveillance provided for new possibilities of advancing a collective, anti-colonial Palestinian narrative. As the Zionist regime and its imperialist supporters grew savvier about how their products were being deployed, the very mechanisms Palestinians and their allies had used were retooled to erase Palestine from the digital sphere altogether.
The implications of moderation (for Palestinians)
In Custodians of the Internet, his definitive study of content moderation on social media platforms, Tarleton Gillespie explains that social media platforms seek to be accepted on the idealized terms of their branding. As a result, platforms are eager to be perceived as permissive spaces that merely host user-contributed content. There is no platform without moderation, and yet moderation must fade into the background — even as the probability of encountering moderation is determined by one’s degree of marginalization. Platforms are thus generally guarded about their moderation practices, if they address them at all. As Palestinians know all too well, the implications of moderation are vast. As revealed by more than 15 months of Zionist genocide, moderation can mean the difference between an atrocity being exposed or silently suffered; a desperately needed fundraiser being shared or hidden altogether; a martyrdom being revealed, or family and community members left in doubt.
And moderation is not simply about an individual post on a particular platform: as platforms become increasingly hegemonic, their moderation decisions can — and do — influence the boundaries of social convention. For better or worse, what becomes familiar on social media often spreads to society at large. What happens when, at the behest of a settler-colonial regime, platforms begin to counteract the narrative shifts they have made possible, however unwittingly?
Virtual Palestine
The internet is a medium with the potential to link all Palestinians together — indeed, already has linked all Palestinians together — despite the fragmentation and ghettoization of colonialism, occupation, apartheid, and exile. It is a medium with the potential to galvanize the Palestinian elaboration and pursuit of an ideal, decolonized homeland — a virtual Palestine whose rootedness in Indigenous history and resistance practices ensures digital settler colonialism’s futility, as Palestinian resistance in all of its forms will only continue to utilize alternative forms of creative opposition to imperial and colonial hegemony.
‘This dream had to die’
According to Nadim Nashif of the digital rights organization 7amleh, “there has been an ongoing war” on the Palestinian narrative across social media platforms since 2015, when Israel’s Cyber Unit was founded. The Israeli Cyber Unit, he said, surveils Palestinian social media and pressures social media companies to remove anything to which it objects. Israeli NGOs mass-report pro-Palestine content, complementing governmental requests for censorship. Furthermore, Nashif said, social media companies accept lists provided to them by the U.S. State Department and the Israeli government that accuse, without foundation, various Palestinians, parties, factions, and NGOs of being “terrorists” or “terrorist organizations.”
In 2016, Facebook (now Meta), described by Siva Vaidhyanathan as “the paradigmatic distillation of the Silicon Valley ideology,” sent a delegation to Israel to meet with then-Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked and Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan to “improve coordination against incitement to terror and murder,” as reported by Al Jazeera. There was, as Nashif explained at the time, “concern that Facebook is adopting Israeli policy and terminology when it comes to incitement.” From October 15, 2015, nearly 400 Palestinians were arrested for online incitement, and Facebook began to delete the pages of Palestinian journalists.
Israel seems to have paid more serious attention to digital activities after Operation Cast Lead, when the [Israeli Occupation Forces] became the first army in the world to establish a YouTube channel (which in turn influenced the U.S. Army) and initiated several “cyber warrior” teams over the next few years, with one coming from the spying Unit 8200, as reported by Jonathan Cook. Nevertheless, the 2016 Facebook delegation seems to mark a watershed moment in the convergence of hegemonic Big Tech collaboration with Zionist settler-colonialism.
The dialectic of Palestinians utilizing prominent digital platforms, only for these platforms to escalate their censorship policies through fortification of digital settler colonialism, has become increasingly pronounced over the years. In May 2021, Sheikh Jarrah became a flashpoint for new forms of Palestinian resistance as Palestinians rose up to resist looming ethnic cleansing by Israeli forces. Eventually Palestinians from all over the world rose up in a collective display known as the “Unity Intifada” to defy Zionist settler colonialism and assert the interconnectedness of all Palestinians. The “Dignity and Hope Manifesto” issued by these Palestinian resisters proudly asserted that “Palestinians are one people, one society,” a direct challenge to the geographically isolated framework of the Oslo Accords and a vital testament to the irreversibility of contemporaneous linkages. From Sheikh Jarrah to Gaza to hunger-striking Palestinians held in Zionist regime jails, Palestinians rose up in collective resistance.
In making cross-geographical connectivity and support possible, social media was strategically utilized by Palestinian activists in both the Sheikh Jarrah uprisings and the resultant Unity Intifada. The resultant uprisings had palpable impacts on Israeli-aligned legacy media: On May 11, 2021, CNN featured Mohammed El-Kurd (from Sheikh Jarrah, via Skype) to speak about his family and community’s looming expulsion from their homes. In manoeuvres recalling [Ghassan] Kanafani’s repartee with Richard Carleton in 1970, El-Kurd repeatedly challenged the corporate script that normalized colonization through euphemism.
At the same time, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter began mass-censoring posts related to Sheikh Jarrah. The companies blamed “technical issues” for the censorship, which digital rights groups like 7amlehdismissed as insufficient given the scale of repression. One important takeaway from 2021 is that it was not particular platforms, but the power and artfulness of Palestinian resistance and the refusal of new generations to live under the shadow of the abandonment of the Palestinian liberation struggle represented by the Oslo Accords that made the cultural shift possible. Looking at it in this way, we can contextualize the mass censorship that began in response to the 2021 protests and has only escalated following Israel’s latest genocide of Palestinians in Gaza in October 2023, as the realpolitik of imperialist corporate hegemony working hand-in-hand with Zionist settler colonialism.
Another takeaway is that every large-scale Zionist assault is a testing of the waters of possibility in regard to scale of depravity and devastation and, crucially, actionable global outrage to such conduct. A lack of international leverage ensures that actionability remains impossible. As such, Israel continues to hone its creative sadism, whose technocratic capacity increases with each new genre of assault.
Relatedly, an extended strategy of coordination with Big Tech inoculates social media platforms from serving as a reliable vehicle for anti-imperial and anti-colonial expression regarding Palestine. These companies in turn hone, refine, and test the scale of possibility for normalizing blanket repression of Palestine, justified under categories of “violation” meant to muzzle dissent and preclude accountability. Both processes are mutually supportive.
An anti-colonial sentiment that fortifies Palestinian connectedness and connectivity suggests that no matter how streamlined or even standardized it becomes, repression will never bear out, as Palestinians from all over continue to “battle the algorithm” (to use a phrase from El-Kurd).
Even as the contours of imperial Big Tech’s facilitation of Zionist settler colonialism grow ever sharper, the persistence and the possibilities of resistance abound.
Omar Zahzah is a writer, poet, organizer of Lebanese Palestinian descent, and assistant professor of Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas (AMED) Studies at San Francisco State University
