Communicating Palestine is a go-to guide offering tools to narrate and engage with Palestine ethically and responsibly. From best practices for countering disinformation to fostering ethical reporting and centring Palestinian agency, this one-stop manual empowers everyone—from activists and artists to journalists and policymakers—to communicate Palestine with integrity.
Stories, reports, pictures and all forms of communication can inspire, educate, mobilise, and connect people. In contexts of colonisation, oppression and systemic racism, communication is weaponised to silence, distort and erase entire histories, identities and narratives. For Palestinians, the battle over narrative and representation has always been inseparable from the struggle for liberation and self-determination.
The Zionist movement has sought to not only take over Palestinian land and ethnically cleanse its people, but also worked actively to erase their identity and cultural and social fabric. This colonial strategy extends into every realm of Palestinian expression—media, arts, storytelling, knowledge production, and political organising.
Historically, Palestinian newspapers have been shut down, publications censored, radio stations destroyed, archives looted, research centres bombed, and intellectuals assassinated. Disrupting political organising, suppressing resistance, and isolating Palestinians from global consciousness and struggles have always been part and parcel of the colonial enterprise.
“It is by no means an exaggeration to say that the establishment of Israel as a state in 1948 occurred partly because the Zionists acquired control of most of the territory of Palestine, and partly because they had already won the political battle for Palestine in the international world in which ideas, representations, rhetoric, and images were at issue.”
— Edward Said, Blaming the Victim
Hasbara—the Hebrew word for “explanation”—is Israel’s public diplomacy strategy to shape global opinion in its favour by portraying itself as a perpetual victim and framing colonial oppression as “defence.” Popularised in the early 20th century with tropes like “a land without a people for a people without a land,” it has since evolved into a strategic, institutionalised campaign embedded in state bodies and sustained through the coordination and funding of global Zionist lobby groups.
These networks orchestrate smear campaigns, spread disinformation, and lobby governments, media, academia, digital platforms and employers to adopt its narratives while delegitimising and censoring Palestinian advocacy.
*Explore more on Hasbara in this section
Zionist efforts of erasure are embedded in broader systems of global power, including colonialism and institutionalised racism, that permeate political, development, academic and cultural institutions, media, and digital platforms.
These actors work to sanitise Israeli oppression while spreading narratives stripped of colonial context, reducing Palestinians to racist and orientalist stereotypes—“terrorists, inherently violent, backward, uncivilised, passive victims, rejectionists or exoticised figures”.
Meanwhile, Palestinians are erased and censored, their credibility made contingent on Western or Israeli validation, their analysis doubted or outright delegitimised and their narratives confined to fit narrow, ethnocentric frames.
Communicating Palestine emerged as a direct response to these entrenched challenges. Building on a long history of Palestinian resistance to censorship, distortion and propaganda, this guide seeks to do more than expose and deconstruct bias.
It centres Palestinian narratives on their own terms, dismantling harmful framings while refusing to be defined in reaction to them. It reaffirms Palestinian centrality through dignified and ethical engagement.
More than a resource, this guide is a manifesto to unlearn, relearn, and practice liberatory communication.
While much of this guide was developed before the genocide, its relevance has only become more urgent. The ongoing genocide has laid bare that dehumanisation, erasure, and silencing are not abstract injustices, but direct enablers of annihilation.
Responsible communication is not merely an ethical imperative—it is a matter of survival.
This guide is the outcome of a Palestinian-led collective process, coordinated by a joint steering committee of Palestinian and international organisations, with the generous contributions of research participants.
Communicating Palestine is led and hosted by PIPD, as part of its mission to advocate for the liberation of Palestine from all forms of settler colonialism and advance Palestinian people’s diplomacy and a Palestinian-led movement.
