SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This chapter interrogates how mediated dominant narratives of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians in mainstream media and public discourses in the global north and elsewhere have taken hold and persisted for almost 70 years. Specifically, it addresses how persistent and recurring visual and discursive narratives (in language and image) of Palestine and the Palestinians have served to support an implicit exceptionalism rooted in the claims of the Zionist movement and, thus, have constructed particular ways of seeing, or not seeing, Palestine, and certainly not from the viewpoint of its people, ‘the narrated.’ In situating the struggle over the right to narrate and the struggle over narrative with reference to the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict at the centre of the discussion, the chapter elaborates on the assumption that any discussion of the global south, as an imagined spatiality, is often defined by its perceived differences from the global north. This argument is made through examining forms of Palestinian self-narration and self-representation in film, documentary, photography, and digital media.