Media, Globalization, and the (Un)Making of the Palestinian Cause

This article examines the Palestinian cause’s relationship to globalization: how it has been represented, mediated, and co-opted since the 1950s, and how it echoed rhetorically, politically, and ideologically by different groups; and how these resulted in both wider attention and obscurity. Particular moments of the Palestinian cause are highlighted, beginning with the movement’s circulation within third world liberation struggles and anti-imperial movements, which thrust the Palestinian struggle to prominence in contemporary history and across media platforms. By the 1980s, Palestine became deployed as an unresolved system of imperialism, and as media attention expanded the result was an abstraction of the struggle’s anti-colonial origins. This tension of attention and abstraction is discernible in contemporary solidarity movements on human rights and social justice. The article concludes that as the cause continues to gain universal traction, the core political issues are rendered distant and mediated spectacles.