AlAhmad, H. and Ayyash, S. A. (2021) ‘Social Media, Activism and the Framing of the May 2021 Sheikh Jarrah’s Event’, in Digital Technology and the Media War in Reporting the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict

This chapter examines the Palestinian narrative on social media platforms during May 2021 events in Palestine, in which the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood was at the centre of political and media attention. The study follows contents of social media accounts of renowned activists, politicians, academics, celebrities and solidarity groups in Palestine and in the diaspora, examining how collective narratives were produced and framed to attract public attention and sympathy. The authors conducted interviews with journalists, and applied narrative segmentation, framing analysis and binary opposition analysis to digital contents. Using the hashtag #SaveSheikhJarrah as a key word for searching content within the analysed accounts, the chapter found two dominant frames in the narratives: colonial policies frame and resistance frame. Key findings indicate that policies of and intervention of social media platforms in the form of deleting activists’ accounts do play a role in the mediatized conflict’s dynamics. Furthermore, the amplification of events on social media, which is affected by the rise of activism on the interactive platforms, was influenced by the dramatic developments of events on the ground. Meanwhile, the high engagement of Palestinian youth on social media provided very rich visual contents, which contributed to the notion that, in mediatized conflicts, social media actors who are in the centre of events play a significant role in enriching conflict digital content, amplifying events and framing their own narratives.