Producing Palestine: The Creative Production of Palestine Through Contemporary Media

The Western imagination of Palestine has undergone many transformations. Today, the image of Palestine presented to us carries not only the weight of history but a warning about the future. What unfolds there is not just a story of occupation, but a harbinger of what may lie ahead.

To see Israel’s genocide in Gaza as an isolated horror would be a mistake. Every empire perfects its cruelty abroad before turning it inward. The tools of domination—surveillance, propaganda, dehumanisation—are tested on the colonised, then refined for use at home. What begins in Palestine rarely ends there. Political violence does not merely strip its victims of humanity; it “decivilises”  the perpetrators of that violence.

It is in this sense that Palestine has become a test for the world’s conscience. As the genocide in Gaza unfolds in plain view, its representation has taken on a global significance no less than that of South Africa under apartheid. When it was seen as an affront to humanity, apartheid South Africa was forced to abandon its political project of racial supremacy. As the last remaining settler-colonial state, Israel—and the question of Palestine—has, in the same manner, become a test of our collective conscience.

The fate of Palestine is inseparable from the moral and political fate of the world itself. But the story does not end there. Producing Palestine turns our attention to the many other ways Palestine is made and remade—through art, media, technology, scholarship, and everyday acts of imagination. The struggle over Palestine, the book suggests, is not only about land or representation. It is also about how meaning, memory, and identity are made and remade.

Edited by Helga Tawil-Souri and Dina Matar, Producing Palestine asks what it means to imagine a nation subjected to colonial violence. The editors bring together artists, scholars, and cultural workers who, in different ways, keep creating Palestine through media, art, memory, and technology.

At its core, Producing Palestine examines the creative labour required to sustain Palestine, not only as a physical place but as an idea, a culture, and a political horizon. The editors describe this work as “a series of overlapping active processes: the experimentation and experience that take place through cultural, mediatic, and technological modes of action.” To “produce” Palestine, they explain, is not a matter of documenting a stable reality but of engaging in “an enlivened and enlivening praxis that engages ‘producers’ and ‘readers’ of different kinds.” In other words, the act of producing Palestine is participatory and dynamic, involving everyone who makes, interprets, or even imagines it.”