By Romana Rubeo
Romana Rubeo examines how Palestinian voices reshape global solidarity, outlining five editorial responsibilities for journalism that challenge complicity and hasbara.
Three years into Israel’s genocide in Gaza, we are still witnessing the horrors of Israeli brutality and the unwillingness of the international community to hold Israel fully accountable and put an end to the slaughter.
However, we are also observing a worldwide mobilization that continues despite the measures taken by Israel’s allies around the world to punish those demonstrating for Palestine.
This raises a question: how did solidarity grow into a movement capable of challenging deeply deep-seated political assumptions?
Challenging the Narrative, Centering Palestinian Voices
Part of the explanation lies in Israel’s brutality itself, alongside statements by Israeli politicians openly advocating mass murder, the slaughter of Palestinians, forced displacement, genocide, and even the use of nuclear weapons against Gaza. But the answer cannot be found there alone.
An undeniable role has been played by Palestinians’ ability to narrate the horrors they have endured. Palestinian journalism, alongside independent media and social media, has been central to changing what societies accept and perceive as common sense.
For decades, mainstream Western representations of Israel’s occupation of Palestine and of the “incremental genocide” of its native population have centered Israel’s needs. Fabricated security narratives have dehumanized those subjected to Israeli violence, reducing Palestinians to “terrorists” or mere victims, while overlooking their history and political agency.
This is how the story keeps getting told backward. Palestinians resist decades of violence and military occupation, yet their resistance is treated as the moment the violence began—an “unprovoked” attack. Everything they have endured before that moment disappears from view. The Zionist state’s ongoing violence then becomes a “response”, and unconditional Western support is made to seem like the only reasonable course.
The Zionist project has long recognized the importance of constructing this corrupt equation, in which Israelis appear as perpetual victims whose ‘right to exist’ overrides Palestinians’ rights to life, freedom, and self-determination. This is why Israel has never stopped investing in its ‘hasbara’, or propaganda, which operates through this hierarchy of credibility as much as through individual falsehoods to promote a fundamentally distorted image of Israel.
Italian intellectual Antonio Gramsci’s understanding of hegemony helps explain why this account has endured. For Gramsci, political power rests partly on securing consent through assumptions that become embedded in everyday thinking. Yet this ‘common sense’ is neither coherent nor fixed. Its contradictions leave room for other explanations to take hold.
Gaza has highlighted those contradictions, exposing the gap between Western claims to defend human rights and Western direct involvement and complicity in the destruction of Palestinian life.
Palestinian journalists have been central to exposing that gap. Working through bombardment, displacement, hunger, and the loss of family members and loved ones, they have documented the genocide as they live through it. Their reporting has challenged a fallacious hierarchy in which Palestinians are the subjects of stories, while outsiders claim the authority to explain their lives.
This work, unfortunately, has come at a devastating cost. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented killings, deliberate targeting, detention, and other attacks against Palestinian journalists. These attacks also undermined the production of knowledge. When witnesses are killed and their equipment destroyed, evidence is lost, and those still reporting face even greater obstacles. But this has not prevented Palestinian media professionals from continuing to spread the truth.
Yet these journalists needed platforms that could bring their reporting to audiences around the world. Without them, their voices risked being lost. There was little reason to expect mainstream media to take on that role. The truth was available; the question was what editors chose to do with it. Those choices reflect the interests and priorities of the institutions they work for. Media ownership, dependence on official sources, and close relationships with political power all help determine which stories get told, whose accounts are trusted, and which explanations never get a hearing.
Social media and independent outlets have been essential to this work. Palestinian journalists and ordinary people have shared what is happening around them, bringing the genocide to our phone screens without having to wait for an editor’s approval. Censorship and algorithms still limit who sees these accounts, but they have allowed Palestinians to reach audiences directly and challenge the coverage offered by mainstream media.
Independent media outlets have helped audiences make sense of these events, connecting them to Israeli occupation, dispossession, but also to international complicity through sustained reporting, historical background, analysis, and Palestinian perspectives.
Five Editorial Responsibilities
However, independence alone does not guarantee that an outlet will challenge the hierarchies embedded in mainstream coverage. That calls for conscious decisions about how journalism is practiced. For those of us working in independent media, five editorial responsibilities follow from this experience.
First, examine the selection of news. The first choice we make is what to cover. We often talk about objectivity and neutrality, but these concepts are used to mask biased depictions of reality.
In actuality, choosing one story and passing over another already shapes what readers see and understand. It determines whose experiences deserve attention. If we want to challenge the way Palestine is covered, we have to start with thoughtful decisions.
Two, select and contextualize sources: copying and pasting a mainstream agency report, then polishing its language while leaving its underlying framing largely intact, is not enough.
Whenever possible, we should try to trace information to the authentic document, statement, interview, or firsthand account. This does not mean that we always have to resort to ‘friendly’ sources.
On the contrary, in order for us to ‘build the news’, we must include material published by mainstream, Israeli, or US media. Our responsibility, however, is to understand the source’s affiliations and agenda, distinguish evidence from assertion, and provide the context readers need to assess it.
Third, recognize Palestinian journalists as producers of knowledge.
We should always prioritize direct reporting from the ground, but we should also keep something else in mind.
Too often, a certain racist division of labor persists in newsrooms: Palestinians are trusted to risk their lives obtaining footage or providing exact death tolls, while outsiders retain the authority to interpret and filter reality.
Yet Palestinian journalists are reporters, analysts, and authors whose work deserves publication, attribution, and circulation. Independent media outlets should give them room to explain their own reality.
Fourth, decolonize language structurally. If a story still reproduces colonial assumptions, changing a word here and there is completely insufficient.
Language has long been used to dehumanize Palestinians and erase their political agency. Only by reclaiming this agency can we provide a full and thorough account of the structures shaping Palestinians’ lives and recognize their rights, history, and capacity to act.
Firth, keep the mission above personal recognition. We should never place ourselves at the center of the story or, even worse, turn Palestinian suffering into a route to awards, popularity, professional advancement, or simply personal satisfaction.
Our responsibility is not to appeal to Western audiences in order to get recognition or awards, but rather to tell the truth and remain accountable to the people whose lives we cover. That mission must guide our choices, including when it carries a professional cost.
From Independent Reporting to Collective Pressure
These practices matter beyond the newsroom. Indeed, independent media can also help people understand the reality on the ground and turn their genuine feeling of disapproval into action.
Reporting on a port blockade, a university campaign, or workers’ refusal to cooperate shows that others are already resisting and it gives audiences reasons to act and examples of what they can do together.
Seeing what is happening does not automatically move people to act. Organizations, networks, and political opportunities remain essential. Independent journalism can help make those connections by showing people that their anger is shared, that others are organizing, and that there are ways to get involved.
This change in common sense has certainly not reached everyone, nor has it ended governments’ support for Israel. Major media outlets still have considerable influence. However, independent reporting has opened up debates they long kept at the margins. More people are questioning colonialism, naming the genocide, scrutinizing arms supplies, and protesting against the institutions that sustain Israel’s crimes.
The movement’s critical mass has grown partly through these connections. Palestinian journalists show the world what they are living through. Independent media help their reporting reach people and explain the history behind it. Organizers and activists provide ways to act on that knowledge.
We need to build on this relationship by protecting Palestinian journalists, supporting independent media, and helping their reporting reach people who might otherwise never encounter it.
Challenging hasbara and accepted narratives means exposing their falsehoods while dismantling the assumptions that made those falsehoods credible. That is where a renewed common sense gains political force, helping build the sustained collective pressure needed for institutions at every level to end their complicity and hold Israel accountable.
– Romana Rubeo is an Italian writer and the managing editor of The Palestine Chronicle. Her articles appeared in many online newspapers and academic journals. She holds a Master’s Degree in Foreign Languages and Literature and specializes in audio-visual and journalism translation.