The third intifada is cultural: How Palestinians are resisting through art and digital visibility

By Berire Kanbur

The Palestinian struggle for sovereignty has evolved over decades, finding new forms of expression and resistance with each generation.

The first intifada relied mainly on collective, civil, and symbolic action. The second intifada took a different approach, emphasising militarised resistance and media visibility. Today, the emerging “third intifada” is taking shape as a cultural one. Previously tied to political unrest, the term “third intifada” is reinterpreted here as a cultural movement, a form of uprising grounded in art and representation.

Since the establishment of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1964, art and cultural production have been central to the Palestinian liberation strategy.

Grassroots efforts in refugee camps preserved oral histories and traditions through community gatherings, keeping identity alive despite the challenges of displacement.

Culture has always mattered, but today it has become a strategic tool for recognition and visibility. 

In recent weeks, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated, “We have to fight with the weapons that apply to the battlefields in which we’re engaged, and the most important ones are on social media”.

In these words, Netanyahu revealed the Esther Project, an Israeli propaganda campaign designed to distort public discourse through what he termed “fighting back”.

The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, through contractors like Bridge Partners, has reportedly paid influencers up to $7,000 per post to publish pro-Israel content on platforms such as TikTok and X, particularly targeting younger audiences and the American public.

Bridge Partners later described these payments as efforts to promote “cultural interchange between the United States and Israel.” This strategy reveals the extent of Israel’s propaganda machinery, whereby it is presented as “cultural exchange,” transforming social media into a weaponised space where truth is distorted, dissent is silenced, and morality is traded for influence.

Why does this matter? Because visibility is power. Controlling social media allows narratives to be shaped algorithmically, reinforcing hegemonic, colonial storylines that have long defined how Palestine is seen and discussed in global discourse.

Narrative power in the digital age 

The shift from television to screens has amplified the stakes of being seen. In the digital-visual era, narrative control is a form of power. A “digital intifada” intertwined with cultural resistance emerges through visual and affective storytelling – film, art, and testimony mobilise empathy and political action, creating shared emotional registers. 

In this war of visibility, truth competes with virality. While governments launch PR campaigns to sanitise occupation, Palestinians document daily life, grief, and resilience with raw honesty. Their stories cut through digital noise precisely because they come from lived experience, not paid influence. 

For Palestinian voices to be truly heard, their narratives must circulate on cultural and artistic platforms, not just news cycles.

Social media, art, and literature allow Palestinians to assert identity, preserve memory, and sustain collective resilience.

Palestinians in Khan Yunis, Gaza, paint a mural highlighting environmental destruction, using art as a form of cultural resistance, November 10, 2025 (AA).

Despite Israel’s efforts to systematically erase Palestinian identity through the appropriation, theft, and destruction of cultural heritage, Palestinians have continued to preserve their traditions from language and cuisine to music and attire, transforming art and literature into powerful tools of defiance.

Through grassroots projects, exhibitions, and educational projects, they share their stories across borders, uniting communities and keeping the cause alive, particularly among younger generations in the diaspora.

Initiatives such as Riwaq, a Palestinian architectural conservation centre, restore historic homes and villages, while Qalandiya International, a biennial art festival held across Palestinian cities and the diaspora, unites artists and audiences to keep Palestinian creativity visible.

These kinds of initiatives demonstrate a willingness to preserve traditions and culture, as well as produce new ones. This is not just passive protection and conservation, but an active statement of identity and sovereignty.

Culture is not just art or heritage; it is daily life: how people cook, build, sing, and gather. The Israeli occupation has attempted to strip these practices of meaning, appropriating everything from food to architecture to olive trees and symbols like the kufiyah.

Yet Palestinians continue to assert sovereignty through culture, using semiotics and symbolism to communicate resilience and identity.

Last month, British street artist Banksy's mural on the Royal Court of Justice in London illustrated this principle: silent but powerful. Though scrubbed off the court wall within hours, it conveyed an enduring message of resistance.

Algorithmic control and digital hegemony

This is the century of social media, where narratives are shaped and spread through digital platforms. Today, these spaces have become the most powerful – and sometimes the only – means of amplifying resistance and making voices heard.

In a globalised world dominated by cultural hegemony, using these platforms is not optional but essential.

Over the past decade, algorithms have gradually replaced traditional media as the new gatekeepers of information, determining which stories are seen and which are buried. They now function as modern instruments of cultural control, deciding which narratives survive in the digital ecosystem.

History has seen this before. When German entrepreneur Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in the mid-15th century, he didn’t simply invent a machine but a unprecedented access to alternative ideas. 

Of course, those in power were deeply disturbed, because it then meant ordinary people could widely read other sources and question authority, directly threatening the foundations of control.

In a way, the printing press was the first algorithm, a counter-gatekeeper of truth that enabled critical thinking and gave “other voices” a platform to be heard. By loosening the authority’s control over knowledge, it triggered an informational revolution. Yet, paradoxically, what began in Gutenberg’s era as the liberation of knowledge has now turned back on itself.

Although access to information today is faster and broader than ever, we once again find ourselves within a mediated system. Like the pre-printing world, our supposedly open digital space filters and reshapes what we see. The algorithm, while appearing neutral, functions as a new gatekeeper — censoring, editing, and repackaging narratives, serving not truth but curated fragments of it.

As Italian philosopher and politician Antonio Gramsci argued, domination is not maintained by force alone but by shaping what societies accept as “common sense.” Cultural hegemony decides who is seen, how they are seen, and what becomes believable.

Breaking the crisis of representation

The cultural Intifada, therefore, is not only a creative movement but a political necessity.

It pushes back against this algorithmic control, Western media biases, and colonial narratives that obscure Palestinian voices.

Symbols like the watermelon have bypassed the ban on the Palestinian flag, demonstrating ingenuity in visibility and narrative reclamation. 

This struggle over visibility is intensified by the role of Western media, which constructs its own geopolitical language regime to sustain propaganda.

Films like Gaza Sunbirds and Holy Redemption exemplify this approach, creating new aesthetic languages to convey what ordinary words cannot. Gaza Sunbirds captures resilience amid conflict through the determination of disabled athletes in Gaza, while Holy Redemption reflects on faith and survival in post-war Lebanon.

By documenting personal stories, gestures, and emotions, they restore humanity and resist dehumanisation. 

When language itself becomes part of the injustice, art becomes a new language. The cultural intifada grows from this need, transforming silence into expression and building counter-hegemonic narratives.

Palestinians and their allies are not only resisting ideological domination but proposing new moral frameworks and re-inventing the very language of resistance.

What is unfolding now is not merely a reaction to oppression, but a rewriting of the terms of resistance.

The third intifada is very much cultural, an uprising of art, memory, and imagination that defies both erasure and algorithm.

Against the machinery of propaganda and control, Palestinians continue to speak, paint, sing, and film their existence into permanence. In doing so, they remind the world that liberation is not only a political demand, but a cultural right — the right to define oneself, to exist in one’s own image, and to remain unforgotten.

Berire Kanbur is an arts and culture practitioner based in London and Istanbul.

The author, Berire Kanbur is an arts and culture practitioner based in London and Istanbul.