It is no longer possible for the Israeli occupation to continue engineering what is seen and what is said as it did two decades ago. This seemingly descriptive statement contains the structural shift exposed by the battle over narrative on TikTok.
Palestinian content, especially that emerging from Gaza, is dominating viewership and engagement rankings in the West before the East, while Israeli content is receding despite organised campaigns, massive government funding, and extensive networks of influencers linked to the security and political establishment.
This raises the central question: why is the occupation losing this symbolic battle on TikTok despite its technical and informational superiority and its highly organised propaganda apparatus? And why does the Palestinian narrative on this platform appear more capable of expansion and influence than ever before?
The Collapse of Image Control Privilege
For decades, Israel controlled not only the land, but also the camera angle and the limits of what the world was allowed to see. The narrative was shaped in Western newsrooms that reproduced Israel as a “besieged democracy” and a “moral exception”, reframing its violence as defensive acts, even when entire families were buried under rubble.
This privilege did not withstand the transformations introduced by digital media into the structure of narrative production. New platforms broke Israel’s monopoly over imagery, pushed the witness to the centre of storytelling, and transformed the victim into a subject that speaks, not raw material to be reshaped.
This exposed the fragility of the old equation and the limits of its function. The Zionist project does not tolerate light, nor does it tolerate the world seeing the victim’s body before the justificatory narrative is complete.
The Palestinian succeeded in turning a technical tool into a political and historical gain that restricts the occupation’s ability to continue its crimes while assuming the world will not see.
The Algorithm of Moral Shock
At this point, TikTok advances ahead of other platforms, not merely as another outlet, but as a radically different narrative model. The platform does not operate on follower networks like others, but constructs the viewing environment based on real time readings of user tendencies.
This methodology relies on what is known as an “interest map”: what provokes you, what shocks you, what lingers in your consciousness. It produces a narrative environment driven not by production quality, but by a piece of content’s ability to trigger immediate emotional reactions.
Here, Palestinian videos emerge as ideal material for the algorithm. A video from Gaza does not require preparation or scripting. It is enough for it to be a direct recording of a building being bombed, a child pulled from under rubble, or a mother screaming while searching for her children.
Such images achieve the highest levels of what can be called a “moral shock index”. Since the algorithm does not understand politics but measures engagement, it pushes this content to the forefront. It quickly detects that millions of users do not scroll past it casually, but stop, rewatch, share, and comment. In this way, the margin becomes the centre, and a weak communication line from a besieged enclave becomes a pivot point in global public opinion.
Narrative Contrast and Shifting Bias
Another element completes the picture, which can be described as “narrative contrast”. When the platform shows the viewer a thirty second clip, it does not explain regional history or settlement maps. It presents two images: an armed force and a victim lying on the ground.
In such a sharp contrast, the algorithm does not require complex calculations to give more space to the narrative that generates broader sympathy. The platform’s structure itself rejects, by its psychological logic, the claim that a heavily armed soldier is the victim and that a child under rubble is the aggressor.
The Superiority of the Palestinian Horizontal Network
The advantage is not limited to the nature of the content, but also to the nature of the space in which it moves. Palestinian content is “horizontal content”. It emerges from a margin without a centre, from tens of thousands of points that cannot be controlled.
A field journalist in Gaza, a martyr’s mother in a hospital, a young man fleeing through rubble, an asylum seeker re explaining the video in another language, an activist connecting what they see to racism experienced in their European city. This dispersion creates a narrative network resistant to suppression. Each video becomes a seed for dozens of quoted, translated, and recycled clips. In a world where meaning is produced from below rather than imposed from above, the central narrative can no longer dictate the terms of reception as it once did.
By contrast, the Israeli narrative is vertical by nature. A political and security decision centre crafts the message, media outlets disseminate it, and influencers repeat it in a filtered and highly professionalised manner.
This model was effective in the era of newspapers and television stations. It fails in an environment that measures success by a content’s ability to generate immediate emotional tension. A narrative that seeks to convince the world that a nuclear armed power is the “victim” cannot withstand a single frame of a child pulled from beneath rubble.
Today’s visual consciousness no longer reads the tank or warplane as signs of weakness, but as symbols of excessive power. Here, “unpolished realism” intersects with “moral shock” to produce an objective advantage for the Palestinian narrative in a space governed not by force, but by feeling.
The Collapse of Israeli Discursive Legitimacy
What makes the Israeli narrative even more fragile in this context is not only its failure to assume the role of victim, but the accumulation of a structural credibility crisis long denied.
Young audiences, raised in a post “war on terror” world and shaped by years of leaks and scandals, no longer treat the Israeli military spokesperson or official statements as neutral sources. They see them as part of a “propaganda theatre”, regardless of how much the institution alters its language or methods.
This is no longer about a tactical lie here or there, but about a long history of fabrications, falsehoods, and terminological manipulation, expanding the definition of “threat” to conceal the colonial structure of control over land and people. Here collapses one of the pillars of symbolic domination: interpretive authority. What remains of a power accustomed to defining truth on behalf of others when those others lose trust in its capacity to speak truth at all?
The core failure goes beyond the algorithm. Violence always requires a cognitive mask. It is not enough to kill. The killing must be narrated in a way that grants it legitimacy. For a full century, Israel enjoyed this privilege in the West, possessing the power to define what is “necessary” and what is “defensive”. The Palestinian appeared in official narratives as a threat, a problem, or an obstacle to peace, as a dehumanised body.
TikTok reversed this relationship. The Palestinian is no longer an object in another’s narrative, but a subject narrating from within lived experience. This shift does not merely neutralise Israeli propaganda, but strikes at the backbone of colonial knowledge structures that assume the victim is silent and the executioner explains events.
The Israeli discourse crisis deepens when moving from image to language and context. Palestinian content does not circulate only within the Arab sphere. It is reproduced in multiple languages. Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students in Western universities share the same raw footage and explain it to their peers, connecting the immediate moment to a longer history of occupation and settlement, and to international law and human rights.
Here, the short video becomes a broader political narrative, acquiring second, third, and fourth lives in circles that were inaccessible to Palestinians a decade ago.
Israeli content, despite its technical capacity, remains trapped in cold bureaucratic English spoken by official state employees. It appears closer to public relations discourse than to human testimony, and automatically loses the ability to create the intimacy that the platform rewards.
The Expansion of the Shift Across Platforms and the Limits of Restriction
At first glance, this may appear as a product of the Chinese platform’s specificity. A brief look at other platforms reveals that the shift is deeper and broader. On X, for example, despite transformations following Musk’s acquisition, the Palestinian narrative continues to generate large areas of organic engagement that the Israeli narrative struggles to match.
On Instagram and YouTube Shorts, Palestinian content periodically rises to prominence before restriction policies intervene to limit or remove it, particularly through shadow banning and automated moderation systems. Yet TikTok remains the clearest model because its recommendation structure is less directly subject to political pressure, and because short video has exceptional capacity to generate emotional shock that drives global conversation.
This does not mean TikTok is a fully free space, nor that the rise of the Palestinian narrative signals the digital sphere’s liberation from Israeli or Western influence. Major technology companies such as Meta, Google, and X remain under intense political and security pressure that pushes them to apply restrictive policies on Palestinian content under labels such as “incitement” or “dangerous organisations”.
Added to this is the debate over the TikTok deal between Washington and Beijing. Washington’s concern is not only about data security, but about the erosion of its symbolic sovereignty over the global media field.
All of this, however, fails to fully suffocate the Palestinian narrative, because the core logic of platforms is stronger than attempts to control them. Short video spreads first, and only afterwards do companies attempt damage control. Once a video has reached millions of screens, no algorithm can erase it from people’s visual memory.
Witnesses of Gaza and the Shattering of the Narrative
The picture is incomplete without addressing the role of Palestinians themselves in shaping this shift. TikTok’s impact would not have reached this level without the central role played by journalists, media workers, and field documenters in Gaza, who became during the war the eyes and ears of the world.
The scenes were not transmitted by insulated international correspondents, but by local journalists and activists working from within the inferno itself, running under bombardment, holding a camera in one hand and the wounded in the other. They formed the most dangerous layer for the Israeli narrative. They did not merely document raw events, but transformed them into narratives charged with ethical and political weight, blending the immediate image with contextual explanation and linking the small incident to the broader colonial structure.
In this context, the occupation’s targeting of journalists in Gaza becomes part of a desperate attempt to reclaim the privilege of vision, not “collateral damage”. The Gaza journalist was not just a transmitter of information, but the embodiment of a witness who breaks the monopoly on truth and redefines the relationship between image and power. The image no longer belongs to the one who holds the weapon, but to the one who places their body in front of it.
The appearance of the Palestinian journalist on screens, bearing unmistakable marks of loss, effectively erased the traditional boundary between journalist and witness, observer and victim. It created a narrative model that Israeli institutions cannot penetrate or neutralise.
The same technology that enabled Israel to bomb a residential building at the press of a button no longer enables it to control what the world sees of that bombing. The technology that amplified its power also amplified the testimony of its victims.
This is why Gaza journalists formed the largest proportion of martyred media workers globally during the months of war. Their targeting was a structural part of the attempt to sever the sole narrative channel the occupation cannot control. Yet the martyrdom of journalists itself became decisive proof of the truth of the narrative they carried, rebounding as a counter strike that exposed the structure of repression the occupation seeks to conceal. It widened global sympathy and deepened the moral sense that the party seeking to extinguish the image with such brutality is the party that fears truth more than weapons.
In this sense, the failure is not technical but epistemic. The Zionist project failed to maintain the “cognitive darkness” it required to justify occupation and crimes. Digital platforms exposed the moral structure of violence that had been covered by dense layers of diplomacy and security discourse.
The Disintegration of Western Knowledge Hegemony
It was therefore unsurprising that a wave of student protests emerged across Western universities, with voices linking what is happening in Gaza to settler colonialism and criticising their governments for complicity in an exposed colonial structure.
What intensifies this rupture is that deep transformations within media audiences themselves made this exposure more likely to take root. Generation Z, along with a significant portion of the following generation, no longer sees traditional news channels or major newspapers as authoritative knowledge sources deserving obedience.
They are the children of a world where certainties collapsed, who lived through successive financial crises, the lies of the war on terror, and leaked scandals exposing media entanglement with power.
They receive events directly from primary sources and treat the voice of the victim as more credible than any “expert” attempting to frame the image politically to soften the weight of genocide. The gap between government discourse and emerging generations is no longer merely political, but an ethical and epistemic rupture that threatens the very structure of hegemony on which the Zionist project relied for decades.
The Historical Window of Opportunity
This raises the question of what all this means for the Palestinian liberation project.
Victory in the battle of narrative does not decide the conflict on the ground, but it opens a rare window to redefine Palestine in the global imagination. The struggle is not between video and video, but between two models of defining reality: one based on military force and knowledge domination, and another based on exposing colonial structures and re centring the victim.
The Palestinian succeeded in transforming a technical tool into a political and historical gain that restricts the occupation’s ability to continue its crimes while assuming the world will not see. The world now sees. This vision is not fleeting, but the beginning of a long disintegration of a narrative once presented as unavoidable fate.
Colonial projects do not begin to collapse only when they lose land, but when they lose their founding narrative and their capacity to persuade, when the illusions on which their legitimacy was built erode.
Yet this will not become a stable historical trajectory unless the Palestinian actor possesses a strategic vision capable of transforming this moment of exposure into a sustained and cumulative path that redefines tools of resistance and builds upon them within a comprehensive liberation project.
