One evening, scrolling through Instagram (the same doomscroll that now defines so much of our collective witnessing), I paused at a meme. It quoted a TV character saying, “I’m condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them.” Another day, another meme. But this one lingered. It reminded me of a line by Sun Tzu: “The opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself.”
That opportunity today is language. And the war is being waged not only through missiles but also through narrative. Through captions and subtitles. Through translation.
In the Israel-Palestine context, language has never been neutral. It has long been asymmetrical, a domain where Israel holds institutional power and global fluency. Israel operates with the full weight of a state apparatus: fluent spokespeople, strategic messaging, and a long-standing familiarity with Western media. Its official narratives are seamlessly inserted into Anglo-American discourse, calibrated for headlines and policy briefings. As early as 2011, an Israeli Defense Forces spokesperson admitted: “Computers and keyboards are the weapons, Facebook and Twitter are the battlefields. It is there we fight, each and every day.” In contrast, for decades, Palestinian narratives have been excluded or distorted within that framework, filtered through media gatekeepers or buried beneath official silence. They’re represented as voiceless victims, or worse, as threats to be explained. But this is shifting. Today, Palestinians are no longer waiting to be translated by foreign correspondents, humanitarian reports, or NGO officers. They’re translating themselves. Their grief, their rage, their history are all spoken plainly, powerfully, and directly into the global conversation, leaving no room to claim ignorance, distance, or media deception when you tell your grandchildren what you knew. Scholar Sema Üstün Külünk calls this phenomenon PalesTranslation: an act of digital self-representation that transcends language, encompassing trauma, testimony, and resistance. This is not just about making content accessible. It’s about seizing narrative control.
Consider Bisan Owda, whose every video begins with the phrase “I’m still alive,” not as a tagline but as a declaration of defiance. Or Plestia Alaqad, who guided millions through the ruins of her city in a calm, intimate English that refused to dramatize what was already unbearable. Or Renad Attallah, the 11-year-old girl who once dreamed of becoming a chef but now bears witness to unimaginable horrors, bravely documenting genocide and forced starvation so the world cannot look away. These are not merely posts. They’re counter-histories, built in real time. And they’re powerful precisely because they speak directly to the world and bypass traditional filters, including editorial boards and newsroom biases.
In translating themselves, these Gazans are performing a kind of narrative insurgency. They’re not just making their trauma legible; they’re asserting authorship. They decide what to show, what to subtitle, and when silence is more powerful than any caption. That autonomy is crucial. It challenges and disrupts the decades-long habit of portraying Palestinians as passive victims, objects of pity, or threats. And it is working.
Despite censorship, shadowbans, and algorithmic suppression, Palestinian digital testimonies are reshaping public discourse not just among activists, but across institutions and policymaking spaces that long refused to name Israeli violence.
But it would be a mistake to romanticize this as some tidy digital victory. The labor of self-translation is brutal. It means recounting trauma in a language shaped by the colonizer. It means performing grief in ways that meet the West’s emotional thresholds. It means asking for recognition and often still being met with silence. To self-translate is to stretch language until it breaks. It is to code-switch between mourning and messaging. To stand amid rubble and decide what the world needs to see today, and in what words.
What “PalesTranslation” ultimately demands from the rest of us is more than solidarity. It demands humility. It asks that we recognize our own role in shaping which narratives gain traction and which are dismissed. It calls us to stop expecting eloquence from those fighting for their survival, and instead to interrogate the systems that made their pain untranslatable in the first place.
To translate is to move between worlds. Palestinians today are doing so every day between Arabic and English, between resistance and remembrance, between the immediacy of death and dignity. Their digital storytelling is not a substitute for political justice. But it’s a powerful refusal of disappearance. They’re declarations: we exist, we are speaking, we will not be misrepresented, we will not be erased.
In a world so quick to deny, dilute, or deflect Palestinian narratives, self-translation becomes an act of radical refusal. They’re not just asking to be heard. They’re insisting on being understood. And it’s one of the most powerful forms of resistance we’re witnessing in this moment.
In this, I find hope. Not naïve hope. A hope rooted in the recognition that the war over language is not secondary to the war on the ground; it is central. And in that war, Palestinians are no longer waiting to be spoken for. They are already speaking. We only need to listen.
Note: I realize not everyone may have access to Sema Üstün Külünk’s scholarly article, but as a postgraduate alum, I’m lucky to have it. If you’re interested in reading it, just let me know and I’d be happy to share the full PDF with you by email.