Digital Palestine: My approach is to analyze the importance of online icons and digital forums. For instance, how Arab American women are protesting in creative online forms, by interweaving "Digital Feminisms" into a discourse of digital protest for Palestine.My contribution to the panel considers how Arab American women activists have used public protest icons and online icons as creative strategies to solidify interracial and gendered solidarities. My work includes examples from Palestinian American digital activist Amani Al-Khatahtbeh as part of her interracial solidarities for Gaza @MuslimGirl. My method is to study digitalized icons as sites of contestation and in forms of digital feminisms and LGBTQ sites. This work focuses on building public and digital alliances, using online icons—for instance, as labor figures, transforming queer racial riveters, as trans-national and/or interracial LGBTQ sites, or in solidarity photos for #Palestinegenocide. These digital icons are used as tropes of belonging, as calls for interracial solidarities, as forms of protest, in issues ranging from #BLM to #QueerMuslimProject to #Palestine. My approach also considers “algorithms of oppression,” challenges within witnessing in the pace and capacity of doomscrolling, onslaught of cyberbullying in racist comments, and death threats, faced by these activists in these case studies. I consider how we approach virtual communities that organize for Palestine in research, and how are US Muslim women creatively and critically situating Palestine as part of a discourse on digital feminisms. I argue that digital platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter/X are being repurposed, and these digital sites call for antracism and anti-imperialism. I consider contrasts between Arab American celebrities and Arab American grassroots solidarities that digitally organize for Palestine. My approach is based on my recent book that shows the tensions in celebrity and grassroots use of icons in their approaches of virtual networking and in networking with “radical secrecy."

Within the early 20th century Syrian diaspora, gender, sexuality, and class were inextricably tied to ideas of race. In my portion of the roundtable, I take a global approach to investigating the many ways that race and gender were sutured together in the first Arab migrant population in the United States. Syrian elite men used their relationship with transnational patriarchs to become white, reinforcing patriarchy and racism within their own diasporic communities. Gendered and classed positions within Ottoman Syria became exacerbated as migrants traveled across multiple empires on their way to the Americas, and for elite Syrian men, policing Syrian women’s sexuality became a way to ensure belonging in their new nations. I ask, how did Syrian men use their access to transnational patriarchy to attempt to control Syrian women travelers? How did Syrian women respond to the different iterations of patriarchy across the Ottoman, European, and US states, as well as the patriarchal powers within the diaspora? How does this affect solidarities within Arab communities today? Building on my own archival research across Lebanon, Europe, and the United States, I reflect on using a transnational method of critical race and gender studies that attends to the “scattered hegemonies” through which migrants travel.

Following the murder of Mike Brown in 2014, Palestinians in the West Bank and throughout the diaspora showed up for Black Lives Matter both in digital and physical solidarity. However, the shared identity under occupation by Black lives and Palestinians goes back even further to the life and mission of Malcolm X. The struggle for freedom crosses boundaries of race and nation state and delves deeper into the intersectional identity of the Arab and Muslim diaspora. For this roundtable, I will talk about my media and digital studies approach, focusing on digital solidarities, and investigating sites of liberation and imagination that cross into these intersectional identities of the Arab and Muslim diaspora. My approach is based on earlier work that examines the mediated dialogue of #WhiteWednesdays, specifically between U.S. mainstream news narratives and Iranian activists on Twitter. These narratives highlight how hierarchies of visibility in both news and social media discourse overshadow transnational feminist politics while reinforcing femonationalist narratives. Such discourses seemingly support women in Iran, but simultaneously promote Islamophobic messages aligned with U.S. geopolitical politics. In a critical discourse analysis of the #WhiteWednesdays campaign on Twitter and mainstream U.S. news coverage of the movement, this analysis complicates representations of Iran, Muslim women, and feminist politics. In the field of media studies, my focus is on the intersections of liberation discourses, and my approach to these diasporas considers race, transnationalism, and digital studies.

My contribution to this roundtable will focus on LGBTQ responses to the Israeli war on Gaza. In the face of Israeli pinkwashing, LGBTQ-led organizing plays an important role in Palestine solidarity efforts. Queer supporters of the Israeli state are utilizing their platforms to support Israel’s bombardment and invasion of the Gaza Strip. And we continue to see massive popular mobilization and pro-Palestinian protests in many major cities - including queer diasporic Palestinians at the forefront. This does not come as a surprise to me as a queer Palestinian and researcher on these issues, and author of the book, Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique. My book traces the rise of the queer movement in Palestine and how it has become a transnational solidarity movement. Within most progressive queer spaces around the world, solidarity with Palestine has become a salient feature of intersectional organizing and advocacy. These expressions of solidarity have also been met with campaigns of repression and censorship as well as significant blowback from right-wing forces. Supporters of the Israeli state and the U.S. state are able to marshal formidable resources and platforms to intimidate, harass and silence Palestinian human rights activists. These responses are often leveled in bad faith to further dehumanize Palestinians and stigmatize people of conscience who call for an end to Israel’s oppression. And others genuinely believe that individuals from a marginalized background are being misled in their support for Palestinian groups that do not accept them in the fullness of their humanity. This question is posed over and over: “Why would a queer person be allied with a homophobe?” The knee-jerk responses that often condescend to queer folks for expressing concern for Palestinian lives and humanity reflect the pervasiveness of pinkwashing discourse. Pinkwashing is a form of propaganda marshaled by supporters of the right-wing Israeli state to draw attention to the state’s purported advanced LGBTQ rights record in order to detract attention from its gross violations of Palestinian human rights. The pinkwashing focus on Palestinian homophobia is therefore deployed to mark Palestinians as “less civilized” — and less human than Israelis — and to therefore normalize Israeli policies of apartheid and military occupation. Homophobia is nearly universal across societies — it is not unique to the Palestinian body politic — and there is nothing endemic to Arab “culture” that makes Arabs or Muslims predisposed to homophobia.