Since Hamas carried out its deadly attack on October 7 and Israel began retaliatory military operations in Gaza, a parallel war is being fought online. A barrage of disinformation, fake news and misinformation has swarmed social media feeds. Pro-Israeli accounts on social media are using the term “Pallywood” to accuse Palestinians of faking their suffering.
Amid the thick fog of this information war, one word has consistently come out from behind the haze. Pro-Israeli accounts online have been deploying the word “Pallywood” as a means to undermine the plight of Gazans.
Two denialist narratives about the Israel-Hamas war have sadly become prominent online:
1- It was Israel that killed its own civilians on 7 October, not Hamas
2- Pallywood: Palestinian civilian casualties are fake crisis actors
Both are false, but get huge Twitter engagement.
— Shayan Sardarizadeh (@Shayan86) November 13, 2023
A blend of the words “Palestine” and “Hollywood”, the term insinuates that stories of suffering coming from Gaza are contrived or embellished for propaganda purposes. The accusations range from hiring crisis actors, to doctoring footage and editing it in a dishonest way that misrepresents reality.
Detractors argue the pejorative term is a deliberate attempt to delegitimise the very real hardships endured by Gazans, and to dehumanise Palestinian lives.
A Gazan caught in the crosshairs
At the heart of the Pallywood claims made by pro-Israeli accounts online is one young Gazan in particular, Saleh Al-Jafarawi. He has repeatedly been accused of being a “crisis actor” working for Hamas who allegedly stages scenes to make himself look like a victim.
Al-Jafarawi has been actively posting videos on Instagram since the start of the war to document what is happening on the ground in Gaza. But he got caught in the crosshairs of disinformation when pro-Israeli accounts started sharing videos showing an alleged Al-Jafarawi in a hospital bed one day, and walking the streets of Gaza the next.
The claim that Al-Jafarawi had faked an injury spread like wildfire, with official government profiles taking part in its circulation. Israel’s official X account also shared the story in two separate tweets, which it then deleted some hours later.
Hananya Naftali, who used to work under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as part of his digital communications team and is now a leading pro-Israeli influencer, also re-tweeted the viral video on October 26.
In Naftali’s post, two videos have been edited side-by-side. The video on the left depicts a man walking through rubble and has a green banner above it that reads “today”. On the right, a man lies in a hospital bed with an amputated leg while a red banner on the top of the video reads “yesterday”. Naftali called the video “Pallywood propaganda”, claiming the Palestinian man was “miraculously healed in one day” from Israeli strikes.
But the two videos are of two different men. The video on the left is of Al-Jafarawi, a Gazan YouTuber and singer. The video on the right is of Mohammed Zendiq, a young man who lost his leg after Israeli forces attacked the Nur Shams refugee camp in the West Bank on July 24.
Though the claim has long been debunked by various news outlets, Naftali has not deleted his post. And claims about Al-Jafarawi have continued to spread.
“[Pallywood] is certainly a form of disinformation,” says Dr. Robert Topinka, a senior lecturer at Birkbeck University in London who has carried out extensive research on disinformation. “It’s being deliberately spread to confuse… It’s purposeful. Why else would it continue to be spread after it’s been so clearly debunked?”
Al-Jafarawi can still be seen in a compilation of photos aimed at discrediting his coverage of the war in Gaza. A mosaic with nine different photos purports to show Al-Jafarawi taking on different “roles”, but they are images from different dates, taken in different settings, and are not proof he is an actor, something French daily Libération has thoroughly fact-checked. The state of Israel reposted the compilation on November 6 and has not deleted it from its X account so far.
As for the misidentified Palestinian man who lost his leg, Zendiq, he has received an avalanche of online abuse. His family now fear for his life.
‘Dilute’, ‘dehumanise’ and ‘undermine’
For Shakuntala Banaji, an expert on disinformation and media professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science who has been monitoring false claims online since the war broke out, Pallywood “is insult added to injury”.
“We don’t really need those kinds of false reports, since the accurate reporting is there,” says Banaji, referring to the journalists on the ground in Gaza. Though no foreign reporters have been allowed into Gaza and at least 53 journalists have been killed in the enclave according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, many are still risking their lives to document what is happening.
For Topinka, one of the reasons why disinformation like Pallywood is created is to dilute the inhumane aspects of conflicts or events. More than 14,000 people, mostly civilians, have been killed in Gaza since October 7, according to the Hamas-run health authority. “These events are so horrifying that people almost don’t want to believe them,” explains Topinka.
But in the case of Israel and Palestine, there are also strong political motivations that drive the spread of disinformation. “Pallywood is propaganda. It’s overwhelmingly clear that Gazans are undergoing incredible suffering right now. There’s endless evidence for it,” says Topinka. “So to make it seem as if people are inflating the suffering helps to tell a different story about what’s actually happening. It makes it seem like less of a humanitarian disaster,” the researcher explains.
Pallywood is being used in the context of real trauma, loss and grief. To reduce this suffering to fake theatrics, Banaji believes, “fits with the entire lexicon of the dehumanisation of Palestinians”. Even the use of the word itself is, Topinka believes, very intentional. Bollywood and Nollywood (terms that refer to the Indian and Nigerian film industries), he argues, “capture a kind of cultural dynamism, where communities and cultures have created their own film industry outside of Hollywood”.
“But in Pallywood, it’s a reversal of positivity. The idea is that Palestinians are uniquely deceptive. It’s meant to capture a culture… but in this case, in a negative way,” he says.
Aside from dehumanising and diluting Palestinian suffering, the spread of disinformation like Pallywood has tangible consequences, not only on the lives of those who fall victim to it, but also on larger efforts for peace. “It can end up undermining campaigns for a ceasefire or even undermine diplomatic efforts,” warns Topinka.
Pallywood’s comeback and Indian influence
It is not the first time Pallywood has been used to discredit Palestinian suffering. The term was first coined more than a decade ago by Richard Landes, a US historian based in Jerusalem.
In 2005, Landes produced an online documentary called “Pallywood: According to Palestinian Sources”, and since then, has largely popularised the term that has now even been adopted by Israeli authorities. Landes continues to use Pallywood in the context of the ongoing war, and recently spoke to the Australian Jewish Association about its invention.
“It is now being re-weaponised,” says Banaji.
Logically Facts, a UK company specialised in combatting disinformation, analysed social media data across Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Reddit from September 27 to October 26. It found that the volume of posts citing Pallywood “increased steadily in the days after October 7”, and that the term was mentioned over 146,000 times by more than 82,000 unique users between October 7 and October 27. The country with the most mentions was the US, followed by India and Israel.
“I’ve been monitoring day and night,” Banaji concurs. “90% of the Pallywood content that is coming out … appears to be coming from pro-Zionist, pro-Israel accounts,” which, according to Logically Facts, is being driven by users based outside of Israel and Palestinian Territories.
India accounts online are a major driver. The country has seen a massive disinformation campaign targeting Palestinians since the start of the war.
“Many of these people are paid trolls, but many of them are unpaid anti-Muslims who have a stake in seeing Israel exonerated,” Banaji argues, referring to the spread of anti-Muslim sentiment by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his BJP party. “[In the UK], there are Indian accounts pretending to be either Muslim or Israelis, spreading disinformation on behalf of the Israeli state, the IDF or British Zionist organisations,” Banaji explains.
But despite official voices like the state of Israel or the Indian government amplifying disinformation like Pallywood, and the exhaustion that comes with monitoring the never-ending rush of her feed, Banaji believes there is a way to rebuild trust in institutions. “I wouldn’t be working on disinformation and teaching about media if I thought all was lost,” she says.
Banaji often tells her students about her four-point plan to combat disinformation. Step one is “for people to learn how to do rigorous research for themselves”. Step two is finding “media organisations which maintain a presence on the ground and a balance in reporting”. Step three is reporting misinformation online “because it can get taken down but only if many people report it”. And step four is “trying to re-humanise groups of people”.
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