Lessons from Gaza’s Digital Stories of Resilience during the COVID-19 Lockdowns

The next speaker in this session at the AoIR 2024 conference is Yuval Katz. His interest is in the way that the COVID-19 lockdown unfolded in Gaza: even before the current war, Gaza had been under siege for decades, and Gazans have developed many mechanisms for inspirational resilience; this was on display also during the lockdowns.

Here and elsewhere, the pandemic was a cultural experience, too; much as in Israel, the pandemic was perceived through comparisons with the holocaust, and digital tools were mobilised to cope with and find solace in times of crisis, in Gaza the Palestinian population mobilised well-established concepts of resilience in the face of occupation and repression to cope with pandemic lockdowns.

Such pandemic-era resilience also translates to the much longer-term project of Palestinian nation-building, and again digital technologies – here for instance for digital storytelling – played a key role. Yuval analysed some 66 digital storytelling pieces from the pandemic, finding a transition from arrogance (about Gaza’s resistance to the pandemic) through fear (about its consequences) to defiance (towards the COVID-19 virus as much as towards Israel) over time.

There was also a strong emphasis on safeguarding and protecting the community during the pandemic – focussing on smaller but deeper friendship and family networks; as well as a sense that the rest of the world would now experience the everyday life situation of Gazans in their permanent lockdown. This also generated a profound sense of ambivalence, however. But overall, the digital storytelling emphasised the fact that Gazans are more than just statistics – an understanding that is crucial under the current circumstances too.