Pallywood: Israel's Egregious Propaganda Campaign
The images and videos promoted online and their origins explained
Above you see a photo of a man seemingly donning many different roles.
The man in question is claimed to be Saleh Aljafarawi, a YouTuber from Gaza.
This photo has been shared on Twitter as a way to show that Palestinians are faking the atrocities committed by Israel.
However, many of these images are either taken out of context or not Aljafarawi at all.
The “resilient patient” is an entirely different person — a teenager who was injured by the IDF in the Nur Shams refugee camp back in August—the “revived corpse” — a photo of a Thai teenager’s 2022 Halloween costume.
And yet these Alex Jones-style crisis actor conspiracy theories were shared by a member of Benjamin Netanyahu’s communication team and the official Israel Twitter account.
But it does not stop there.
Above is a screenshot of a tweet sent out by Ofir Gendelman, the “Israeli Prime Minister's spokesperson to the Arab world.” Gendelman tweeted this out yesterday as a way to show that Palestinians, in his words, “are fooling the international media and public opinion.”
A community note left on the tweet says “The video is the backstage of the short film "The Reality" shot in Lebanon by Lebanese actors to support the population of Gaza.”
At one point in the clip you even see a man playing a violin while the Palestinian Red Crescent tends to the girl on the stretcher.
Rather than deleting the tweet and apologizing he instead tweeted, “Palestinian accounts have published this video as if it was genuine. That's why it was posted here.”
The original tweet got 10k likes and 12k retweets in 24 hours. The correction only received 92 likes and 278 retweets in 24 hours.
While many of the quote retweets and replies called out and made fun of Gendelman for this huge error, many people shared the video as if it were fact before and after the community note had been added.
So what is Pallywood and how did it start?
PALLYWOOD ORIGINS
On September 30th, 2000, at the start of the second intifada, images of a twelve-year-old boy trapped with his father in the crossfire between Israeli troops and Palestinian gunmen in the Gaza Strip were captured by French TV cameras.
The boy was Muhammad al-Durrah and he was killed by the IDF in this incident.
This took the world by storm and the footage was shared far and wide.
The cameras rolled for 45 minutes which Israeli media and defenders immediately called into question. Over the months and years that followed, a campaign was launched to tear apart the footage and analyze it frame-by-frame.
An essay by Rebecca L. Stein titled “‘The Boy Who Wasn’t Really Killed’: Israeli State Violence in the Age of the Smartphone Witness,” states, “self-styled forensic experts: an American academic, Richard Landes, an “expert in Palestinian media manipulation,” and an Israeli, Nahum Shahaf, a physicist and “forensic expert” who would lead the military’s investigation of the incident” were at the center of this campaign.
Their final conclusion? This incident had been staged.
Landes in particular dedicated his life’s work to this so-called “issue” and even coined the term “Pallywood” to describe “the Palestinian national film industry in which ‘militant’ journalists and street actors produce staged news as propaganda.”
Muhammad al-Durrah is considered a martyr in the Arab world and until 2013 the conspiracy remained relatively unchallenged.
That is until a French court vindicated France 2 and cameraman Abu Rahma, by upholding their defamation case against a French media commentator named Philippe Karsenty.
Karsenty accused France 2 and Rahma of staging the video and the court fined him 7,000 euros.
Over the years Israel has claimed they did not kill al-Durrah.
In 2013 a National Israeli Panel of Inquiry claimed al-Durrah never even died and claimed that there were "numerous indications" that he and his father, Jamal al-Durrah, were not actually hit by any bullets.
As cell phone footage of Israeli atrocities has grown more and more frequent, and their distribution on social media has become more and more prominent, so has this conspiracy.
“Pallywood” is often easy to debunk and many analysts are critical of it, yet it persists to this day…