Since the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, the world has witnessed unimaginable, almost constant violence in Gaza and the West Bank. But people’s understanding of these events is not universal – each person is exposed to a particular set of narratives surrounding history, victimhood and trauma.
The vast majority of news reports, social media posts, videos, and books that have covered the events since October 7, 2023 can be defined as what I call “conflict media”, which reproduces the divisions of the conflict it describes, perpetuating it to the point where the media itself becomes a weapon in an information war.
As a scholar of the Middle East, I have rarely – though not never – encountered conflict media’s opposite, which I call “resolution media”.
The most famous works of resolution media have emerged after a conflict ends, and highlight the universal suffering of war. Wilfred Owen’s First World War poem Dulce et Decorum Est, for instance, is still widely quoted to expose “the old Lie” that it is “sweet and fitting” to die for one’s country.
The Israel-Palestine conflict has produced its own resolution media. In 2002, during the Second Intifada, Palestinian and Israeli educators Sami Adwan and Dan Bar-On published school booklets that printed their peoples’ histories on facing pages, with blank space between...