Article - Palestinian Narrative: How Do We Build A Strategy?

Why is a collective narrative important to the Palestinian liberation struggle? What challenges do the Palestinian people face in promoting their narrative, and who has legitimacy to promulgate it?

Al-Shabaka analysts Tamara Ben-Halim and Hazem Jamjoum weigh in on these questions and more in this month’s Palestine Policy Lab, facilitated by Amjad Iraqi.

Tamara Ben-Halim is a co-founder, trustee, and former director of Makan, a Palestinian-led nonprofit based in the UK that works to strengthen voices for Palestinian rights through educational and capacity-building programs. She also co-founded Cycling4Gaza, an initiative that has raised over $1.2 million for vulnerable Palestinian communities in Gaza since 2009. She holds an MSc in Human Rights from the London School of Economics and an MA in Modern European Languages from the University of Edinburgh.

Hazem Jamjoum is a Palestinian cultural historian, archivist, and editor based in London. He is an editor at Safarjal Press and curator of the British Library’s early twentieth century audio recordings relevant to Arab and Gulf history. His translation of Ghassan Kanafani’s The Revolution of 1936–1939 in Palestine (1804 Books) won the 2024 Palestine Book Award, and his translation of Maya Abu al-Hayyat’s No One Knows Their Blood Type was published by the CSU Poetry Center in 2024.

Amjad Iraqi is a senior Israel/Palestine analyst at the International Crisis Group. He was previously a senior editor at +972 Magazine, an associate fellow with Chatham House’s MENA Programme, and an advocacy coordinator at Adalah. Among other outlets, he has written for the London Review of BooksThe New York Review of BooksThe Nation, and The Guardian, and has appeared on various podcasts including “The Ezra Klein Show”. Amjad has an MA in Public Policy from King’s College London, and an Hon. BA in Peace and Conflict Studies from the University of Toronto.

Latest Analysis

 Politics
When four donkeys were evacuated from Gaza to a German zoo in November 2025, their rescue was celebrated as a humanitarian success. Yet while the animals were transported to safety, given new names, and described as leaving behind "hunger and misery, beatings and hardship," Palestinian children have been unable to evacuate amid a relentless ongoing genocide. In this commentary, Asmaa Abu Mezied examines how humanitarian concern operates through racialized hierarchies of grievability that render animal suffering more visible and rescue-worthy than Palestinian human life. She further argues that animal welfare interventions are materially entangled with the dispossession of Palestinian survival infrastructure, showing how it can become an enabling mechanism of colonial violence rather than its interruption.
Asmaa Abu Mezied· Aug 11, 2026
 Politics
In this policy lab, we are joined by policy expert Lara Friedman and investigative journalist and writer Antony Loewenstein to explore the shift in Israel’s relationship with the US from dependence to deeper symbiosis.
 Civil Society
After Hamas’s recent announcement that it will hand over governing authority in Gaza to the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG), urgent questions about who will shape Gaza's future and on whose terms have reemerged. These questions are particularly salient given that the NCAG’s framework reflects the same technocratic and externally imposed logic that has come to characterize the dominant international proposal for Gaza's reconstruction: one that treats it as a technical exercise in disaster management, sidelining Palestinian sovereignty, return, and self-determination. In contrast, this roundtable asks what it means to understand Gaza as an Indigenous region rather than simply a besieged strip or humanitarian space. Nour Joudah and Dena Qaddumi explore how Indigenous frameworks reshape prevailing understandings of urbanism, reconstruction, and governance; why reconstruction must begin with Palestinian agency and reclamation rather than externally designed colonial master plans; and how rebuilding is already taking place through everyday forms of Indigenous endurance, social organization, and spatial resistance under conditions of ongoing genocide.
Nour Joudah,Dena Qaddumi· Jul 23, 2026