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 Books, The New York Review of Books, The 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

This Focus On engages with some of the most pressing aspects of this escalation in the West Bank since October 7, 2023. It features analyses by Al-Shabaka members and contributors that show how collective punishment of Palestinians has led to a collapse in access to food, healthcare, work, and education. The compilation also examines the Palestinian people’s resistance to the expansionist Israeli scorched-earth policy, and the political leadership’s complicity and failures.
 Politics
In this Policy Lab, Al-Shabaka analyst Amjad Iraqi joins host Tariq Kenney-Shawa to examine Israel’s electoral landscape, the limits of its so-called opposition camp, and what the election means for the future of the Palestinian struggle.
Al-Shabaka Amjad Iraqi
Amjad Iraqi· Sep 22, 2026
 Civil Society
This policy brief argues that the health sciences—from public health to epidemiology, nursing, medicine, pharmacology, and nutrition, among others—have a distinct role to play in preventing and documenting the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza and other settings, as well as in generating evidence to inform accountability processes.