The History of Food Blockades against Palestine

A look into how the Internet Develops Our Truths, Untruths, and Imagined Futures

According to the Sufra Archive أرشيف سفرة, “since 2007, Israel had imposed a siege on Gaza— restricting the movement of goods, people and aid. The blockade on food transfer acts to impoverish, collectively punish, and humiliate the people in Gaza. Today, more than 90% of Gaza’s population are below poverty line, +75% are severely food insecure, 95% suffering from a lack of a healthy diverse diet and +75% rely on humanitarian aid for food.” As previously noted in the Sufra Archive أرشيف سفرة module, Salma Serry uses Instagram as a platform to make information and archival stories accessible to all. However, it is important to note that she must censor words in captions (G@zza); to have her message reach a wider range of people, and to avoid penalties from the platform. This begs to question whether the evolution of the archive over the internet will still be met with barriers in dissemination, especially further considering algorithms centring a user’s biases.

In the hopes of bringing Palestinian truths to light, Salma and other creators such as journalist, Rania Khalek and professor, Hanine Hassan bring archives into question. Narratives surrounding Israel’s attempts to demystify the history of genocide and epistemicide in Gaza are spread throughout online platforms. But who are they reaching? On the other side of the internet, there are Zionist (at times conflated with Jewish) media outlets and social media accounts that claim Palestinians in Gaza are to blame for the war— for their own displacement— as the terrorist group Hamas selfishly brought the lives of Gaza within their own hands. Examples could be seen in headlines regarding their hoarding of food and aid, while other media platforms accuse the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) of being the ones hoarding food and aid on the behalf of a Zionist population. Here, we can see that information is becoming distorted and that there are evidently fragments of information which can only be told through those who directly experienced the memories and trauma of Gaza.

What will happen when truths and untruths are archived?

Perhaps future generations of Gaza will need to seek new ways of telling their own stories and perseverance. When researching on overseas Palestinians and thinking of the future generations of displaced Palestinians, The Taste of Earth and Homeland: Remembering Palestine in “Little Ramallah”  by Jennifer Shutek states that “migrants use multiple senses to create a synesthetic new and old home, involving multisensory memories of the space from which they emigrated within a new cultural and political context.” Passages throughout this chapter specifically reference the act of eating food and taste as a way to remember events that displaced generations may have not directly experienced.

In a specific case study on the Palestinian diaspora in New Jersey, it is proposed that they may remember their identity when consuming family recipes that were adopted from home after displacement. Shutek further elaborates that “this “remembering” of events— not directly experienced— is termed post-memory and refers to the transmission of particular memories to generations that did not experience a specific place or event but learned about these memories and adopted them as their own.”