Digital Activism for Palestine on Twitter: A Comparative Arabic and English Corpus-Based Study

Since the establishment of Israel in 1948 on the land of Historic Palestine, Palestinians have been trying to resist the illegal Israeli settler colonialism and military occupation of Palestine in different forms, including by both armed and peaceful resistance. More recently, with the emergence of technology and social media, platforms such as Twitter have become a new effective form of resistance and self-defense for Palestinians. In this thesis, Arabic and English Palestine-related corpora of 5000 tweets were collected by the digital tool TAGs during three different periods: October 2020, February 2021, and May 2021. That was done to explore the role of Twitter in raising awareness of the Palestinian cause. It also seeks to better understand what Palestine-related tweets can reveal about the life of Palestinians under the Israeli occupation and people’s feelings and reactions to it, as well as the main themes and topics discussed on Twitter by people who tweeted for/about Palestine. Both corpora were analyzed based on sentiment and emotion annotation, corpora annotation statistics, and the use of the keywords and N-Grams functions in the digital tool AntConc. The two corpora were also compared to each other. The results show that both are very similar, yet the Arabic corpus was slightly more positive sentimentally than the English corpus. The corpora statistics indicated that most people’s reactions and feelings to the situation in Palestine are mainly sad and negative. The data analysis results highlighted the importance of Twitter in digital activism for Palestine and helped in identifying various themes and topics in the corpora such as Arab and international solidarity with Palestine, Israeli violence against Palestinians, Arab normalization with Israel, COVID-19 and vaccinations in Palestine, social media censorship of Palestine-related content, boycotting Israel and Palestinian women’s resilience.