Since the Israeli invasion of Gaza in October 2023, activism for solidarity with Palestine has embraced Nelson Mandela’s famous mantra that “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.” From South Africa to Kashmir, activists have connected to the Palestinian struggle and drawn parallels to their own liberation efforts. 

In Prishtina, the Feminist Collective for Thought and Action and the Social Space for Deconstruction have mobilized for Palestine in protests, film screenings, talks and a performance of the Gaza Monologues. They raised a Palestinian flag in the city center along with Dylberizm, a nongovernmental organization centered on LGBTQ+ rights, which the police quickly removed. Diaspora members have mobilized in solidarity as well. 

In Tirana, the grassroots collective Palestina e lirë — Free Palestine — has organized rallies and declared June a month of Palestinian culture.

Social media has been a prominent space for analogizing Palestinian history with local experiences, with everything from graphic explainers of Palestinian solidarity to protest signs offering quick messages generating engagement. 

This use of social media is no coincidence. The call for a globalization of the Palestinian struggle expresses itself through the global reach of social media, crisscrossing physical borders. As governments across the globe shrink the space available for Palestinian solidarity within their borders, cracking down on in-person protests and punishing participants, activists have naturally turned to the less-bordered virtual space of the internet. 

Some activist and activist collective accounts, like that of Palestina e lirë, offer interpretations of history that often contest government positions in the region, which promote integration with the West and a sense of white European-ness at the expense of any potential connection or solidarity with Palestine. These interpretations of history are, like the state narratives they contest, themselves constructed and bring their own exclusions, assumptions and potential inaccuracies. What is interesting about these posts, though, is not necessarily the accuracy or how convincing activist claims are, but rather what is said by the very choice to narrate history a certain way. 

The process of contesting historical narratives creates the basis of an identity politics, one where people are called to be in solidarity in Palestine, at least in part because of their ethnic or national history. Social media, as an informal, transnational platform, becomes an effective medium for visions that often decenter and clash with states.  

Beyond physical borders, however, pro-Palestinian social media content has also crossed temporal ones. While states often claim a monopoly on history — offering set interpretations of national pasts through measures like school textbooks, monuments and museums — social media provides a space to spread alternative historical narratives. 

Government positions and counter narratives

Israel and states in the region have actively cultivated diplomatic ties, particularly as states in the region seek a way to ingratiate themselves with Israel’s main ally, the U.S., or develop economic ties. These pragmatic efforts are often accompanied by historical narratives meant to suggest close affinity with Israel, such as Kosovo’s former ambassador to the U.S. suggesting that Kosovo “look[s] up to Israel as an example of how a state can be built” or Israel-aligned intellectuals suggesting that North Macedonia and Israel have a shared history of struggle for self-determination. 

Pro-Palestine accounts aim to flip this script, deploying history to instead advocate for Palestinian solidarity and divestment from Israel. They aim to shape popular understandings of the region’s history and how people understand the political stakes of their ethnic identities. In this context, a complex network of overlapping arguments for Palestinian solidarity emerges, at times rooted in contradictory understandings of factors like history, ethnic identity and religion.

Official histories may deploy stories of past wars, for example, for the sake of centering the state and advancing nationalism. Public memories, however, shaped by grassroots memory practices, might take those experiences and make them the motivating force for activism that pushes against the priorities of those very states. The social media discourse about Palestine that I have seen reflects how state histories often clash with public memories, those informal stories of the past that circulate and shape people’s sense of identity. 

One activist account from North Macedonia shows this process of narration and the politics it comes with. Linking Palestine with Yugoslavia, the account announced a protest on November 30, 2024 — one day after the U.N.-recognized International Day of Solidarity With the Palestinian People and the anniversary of the 1947 U.N. Partition Plan for Palestine. Its post announcing the protest states “the protest, not by chance, is scheduled the day after November 29, the Republic Day of our former common homeland. Yugoslavia, as it should be, was a great supporter of the fight against colonialism and in that direction recognized Palestine.”

Invoking both Palestine and a Yugoslav past in a North Macedonian context offers an understanding of history that works with memory of Yugoslavia’s positioning of itself as an anti-imperialist state that rejected major world powers and aligned with newly decolonized states in Africa and Asia. This narrative highlights the contrast between a nostalgia for a Yugoslav-Palestinian connection and contemporary actions of the states these activists are in. North Macedonia, conversely, does not have diplomatic relations with Palestine and has generally abstained in votes on pro-Palestine measures at the U.N.  

Of course, expressions of various public memories are no less constructed than official histories and come with their own omissions and political positions. The undefined “our” in the post’s reference to “our common homeland” naturally raises the question of who feels like part of that “our.” As the Balkan Solidarity Network, another pro-Palestine account, points out, Tito’s positioning of Yugoslavia as an anti-imperialist abroad clashed with Yugoslavia’s internal colonialism towards groups like Kosovo Albanians.

The North Macedonian account’s embrace of Yugo-nostalgia comes with potential exclusions, revealing the uneven terrain of public memory and identity-based claims for Palestinian solidarity: pro-Palestine narratives formed in different contexts may very well conflict with not just their respective governments, but also each other. 

Clashing views of Kosovo’s history 

This dynamic between official memory and unofficial memories is particularly visible in the case of Albanian accounts. While grassroots comparisons between the oppression of Albanians in Kosovo under Yugoslavia and the plight of Palestinians have been made since at least the 1980s, Kosovo and Palestine do not have official relations. Palestinian officials have often cultivated relations with Serbia on account of Serbia’s less-friendly relationship with the U.S. and argued that Palestine deserved independence more than Kosovo. Meanwhile, Kosovo’s governments, since independence, have sought to build ties with Israel to try to further align Kosovo with the U.S.

The complexity of the Kosovo-Palestine dynamic has existed since the 1998-99 war in Kosovo, shortly after which President of the Palestinian Authority Yasser Arafat controversially invited Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević to observe Orthodox Christmas in Palestine. While Arafat viewed Serbia as inheriting the solidarity with the PLO established by Tito’s Yugoslavia, Israel simultaneously cultivated close relations with Serbia, selling Serbia weapons during the 1990s. In its own act of analogy-construction, Israel opposed the NATO intervention in Kosovo and initially did not recognize Kosovo’s independence out of fears that successful independence for Kosovo would provide inspiration to the Palestinian struggle. 

Even with these historical nuances, Kosovo’s governments have generally taken a consistently pro-Israeli position. Vetëvendosje, Kosovo’s ruling party from 2021 to 2025, even sought to erase past statements about a Kosovo-Palestine connection, which it made before entering electoral politics. In this context, Albanian-language social media accounts draw on the history of Kosovo Albanians and Albanians more broadly to argue for a natural affinity with the Palestinian cause.

One image posted by Liri Palestines shows a protester holding a sign saying “Israel = Serbia, Netanyahu = Milosevic, Palestine = Kosova, Palestinian Resistance = UÇK,” referencing the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA)’s Albanian name. Even this, an account in Albania invoking the specific Kosovo Albanian experience in its construction of broader ethnic Albanian solidarity with Palestinians, demonstrates how social media can bridge borders and showcases using history, even that which was not personally experienced, to build solidarity.  

Another post, done jointly by account Palestina e lire and Liri Palestines, has a purported image of an Israeli soldier in Gaza in 2024 holding a Chetnik flag, with Liri Palestines offering comments, in English and Albanian, arguing for a historical connection between Israel and Serbia. 

These posts are not just promoting the Palestinian cause; they also offer new arguments about which lessons should be taken from the history of ethnic Albanians. These arguments go beyond narratives promoted by the states Albanians find themselves in, like Albania and Kosovo, which are often explicitly pro-Israel and promote an orientation towards the West, away from any perceived ties with Palestine 

Contesting religious legacies 

Albanian-language accounts’ use of religion as a source of histories beyond official narratives, is a striking case study of how conversations about Palestine are also opportunities for grassroot conversations about the role of religion in identity. 

Accounts like Liri Palestines have aimed to draw on connections between Muslim Albanians and the Muslim-majority world. One post, for example, shows a painting of an “Albanian soldier in Jerusalem,” with Liri Palestines adding in the comments: “ALBANIANS HAVE GIVEN MANY MARTYRS IN THE DEFENSE OF THE HOLY LAND OF PALESTINE… And currently in Palestine, even in Gaza, there are families of Albanian origin.” 

Seemingly referencing the history of Albanian subjects of the Ottoman Empire fighting against Napoleon’s invasion of the Ottoman Middle East, the account draws on an Ottoman past to present a notable counter-memory to the common practice of post-Ottoman states in the Balkans disavowing perceived ties to Muslims in the Middle East.  

Accounts’ efforts to connect Albanians and Palestinians, through constructing a pan-Islamic identity, is a deeply vexed one. This effort faces challenges on two levels. First, in a local Albanian context, as not all Albanians are Muslims, particularly in Albania, and second, in a global context, as Islamophobia — heightened in the global war on terror — has criminalized displays of solidarity based on pan-Islamic narratives. In Albania, Kosovo and their diasporas, identity claims are often made in explicitly secular terms, setting Albanian or Kosovar nationhood against identification with Islam. 

The intersection of memory, religion and politics in the war on terror is visible in reactions to a Liri Palestines post featuring an image of KLA fighters, one of whom is wearing a green headband featuring Arabic writing with Islamic references. The caption reads: “Ramiz Kiqina, the first KLA soldier who entered liberated Drenas in Kosova on June 14, 1999. / Glory to the resistance! Glory to the martyrs! / KLA = PLO.” 

Resistance to the comparison in the post’s reactions was specifically couched in terms of secular national history. Some condemned the post as “an insult to the KLA” and accused it of “mix[ing] the Taliban with our heroes and with our flag,” with other comments claiming the post endorsed Hamas. This leap from headband to Islamist groups like the Taliban and Hamas is made in spite of the post itself only comparing the KLA and the PLO, two organizations that were themselves secular and nationalist in ideology. This reveals how pre-existing conceptions of religion come to bear on perceptions of Palestine and history. 

Liri Palestines responded by invoking the history of the KLA to question the terrorist label in the first place: “Don’t forget that Serbia and Russia and other countries have also called the KLA a terrorist organization in the past, so be careful with these slurs because we know very well how easily they are misused.” 

Other commentators made the identitarian stakes of the analogy even more explicit. They accused those rejecting the analogy of “forgetting Europeans don’t want you” and being the victims of “Americans wanting to erase not only our brains but also our faith.” 

Contesting the power to narrate

Palestine’s place in Balkan social media discourse seems to confirm a fact central to the work of the Palestinian writer Edward Said: speaking about the other is, in reality, an essential part of defining the self. If Said’s “Orientalism” was about the importance of European imperialism in the Middle East to defining European modernity, social media discourse around Palestine today reveals the enduring importance of images of the “Orient” to the self-fashioning of European national identities. 

Palestine becomes a prism through which other debates are refracted, whether they be over the legacy of Third-Worldism and the stakes of EU enlargement or Islam’s place in the past and present of Albanians. 

A Said quote, posted by an Albanian language account, summarizes the stakes of these contests over memory and identity: “[N]arrative is crucial… The main battle in imperialism is over land, of course; but when it came to who owned the land… these issues were reflected, contested, and even for a time decided in narrative.” 

On the surface it may be easy to dismiss the importance of social media discourse. But, in the back and forth of Instagram comments, lies a contest over the power to narrate, shaping how people see themselves and, potentially, the world. 

Feature image: Atdhe Mulla / K2.0

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