Documenting Dark Sousveillance with the Palestine Online Web Archive

The following website was created as a media analysis project for Surveillance and Power , a course taught by Professor Alix Johnson at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. My name is Nelson Mondale— I am a white American college student who has never been to Palestine, and has in turn constructed an image of the Palestinian people through the people around me and the digital media that I consume. I am interested in digital history and surveillance within a digital landscape, and my hope is that this essay can provide a valuable understanding through a US-centric lens of the functionality of surveillance and digital media as to the value of preserving and engaging with Palestinian cyberculture.

This website works with The Palestine Online Web Archive, and attemps to appropriate and reproduce the styles and gifs in use by the featured websites in order to extend, and hopefully further establish the presence of Palestinian digital media within the sprawling landscape of the internet. Please reference the subtitles under gifs and pictures to look at the source page, and to learn more about the context that surrounds them, and please interact with the two embedded iframes found within the site. Readers are encouraged to visit the website before reading, if possible, thank you!

For further reading on the Palestine Online Web Archive, and it's curator, creator, and upkeeper Amad Ansari, I can recommend the following two articles:

VICE: Palestine Online: Preserved 90s Gifs by Janus Rose

Processing Foundation: Digital Resistance: Palestinian Web Archives with Amad Ansari

Introduction

Palestine Embroidery 2001: "In Loving memory of our parents Lydia (Bahu) Ladah (1920-1956) and Salim Ibrahim Ladah (1912-1991)"

Simone Browne's Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness provides a foundational framework for understanding how surveillance operates as a racialized practice of power and control in the United States. Through her analysis of historical and contemporary surveillance practices, Browne demonstrates how surveillance technologies have been used to mark, track, and control racialized bodies, while also highlighting the ways that marginalized communities have developed practices of "dark sousveillance" to look back at these power structures (Browne 2015, 32), particularly in North America.

The Palestine Online Web Archive, created and preserved by Amad Ansari, features many websites created by Palestinian artists, coders, activists, and writers in the 1990s and early 2000s. These early websites are characterized by their distinctive use of animated GIFs and basic HTML layouts, signature stylings of the early internet. Through this archive, we can see how Palestinians developed early web technologies to document checkpoints, human rights abuses, and everyday life under occupation.

The Palestinian digital landscape has long been shaped by surveillance and control, with the Israeli state employing various technologies to monitor and regulate Palestinian movement, communication, and identity (Aouragh 2011, 15). During the late 1990s and early 2000s especially, the Israeli state implemented a comprehensive surveillance system that included biometric identification, movement tracking through checkpoints, and digital monitoring of Palestinian communications (Aouragh 2011, 18). This period coincided with the Oslo Accords, which marked a significant shift in Palestinian digital presence, as the establishment of the Palestinian Authority's telecommunications infrastructure, combined with the global rise of the internet, enabled Palestinians to develop new forms of digital resistance while navigating increased surveillance (Aouragh 2011, 22). This surveillance infrastructure fundamentally shaped how Palestinians navigated (and currently navigate) both physical and digital spaces. The Israeli state's surveillance practices, including the use of facial recognition technology at checkpoints and the monitoring of Palestinian internet activity, mirror what Browne describes as "racializing surveillance" - technologies and practices that mark and track racialized bodies while maintaining systems of control (Browne 2015, 42).

Case Study 1: Al-Karmel Guestbook and Dark Sousveillance

Founded in 1981, Al-Karmel was a highly influential Palestinian literary magazine that served as a platform for Palestinian and international writers, including Edward Said, Russell Banks, and J.M. Coetzee, to share their work and perspectives. (Yasser Afrat Museum) This guestbook, archived by the Palestine Online Web Archive, was a secondary page of the Al-Karmel website, where users could leave messages and comments through a simple form with only 6 fields: name, email, country, city, url, and message.

Palestine Online Embedded Iframe: The Al-Karmel Guestbook

The guestbook's development and operation were deeply shaped by the material conditions of Palestinian internet infrastructure. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, Palestinian telecommunications operated through Israeli providers, with Paltel (Palestine Telecommunications Company) forced to rely on Israeli companies for bandwidth and connectivity (Aouragh 2011, 56). This created a paradoxical relationship where Palestinian digital resistance depended on Israeli-controlled infrastructure - as Aouragh notes, "to go online the occupied had to tap from their occupier" (Aouragh 2011, 57).

Palsoft Internet Cafe Image with Drop Shadow

Internet access was primarily available through public spaces like internet cafes and educational institutions, with only 9.2% of households having direct internet access by 2004 (Aouragh 2011, 60). This made the guestbook's role in facilitating connections even more vital, particularly as it offered "practical solutions to problems such as isolation, discrimination and exclusion" perpetuated by processes of Israeli surveillance and control (Aouragh 2011, 54).

Dark sousveillance, as theorized by Simone Browne, represents a form of resistance to surveillance where marginalized communities develop methods to look back at and subvert systems of control (Browne 2015, 32). It encompasses practices that challenge dominant surveillance regimes through alternative ways of seeing, being seen, and representing oneself. This could include using makeup to subvert racial categorization, taking on aliases to evade identification, or creating alternative networks and spaces that bypass surveillance systems. Browne uses the story of Seth (or Sall), a 14-year-old girl who used makeup, aliases, and strategic visibility to evade surveillance in 1783, to illustrate the processes of dark sousveillance. (Browne 2015, 53)

The guestbook's simple form structure and multilingual nature enabled Palestinians to practice digital forms of strategic visibility - in creating a space that established strong global connections and strengthened notions of national identity, while counteracting a colonial narrative that sought to eradicate this very sense of community and national identity through processes of control and surveillance. This practice of resistance through digital space parallels what Browne describes as "the creative ways that black people have used technologies to maintain connections and share information" (Browne 2015, 32), though in a different geopolitical context.

Framed Image from Gaza International Airport Website

Guestbook Entries

The guestbook entries themselves provide powerful examples of how this digital space enabled forms of dark sousveillance:

The Al-Karmel guestbook is one of four message boards and guestbooks featured in the Palestine Online web archive, all acting as digital spaces that catalyze a similar process of dark sousveillance.

Case Study 2: Map of Destroyed Palestinian Villages: A Reign of Terror & Systematic Expulsion and Simone Browne's Looking Back

This website features an interactive map entitled "Destroyed Palestinian Villages: A Reign of Terror & Systematic Expulsion", created Center For Research & Documentation of Palestinian Society in 2000. The map is a collection of markers, each representing a village that was destroyed by Zionist colonists before, during, and after the foundation of the State of Israel (15 May 1948). (Please reference note within website homepage as to the use of the term "Zionist" in this context.) Users can click on each marker to learn more about the village, its past, and how it looked in the year of the map's creation.

Palestine Online Embedded Iframe: Destroyed Palestinian Villages

Through this digital mapping project, the Center For Research & Documentation of Palestinian Society practice what Simone Browne describes as "looking back" - a form of resistance to surveillance that transforms the conditions of visibility and challenges attempts to erase history (Browne 2015, 62). The map functions as a powerful tool of self-representation, making visible what has been systematically erased from the physical and cultural landscape. Each marker on the map represents not just a destroyed village, but a site where Palestinians can exercise their right to look back and document their presence. In this way, the map embodies what bell hooks (cited by Browne) calls "talking back" - converting Palestinians from objects of representation to subjects who can represent themselves and their experiences on their own terms (Browne 2015, 58). The interactive nature of the map, allowing users to click through and learn about each destroyed village, creates a digital space where Palestinian history and presence can be actively engaged with, rather than passively observed.

Through this digital mapping project, Palestinians create what Aouragh describes as "virtual space" that functions as a form of resistance to physical territorial control (Aouragh 2011, 41). In the forced absence of physical sovereignty over their land, Palestinians use digital technologies such as the map to establish boundaries of Palestinian space, transforming the map into what Aouragh calls a "techno-political infrastructure" that enables Palestinians to maintain claims to their land and history (Aouragh 2011, 41). This digital territory, as Aouragh argues, becomes a space where Palestinians can "construct identity" and maintain community ties across borders, demonstrating how virtual spaces can serve as sites of resistance to physical surveillance and control (Aouragh, 2011 41).

Cyber Palestine Home Page

By combining Browne's concept of "looking back" (Browne 2015, 62) with Aouragh's analysis of virtual space (Aouragh 2011, 41), the map functions as both a tool of oppositional gazing that challenges historical erasure and a digital territory that enables Palestinians to maintain claims to their land. Like the artistic works Browne describes - Robin Rhode's Pan's Opticon and Adrian Piper's What It's Like, What It Is #3 (Browne 2015, 58) - the map serves as a creative intervention that disrupts surveillance and challenges attempts to control Palestinian narratives.

Village Documentation``: Al-Faluja

Conclusion

The evolution of Palestinian digital resistance into a contemporary understanding reveals both the transformative power of digital technologies and the increasing sophistication of surveillance and censorship mechanisms. As Omar Zahzah argues in Refusing the Language of Silence: Palestinian Resistance Goes Digital, what began as a promising space for Palestinian self-representation has evolved into a complex battleground of "digital/settler-colonialism" where Big Tech companies actively facilitate Israeli colonial control. (Zahzah 2024) This shift is particularly evident in how platforms like Meta have moved from passive censorship to active complicity in surveillance and repression. For instance, WhatsApp's metadata was used by Israeli forces to generate "kill lists" through AI systems like Lavender, Meta's potential policy changes that would effectively ban anti-Zionist speech by misclassifying it as hate speech. (Zahzah 2024) However, as Khamis and Dogbatse document, Palestinian women activists like Bisan Owda have leveraged platforms like Instagram and TikTok to document genocide in real-time, to a vast global audience, even as they face these systematic targeted attacks and communications blackouts. (Khamis, Dogbatse 2025) These developments demonstrate how digital spaces have become both a powerful tool for Palestinian resistance and a contested terrain where colonial power seeks to maintain control.

Bibliography