How pro-Palestinian influencers are using social media to push Harris on Israel

“Time to step up the pressure on Kamala," Eldin, a former journalist of Palestinian descent, wrote to his roughly 1.1 million followers.

Since then, Eldin’s social-media feed has routinely featured content scrutinizing Harris’s position on the Israel-Hamas war, accusing the vice president of backing the violence in Gaza.

He is one of many pro-Palestinian content creators who have used their platforms to highlight the plight of civilians in Gaza. Israel invaded the Gaza Strip after the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on southern Israel left 1,200 people dead and some 250 taken hostage. The war has reduced much of once-bustling Gaza to rubble and has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians, according to Gaza health officials. They don’t say how many were combatants.

In a conflict many are watching unfold online, pro-Palestinian influencers have helped shape the views of young people who oppose Israel’s military offensive and the Biden administration’s support for it. At the same time, Harris must contend with Jewish Democrats who are consuming a more pro-Israel social media feed and inclined to see her taking a tougher approach toward the close U.S. ally as a betrayal.

Now, as Harris and Democrats meet this week for their convention in Chicago, the online community of pro-Palestinian influencers, journalists and activists are using social media as a powerful tool to keep the Biden administration’s handling of the war in public view. Their efforts stand in contrast to the ways Harris’s supporters have used social media to their advantage since she became the Democratic nominee, with online memes such as “brat summer" going viral in support of her candidacy.

“Palestine is going to be a litmus test. If Harris wants to reclaim voters, she needs to offer something new," Eldin said in an interview. “I don’t believe that in action she will be that different than Biden…until she takes a step like demanding an end to U.S. arms sales or promises a conditioning of aid, given how severe the suffering is and the deepening of the crisis."

The Harris campaign didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Harris was an early advocate within the Biden administration for a cease-fire and hostage deal, and she has at times sharply criticized Israel over its conduct in the war. Rhetorically, she has sounded more alarm over the situation in Gaza than Biden, describing the conditions there as “inhumane" and stating there would be “no excuses" if Israel didn’t do more to improve the flow of humanitarian aid—earning her praise from some Arab American leaders.

But she also has reiterated her support for Israel’s right to defend itself. Also, like Biden, she opposes an arms embargo on Israel.

Before Biden dropped out of the race, his top aides believed the backlash on the left to the administration’s steadfast support for Israel was limited to a vocal minority—and not reflective of how most Americans see the issue. Some Harris campaign aides have privately echoed that sentiment and pointed to a renewed sense of enthusiasm and party unity since Harris succeeded Biden as the Democratic nominee.

Some pro-Palestinian activists have credited Harris with showing more empathy than Biden regarding the suffering in Gaza. Some activists have expressed hope that her rhetorical support for the humanitarian plight in Gaza might mean she is more open to adopting a tougher stance toward Israel. But thousands of protesters from across the country have descended on Chicago to demonstrate outside the convention in support of a cease-fire and end to U.S. military support for Israel.

Harris has continued to encounter pro-Palestinian demonstrators at her campaign events, including a viral moment at a rally in Detroit where she suggested that the protesters were helping former President Donald Trump. At another campaign event, Harris was more conciliatory in her response.

“Right now the growing consensus is that Kamala Harris is no different than Biden when it comes to Israel and Gaza," said Rosy Pirani, a pro-Palestinian content creator who said her following on Instagram more than tripled from roughly 225,000 to about 734,000 since she began posting about the war.

“The truth of the matter is Biden has isolated a lot of Democrat voters, especially young voters along with Arab and Muslim voters," she said.

A Pew Research Center survey in 2022 found that those under the age of 30 were almost as likely to trust information from social media as they were to trust information from national news outlets.

“There’s less trust in politicians, and there’s less trust in institutions in general," Eldin said.

Pirani is the kind of influencer who might have otherwise been an asset for Harris’s campaign. She is a lifelong Democrat who, like Harris, is of South Asian descent.

A real-estate investor of Pakistani descent, she first built a social-media following by creating lighthearted content about her marriage to her husband, Akbar Pirani, an entrepreneur of Indian descent.

Over the past 10 months, the playful reels, photos and memes that once dominated Pirani’s social-media profile have mostly vanished. Instead, there are near-daily updates on the crisis in Gaza. Included are graphic images and videos that underscore the dire condition of Palestinian civilians—be it from a near famine across the Gaza Strip or the aftermath of deadly Israeli airstrikes in the besieged enclave. She also posts on TikTok, which is popular with young Americans.

In one recent post on Instagram, Pirani and a handful of other pro-Palestinian activists shared an image of a bloodied Quran following an Israeli strike on a mosque in Gaza and wrote: “No condemnation from Biden or Harris…remember this picture when you step inside the voting booth in November."

Polling has consistently shown that younger Americans, especially those who are Democrats, are much more likely to disapprove of Biden’s handling of the war by wide margins. Part of that is consistent with a broader generational shift in attitudes toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but Biden administration officials in public and private have cited social media as one of the main reasons they have struggled to communicate their position on Israel to young people.

“You have a social-media ecosystem—environment—in which context, history, facts get lost and the emotion—the impact—of images dominates," Secretary of State Antony Blinken said during a Q&A at the McCain Institute’s 2024 Sedona Forum. “We can’t discount that, but I think it also has a very, very, very challenging effect on the narrative."

Although legislation in Washington to ban TikTok had long been discussed before the war, the conflict in Gaza marked a turning point in the push against the platform. Some researchers found that at times the ratio ran 69 to 1 in favor of videos with pro-Palestinian hashtags compared with those with pro-Israeli hashtags. TikTok has said the platform doesn’t promote one side of an issue over another.

Pro-Palestinian influencers have repeatedly disseminated clips on social media from White House and State Department briefings to highlight moments in which they believe top Biden officials have misled the public or shown double standards in their treatment of Israelis and Palestinians.

In one such clip, which has more than 187,000 views on TikTok, Rahma Zein—a former journalist in Egypt with nearly 111,000 followers on TikTok and one million followers on Instagram—pulled from a White House briefing in which National Security Council spokesman John Kirby declined to condemn the phrase “from the river to the sea" when used by Israelis. The post added that Kirby previously denounced the phrase as antisemitic when it was used at pro-Palestinian rallies in the U.S.

Pro-Palestinian activists say the phrase is a call for liberation and equality for Palestinians who live under Israeli occupation, but many Jewish people interpret the slogan as a call for Israel’s destruction. Pro-Palestinian groups say Israel’s policy of controlling all land west of the Jordan River amounts to ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

Although domestic attention has shifted away from Gaza with Harris at the top of the ticket, the pro-Palestinian online community will try to keep the war in focus.

“The reason there’s such an uproar is because the truth has spread like wildfire," said Zein. “Social media is showing you what’s happening on the ground…You can no longer ignore it."