MEDIUM | PALESTINE
Shadowbanned?
Is plummeting interaction on Palestine posts censorship or reader fatigue?
Empire distracted you with Christmas? Or shocked at the disintegration of Syria? Traveling perhaps? Or suddenly woke up to a need to catch up with a life you put on hold, “until the genocide ends”?
It’s been a long year, and no, I won’t burden you with a recap.
I just want to know why has NO ONE — I repeat — NO ONE from the Medium community checked out my Bethlehem Photo series. Medium staff have assured me in the summer that they do not censor posts for Palestine content. Still, my December posts only got claps from people to whom I had sent direct links.
Interactions on my posts have plummeted since mid-November, across all platforms. I notice other people’s Palestine stories have also been getting fewer comments and claps than usual. Is it activist fatigue, each of us needing to catch up with our lives, or is there something nefarious going on?
The one clue I have is that my Medium posts that are not photo essays are receiving greater interaction. This suggests that Medium is automatically suppressing the distribution of posts with too many photos and little text.
Therefore, for your convenience, I include here an index of the Photo series I am publishing on Bethlehem, Palestine. This is not your usual tour of a Biblical fantasyland, but a tour of a real, living city, and a documentary of resistance to oppression. Please take a look:
Part 1: The Road to Bethlehem (Checkpoints and Detours)
‘Bethlehem, in a Palestinian-controlled area, became inaccessible to the northern West Bank. Christians wishing to reach it from Ramallah were condemned to Wadi an-Nar, or Hellfire Valley, a narrow, dangerous, and accident-prone route that circumvented Jerusalem down the eastern slopes, halfway to the Dead Sea.’
Part 2: Birthplace of Jesus: Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem
‘The Israelis had installed automatic machine guns, aimed at the church, that were laser-triggered by anything that moved. Birds easily set it off. I saw the centuries-old stone riddled with bullets.’
Part 3: Shepherds’ Field: Beit Sahur and the Palestine Museum of Natural History
‘One of the most daring acts of the Intifada was organized by the neighborhood committees of Beit Sahur, a Christian Palestinian town near Bethlehem, at the site of the field where the angels appeared to the shepherds to herald the birth of Jesus.’
Part 4: ‘World’s Largest Canvas,’ Wall Street, Bethlehem, Palestine
‘The guard towers peered into the Palestinian stores and houses on the other side.’
Part 5: Portrait of Bethlehem the Week Before October 7
‘The world has betrayed these artists as it has betrayed Gaza. The sound of the ‘oud shattering into 2000 lb. explosions is now heard daily beyond the barrier, and yet no one moves.’
Thank you for taking the time to visit my Bethlehem series. Please feel free to share your own experience — are your posts on Palestine being seen?
May 2025 be the year of Palestinian Freedom!
With love,
Ramsey Hanhan
Author, Fugitive Dreams
More Photo Essays from Palestine:
