If a picture is worth a thousand words, then an infographic may be worth a thousand more. Despite the efforts of organisations and individuals in and out of occupied Palestine, many say the coverage of mainstream media fails to reflect the lives of Palestinians after decades of occupation. Visualising Palestine is a recent initiative that transforms the facts and data gathered on the ground into graphics that tell a more accurate story. “For many years we tried to communicate to the public and decision-makers the enormous discrepancy in water access between Palestinians and Israelis and the root causes of this,” said Ziyad Lunat, advocacy coordinator for EWASH, a coalition of local and international aid agencies operating in the West Bank and Gaza. “None of what we tried before (reports, fact sheets, videos) have been as effective as infographics in putting across our message.” Infographics — sometimes called data visualisations — have become an important tool for advocacy in recent years. Since they are rich with drawings and short on text, they are able to communicate a lot of information in a short amount of time. The infographic Visualising Palestine completed with EWASH, for example, shows the details of how Israel has enforced a strict water regime on Palestinians in the West Bank. Lunat said that within minutes of publishing the infographic, it “went viral” on social media. “We can grasp the key message about the reality of occupation within seconds of looking at the infographic,” Lunat said. “It is great for the majority of the people who don't have access to the lengthy reports put out by the NGO community. Infographics summarise their key messages just as well and maybe better.” An important mantra of good writing is “Show, don't tell.” Infographics encapsulate that tenet because they are driven by visuals rather than words. With more than a dozen infographics completed on topics such as hunger strikes, segregated roads and buses, housing demolitions, bombings, deaths and US military aid, Visualising Palestine has already created a substantial body of storytelling. On the West Bank water infographic, the team incorporated water stats about London — perhaps the city most famous for its rain — to show how although Ramallah receives more rainfall than London, Palestinians have access to far less water, falling short of the recommended amount of the World Health Organisation. The infographic shows, in contrast, that Israelis receive double the amount of Londoners and more than four times the amount of Palestinians. “We take this data that is dense and complex and create visual stories,” said Ramzi Jaber, co-founder of Visualising Palestine. “The data paints a story, and we just tell it.” The data comes from a host of organisations such as Amnesty International, B'Tselem, Defence for Children International, Badil Centre and Human Rights Watch. Some of the infographics came on initiative of Visualising Palestine, while others came from organisations making requests. The staff is mostly divided between Ramallah and Beirut, although contributors have worked from other countries. The process of creating infographics, coordinated across boundaries, is not without its difficulties. Graphic designers cannot easily take data and convert it into pictures. The team has developed a work flow that they hope can be used by other groups who share their values. Visualising Palestine does not espouse any political beliefs, but works from a framework of “equality and dignity” that cuts across borders. “We do want to talk about other social justice movements in relation to Palestine,” Jaber said. “We are building solidarity. We are being pushed by people who are interested in data visualisation, but we don't have the capacity to work on every social movement. But we want to create tools and have an umbrella platform so that other movements can use this.” The impact of data visualisations — and any work in the communications field — is hard to quantify, even if many people see it and share it. The lives and stories of human beings are crowded into today's complex media landscape. But history, of course, will be the final judge. “The narrative takes a long time to change,” Jaber said. “We're working as part of an ecosystem, and it's hard to quantify, so I don't know if we're changing it, but we're part of changing it.”
