A cultural shift in Western perceptions of Palestine

Terry Regier, Muhammad Ali Khalidi


Abstract
We argue that a cultural shift in Western perceptions of Palestine began in the late 1990s to 2000s, leading to increased openness to Palestinian perspectives, including awareness of the Nakba. We present 3 computational analyses designed to test this idea against data from the 2020 Google Books English dataset. The results support the claim of a cultural shift, and help to characterize that shift.
Anthology ID:
2025.nakbanlp-1.2
Volume:
Proceedings of the first International Workshop on Nakba Narratives as Language Resources
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi
Editors:
Mustafa Jarrar, Habash Habash, Mo El-Haj
Venues:
NakbaNLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9–17
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.nakbanlp-1.2/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Terry Regier and Muhammad Ali Khalidi. 2025. A cultural shift in Western perceptions of Palestine. In Proceedings of the first International Workshop on Nakba Narratives as Language Resources, pages 9–17, Abu Dhabi. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A cultural shift in Western perceptions of Palestine (Regier & Khalidi, NakbaNLP 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.nakbanlp-1.2.pdf