Question posed by University of Lockheed Martin Communications Department:
      Find an example of a narrative in media (this can be a scene from a film or TV show, a political speech, a chapter from a book, etc.)
        What voices are centered? And why is that significant? (i.e. Whose story is being told? And how does the telling impact the telling or non-telling of others?).
          How does this narrative foster empathy for those voices? (If it does, what could be done differently to create empathy?). In what ways is power challenged? (If power is not being challenged, what could be done differently to challenge power productively?)

          HI

          STORYTELLING ACTIVITY: BENJAMIN NETANYAHU'S ADDRESS TO UNITED NATIONS GENERAL ASSEMBLY IN SEPTEMBER 2024

          SCRIPT:

                ON THE NARRATIVE FORGED BY THE STATE OF ISRAEL IN THE 2020s

                July 26th 2025 A prevalent narrative in Western media is reflected in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech at the UN General Assembly in New York, delivered September 27th 2024. His speech centers the voice of the Israeli state, which calls for nationalistic sympathies from the audience by labeling its geographic neighbors as “savage murderers” seeking to destroy its existence. This is significant given the nature of the military actions taken by Israeli forces as described by the United Nations, numerous humanitarian aid organizations and the International Criminal Court, which have accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza by systematically bombing civilian infrastructure and blocking humanitarian aid from arriving. In order to justify and expand occupation, a powerful narrative has been necessary to retain support of the Israeli state in the face of accusations of crimes against humanity by historically credible sources. The result has been successful; while nearly 50,000 Palestinian civilians have been killed by occupying forces, much of the Western world continues to support the perpetrators of genocide due to the widespread and historical demonization of the surrounding Middle East. The strategies deployed by Netanyahu interestingly coincide Yam's ideas of critical empathy in that he seeks to eliminate "informed and affective connections with other human beings" (namely, Palestinians) by means of propagandized narrative development.

                In his speech, Netanyahu utilizes two tactics to garner empathy from his audience: what Adichie refers to as the construction of a “single story” to fuel righteous anger, and the weaponization of history to justify the extent of retaliation. By labeling all opposing forces as bloodthirsty and savage, Netanyahu constructs a single story of the actors that stand against Israel: antisemitic terrorists driven by nothing but unfounded violence and inherent barbarism. This story has been incredibly resonant with the West, which has been using similar narratives alluding to the savagery of the Third World to justify its colonization and occupation for centuries. By referencing the horrors of the Holocaust, Netanyahu weaponizes empathy towards the Jewish experience to justify the military violence against civilians in Gaza. The development of this narrative is illustrative of the profound impact of a lack of deliberative empathy that has resulted in the complete removal of the marginalized rhetors from the public sphere and the perpetuation of a myth that justifies the destruction of an entire people. For the propagandist, the “single story” is essential to fostering empathy for the selected heroes of the story by engineering bias towards one side of the conflict, then destroying faith in divergent accounts by portraying them as irrationally violent. The relationship between power and empathy that Yam discusses is present in Netanyahu’s speech; he recognizes how impactful the evocation of empathy in dominant groups can be on restoring marginalized voices in a political sphere and seeks to quash the threat of this alternative line of thinking by leveraging the power of the single story.

                The speech does not challenge power in the traditional sense; rather it tests the extent to which power holders are able to justify their global expansion to the wider population by means of narrative construction. By framing Israeli military actions as justified in a fight between good and evil, the speech leverages the power that has accumulated over centuries of Western expansion and tests its influence in the modern world, where society has grown more sensitive to human rights violations. To challenge the power demonstrated in this speech, it is imperative for onlookers to recognize the nature of Israel’s actions in the context of historical power imbalances between settler colonies and indigenous populations. To respond to the dominant narrative, rhetors must deploy their own storytelling capabilities to document and disseminate the experiences of those living under a brutally repressive occupying force, thereby reconstructing the public’s understanding of the issue to align with the material realities of those currently being erased from existence.