My name is Faris Giacaman, and I’m so excited to introduce myself as Mondoweiss’s Managing Editor.
I live in Ramallah, and have in recent years been working towards completing my PhD in History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at NYU. I have worked on different collective projects with Palestinian writers to produce politically and socially engaged research and writing, and to address issues relating to settler-colonialism, political economy, and Palestinian liberation.
This is a new role not only for me but at Mondoweiss itself, so it’s a huge opportunity for learning.
But I know one thing for certain: as journalists covering the Palestinian freedom struggle, we cannot claim to be dispassionate observers. We have a responsibility to produce knowledge that is useful for the struggle for liberation.
That’s how Mondoweiss approaches our mission and our work – and we need your support to do just that. Financial independence is central to everything we do. So, please, will you help us reach our summer match goal by contributing today?
Journalists have to ask ourselves what our role is under a settler-colonial apartheid regime. The common trope that journalism must be “neutral” is something that all Palestinians must reject. Not just because we should unabashedly declare our politics – it’s about being more deliberate and searching in our questions about what Palestinian society needs from journalists.
The farce of “neutral” journalism only serves ongoing apartheid and dispossession.
It’s a difficult challenge to responsibly and ethically cover issues that operate in a living, breathing political field. We want to be faithful to the liberation struggle, not unknowingly compromise it. We want to expose the crimes of the occupation to the world, but we do not want that coverage to generate mere sympathy–we don’t even want passive solidarity.
We want militant action to isolate one of the last settler-colonial regimes left in the world. We want to weaken its standing and position, to the point where the Palestinian struggle for freedom and liberation can be realized.
That’s what you are already doing – as Mondoweiss readers, and as activists tirelessly advancing this struggle. Will you help us today with a generous donation, which will be instantly matched?
Solidarity with the Palestinian freedom struggle ought to focus on legitimizing Palestinian resistance and let Palestinians speak for themselves uncensored. There has been a tendency among the solidarity community to focus only on the marketable forms of “peaceful” resistance, and while those forms of popular mobilization should be celebrated, they should not be domesticated for the purposes of mainstream acceptability.
Mondoweiss has been able to help widen that narrow space, using different media forms to reach a wider audience, from podcasts, to video series, and to its newest apartheid documentary. These mediums have a great potential to reach more people and transmit the voices of Palestinians to the world.
Because that is the very heart of the matter: Mondoweiss allows Palestinians to speak for themselves.
