In June of this year, I found myself in Birmingham, UK taking a HEAT training for journalists in conflict areas. I was surrounded mostly by journalists covering or about to cover developments in Ukraine.
What I quickly recognized is the double standards of journalism, how easy it can be to
discredit an entire population, and how difficult it can be to remain loyal to showcasing the various and entangled realities on the ground. Perhaps that training was my final trigger point to recognize that the world is increasingly unsafe for journalists.
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I recalled the echoes of Donald Trump as he spewed incitement towards news networks which defied and refused to entertain his racism. The phrase “fake news” became a common accusation. I also couldn’t help but remember how just weeks before, our revered veteran journalist colleague, Shireen Abu Aqleh, was shot and killed by Israeli forces.
Where the officials and representatives failed in heading a genuine investigation for Abu Aqleh, journalists succeeded. News networks like CNN, New York Times, The Washington Post, and Al-Jazeera- the network that was home to Abu Aqleh- took on their own independent investigations. Save for Al-Jazeera, these are the same outlets that have historically misreported on Palestine and fell into the trap of Israeli framing when it comes to developments in Palestine.
I felt pride when reading the independent investigations and their results. The ways in which Israeli spokespersons and American diplomats were unable to curve the truth. For once, I felt that journalistic integrity was not buried in Palestine, but revived with a force of triumph. I once more found hope in the journalists, editors, and researchers that did not succumb to the pressures.
A story that I have held dearly is one last year by Eric Wemple for the Washington Post about the ways in which the media coverage of the Attica Prison riots more than fifty years ago continue to hold negative impact on the lives of families, friends, community members that lived through the misrepresentations. I think of being a journalist in Palestine, while I consider the essence of journalism. To report, to cover, to be a messenger.
To be a journalist in Palestine is not only being caught in the cross fires of Israeli settlers, and their army, and Palestinian confrontation. It is also having to challenge and re-define the common lexicon and representation of the older generations of journalists that carried colonial ideologies, perceptions, and attitudes into the profession that was built on the idea of objective truth. It is the recognition that as part of the global south, we have been consistently and constantly excluded from editorial positions, senior reporting positions, and our professional integrity denied, doubted, criminalized.
As a local fixer, translator, and then reporter I was exposed to the dualities of journalism at an early stage. It is necessarily entwined with the way we communicate and process
information. I first witnessed my own testimonies and analysis be twisted and turned in a manner that was not only inaccurate, but misleading.
As a journalist, I had to constantly challenge my peers and colleagues, I lost many
opportunities, and actively refused to sign a contract with any news network out of fear of being forced to censor or deny parts of stories. I would later realize that in journalism- as in life- there is no absolute truth. There are only the messengers, and to be a messenger is to be entrusted with sharing a specific narrative and experience with the duty to position it in its broader sociopolitical and economic context.
Yet, what Palestine will teach journalists is the power of taking the risk. It will test the
strongest of hearts and the bravest of voices, because it’s a place mired with layers on
layers of abuses and abusers. Yet amid all the noise of commanders giving assassination
orders, military forces threatening children at gun point, and no international protection, there are the voices of the millions of lives surviving and defying for a possibility of a future other than the one we inherit. We learn that here, that to be a journalist is to insert yourself in the story, because there is no escaping it.
Journalism in Palestine becomes a battlefield where the only way to tackle all the injustices swallowing this speck of the world, is to give justice to the story. To do so, no matter which powerful forces command us to mutilate the testimonies pointing at their aggression and repression.
