We are two years into the most tragic episode of Palestine’s history since the Nakba. As journalists, we’ve been saddled with the overwhelming responsibility of reporting on the worst of times, and what’s made it all the worse has been working in an environment where Palestinians are dehumanized even as their bodies are being crushed under the weight of Israel’s genocide. Despite these conditions, we’ve had to push ourselves to attempt to reflect our reality and translate it to the rest of the world, making it legible to eyes that don’t see us as fully human. There is an element of self-degradation in this practice, but we do it anyway.
Journalists in Gaza have been at the forefront of this story, carrying out feats of bravery that represent the best of what the profession can ever hope to accomplish. Yet the world continues to call the validity of their reporting into question — when they’re not being targeted and killed. They have paid a price beyond imagination. But the rest of the world has also paid a price.
The world has been forced to take off its glasses and see the reality of the postwar rules-based international order, which we have all been told for decades is founded on a basis of human rights and liberal democracy.
Yet two years of an unchecked campaign of human slaughter have forced everybody to confront the reality that this world, the only one we have, is still ruled by the law of the jungle. The principle of might makes right reigns supreme, and that’s a truth that hasn’t changed since the days of Genghis Khan.
A journalism committed to holding up a mirror to this world’s ugliness has no place in it, and that’s why it would rather see Gaza’s journalists disappear.
But there’s another world beneath it that’s starting to wake up. Since the Vietnam War, the world hasn’t seen citizen-led mobilizations as large as the ones that we have witnessed demanding an end to the genocide in Gaza. This global mobilization was a key factor in the pressure to end it, and it will continue to be essential if the current ceasefire between Israel and Hamas does not hold. Yet even this ceasefire wouldn’t have been possible without the global movement of people who could not accept a basic fact: that this ugly world is the same world they live in. If Israel doesn’t respect the ceasefire and resumes its genocide, that movement will be the only global force that can hold it to account.
Palestine didn’t become a central cause just out of sympathy for the suffering of its people. It became the world’s moral compass because the world understands that what happens in Palestine is by no means confined to its borders. If global leaders allow a livestreamed genocide to happen without consequence, then there is no reason to expect that human rights will be respected anywhere else in the world. It sends a message to everyone about the kind of power systems that really run our lives.
The battle in Palestine today will determine the kind of world we live in. And perhaps it will be a world where being Palestinian no longer needs to be translated.
