One day, a colleague who worked in a Catholic magazine for which I had written, and who was writing an article about Palestinian Christians, wanted to interview me as an average Palestinian Christian. At one point, this journalist who came from a European country, asked me if I identified first as Christian or as Palestinian. I asked her back if she had ever had to answer that same question, and choose between her faith or religious heritage, and her nationality to put before the other. She said that she hadn’t, and when I asked her why, she said that in her case, the question wasn’t relevant, because it wasn’t political.
Somehow, my identity, which is, like the identity of any person anywhere, multi-layered, became a political issue. Not political in the sense that my answer would say something about my values or ideas, no. It is political in the sense that my answer, whatever it would be, would be a contribution to a controversial debate, between extensive, clashing world views, none of which is necessarily mine. In other words, the way I identify would be an ideological statement for somebody else.
This is deeply disturbing, because I didn’t choose it. It is the situation of my country, and the fate that has been that of my people for the last century, that has made anything coming from us, Palestinians, ideologically consequential for others, and therefore controversial. This makes my work, and that of all Palestinian journalists who spend our time telling the world about our country and our people, by definition a risky one, as our perspective, and the narrative that we offer will be and have been understood as ideology, and therefore as less valuable, less serious, and less credible.
This is the result of power dynamics; the conqueror, the stronger party gets to define what the conventional wisdom and the objective reality are, and what is labeled as ideological and political. This definition is made based on the ideology of the stronger party. It is so much about power dynamics that the weaker part is pressed to believe that the simplest opinion about themselves is ideological.
As a journalism student, I was trained to avoid slipping into endorsing political and ideological stands by giving equal coverage to opposed points of view. When writing about Palestine, I ended up understanding that the Palestinian refugees’ right to return is to be presented as one of the points of view, for my work to be professional and journalistically impartial. This is the result of a political process; Palestinian movements advocated for the right of return, and Israel refused it, and the more a Palestinian movement insisted on the right of return and refused to negotiate on it, the more ‘radical’ it seemed.
This issue, the right of return, has been more influential in defining the Palestinian ‘ideological’ spectrum than differences between Palestinians over the way to organize society, the choice of economic model, or the role of religion in public life. However, the right of a person to leave their country and return at any time is a fundamental human right enshrined in the international declaration of human rights. But the right of Palestinian refugees to return, the Palestinians’ right to their land, as the way a Palestinian Christian identifies, and eventually, just as the name of Palestine itself are deemed ‘ideological’, and need to be put between brackets.
In the past three years, we have seen the display of this logic to its maximum in mainstream media. The number of Palestinians killed became an ideological statement. The statement that they were killed by Israeli bombs became an ideological statement. The statement that most of them were civilians also became an ideological statement. Today, the right of the people of Gaza to reconstruction, food, medicine, having their lives back and running them themselves is put between brackets, and Palestinian voices that are invited or quoted by mainstream media outlets are invited to a debate. A debate over the humanity of their own people between ideologies that are not theirs.
This brings the question back to what kind of journalism we should be doing, outside of mainstream media. Some see independent and alternative media as an ideological one, because it voices causes like the cause of Palestine. But this is a label that is made in the upper levels of discussion, where things as elemental and basic as food, medicine, freedom of movement, dignity, and control over your own life are taken for granted, and the discussion about them is always the discussion about them for others.
But for those who lack them, those who are deprived from them, who are forced to survive every day without them, they are not a matter of discussion or debate. They are not political. They are the difference between one day their children having a chance to live in this world or not.
In the first days of the genocide I saw on TV a Palestinian elderly woman interviewed by Al-Jazeera on her way south, fleeing Israeli bombings on foot, sustained by one of her grandchildren. She said, while holding her tears, that she had fled this same way three times since 1948, and that all that kept her going in life was the hope of seeing the place where her home village once stood once before dying, and instead she is fleeing again.
This reminded me of Palestinian educator and thinker Munir Fasheh, whom I spoke to in Ramallah in 2019, who also struggled to hold his tears when he spoke about his journey to Jerusalem to see the home where his parents lived, occupied by a strange Israeli family who didn’t even know who the house belonged to. I asked myself; Does that Palestinian grandmother think of her longing to her destroyed village as her ‘ideology’? Does Munir Fasheh think of his attachment to Jerusalem and his parents’ home as a political stance? And who am I, who is anybody to tell them that that’s what they are?
This is why independent journalism is not ideological, because we don’t engage in an abstract debate over abstract ideas about somebody else’s life.
We report our lives, and the lives of people around the world for whom basic rights and recognition of their own identity is not abstract. These people are the majority, from Palestine to Minneapolis, and therefore, independent media has the mission of being the mirror of the largest part of the world as it looks. This is why we don’t subscribe to the ‘common wisdom’ labelling of what is ideology and what isn’t. We stick to the common reality of our common humanity.
At least we try.
The first thing that struck me about this article was remembering how John F Kennedy’s Catholicism was used against him by his political opponents in 1960. He had to resort to describing himself as “an American who happens to be Catholic.”
The other thing was the relentless insistence by Israelis and Israel’s supporters that there never was a country called Palestine or a people called Palestinians. Whenever they insist that Israel has a right to exist, and demand that the world acknowledge it as fact, they are denying the right to exist of Palestine – from which Israel was carved in 1948. All nation states are transient, but to admit that would remove a vital block from the Jenga pile.
@john
It could be an involuntary admission that their ancestors were never Ottoman subjects to begin with, which means they failed to become ipso facto Palestinian citizens under the 1925 Mandate law. In other words, they are not indigenous, but illegal settlers under British de facto occupation.
The tired Zionist falllacy that ‘there is no Palestinian people’ is merely a smoke screen to deflect from the fact that Palestinians constitute a legitimate civic nation, something that the Jewish “people” can never be. While the Palestinian definition of a nation has always been civic and inclusive, the Zionist definition remains fundamentally racial and exclusive and expanding even to Jews who aren’t even citizens of Israel. So a non-Jewish Palestinian doesn’t belong to the nation (civic) state of Israel while even a Jewish non-citizen does. Go figure.