Palestine Letter: When the context is the story

I was in middle school when the Second Intifada broke out and I first became aware of the media and the way it framed events. I was too young to understand all the details, but I understood the context from which the uprising erupted.

In the years before, I had grown up listening to stories about the First Intifada, the popular mass uprising of the late 1980s, and about the hope and optimism of a future in an independent Palestinian state. I remember the day Yasser Arafat arrived in Ramallah: the celebrations, the tears, my father shaking hands with and hugging the Palestinian police officers patrolling the streets of his city for the first time. Then I began to grasp the changes happening around me.

I first learned what a checkpoint was as a child, during the “peaceful” years of the Oslo process. Almost every time my family and I drove back home, we had to stop because Israeli soldiers had set up a flying checkpoint. I remember the fear, and the long waits during which my brother and I would fall asleep in the car. I remember how my uncles, who had farmed all their lives, could no longer make a living from the land. The market was flooded with Israeli produce, and they could no longer reach parts of the family’s land, cut off by newly built Israeli roads and expanding settlements.

I remember the anger around me when Israel seized Jabal Abu Ghneim in Bethlehem, one of the city’s last green spaces. I remember news of protests, and of protesters being shot. Today, the Israeli settlement of Har Homa sits there. I also remember people’s frustration at no longer being able to go to Jerusalem freely — not even on religious holidays, even though they had family and property there. Then came the Second Intifada, and with it, my passion for following the news — and, eventually, for reporting it.

None of what I had understood as a child made it into the international news. All that was there were events, most of them bloody. First, clashes between protesters and Israeli soldiers, with a daily toll of protesters killed or injured. Then the tanks, the helicopters firing missiles, and the suicide bombings. Little by little, I came to see what Palestine looked like in the international news: a crazy place, full of violence that nobody could explain, inhabited by crazy, violent people. Years before I studied it in college, I could already identify what was missing: context.

In college, I was taught that context is the part of a news story that provides background. But over my years working as a journalist in Palestine, I have learned that the absence of Palestine’s context, accumulated over decades, has grown into a stand-alone story of its own — one that can’t be covered in a single article, news report, or even a documentary series.

Time and time again, I find myself in back-and-forth exchanges with editors because I slip into explaining the context behind the context, to the point where the news itself becomes the background. Most international journalists, I suspect, find it too complicated to untangle, which is why they keep jumping from one big, bloody event to the next. Perhaps some of them aren’t interested in learning the context in the first place.

But it doesn’t stop there. Ignorance of the Palestinian context has allowed for a gradual, slow-burning alienation of the Palestinian people from the conscience of millions around the world. It is cruelly simple: if you don’t know someone’s story, you can’t empathize with them.

In trying to walk the fine line between providing the context of Palestinian lives and sticking to the news angle — without turning every report into a history lecture — I noticed that we Palestinian journalists have developed an instinct for storytelling as an integral part of reporting. It might sound like a cliché, but it’s true: telling stories is the best way to convey a complicated story in the simplest way possible, and Palestinians have countless stories they want to tell the world.

But here, another realization kicks in: the stories we tell about other people are nothing but small pieces of our own ongoing, collective story. At some point, as a Palestinian journalist, you no longer know whether you are reporting your country’s news, or whether that reporting has become the vehicle through which you are trying to tell your own story.

It is a heavy realization, because you come to understand how invisible you, your community, and your entire existence have been for decades — to the point that your whole professional career has been nothing but a desperate attempt to be recognized.

It is not a romantic idea that makes you proud of what you do. On the contrary, it is a devastating reality that makes your heart sink.

It is even more devastating to realize that we are making this attempt too late, because a genocide has already taken place and been normalized.

But Palestine hasn’t disappeared. Our story hasn’t ended. Millions around the world are waking up and seeking to learn Palestine’s story.

This is why, although the past three years of genocide are the biggest and bloodiest story we must continue to cover, there is a larger context — one that is a long, stand-alone story of its own and needs to be told. It is the story of a small, proud people on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, carrying a full century of defeat and resilience, hopes and disappointments, dreams and endless memories, and wounds that are still open. A people with so much heritage, poetry, and beauty woven into its pain, and so much passion to share what it has with the world.

We will continue to tell it until it is fully, fairly, and properly heard.