Palestine Letter: Reporting genocide, and why words do matter

Palestinian journalists filming a building being destroyed by Israeli bombing in the Gaza Strip, May 14, 2021. (Photo: Osps7/Wikimedia)

Ever since I could remember, I wanted to be a journalist. I always wanted to practice journalism in Palestine, and about Palestine. Not only to get the plight of my people known to the world, but also to share Palestine’s culture, history, creativity, and everyday life with the world. I always believed that this is my way of putting my love of Palestine into practice, and contributing to its journey to freedom, but also to its thriving and flourishing even under occupation. I always believed this is my way to fulfill journalism’s ideal of advancing knowledge and understanding on the important issues of the world, to help advance public accountability, and there are few issues as central to the world as Palestine. I never doubted that through journalism I can help Palestine and the world be a better place, until last year.

My generation of Palestinians have seen, before reaching the age of 30, intense difficult moments that would put the strongest convictions of any person to the test. The second Intifada and all of its bloody events. The 2002 invasion of Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah, and Bethlehem, and the images of Israeli tanks rolling through the streets of my city, tearing it apart. The 2008 Israeli bombing of Gaza and white phosphorus raining down on school yards. The summary executions of our age-peers in 2015 and 2016. Israeli snipers hunting down protestors during the great march of return. The arrest campaigns of our classmates, the incursions into our college campuses, the demolition of homes, settler attacks, curfews, checkpoints, and a thousand individual moments that were burned into our memory and our souls. However, the ongoing genocide in Gaza is something else entirely different.

Everything we lived and witnessed before pales in comparison to what Gaza has been subjected to since last year. Never before have we felt more vulnerable, more helpless, more speechless, more suffocated, and more guilty than in the past 14 months. Guilty of having a roof over our heads. Guilty of being able to reach out for a snack when our stomachs crunch, or for a blanket when we feel cold. Guilty of being alive, and of being able to go to sleep without worrying that we might wake up, or not, under the rubble of our bedrooms. Guilty of having nothing else to offer but tears and horror, this sense of guilt includes us journalists in a particular way.

We have always practiced our profession with the strong faith that with every article, with every report, and every story, we were making the Palestinian reality closer to the understanding of the world public opinion. That we were making progress in making the world audience more familiar with the Palestinian experience of living under occupation and siege, more sensible, and more empathetic to it. But then came the Israeli assault on Gaza in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks, and we began to see total siege leading to starvation, mass carpet bombing obliterating entire neighborhoods, refugee camps, and cities, and whole families buried under their homes. Most importantly, we began to see the concerted systematic denial, and paradoxically, the justification of these crimes by public figures, both in the media and in politics.

I couldn’t take away from my mind, in the early weeks and months of the current genocide, the fact that every time I finished a story, a report, or an article, and went to sleep, the carnage in Gaza continued, and that a few hours later when I woke up, there were 200 or 300 more names added to the list of victims. The idea that no amount of reporting could help save even a single life, or stop a single politician from dismissing or justifying another death was devastating. It made me feel for the first time that journalism, among many other things, was useless; that I had been fooling myself into thinking I was part of a change my entire life.

I have continued to write and report because it is the only thing that I can do. But then, I began to become more aware of the echo of the voices coming from Gaza: Your voices. They came from your university campuses and your streets, and they made their way to every public space of debate in your countries, even on mainstream media for the first time ever. The discourse trying to hide the reality of genocide began to appear in its true nature: ineffective, full of wholes, and outdated in front of a rising consciousness about Palestine, that can no longer be dismissed or overlooked. Something has changed. I don’t know how far and deep this change might be, but it is real because the mask that has been imposed on Palestine’s reality has begun to fall.

Leading the way are the real heroes of this entire story: Gaza’s journalists. The men and women who have been dedicated to bring the every-day of their own, their families and their communities’ genocide to the screens of the rest of the world. Displaced, hungry, and bombed, they wrote, reported, and told stories every day, and they did not go to sleep after work very often. And when they did, the new names on the list of victims that they learned of when they woke up were often those of their beloved ones.

At least 180 of Gaza’s journalists have given their lives over the past year for a vocation they believed in, and they didn’t let the hardest of conditions weaken their belief, but on the contrary, they strengthened it. In front of their dedication and courage, our sense of guilt, which is a natural human reaction to an unnatural and inhumane reality, must turn into a sense of responsibility. The responsibility to continue to expand the echo of the voices coming from Gaza because even if words can’t save lives, they are never useless. In fact, they are more necessary than ever. I should never forget that, and neither should you.