A Letter to Journalists Covering Gaza
I have never regretted leaving the BBC after the coverage of BBC NEWS of the 2014 war in Gaza, when 551 children and 299 women were murdered.
Funeral ceremony held for Palestinian journalists Saeed Al-Taweel and Mohammad Sobh, who were killed in Israeli airstrikes, in Gaza Strip, Gaza on October 10, 2023.The journalists were killed while filming the targeting of a residential building by Israeli warplanes in Rimal district in western Gaza. Photo by Anadolu Images
TI have a message to journalists in mainstream media, to the journalists with a conscience. A message which I have always wanted to write about:
While the world is witnessing another phase of ethnic cleansing and mass killings of Palestinians, in this current war on Gaza (which international media is deceitfully calling a ‘conflict’), where more than 5,000 Palestinians’ have been killed (not ‘died’), at the time of this message; 70% of them are babies, children, women, and elderly, and while more than 60% of the population of the Gaza Strip had been displaced – journalists can do one of two things:
2. Resist journalistically the deceitful narrative which equates the colonialist oppressors’ powers with the oppressed colonized people. This can be done in various ways; in the field, inside the newsroom, on air, in editorial meetings, via emails, in your terminologies, via the choice of words, images and footages, your sources, in explaining the context and the history of the occupation and the sufferings of families under the apartheid regime.
2. If you have tried hard and failed and you cannot make even 1% change, if you are made to be silent, if you are pressured to become complicit in twisting the truth, if you have been marginalized to become just a number, a journalist with no contribution towards correcting the narrative, then you need to think seriously about your career choices, where you don’t become a bullet in the machine gun of the mainstream media which can manufacture the public’s consent in supporting massacres.
You are a journalist, with a mission to convey the truth and stand up for justice, not a tool in the occupiers’ army propaganda machine. You can also be a tool by your shameful silence, in the time when you are mostly needed to speak up.
I have never regretted leaving the BBC after the coverage of BBC NEWS of the 2014 war in Gaza, when 551 children and 299 women were murdered, and in which the scale of human loss, devastation and displacement caused was catastrophic and unparalleled, since 1967 according to the UNRWA . People have forgotten that massacre as they forgot others, but Palestinians who are living with its after mass can never forget.
Now, the so called international community is giving the green light to another neo-colonial project accompanied with war crimes in Palestine, and the dehumanization of Palestinians in media discourse and political rhetoric doesn’t only impact their lives but it intersects with the Islamophobic and neo-orientalist discourse about Arabs and Muslims worldwide, which demonizes them and leads to a spike in hate crimes.
For journalists to make a change, they need to decolonize their mind-sets first.
