4 Oct 2024 | Israel, News and features, Newsletters, Palestine, Sudan
If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? This well-known philosophical question most likely stems from the work of 18th century philosopher George Berkeley, who questioned the possibility of “unperceived existence”. In other words – did something really happen if no one is around to witness or perceive it?
This might seem a lofty and pretentious way to start this week’s Index newsletter. But the first-hand observance and subsequent documentation of events is the fundamental basis of rigorous journalism, and enables injustices to be accurately reported around the world. It provides us with the ability to understand truth from falsehood. And it is being increasingly undermined.
Journalistic “black holes” are appearing in conflicts globally, stopping the world from being able to witness what is happening on the ground, and therefore causing us to question reality.
Since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, triggered by Hamas’s incursion into Israel on 7 October 2023, Israel has banned foreign media access in Gaza. Only very limited international news crews are allowed in under strict conditions. This has left the world reliant on press statements, the words of government officials, and individual Palestinian journalists, who have risked their lives to showcase the brutality of the war on social media.
And many have lost their lives in the process. According to investigations by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), as of 4 October 2024, at least 127 journalists and media workers are among the more than 42,000 Palestinians and 1,200 Israelis killed since the war began, making it the deadliest period for journalists since the organisation started gathering data in 1992. The CPJ has determined that at least five of these journalists were directly targeted.
Major broadcasters have also been targeted. Last month, Al Jazeera’s office in the West Bank was raided and shut down for 45 days by Israeli soldiers, following the closure of the channel’s East Jerusalem office in May, on claims that they are a threat to Israel’s national security. But as Al Jazeera English’s Gaza correspondent Youmna El Sayed writes for Index this week, such shutdowns of legitimate news providers prevent global audiences from being able to see the pain and suffering that is being endured by both Palestinians and Israelis, encouraging misinformation to propagate.
As hostilities escalate across the Middle East, news channels continue to be curtailed. This week, an air strike destroyed the headquarters of the religious al-Sirat TV station in Beirut, Lebanon, on grounds that it was being used to store Hezbollah weapons, a claim which Hezbollah denies. Foreign correspondents are, however, still allowed in Lebanon – but in Iran all broadcasting is controlled by the state, with foreign journalists barred, meaning access to objective reporting is essentially impossible.
Outside of the region, other countries’ severe reporting restrictions and intimidation of journalists have made it difficult for global audiences to comprehend what is happening in conflicts. This includes Kashmir, the disputed mountainous region between India and Pakistan, and Sudan, where it is estimated that 90% of the country’s media infrastructure has been wiped out by the civil war.
What is the impact of this? The worrying rise in press suppression not only creates huge risks for journalists, but severely curtails people’s ability to understand geopolitics, conflict, and in future, historical events. It stops us from being able to weigh things up and form opinions based on what we have perceived.
Ultimately, it is impossible for any news producer, whether they be an individual correspondent or a major broadcaster, to be truly “objective”. People are driven by motives, both emotional and financial, and their own lived experiences. A news organisation, backed by a particular country or group, will appear truthful to some and severely biased to others.
But the only way to ensure some level of objectivity is to retain access to a broad range of sources, from the BBC to Al Jazeera, helping us form a more rounded world view. To go back to Berkeley’s philosophical analysis, the only way to verify the truth is to have the privilege of witnessing the evidence. Without this, it becomes virtually impossible to be able to tell fact from fiction.
3 Oct 2024 | Israel, Middle East and North Africa, News and features, Palestine
Last week, Israeli soldiers raided the Al Jazeera office in Ramallah, within the occupied West Bank and ordered the network’s bureau to shut for 45 days.
This is not the first time a media shutdown has happened. In early May, the Israeli army stormed the Al Jazeera bureau in East Jerusalem and closed it after confiscating its equipment, claiming that the network was a threat to Israel’s national security.
An additional two claims were made by Israel this time, which were that the network “incites terror” and “supports terrorist activities”.
Israel has long exercised suppression against the freedom of press and media in the occupied Palestinian territories. Many Palestinian journalists have been killed, attacked, threatened and arrested.
Israel has made Palestinian journalists’ jobs in the occupied territories almost impossible. It’s a constant life threatening situation – on many occasions, Israel has deliberately targeted Al Jazeera journalists and their families.
The sniping of Palestinian-US journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in 2022; the targeting of many other colleagues’ families in Gaza, including my own family; the deliberate killing of Al Jazeera journalists in direct attacks; these all resemble Israeli crimes against press freedom and attempts to silence journalists.
Regardless of the feeling that your press gear labels you as a direct target to the Israeli army, the pain and worry of being a danger to your loved ones is indescribable.
Since October 2023, Israel’s suppression of the press has reached foreign journalists too, as it has prevented all international journalists from exercising their right to cover one of the most brutal wars in recent history.
I believe this is an attempt to avoid exposure of crimes committed against the Palestinians, and the crisis they face.
Al Jazeera as a network has long been a prominent voice in covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and its presence in the region has always been crucial for a global audience.
The network’s coverage depends on a large number of journalists, bringing together all aspects of the story at once.
Over the years, Al Jazeera has built a reputation for its commitment to telling the story from both sides of the divide. Many people across the world turn their sights to Al Jazeera channels for the latest developments of breaking news stories.
Its coverage isn’t just a reflection of events on the ground – it is an avenue for audiences, globally, to understand the complexities of these events and engage with every story.
The closure of its offices sends a chilling message to the media landscape as a whole.
For years, Al Jazeera has been criticised by Israeli officials for what they allege is biased reporting. Yet, such accusations overlook the network’s fundamental journalistic principle: to show the full spectrum of the story.
I believe that Al Jazeera’s coverage is notably impartial. I say this because it brings to light the narratives of both Israelis and Palestinians, ensuring that no side goes unheard.
Its reporters don’t shy away from broadcasting the pain and suffering endured by civilians on either side of the conflict. Whether it’s an Israeli family mourning after a rocket attack, or Palestinians in Gaza grappling with the aftermath of airstrikes, or settler violence and illegal confiscation of Palestinian land in the West Bank, Al Jazeera’s cameras capture both human realities.
All this is clear in its coverage since the beginning of the Gaza war. On 7 October 2023, my reporting as a Gaza correspondent was on the Palestinian attacks on Israeli towns with complete objectivity. Other stories for my colleagues in Israel highlighted the aftermath of these attacks and the impact on Israeli families.
This objectivity is rare and invaluable in a conflict where misinformation, propaganda, and one-sided narratives often dominate. Where many news outlets have taken up clear ideological stances, Al Jazeera has remained steadfast in its commitment to neutrality. It’s not just about giving airtime to both sides – it’s about letting the facts speak for themselves.
And this, in my opinion, is the true objective of journalism in the first place. Our job as journalists is to inform the public based on facts and evidence, not political agendas.
But to suggest that this impartiality is a threat worthy of office closures is to misconstrue the role of journalism in a so-called “democratic society”. The very essence of free press is to inform the public, to provide transparency, and to hold those in power accountable. Silencing a media outlet like Al Jazeera is a direct assault on these values.
The closure of Al Jazeera’s offices also highlights a troubling double standard. Israeli authorities have allowed other international news agencies to continue their operations, many of which cover the conflict in ways that are far less nuanced or balanced. Yet Al Jazeera, a network that works diligently to present both Israeli and Palestinian perspectives, is being targeted and its journalists are constantly under attack. What does this say about the future of press freedom in Israel and the occupied territories?
2 Aug 2024 | Israel, Middle East and North Africa, News and features, Palestine, Volume 53.02 Summer 2024
They emerge very slowly from a black hole in the background. Men and women, their faces tired, all take heavy steps. Some are dragging a bag, others have mattresses and household objects. The stage is lit in green and red, illuminating the young actors and dancers one by one, emphasising their individual suffering. The music – rapper Hijazi’s remix of the traditional Palestinian choral song Tarweeda Shamaly – repeats in a hypnotic loop to tell us that, for 70 years, the story of Palestinians has always been the same: moving forward in an exhausting and constantly uprooting process. The Palestinians call it Nakba and this dance-theatre show named The Story is Sick by the Ayyam al Masrah company, the only one active in the strip, was performed just over a year ago live in Gaza. It was a performance like no other which I saw on a reporting mission to the strip. Today it seems to rise again in tragic reality, after 7 October 2023.
The theatre has been destroyed now and no longer exists. The cast and crew have paid a horrific price for living in Gaza. Of the company’s 20 or so actors, aged between 20 and 35, many are displaced in Deir al-Balah. Only one, the stage technician, Ahmad Gheidar, decided to stay in Gaza, risking his life; a couple of actors, Mohannad and Lina, got engaged, left Gaza and did everything they could to escape to Egypt; three have died with all their families. None of the members of the company have a home to return to; their houses are all destroyed. The only thing left to the actors of Ayyam al Masrah is theatre, as the artistic director of the company, Mohammed al-Hessi recalls, constantly disturbed in the background by the buzz of Israeli drones.
For al-Hessi himself it was unimaginable that one of the play’s characters – a Palestinian, forced to abandon his home in 1967 and wander through refugee camps in the region – would be his reality a year later. Displaced from Gaza City after the Israeli bombings of November 2023, he and his wife and three daughters are searching for a fourth refuge, after Khan Younis, Deir al-Balah and Rafah.
“I am very worried,” he told Index in a series of daily voice messages that continue a dialogue that has already lasted more than six months. “There are thousands of people who continue to move by cars and donkeys like us. After being shot in the back and miraculously unharmed, I spent two months on Rafah beach in al-Mawasi. Here, at times I hoped to end it all. The cold in February was excessive and we tried to survive by somehow diluting the salty sea water for drinking. I was morally destroyed by the impossibility of giving a dignified life to my wife and my daughters, but I didn’t believe I would be forced to move again and again to get away from the bombings that reached us as far as the south of the strip”.
Al-Hessi’s fate is also that of a man unafraid to speak truth to power: inconvenient for Israel, to the point of not being able to leave Gaza for seven years now, because he raises political issues in his plays and is not afraid to highlight the impact of the Israeli occupation on Gazans’ daily life; inconvenient for Hamas because the theatre company has been the only one on the strip since 1995 that does not bow to the local powers that be. He has challenged Hamas’s moral police by putting men and women on stage as couples and has had the courage to question the Islamic values on which daily life is based, stimulating debate among spectators. In the audience, men and women sit together, next to each other, condemned by Hamas authorities as a dangerous potential for “promiscuity”.
In Gaza City, the success of The Story is Sick was so overwhelming when it was first staged in February 2023 that the number of performances was doubled to 40. “People loved our show because it manages to generate a great debate between the public and the actors,” al-Hessi told Index proudly. “After the performance everyone asks questions, as if looking for a solution. And the theatre has always been full: those who saw the show brought other people, students, associates. At the debut there were 350 people in the room and there were people waiting outside, sitting on the stairs.”
For those who attended the play last spring, the atmosphere was alive with debate, pulsating even. From the stands, many were wondering about the weight of tradition on family relationships and how the Israeli occupation and segregated life on the Gaza strip made the patriarchal system and male-female dynamics more burdensome and complicated.
Hana Abd al-Nabi, a lively and dynamic actor in the company, wrote the script of The Story is Sick together with the artistic director. She explained: “In this show we faced a new challenge: it was the first year in which we added male figures to the narrators on stage because we had always entrusted the role of the narrator to a female voice and body. The audience so far had not been mixed but was mostly female only.
“We then inserted male characters into the show and encouraged the presence of young men in both to change their point of view on the topics treated in our comedies. The female character tells the story from her point of view, and the male character tells the same story from his point of view. As an author I had to split between genders: if I were a man, would my wife say a certain thing, and would she complain in a certain way? And what would I do if I were a woman? And who would be right between the two? On stage, with respect to individual stories, both genders – man and woman – are right, each from their point of view. Actually, we still find ourselves trapped in the same cultural and social pattern, from the era of the Arabian Nights to the era of social media, where our entire lives, even private, are discovered, exhibited.”
The project started with a workshop between 23 actors to understand how to tell a story. The cast of Ayyam al Masrah had gathered the voices of three generations of Palestinians from Jaffa, Haifa and all of historic Palestine. Stories of the first Intifada, the second, and life today. Stories of couples who got married or who lived together or who had a love story. Each actor brought six stories. “In this journey,” said al-Hessi, “we saw something happen in front of us: in this story of the Palestinian people there was something sick. From 1948 to today, love and life have progressively disappeared. And we saw that the future in the eyes of the young was already broken, and that each of us was torn to pieces. We saw how each event – an intifada, an offensive, a siege – had an increasingly worse effect on social life. In the difficulties of everyday life, in looking for a job, in family life: even love stories have disappeared.”
The only moment al-Hessi smiles is when he talks about his workshops in refugee camps: “Our first show in 1995 was called Mothers. 200 women came to see it, and a long discussion started there too. Instead of an hour we stayed there for three hours because all the women wanted to talk. From there we started our storytelling programme for women. Now I have built a 20-minute show that stages our displacement in which women are once again the main characters and we will have three female actors on the stage. And I wrote another script, and I have three male actors on stage: it is a show tailored to the needs of children up to 12 years of age.”
Al-Hessi’s recipe is simple. At the end of the day, his bread is life: tragic, absurd, unexpected, constantly balanced between the grimace of pain and the laughter of survival.
3 Jun 2024 | Israel, News and features, Palestine
Israel’s decision to seize video equipment from AP journalists last week may have been swiftly reversed but the overall direction of travel for media freedom in Israel is negative.
Journalists inside Gaza are of course paying the highest price (yesterday preliminary investigations by CPJ showed at least 107 journalists and media workers were among the more than 37,000 killed since the Israel-Gaza war began) and it feels odd to speak of equipment seizures when so many of those covering the war in the Strip have paid with their lives. But this is not to compare, merely to illuminate.
The past few days have provided ample evidence of what many within Israel have long feared – that the offensive in Gaza is not being reported on fully in Israel itself. On Tuesday a video went viral of an Israeli woman responding with outrage at the wide gulf between news on Sunday’s bombing of a refugee camp in Rafah within Israeli media compared to major international news outlets. Yesterday, in an interview with Canadian broadcaster CBC, press freedom director for the Union of Journalists in Israel, Anat Saragusti, spoke more broadly of the reporting discrepancies since 7 October:
“The world sees a completely different war from the Israeli audience. This is very disturbing.”
Saragusti added that part of this is because the population is still processing the horrors of 7 October and with that comes a degree of self-censorship from those within the media. The other reason, she said, is that the IDF provides much of the material that appears in Israeli media and this is subject to review by military censors. While the military has always exerted control (Israeli law requires journalists to submit any article dealing with “security issues” to the military censor for review prior to publication), this pressure has intensified since the war, as the magazine +972 showed. Since 2011 +972 have released an annual report looking at the scale of bans by the military censor. In their latest report, released last week and published on our site with permission, they highlighted how in 2023 more than 600 articles by Israeli media outlets were barred, which was the most since their tracking began.
In a visually arresting move, Israeli paper Haaretz published an article on Wednesday with blacked out words and sentences. Highlighting such redactions is incidentally against the law and will no doubt add to the government’s wrath at Haaretz (late last year they threatened the left-leaning outlet with sanctions over their Gaza war coverage).
The government’s attempts to control the media landscape was already a problem prior to 7 October. Benjamin Netanyahu is known for his fractious relationship with the press and has made some very personal attacks throughout his career, such as this one from 2016, while Shlomo Kahri, the current communications minister, last year expressed a desire to shut down the country’s public broadcaster Kan. This week it was also revealed by Haaretz that two years ago investigative reporter Gur Megiddo was blocked from reporting on how then chief of Mossad had allegedly threatened then ICC prosecutor (the story finally saw daylight on Tuesday). Megiddo said he’d been summoned to meet two officials and threatened. It was “explained that if I published the story I would suffer the consequences and get to know the interrogation rooms of the Israeli security authorities from the inside,” said Megiddo.
Switching to the present, it feels unconscionable that Israelis, for whom the war is a lived reality not just a news story, are being served a light version of its conduct.
In the case of AP, their equipment was confiscated on the premise that it violated a new media law, passed by Israeli parliament in April, which allows the state to shut down foreign media outlets it deems a security threat. It was under this law that Israel also raided and closed Al Jazeera’s offices earlier this month and banned the company’s websites and broadcasts in the country.
Countries have a habit of passing censorious legislation in wartime, the justification being that some media control is important to protect the military. The issue is that such legislation is typically vague, open to abuse by those in power, and doesn’t always come with an expiry date to protect peacetime rights.
“A country like Israel, used to living through intense periods of crisis, is particularly vulnerable to calls for legislation that claims to protect national security by limiting free expression. Populist politicians are often happy to exploit the “rally around the flag” effect,” Daniella Peled, managing editor at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, told Index.
We voiced our concerns here in terms of Ukraine, which passed a media law within the first year of Russia’s full-scale invasion with very broad implications, and we have concerns with Israel too. But as these examples show, our concerns are far wider than just one law and one incidence of confiscated equipment.
