It has been a turbulent few weeks in international news, with the conflicts between Israel and Palestine dominating the headlines. Over the course of 11 days, the Israeli Defense Forces killed at least 243 Palestinians, including 66 children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry; meanwhile, 12 people, including two children, died in Israel during the same period due to rocket attacks launched from Gaza.
There is thankfully a ceasefire in place as of yesterday, bringing an end to this round of death and destruction, but the hard-line Israeli government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has warned that they will respond with “a new level of force” should the ceasefire fail. It is hard to look to the future expecting anything more than continuing tension in the region – which, unfortunately, has been true for decades. Particularly in impoverished Gaza, the effects of the IDF bombing campaign will have consequences for a long time to come: more than 30 medical facilities, for example, were damaged in the conflict, bringing COVID-19 testing in the region to a standstill.
The IDF’s airstrikes also brought into sharp focus the dangers that journalists face, especially in the face of state repression. Last Saturday, the IDF struck the al-Jalaa building in Gaza, a high-rise tower that housed, among other offices and personal apartments, offices of the Associated Press and Al Jazeera. The IDF informed the building’s owner, Jawaad Mahdi, only an hour in advance that the building would be struck.
A plume of smoke rises from the al-Jawaa tower after it was bombed by the Israeli Defense Forces, May 15, 2021 [Osps7, Wikimedia Commons, CC 4.0]
In a video broadcast by Al Jazeera, Mahdi pleaded for an extra ten minutes so that journalists could retrieve their cameras before the bombing, but the IDF denied the request. “You have destroyed our life’s work, memories, life,” Mahdi said at that point. “I will hang up. Do what you want. There is a God.”
Although the strike on the Associated Press office has garnered the most international attention, it was not the only building housing news organizations struck by the IDF during the campaign. On May 11 and 12, Israel bombed two other office buildings that held 12 other news offices, mostly Arabic language outlets, some of them supportive of Hamas.
In all cases, the IDF has claimed its actions were justified because the buildings held Hamas militants. The AP, for its part, claims otherwise in the al-Jalaa building. “AP’s bureau has been in this building for 15 years. We have had no indication Hamas was in the building or active in the building,” said the AP’s president and CEO, Gary Pruitt. “This is something we actively check to the best of our ability. We would never knowingly put our journalists at risk.” (The State Department has said Israel shared intelligence regarding the building with the U.S. but has not confirmed the contents of that intelligence, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he had not personally seen any confirmation of Hamas being in the building.)
One expects that journalists covering the Gaza strip understand that they are taking risks: it is a dangerous part of the world, and tensions between Palestine and Israel are constantly balanced between an inequitable peace and open warfare. Journalists in such an environment are surely prepared to be caught in the crossfire. But it is another thing entirely for a sovereign state, especially one that frequently trumpets its position as the so-called “only democracy in the Middle East,” to launch attacks specifically on news offices.
Even if there were militants also using these buildings – and again, while Israel has claimed it had intelligence, the public has not been shown anything to confirm this – it still should not have been targeted, just as hospitals and schools should not be targets for airstrikes.
As Pruitt said following the attack: “The world will know less about what is happening in Gaza because of what happened today.”
In a bitter postscript, the AP fell into the spotlight again regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict on Friday, when the organization fired the journalist Emily Wilder after a campaign spearheaded by the Stanford College Republicans highlighted her pro-Palestinian activism while at Stanford, such as with the organization Jewish Voice for Peace. Ms. Wilder did not cover international news in her position, and so was not reporting on Palestine or Israel at the time.
The AP stated that she was fired for violations of their social media policy while she was employed at the AP, although the Guardian notes that she has only tweeted 18 times since she began her employment there, with her most subjective post being about the difficulties of “objectivity” in journalism.
“‘Objectivity’ feels fickle when the basic terms we use to report news implicitly stake a claim,” she wrote. “Using ‘Israel’ but never ‘Palestine,’ or ‘war’ but not ‘siege and occupation’ are political choices – yet media make those exact choices all the time without being flagged as biased.”
One sympathizes. Even in an apparently cozy corner of the journalistic world like The Wild Hunt, where for the most part our controversies only lead to heady critiques in the comments section, we have had journalists receive serious threats to their health and safety. We have even had to consult with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and local law enforcement in these matters. And I am certainly aware that in many newsrooms, the very fact that I am a Pagan, and vocally pro-Paganism, would disqualify me from covering my own community – a fact that newsrooms are currently reckoning with in regards to other identities.
“Objectivity” has often been a bludgeon used to maintain the status quo, as certainly appears to be the case with Ms. Wilder.
The fate of one office building or one young journalist’s career may seem to pale before the enormity of human suffering that the last two weeks have seen in Palestine and Israel. But ultimately we require journalism in order to decipher the world around us – it is the only way we have to even know that suffering exists, much less what has led to it. That requires a trust in both the physical infrastructure that supports journalists and the legal and ethical framework in which they work. The past few weeks in Gaza, and its aftermath, has shown just how tenuous these supports are.
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