REFLECTIONS ON THE MEDIA

A Powerful Tool for Palestinian Liberation

Qassem Izzat Ali

MEDIA. JOURNALISM. These were meaningless words to me, whether in Arabic or in English, until my early thirties. I was consumed with fighting to protect my family, my land, and my people from being removed and erased. With time, I found that the best way for me to resist was to keep us in the world’s eye by being the first to report on what was happening in Gaza and the rest of Palestine. Through journalism, I was able to communicate directly to the world—and not through the flawed and ineffective political structures set up by Oslo to dictate the Palestinian story.

My life started in Beit Hanoun, a village that is a symbol of Palestine: dispossession, migration, generosity, resilience, frontier. And, after all my travel, displacement, deportation, escape and denial, my life will likely end there, too.

My life—and my identity—is intricately interwoven with the struggle. To be born in Gaza is to be born a liberation fighter. There is no other destiny. It is only the means that differ. Shopkeeper, nurse, business owner, farmer—our very existence is a symbol of resistance on this land, having witnessed the injustice of the past 70 years.

Alongside the struggle, a defining feature of my life has been the powerful influence of women. At the center of my life is my mother, Khadra Zweidi, forced out of her home at 10 years old. In the 1948 Nakba, Israeli forces cleared her village (Dimra) of its houses, mosques, markets and crops and forced the exodus of its residents. Most of the villagers ended up in Beit Hanoun, whose larger tribes followed Arab tradition by “adopting” the families fleeing the Nakba. In this way, my mother—our yumma—became part of the Kafarneh clan, a brawny and stubborn tribe of over 10,000 members. She went on to marry one of its grandest figures, Izzat Qassem Ali: prominent businessman, elegant dresser, deeply respected and (all importantly) eldest brother.

My grandmother (her mother-in-law), sitti Hissen, also had a strong hand in shaping me. Daughter of the mukhtar, or tribal chief, sitti Hissen was a true fellaha, a country woman in whose veins coursed the rich soil of Mother Palestine. Her home was in the bayarat, the orchard of oranges, lemons and pomelo that embraced our village, where she worked the land endlessly: loving each tree by day, boiling tea and sleeping serenely beneath them by night. The greater part of my youth was spent with her, learning. I admired her stamina, her attachment to the land, her physical strength and the knowledge stored in her mind, all gained from our most valuable asset—the land on which we lived. My mother, Khadra, rarely saw me but knew that I was spoiled in the lap of true luxury—the love of a grandmother and the embrace of the land.

Sitti Hissen’s husband was Qassem, my grandfather and namesake. As a prominent man in the village, Qassem decided to take a second wife. His new wife, hajjé Sarah, was the daughter of a prestigious martyr from our clan, hanged by the British police for bearing arms. As life would have it, hajjé Sarah was unable to bear children, this defining measure of a woman at the time. Destiny had other plans for hajjé Sarah, who became the leader from the shadows; the force in our tribe of strategic mind and extraordinary tact. Unlike sitti Hissen, hajjé Sarah was an intellectual force, comprehending social, clan, human and tribal power dynamics with such perspicacity that her counsel was mandatory on key decisions, from approvals of marriage to conflict mediation and tactical calculations with village tribes. Although she lost her husband at the age of 28, she chose not to return to her family but stayed with us, continuing in her role as businesswoman, clan leader and the voice of authority in our village.

As luck would have it, the fourth woman to grace and shape my young life was an outsider to our family, my first-grade teacher, Miss Salwa Yaffawiyyeh, Miss Salwa was educated, tall, sophisticated, impeccably dressed and absolutely beautiful. At the age of six, I felt the butterflies of love in my stomach. Miss Salwa inspired me to learn through focus and discipline, to love knowledge and understand the power of education. Inadvertently, she also provoked in me the resistance fighter that I would remain for life. One day, as a reward for excellent academic performance, she gave me a “white card”—the equivalent of food stamps from the United Nations to get special provisions and food from the agency. I hated the notion of a handout and felt ashamed to be carrying it but loved Miss Salwa. Once out of her sight, I ripped the card into a million pieces and ran home to tell hajjé Sarah. Sarah was pleased. “Ya Qassem, ya habibi, we are proud people, and proud people do not accept to eat from the hand of the United Nations.” From that day, I wondered why the UN was giving us food. What did they want from us? Were they trying to buy us? Influence us? Foster a dependency? We did not need handouts; we were proud people of lengthy lineage living on incredibly fertile lands! My young mind was already simmering …

Growing up in a life of palpable power and influence, buttressed by my father, hajjé Sarah and our clan, life took a dramatic turn at the age of nine, when the 1967 war ushered in the Israeli Occupation. The timing of the invasion corresponded with one of my father’s many business trips to Cairo and, with the new Israeli control over all Egyptian territory east of the Suez Canal, an impenetrable frontier now separated him from his wife, seven children, tribe and homeland. Ten years would pass before we saw my father again. There was to be no facilitation of his return, given his prominence in the PLO leadership. Circumstance gave Israel this golden opportunity to trap him outside.

The next chapter of our lives was marked with the trauma of not knowing my father’s fate, and a dramatic collapse in our economic status in his absence. It revealed a depth of grit and determination in yumma Khadra and hajjé Sarah that shaped my siblings and me for life. These two women, with no formal education or literacy, began a business of selling fabric from the only village shop. It became a success, and—one by one—these two women sent all seven of us to university, starting with my eldest sister, Fairuz, to Cairo, Marwan to Baghdad, Azza, Nihad, Nasser and me to Birzeit and Marwa to Bethlehem. Among us, today, there are holders of Ph.D., Master and Bachelor’s degrees.

In that land without electricity, let alone media, we grew up vividly aware of the dramatic injustice that had befallen our country, our people, our families, our lands. For me, it meant figuring out how to become a man at the age of nine; how to maintain the family status with no market for our citrus, no income from my father’s business; how to help my mother and my family. In addition to other side gigs in the village (including becoming a skilled and successful poker player and gambler), this meant excelling in my studies, achieving top grades in tawjihii, and getting a full scholarship to study engineering in Cairo.

At that time, to study in Cairo was the greatest achievement: it was also the most meaningful gift of gratitude that I could give yumma and hajjé Sarah. But it was not to last. In Cairo, I was far from the struggle and unable to meaningfully engage, confront and mobilize against the entity attempting to snuff out my people. I knew I had to find my place in Palestinian political life, at its beating heart—Birzeit University. Devastating for my family—I went from working towards a career in engineering to studying political science, known as a fast-track to prison rather than a career. Since my namesake, grandfather Qassem, died in the 1956 war at the hands of the British and the French when they invaded in opposition to Jamal Abdel Nasser having nationalized the Suez Canal; and my family doppelganger, my maternal uncle Hassan, kidnapped by Israelis in 1948 and never heard of again, I would say, in hindsight, that my destiny was set. Activism and political leadership would see me spending the next 10 years of my life in and out of Israeli political prison.

By this point, you may be wondering where the media comes in. The next part of my journey turned out to be a formative and fundamental ingredient to my engaging meaningfully with journalism as a powerful tool in the struggle for liberation. It was a journey digging to the roots of my people; collecting their experiences of life; debating on political visions; disagreeing on ideology, religion, cultural constructs. It was a collection of exchanges as minute as sharing a cigarette, as profound as enduring torture rather than reveal a name. It was the most formative and (ironically) meaningful period in my life, building my understanding of my people, my oppressor and myself. The crucible blending and catalyzing our nationalism, uniting us as a people, erasing gender, socio-economic, religious and ideological barriers, and all of this provided on a silver platter by our Israeli oppressor: PRISON.

Without any of the material tools of journalism—no camera, no paper, no microphone or feed equipment—my memory became my vault. Listening, recording, processing, analyzing conversations, experiences, ideas, strategies … it was all accumulating in my head and perfectly safe from Israeli confiscation. It would serve me well.

My exit from prison and from politics corresponded with my graduation from Birzeit University with a B.A. in Middle East Studies, minor in Political Science, fundamentally useless under the Occupation. Armed with my useless diploma, deeply disgruntled with Palestinian political factions, and as a Palestinian from the “inside” (as opposed to those trapped outside the country following the 1948 and 1967 wars), I would not direct my fiery passion to support the PLO, the supposed “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people” because I, like so many others, had lost faith in that dilapidated and exclusive institution. With tomes of personal stories, opinions, ideological positions, debates, arguments and contradictions bouncing around in my head like free radicals, I knew that I had to find an alternative to politics. Some way to speak to our occupier and to the world about our stories, challenge colonial narratives and shape perceptions to a deeper realization of who “we” are—the people whom Israel claimed did not exist.

Nothing seemed evident. I worked in Israel as a laborer and then started a farm with a friend. It took some time, but the realization came to me that Gaza needed me more than Birzeit, Ramallah or the West Bank. To Gaza I returned.

Gaza was always the lesser-known entity, and a place where Israel had a different strategy of engagement—a level of complete impunity with brutal repression of any space for democratic expression. In Gaza, community groups, associations and clubs were not permitted to emerge. The Israelis exerted tight control over a population that seethed with militancy and armed struggle. It was in this environment of absolute penetration and coercion, where jobs were linked either to the Israeli Occupation authority or the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, that I had to figure out how to earn a living while channeling my fury and indignation at the grotesque level of injustice that had befallen my community and my people. As a revolutionary spirit, former prisoner and political junkie, trusted comrade, and effective organizer, I still could not see a course of action for myself.

Then in 1987, the Intifada exploded and a path for my future finally emerged. My friend, Ali Ka’adan, asked me to work as a producer with WTN in Gaza. I had no idea what that meant. Producer of what? We did not have televisions readily available and could not conceptualize news through that medium. A camera for me was used in cinema, for producing Egyptian soap operas, Jordanian television programs. These networks were not about news but about extolling kings, presidents and other popular personalities. WTN provided me with two hours’ training on a VHS video camera at Erez checkpoint, and I began my television media career.

In one of my first pieces of footage, I filmed children and women throwing stones at helicopters in the Rafah refugee camp on the border with Egypt. Jumping between the corrugated metal rooftops, I collected raw footage that would become one minute of explosive video aired internationally against the Israeli narrative. Accustomed to perceiving the news “embedded” in the Israeli army (i.e., “aggressive” Palestinian youth throwing stones), with news collected, filmed, produced, narrated and dubbed by Israeli journalists and technicians, the big networks were now able to access material with the visual counternarrative, and they were all over it. My camera gave quite a different story: I was filming from amongst women in traditional dress and children with school backpacks throwing stones, while in the aperture, Apache helicopters launched missiles and Israeli jeeps fired from grenade launchers and mounted guns. To get the tapes out of (pre-internet and pre-digital) Gaza, I had to rely on my community networks—the mothers and fathers who trusted me and their sons and daughters to whom I had grown close in prison. That trust made everything possible and smuggle the tapes we did—much to the chagrin of the Israeli army commanders, who—recognizing that the international public was becoming increasingly sympathetic to the Palestinian cause—went ballistic when they realized that they had lost control of the imagery.

Little did I know that my evolution into a journalist was to leap forward, in large part thanks to a small hotel—and its dynamic manager. Marna House: a tiny place in the beachside Rimal neighborhood, adorned with lovingly tended plants and flowers, with aromas of lavender, jasmine and citrus. Every foreigner coming to Gaza wanted to stay at Marna House and would wait for weeks to get a room. It was run by a woman of sharp intellect, incisive instinct and stalwart principle. A woman who was to become my mentor, my friend, my confidante, my third mother: Alia Shawwa.

An excellent listener and infrequent talker, Alia was my teacher, my enabler and my conscience in shaping my understanding of the media. She was educated, objective and principled, trusted by the top personalities in the industry at the time—Robert Fisk (writer), Gloria Emerson (NYT), Sarah Roy (Harvard researcher), Peter Jennings (ABC), Larry Register (CNN), Paul Taylor (Time Magazine), Bob Simon (CBS), Joe Sacco (Maltese graphic author). Alia did not give a spit about class, wealth or VIP status. Everyone was afraid of her—“fearfully reverent” would be one way to put it. She loved Marna House, this long-established “institution,” serving intellectuals, diplomats and international organizations. She made of it the best Ministry of Information, with herself the Minister, deeply aware and insightful regarding the significance of the media industry and the needs of the personalities who made it work.

Marna House was the secure venue for sharing valuable information amongst Palestinians and with trusted journalists, fostering an atmosphere of nationalism and intellect that—along with the American Colony in Jerusalem—has seen no rival in Palestine. Alia had the network and the sources to guarantee the identity of every single person staying at the hotel, specifically ensuring they were not Shin Bet officers, frequently placed into Gaza undercover as journalists to collect information, arrest and kill activists. This cover, well played, was able to provide them access to camps, villages, and the many centers of the national resistance movement. The physical protection of this precious venue was in the hands of my village clan.

Alia reshaped the focus of journalists to write about the core issues of the conflict, not about Palestinians as a humanitarian issue. At Marna House, a new narrative was shaped. It became one of the most significant Palestinian institutions for refining, sharing and amplifying the media messaging that would influence the course of one of the most spectacular popular uprisings in contemporary history.

Every day, I would travel with my VW Bug from Rafah in the south to Beit Hanoun in the north, gathering news and bringing it back to Alia, updating her with events, sitting with her, Dr. Haidar Abdel Shafi and sit Yusra al Barbari to ensure they had the freshest, most accurate grassroots information on what was happening on the ground and what people were thinking.

The Oslo Accords marked a tectonic shift in our vision for liberation and the popular nature of our struggle. A cheap deal struck with no representative support, the Palestinian “gains” from Oslo were similar in style and substance to negotiations that took place in jail. Seeking small improvements in the comfort of our compatriots and ourselves, we would negotiate a phone call, a cigarette, an extra ladle of mulokhia. Our Oslo “political leadership” was negotiating in such a way—to get a “better” Occupation, not to free our people.

What we did not anticipate at the time was how we as a people were to change in its wake. Not only did the liberation agenda become politicized and transacted like vegetables at the market, but it also became a tool for individual promotion and conceit. We converted our collective belief in popular activism to worshiping a golden calf; believing that liberation could be achieved by “political leaders,” “government,” “negotiations.” We lost our dedication, our willingness to talk through our differences, to put our unity as a people over individual or party agendas. No good was to come from this short-sighted compromise.

As the years moved along, so did my involvement with the media. I started a company that covered the return of Yasser Arafat and his entourage of PLO people to Gaza in 1994, all of whom had been living in exile for decades. Once fulsomely distressed with the evolution of the new Palestinian Authority, I left for New York and then Oxford to study. Upon my return in 1999, I worked with several journalists from different political backgrounds with whom strong bonds had been created in prison to found Ramattan News Agency as an independent platform for free expression. An incredibly successful undertaking, Ramattan served as a different form of resistance, mobilizing and training hundreds of young Palestinian women and men as technicians and journalists, obtaining and disseminating through mainstream international media both incredible imagery and incisive analysis of the continuum of tragedy that has been brought on by the failed Oslo formula.

Trust. Integrity. Unity. Activism, organization, mobilization. A collective and individual willingness to take risks. Our people will, through the generations that succeed us, forge a path forward through this stalemated atmosphere of petty political bickering and increasing international indifference. Faithful to our plight, we will continue, generation on generation. This is the foundation enabling us to speak of media as a tool of liberation.

Looking back 30 years, to the ’70s and ’80s era of collective struggle and sacrifice, I am convinced that—should social media have existed at the time, dovetailing with the intense spirit of nationalism and grass-roots activism—our country would have been liberated long ago. What incredible risks we took in those days to organize a strike or a protest, to print leaflets letter by letter, distributing them door to door under the noses of the Israeli army, when getting caught meant, at best, six months in prison and at worst, getting shot. It is tragic that such instantaneous tools were not to intersect with our most glorious time of belief in ourselves, in one another and in our collective ability to take on the might of Israel and the Western colonial agenda.

Now, beholding our young generation in Gaza, the West Bank, historical Palestine and in the diaspora, I see another opportunity for media to become a tool of liberation. Over the past months, young Palestinians have turned to social media to mobilize against the ethnic cleansing of East Jerusalem, document the devastating bombardment of besieged Gaza and talk about what the future of the Palestinian leadership could be, in the wake of the killing of human rights activist, Nizar Banat. The swift and untrammeled reactions of social media have meant that people around the world are finally hearing the Palestinian story directly—uncensored, raw and human. Thirty years on from the time that I picked up the camera to show the world what was happening in Gaza, Palestinians now have a new tool that will drive, shape, change the way our story is heard—and acted upon.