Moving past the Palestine Exception
Pacinthe Mattar delivered her speech “Objectivity, Press Freedom and the Palestine Exception” at Carleton University on Sept. 30. A version of that speech follows.
I joined the CBC as an intern in 2009. For the first two years of my time at CBC, it was very on and off again work. I would check my email compulsively to see if the schedulers needed me. I never said no to a shift. 6 a.m., 2 p.m., 4 a.m. I said yes to it all. Then came January 2011. Egypt was going through a revolution.
Suddenly, my ability to speak Arabic and find compelling people to interview on the ground was highly sought out, catapulting me from barely employed, casual producer, to full-time, unionized staff employee at the public broadcaster.
I wept when Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak resigned in 2011. We had just recorded an interview with a protester in Tahrir Square for CBC Radio. I could barely hear our interviewee’s hoarse voice straining over the cacophony of Cairo’s syncopated, blaring horns, the high pitched whistles, the roar of applause. I kept my emotions in check until the interview ended, but tears flowed after I came out of the control room. A colleague then asked if he could record an interview with me about the moment’s significance. Through tears, I said that watching this history unfold in Egypt, the country that my family and I left behind, made me think that perhaps I could go back, make it home again. That evening, the show aired a clip of my tearful burst of hope for my native Egypt. The CBC had proudly claimed me as one of their own.
But as I found out, that kind of pride has its limits.
In 2017, I produced an interview with a Palestinian-American journalist – Ahmed Shihab-Eldin. The Emmy-nominated journalist was covering protests at the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem for Al-Jazeera at the time. He talked about the harassment and intimidation he experienced at the hands of Israeli officers while reporting, linking it to a pattern of intimidation documented by organizations like the Foreign Press Association.
Out of the thousands of interviews I’d produced, this is the only one in my decade at the public broadcaster that didn’t make it to air. It was pulled with no explanation to me, and no editorial discussion.
We asked Shihab-Eldin what remains a relevant and timely question: “The Foreign Press Association put out a statement condemning the restrictions on journalists trying to cover the events around the holy sites. What kind of challenges did you face?”
This is how he answered:
Shihab-Eldin: This may be the most important question that you’ve asked me. And although it, you know, worries me to be as candid as I will be. I feel like it’s my duty and responsibility. Israel has long prevented journalists from practicing journalism and documenting the reality on the ground. There is so much evidence that can confirm this reality. But having covered Israel in the past, in the occupied West Bank and travelling throughout Israel in the past, this time, what was extremely impossible to ignore. As a reporter on the ground, what I could not ignore was the way in which I was targeted in the past. It’s long been known for any journalist who’s reported inside Israel in the occupied West Bank, that you are targeted. The Israeli government does not want the reality on the ground to get out. I am not saying this as reflecting my personal views. I am saying this as a journalist. I received a lot of criticism as a Palestinian originally myself. My parents fled in ‘48 and ‘67, and as a Muslim for entering the Al-Aqsa mosque because they viewed it as, you know, controversial given the restrictions. That said, my job in going there was to report what was happening on the ground. And when I say you’re targeted, I mean when you say you’re a journalist, they hit you, they push you, they break your camera. These are not tales that exist in a vacuum. There is a pattern of suppression when it comes to how the Israeli army in particular treats journalists… There is ample amounts of video online that documents in the past week and in the years prior that Israeli soldiers shoot tear gas canisters, sound bombs directly into narrow hallways, into mosques, into religious institutions like mosques, into schools, into refugee camps. These are all violations of international law and beyond the excessive force. (Once at the Al Aqsa compound) I was standing in the corner and I identified myself and was wearing press gear. And, you know, I told the soldiers I was press. They saw that I had a camera, I had a cameraman, I had a crew. The minute they started attacking the crowds to disperse them. They throw sound bombs directly in the direction of the media, and that is a tactic that they use to immediately limit the amount of cameras that will then document the following an ongoing onslaught. Now, what does that feel like?
Host: What does that feel like? A sound bomb.
Shihab-Eldin: It feels like a very loud explosion. And it’s so scary because you don’t know whether it is in fact a sound bomb or if it is a weapon, or if it is a tear gas canister. And these weapons, sound bombs, have killed Palestinians. These are lethal weapons, even if not intended to be lethal, if used in the way that Israeli soldiers use them, they can very much be lethal. And what it sounds like is a loud snap in your ear. You hear a ringing there. Smoke. It smells a little bit like tear gas, even though it’s not CO2 gas. … You essentially realize in that moment that they are using it to disperse the crowd, make everyone run away, which I didn’t. And because I did not run away in the seconds that followed, one of the Israeli soldiers making eye contact with me … As I turned my back to cover my face, he took his gun and he smashed it into my back repeatedly. Now, this is a soldier of a government that claims to be a democracy. He knew I was press. He knew I was vulnerable, and he made a decision to strike me and beat me. Now I am not the victim. I was there doing my job. But that, you know, to answer your earlier question, what does that feel like? That makes me all the more motivated to document the abuses of power that are happening, not to reach a political aim or necessarily to influence any sort of political resolution, but to simply counter the narrative that the Israeli government is putting out there, which is, again, that they are a democracy that has no place in any democracy.
As is standard, I had also put in a request with the IDF to respond to Ahmed’s claims. I edited the interview down from about 26 minutes to seven minutes to fit the show – went for a celebratory coffee walk, and came back to my desk, where I was told that the interview would not be airing. I was not given a reason, and was told to take it up with management.
I was in shock. I was shut out of my own story. I felt shame, like I’d done something wrong, except no one would tell me what it was. Our own editorial processes, our transparency, were thrown out the window.
At CBC and other Canadian news organizations, language guides prohibit even the use of the word “Palestine,” even though 146 countries — that’s more than 75 per cent of the world — recognize the State of Palestine. (Canada is not one of them.) Meanwhile, CBC does use the word “Taiwan” in its coverage, even though Canada also does not recognize it as a sovereign state. But it’s way bigger than just that.
“There is a Palestine Exception in Canada, and in Canadian media in particular. So, you can talk about human rights violations anywhere in the world. Don’t touch the Palestinians. They’re not worthy of being aired, as you know, as colonized people…If you touch them, we don’t listen to you.That’s the sort of general unwritten rule,” Carleton Professor Nahla Abdo described in a groundbreaking piece by then-student journalist Rahaf Farawi in the Review of Journalism in 2022, called CBC’s Palestine Exception.”
I’ve seen that general unwritten rule play out with me, and others, time and time again. In the past, I’ve been skittish to talk about it, fearing that I’m not enough of an expert. This is just one layer to the fear, but it’s one I’ve learned to push through over the last few years. But I want to be clear, too, about where my expertise lies. To quote Elias Khoury, the towering Lebanese intellectual who passed away earlier this month, “I am a student of Scheherazade — I tell not the story but how the story has been told.”
I did not grow up knowing I wanted to be a journalist — it was a last minute, rather panicked decision I made after finishing my undergraduate degree, facing down getting a job or likely moving back home. But journalism, to me, felt like licence to be curious about the world for life. And I was a student of the world. I was born in Alexandria, Egypt, and moved to Canada when I was three. At nine years old, we moved to Saudi Arabia, and I lived in three cities there over five years. I attended high school in Dubai before coming back to Toronto for university. This quote you’re looking at hung above my 10th Grade English teacher’s desk at my high school in Dubai. It describes my life perfectly. Growing up, my dad ensured that my brother and I knew how to speak, read and write Arabic, and enrolled us in French immersion schools in Toronto. The mix of travel, languages, and forever being both an insider and outsider almost everywhere I went, coupled with my love of writing made me apply to journalism school. I got in by the skin of my teeth, was waitlisted at first, to Toronto Metropolitan University. There, I failed my very first journalism assignment for spelling the name of the person I’d interviewed wrong – but I learned a hard lesson: accuracy is everything in journalism. And I believe we’ve been failing the test of accuracy in covering Palestine for generations.
The CBC debacle was not the first or last disagreement I’d had editorially. As a journalist, they happen all the time and I think they’re signs of a healthy newsroom. In 2020, I wrote about some of those disagreements — and the hollowness of Canadian media’s ‘diversity,’ in my Walrus essay, Objectivity Is A Privilege Afforded to White Journalists.
The basic premise of the piece, which was based on my 10 years at the public broadcaster, was that news organizations love to talk about diversity but do not live up to its ideals. I said that the concept of objectivity is often weaponized against racialized journalists and racialized people we cover, specifically Black and Indigenous people. I used real life examples from my own reporting, where under the guise of ‘balance’ or ‘verification,’ Black and Indigenous peoples’ stories were sometimes shut down, challenged and doubted.
In the two other instances I wrote about in my Walrus piece, I detailed editorial disagreements I went through while covering protests against police brutality in Baltimore, and while covering anti-Indigenous racism in Canadian health care. There’s a crucial difference, though. In both cases, although we disagreed, debated – those stories ultimately aired. The Palestine one did not. This was the Palestine Exception, embodied for me. Here’s what I want to emphasize: it is not standard practice to kill a story with no due process, or without it meeting a very high bar— it is factually incorrect, or there are significant legal concerns.
Two years after my unaired interview with the Palestinian-American journalist, I left my full time, permanent, unionized job at the public broadcaster, sensing that I had hit a ceiling I would never crack. I was not wrong: after I left, I learned that the unaired interview had marked me as “biased” by a senior manager who then opposed my attempts at advancing into a position of editorial leadership. It was devastating but affirming. I hadn’t imagined it. I really had been sidelined by the same institution that once proudly held me up as an example of the feel-good, low stakes diversity Canadian media loves.
There’s a perception that those who cover Israel and its government’s policies and actions are obsessed with singling out Israel. But in my decade at the public broadcaster, I produced stories on alleged violations in almost every country in the region: Tunisia, Libya, Syria, my native Egypt, Sudan, Saudi Arabia. I helped colleagues with their coverage too. As one of very few Arabic speakers in the building, I consistently received requests to translate videos of armed groups, of Syrian fighters, of ISIS or Daesh. I covered the repression of Uighurs in China, the Rohingya in Myanmar, of Yazidis in Iraq. I covered Canada’s mistreatment of Indigenous peoples. I covered police violence against Black people in the United States and Canada. My journalism was fueled by a value we like to say we hold dear: seek out the marginalized, excluded and oppressed, tell their stories with nuance and complexity, while holding the powerful to account. Working alongside some of our industry’s best, we received awards for our sensitive, hard-hitting journalism. It felt like no topic was off the table — until my journalism focused on the actions of the Israeli government and military, especially as recounted by a Palestinian.
I believe one of the reasons we’re here is because journalism has lost its way on the matter of objectivity. While many organizations see it as a required personal quality of journalists, it was never meant to be. Instead, according to Tom Rosenstiel, who co-wrote the journalism textbook that many journalists have used, objectivity is a “discipline of verification.” We had to be objective about our methods, precisely because we have biases.
Rosenstiel took to Twitter in the summer of 2020, after George Floyd’s murder cracked open conversations on objectivity.
2… When the concept of objectivity migrated to journalism in the ‘20s, it was not intended to suggest journalists were without bias. Actually it was just the opposite… 2 of 22
— Tom Rosenstiel (@TomRosenstiel) June 24, 2020
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the 1619 Project, rejects the premise of objectivity in journalism outright.
“I’ve been very explicit and outspoken on this, in that I don’t feel journalism is, by definition, an objective profession or neutral profession. The reason I founded the Center for Journalism and Democracy at Howard is to say we have to take a stance on certain things. I often quote the motto of The Washington Post, which is, “Democracy dies in darkness.” That’s not a neutral stance. That’s saying that our role as journalists is to protect democracy, right? So I actually see all good journalism as activism,” she told Poynter in September.
“And I think far too often we are now taught that objectivity requires us to adhere to this notion of balance, even when we are reporting on a political system that has a tremendous imbalance. I say our obligation is not to balance or objectivity, our obligation is to the truth.”
On Oct. 7, 2023, I knew something was wrong because my Instagram became a flood of Palestinian flags, and one Israeli one. I had a visceral sinking feeling that something terrible happened and was afraid to look into it. Then a friend wrote to me: “I often come to your account to see what news you might share on religion and equity and politics – I always appreciate your informed perspective. Where can I go to understand, using facts and maybe a little sympathy, what is happening in Israel?”
I directed her to a video I had just posted of MSNBC journalist Ayman Mohyeldin, who was featured in the incredible documentary The War Around Us, during Israel’s war on Gaza in 2008-2009. This is someone with intimate knowledge, who’s lived in Gaza, and one of the most visible Arab-American journalists in North America. And I saw him make a point on MSNBC that has not left me since that day:
“Many Americans are going to ask why is this happening, why is there no peace, but the very nature of how we have been looking at this conflict, the narrative by which we have been trying to understand what is happening has not been accurate, so we are not able to accurately solve the problem.”
Narrative. Narrative is everything. Who do we hear from? When do we hear from them? How often? What language do we use about them? Who gets coverage that fuels empathy? Who gets coverage that fuels stereotypes? And most crucially, does the average person understand why this is happening? Does a Canadian understand the role their own government is playing in supporting the status quo of never-ending cycles of violence in Israel and Palestine?
There’s been incredible reporting on this over the last year from fellow Canadian journalists, featuring analysis and data on how the media here covers this. There’s the imbalanced way that Canadian media reports on Israel and Palestine: analysis by reporter Emma Paling for The Breach captured the underrepresentation of Palestinian voices, and the hierarchy of language used to describe the killing of Israelis (“vicious,” “murderous,” “brutal”) vs. the killing of Palestinians (“remote”). I especially want to highlight a piece published in the Breach written by a former CBC journalist. Headline: “CBC has whitewashed Israel’s crimes in Gaza. I saw it firsthand. The subheadline read: Working for five years as a producer at the public broadcaster, I witnessed the double standards and discrimination in its coverage of Palestine — and experienced directly how CBC disciplines those who speak out.”
It’s worth noting that this piece was published under a pseudonym, given the risks of talking about this issue. It is also worth noting that this journalist is Jewish. Her testimony helped make the case that the Palestine Exception is not limited to Arab journalists, although we are perhaps most at risk of experiencing it, but rather, anyone who tries to cover it, but it’s especially Palestinian journalists who bear the brunt of this. I reached out to the CBC for comment on my and others’ claims about the Palestine Exception there. Here’s part of what the spokesperson wrote back to me: “We categorically reject the suggestion there’s a ‘Palestinian exception alive at CBC’ or that certain coverage is off-limits.”
Meanwhile, over the last year, at least two Palestinian journalists in Canada said they were fired from their outlets after expressing solidarity for their own people while critiquing the root causes of their displacement. Even before Oct. 7t, Palestinian journalists were writing about obscuring their identities from journalism colleagues entirely.
I myself was at a little bit of a loss for words after Oct. 7, shocked by the horror of what was unfolding, and not sure what to do as a now independent journalist, with no newsroom to work in or produce for.
It’s times like these — where there is an absolute bloodlust for more punishment, more cruelty — where the need for responsible, accurate, humanizing, unflinching journalism has the most crucial role. A big part of why we’re here today is because we have failed at this for decades. Journalism that’s courageous, consistent and contextualized — the clarifying, exponential power of all of those things together — not one or two of them — would’ve long ago shown and explained how the status quo in Israel and Palestine eviscerates conditions for peace. Not obfuscated it.
While Palestinians do occasionally make it in the media in Canada, they are often brought on to share trauma, but often prevented from sharing crucial context: the Nabka, Israel’s illegal occupation, invasion, annexation and siege of their lands. They are often brought on only when Israelis have been killed or injured.
“In 1984, in response to the Israeli-Lebanese War, Edward Said published his essay Permission to Narrate, where he critiqued the Western media’s biased coverage of the war, which favored the Israeli narrative and suppressed the Palestinian viewpoint. Today we are in a very similar predicament. Israeli politicians and analysts go on TV to frame the so-called conflict, while only Palestinian victims get that opportunity — and even then, they aren’t interviewed as much as interrogated,” wrote Palestinian writer Mohammed El Kurd in The Nation.
In the days after Oct. 7, I began using my instagram as a mini newsroom. At first, I was alternating between posting stories from inside Israel and also from Gaza. I watched multiple interviews featuring Israeli survivors of Hamas’s attack, especially from those who’d lost family members. I shed tears along with Moaz Inon, an Israeli who lost both of his parents during Hamas’s attack, who pleaded, tearfully in a BBC interview, to not have his parents’ deaths justify the killing of more people in Palestine. I listened to Noy Katzman, whose brother, peace activist Chaim Katzman, was killed during Hamas’s attack too. Noy also told Jake Tapper on CNN that he did not want his brother’s death to fuel more violence against innocent people in Palestine.
I learned about Vivan Silver, a Jewish Canadian humanitarian from Winnipeg who was killed in Hamas’s attack, through a tribute written by a Palestinian peace activist who worked with her, which read, in part: “I know you will be greeted up above by your Palestinian and Israeli partners in activism, and the thousands of other victims of this pointless war.”
Soon, I began to pay attention to another story unfolding. The beginning of Israel’s assault on Gaza and its over two million inhabitants, half of them children.
One report stuck out to me, stopped me in my tracks, from Youssef Hammash, reporting for Channel 4 news from inside Gaza. Its visceral simplicity transported me.
Then, I started seeing how reporters were finding their own friends and families in Gaza’s hospitals. Here is the BBC’s Adnan Al Bursh. Gaza’s journalists were becoming part of the story.
On Oct. 10, I got my first interview request. A fellow journalist had gotten a request to do an interview with Al Jazeera about media coverage of Palestine. They were not comfortable doing it – would I do it? I hesitated. I knew this story is what ended my career in mainstream media. The sting was still there. I didn’t want to touch it. But I took a call with a producer to talk it through. As I walked by a dog park in my neighbourhood on the Danforth in Toronto, I strained to hear what they were saying: The producer said to me – we may have to cancel it if … then the sound cut out. I said if what? They said: “If there’s a ground invasion in Gaza.” Hearing that made my fear wilt. What fear could I possibly have in comparison to that? I accepted and joined The Take, Al Jazeera’s daily podcast, detailing my experiences with the CBC and the lopsided way many media organizations cover Israel and Palestine.
Then, I got another message from another journalist. They had been invited to speak about Palestine and media coverage on Canadaland. After some hesitation, and what I thought was a productive and encouraging pre-interview with the producer and host, I agreed. I spoke about the risks that journalists in Gaza are facing, how no foreign correspondents were being allowed in, and how we had a duty to listen to those bearing witness for us. I talked about the killing of Lebanese Reuters photojournalist Issam Abdallah, killed by shelling “from the direction of Israel.” I talked about the importance of verification and the urgent need for journalists not to be mere stenographers, but to verify extremely dangerous reckless and unfounded claims of beheaded babies, which many, many journalistic outlets ran with no verification.
I also made the point that, even in the early, foggy days of Israel’s assault on Gaza, there were patterns, and information that we were receiving from journalists on the ground about what Israel’s intentions were. I raised a real life case study I’d just watched: an Arab journalist with Al-Araby TV, Ahmed Darawsha, was doing a live stand up, reporting on what was then the new Israeli military onslaught in Gaza. Here’s how The Independent reported on the incident:
“An Israeli police officer threatened and screamed at a reporter live on air.
Ahmad Darawsha from Al Araby Television Network was covering live on the ground in Ashdod, Israel, when a man, dressed like an officer approached him.
“What are you saying? I don’t care if you are live, what are you saying?” he asks.
“I am saying what the Israeli army is doing,” the journalist responds.
Interrupting Mr. Darawsha, the officer shouts: “You better be saying good things. Understood?
“And all of these Hamas should be slaughtered. Am I clear? If you don’t report the truth, woe is you.”
After the officer walks off-screen, the reporter says: “The Israeli police are monitoring what we are saying.”
Seconds later, the officer returns, stands directly in front of the camera, looks down the lens and says: “Detestable! We’ll turn Gaza to dust! Dust, dust, dust.”
In my Canadaland interview, I told the story of what happened to this Darawsha, focusing on what the Israeli officer said, repeatedly, to camera, on live television: “We’re going to flatten Gaza to dust,” he’d said. “To dust.” I said that this incident was just one indication of what Israel was planning.
When I listened to the interview the morning it aired, that anecdote was there. But later, I saw a bizarre note on my episode: “Correction (October 19, 2023): A previous version of this episode featured claims of an altercation between an alleged Israeli police officer and Arabic-speaking reporter, elements of which Canadaland has since not been able to verify.”
I wrote for clarification to the producer, sharing links to this story being reported elsewhere, including in Newsweek and The Independent. I asked what elements “could not be verified.” I then got an email from the editor-in-chief.
“Because so much of what is being reported one minute – in even the best media – is being retracted as new facts surface, we had concerns about being able to confirm some of what was reported – not by you – but by the outlets … For example one issue being debated was if the officer was a police officer, or security. Rather than let it sit out there when we were unsure it seemed more responsible to pull it,” she wrote.
She suggested we speak on the phone, but I wanted this conversation in writing. I wrote back to ask what specifically was hard to confirm or verify, and said that my bigger concern is that whether the Israeli was a police officer or security seemed to be a very minute distinction given the larger point I was making: that the Israelis have expressed intent to “turn Gaza to dust” and that this threat was made live on the air to a reporter. I said I was deeply disappointed by the correction, and urged her to reconsider it.
Though we did have one brief discussion about this incident soon afterwards, I still had no clarity on why this correction was made. I followed up again over two weeks later. My follow-up yielded no response. About two weeks after my third and final email, Reporters Without Borders called for “an immediate end to harassment, intimidation of journalists in Israel.” The lead image for this report was a still from the very incident I’d talked about in my interview: Darawsha, being harassed and intimidated and threatened live on the air by the Israeli officer. Canadaland updated their correction to say this incident had been verified elsewhere, but still did not correct their correction.
While I waited for an explanation on this so-called correction, Canadaland also put out an additional clarification. In my interview, I’d mentioned “75 years” of occupation. I was referring to the Nakba in 1948 during which 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their land. Legally, the occupation began in 1967. I had meant to refer to the beginning, the root cause, of the conflict, one that rarely makes it into media coverage. Here’s how my episode now looks on their website — with this list of corrections and clarifications:
This correction and clarification ended up in their annual transparency report. I find it ironic that I was exempt from this very transparency.
Here, once again, was the Palestine Exception, even in an interview about coverage of Palestine.
Still, I heard from many people after the interview aired who wrote with messages of support. One email was from a former journalism professor of mine.
“I heard you talking good sense from the heart (so very hard to pull that off!) on Canadaland the other day and continue to admire your ability to speak up against prevailing wisdoms to reflect experience that otherwise remains under a blanket, something I first appreciated many years ago in the classroom,” he wrote.
“You are walking an emotionally demanding and perhaps lonely road. As the go-to person for risky commentary about journalism, more than once in the interview I heard the reluctance and strain and risk-awareness in your voice.”
“I used to be a Patreon supporter of Canadaland, but my appearance marked the last episode that I listened to. I canceled my subscription,” wrote a listener.
Ironically, one matter we’d discussed in my Canadaland interview was the campaign of delegitimization, intimidation and harassment waged by HonestReporting Canada against journalists whose coverage of Israel and Palestine criticizes the actions of the Israeli state or appears sympathetic to Palestinians.
Eventually, days after my Canadaland interview aired, just as we’d discussed in my interview, HRC did to me what they do to many journalists, often women, often racialized women. They sent out an action alert to their members, with my face and name plastered across it, saying that I’d said “Israel has no right to exist.” The article about my interview was rife with inaccuracies.
To Canadaland’s credit, they did a follow up about this targeting, and talked about the pattern of who they target. It was one of the first times I’ve ever seen a media institution name and address the actions of HonestReporting Canada and their efforts to delegitimize journalists who offer any critiques of Israel.
As I address our industry with these questions and critiques, I must begin with myself: for too long, I have internalized the lesson that in order to keep my place in the business, I must tiptoe around this story. This lecture is part of my continued attempt at undoing this self-censorship. I invite you to do the same, whether you still think it’s “too complicated,” or you’ve been intimidated into not asking questions about editorial decisions. It’s time for us to confront the chill head on. I know it will not be easy. But I hope we can start by saying loudly, unequivocally, collectively, that journalists — no matter where they are around the world -– should not be killed for doing their jobs. And that includes Palestinian journalists too.
To my journalism peers and colleagues: I’m asking us to speak more urgently, more clearly, about the fate of Palestinian journalists –- now. Last November, Palestinian human rights attorney Rabea Eghbariah wrote a piece for the Harvard Law Review which was pulled at the last minute in what an editor there called “an unprecedented decision.” Here’s how the piece starts:
“Genocide is a crime. It is a legal framework. It is unfolding in Gaza. And yet, the inertia of legal academia, especially in the United States, has been chilling. Clearly, it is much easier to dissect the case law rather than navigate the reality of death. It is much easier to consider genocide in the past tense rather than contend with it in the present. Legal scholars tend to sharpen their pens after the smell of death has dissipated and moral clarity is no longer urgent.”
But while many of us – myself included — worry about ‘losing our livelihoods,’ the worst possible thing that can happen to us, I want to remind us what the worst thing is for Palestinian journalists. They are losing their lives. Their families and children are losing their lives. That worst thing is happening to them right now, and has been happening, at an alarming, historic rate, for the last year.
As a rule, journalists do not sign open letters or petitions or take a stand, but when I saw a letter circulating condemning the killing of journalists in Gaza, I signed it with little to no hesitation. I later joined Al Jazeera’s Inside Story to talk about why I did:
I said I was alarmed by the silence of fellow journalists on the apparent targeting of our colleagues in Gaza, and said that despite the rule that journalists should not take any public stances, if we cannot say we are against the killing of journalists, what are we even doing as a profession? How can we remain objective and neutral about the fact that journalists were being killed while doing their jobs – or sleeping at home with their families?
One image that will stay with me for a very long time is Al Jazeera Gaza bureau chief Wael El Dahdouh’s shell-shocked face when he learned that his wife Amna, his grandchild Adam, his 15-year-old son Mahmoud and seven-year-old daughter Sham were killed in an Israeli strike in Nuseirat refugee camp in October. He was live on the air reporting on the strike. Images of him rushing to the hospital to find and hold their bodies, surrounded by crowds of people, stunned me.
Somehow, Wael el Dahdouh was back on the air reporting after this devastating loss. Then in January, his eldest son, Hamza al-Dahdouh, a fellow journalist, was killed in an Israeli airstrike on the car he was traveling in with fellow journalist Mustafa Thuraya. They’re just a few of many Palestinian journalists who were buried along with their blue press vests and helmets.
Meanwhile, I was occasionally going to pro-Palestinian protests. The broad range of people who showed up to these protests week after week was something to behold: children, Black, Indigenous, Jewish, queer, Trans, Vietnamese, librarians, teachers, parents, Tamil. It was especially significant to see a consistent Jewish presence at these protests. I’d heard from Jewish friends and colleagues about the rifts this time has brought out. Some have been estranged from their families, their relationships strained. But things are changing, it seems.
In a way, I think we’ve all been trying to find meaning and community in what’s happening. Last February, I co-organized a vigil with a team of journalists, held at Toronto Metropolitan University, for the journalists who’ve been killed in Palestine, Lebanon and Israel — the vast majority of them Palestinian. We received funding from the Inspirit Foundation to buy flowers, candles, and a poster we had printed with all the names of the journalists who’d been killed.
At the time, of the 85 journalists and media workers confirmed dead since Hamas’s attack, 78 were Palestinian, four Israeli, and three were Lebanese. Today, the Committee to Protect Journalists puts the numbers at 116: Of them, 111 are Palestinian, two Israeli, and three Lebanese. The Committee noted that at least five Palestinian journalists were directly targeted by Israeli forces in killings the CPJ classifies as murder. We e-mailed editors and newsroom leaders at every news outlet in the Greater Toronto Area, inviting them to cover it, and to allow their journalists to attend the event without fear of punishment or discipline. In the end, not a single mainstream outlet covered the vigil. Only the student press from TMU — from the Eyeopener, the Review of Journalism, and On The Record — showed up, bore witness and documented it for their audiences.
That echoes a trend I’ve noticed over the last few months. While mainstream news outlets are skittish and reluctant to cover Palestine, younger, student journalists, including many who covered encampments on their own campuses, have been leading the way.
Though there is much to critique, I want to also nod to some excellent work that’s been happening over the last year. To me, there’s never been a more crucial time for independent journalism, and in Canada, we have some great examples. I’ve been following reporting from Dave Gray-Donald and the team at The Grind, Jeremy Appel’s work at The Maple, Scott Martin at The Catch, Samira Mohyeddin’s On The Line Media, which has done one-of-a-kind, near daily coverage of the encampment at the University of Toronto.
There’s also great work happening in mainstream institutions. At the CBC, I’ve been following the great work of reporter Evan Dyer, one of the few, if only, senior mainstream Canadian journalists doing consistently stellar work on Palestine and Israel since Oct. 7, with a focus on how it intersects with international law, Canadian domestic politics and foreign policy.
My former CBC colleague Yasmine Hassan has also been doing incredible reporting on life in Gaza, in collaboration with journalists on the ground there. Reporter Brishti Basu wrote an incredible piece for the CBC detailing “many instances across Canada in which employees and students have faced firings, suspensions or calls for them to not be hired based on their publicly stated political stance on the Israel-Hamas war.” Soon after the piece’s publication, her contract at the CBC was cut short.
I’m painfully aware that every time I talk about our shortcomings when covering Palestine — and now, the alarming killing of Palestinian journalists — I lose “credibility.” This fear of being seen as biased used to affect me. I bowed to it for too long. I silently agreed not to talk about Palestine in exchange for a viable career in journalism.
No longer.
Pacinthe Mattar is an Egyptian-Canadian journalist and author of the National Magazine Award-winning article, "Objectivity Is A Privilege Afforded to White Journalists." She was the 2022 Martin Wise Goodman Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.