Thursday 10 April
Today I want to tell you about a reporter, Ahmed Mansour. You have probably seen the horrible image of that Palestinian journalist seated on a chair and being burned alive by an Israeli bombardment which hit the tent he was in along with other journalists. Three men were killed in all. Two newsmen, Ahmed Mansour and Helmi al-Fakaawi and another man who happened to be nearby. Nine other journalists were wounded, some very seriously... That picture was seen all over the world. This wasn’t the first time the Israelis used that kind of incendiary weapon. We have seen shots of charred bodies after a bombing before.
And as for journalists, over two hundred have been killed by the Israeli army since this war began, according to the NGO Reporters Without Borders. Some were killed together with all their families. Sometimes, it was just their families who were killed, as happened to Wael al-Dahdouh, the al-Jazira correspondent, who lost many of his relatives in targeted strikes. Regrettably, many foreign media treat this war against journalism by adopting more or less the Israeli point of view. Like those that emphasised, in their headlines, that Ahmed worked for a “media affiliated with the Islamic Jihad, which many countries regard as a terrorist organisation”.
This is true, and at the same time it is false. Yes, Ahmed worked for Falastin al-Youm (“Palestine Today”) ever since he graduated from journalism school ten years ago. And yes, this media is connected with the Islamic Jihad. But according to his friends, Ahmed was one of many reporters who did not share the ideology of their employer, be it Fatah, Hamas, or others. But to exercise their profession, they scarcely have any other choice, most Gaza media depend more or less on some political movement.
“He was afraid of ending up like them”
Ahmed Mansour was married and had three children. He had experienced the same hardships as all the other Gazans. He, his parents and his whole family had been displaced several times. His family is from Khan Younis in the southern part of the Gaza strip, they had ended up living in a tent in the al-Mawazi zone, which the army of occupation claims to be a “safe humanitarian area” while bombing it systematically. He wanted to stay in the field, in the Khan Yunis area, with some of his fellow reporters.
Several of them died in the same tent, next to the Nasser Hospital. They had gathered there for a good reason: many reporters stay close to the hospitals because that is where they can get news. When they see the wounded arriving they can ask the ambulance crew where the bombing happened and how many victims there were, and they can try to get to the location. The procedure is the same near all the hospitals still more or less functioning in the Gaza strip, like the Indonesian hospital, al-Shifa hospital, the Baptist Maamadani hospital in the north and al-Aqsa hospital at Deir el-Balah...
These clusters of reporters are known to the Israelis, as are the media’s professional vehicles, such as the SNG satellite truck with a big antenna and a satellite dish on its roof for live broadcasts on the al-Quds al-Youm channel (Jerusalem Today), targeted by a missile strike last January 26th in front of al-Awda Hospital. Its occupants were burned alive. Ahmed Mansour went there. His friends told me he was overcome with horror. He wondered how they die, how they had experienced that moment, what they had suffered. He said he was afraid he would end up like them.
“I often think of Pierre Brosselette”
What saddens me most is the way the media adopt the Israeli viewpoint to deal with what is happening in Gaza. Adopting the viewpoint of the strongest. We are under occupation. The occupier calls the occupied “terrorists”. Any occupied person is a terrorist. Hamas? All terrorists. El Fatah, the party founded by Yasser Arafat? All terrorists. Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian State? A terrorist. Anyone who denounces the occupation? A terrorist.
The French reporters who spread this rhetoric ought to remember that France was once occupied and that the Germans and the collaborationist government justified their crimes by calling their victims terrorists. The resistance fighters were terrorists. The reporters were terrorists. Today they are heroes, for they denounced the massacres perpetrated by the occupants and their accomplices and worked for the country’s liberation.
There were journalists among the resistance fighters. I am thinking of Pierre Brosselette, buried today in the Panthéon. Of course the circumstances and the personalities were different, but he was a newsman, just like Ahmed Mansour, and he was also called a “terrorist”. Both lived under an occupation, witnessed the massacres and the bombings. Brosselette was a high-level leader in the Resistance, but he also wrote in the underground newspapers and spoke often on the BBC. Both are dead. Pierre Brosselette was arrested and committed suicide to avoid talking under torture.
He was a European and hence a hero. Ahmed Mansour was a Palestinian, and hence was necessarily associated with a “terrorist” movement. Everything Palestinian must be demonised. When you are occupied, it is normal to resist, with actions or with words. I don’t understand this double standard when both peoples have experienced occupation. Maybe it’s because we are not considered human beings. Maybe, as I often say, it’s because we don’t have blue eyes and blond hair. But I think that defending their homeland is the right of anyone who knows the bitter taste of occupation. To honour Brosselette while denigrating Mansour, is to deny the universal legacy of resistance to oppression. Courage doesn’t change its nature according to geography or the identity of the resister. What changes is how you choose to see it.
“We always wind up being guilty victims”
Killing these reporters horrendously isn’t so bad, it’s nothing to make a big fuss about, because they’re so “close to the terrorist groups”! I’m not talking about all Western journalists, I know there are some that do their job professionally. But there are all too many who adopt the Israeli viewpoint. Imagine a Ukrainian reporter killed the same way, targeted by the Russians on account of his profession. Would he be described as “close to a terrorist movement”?
We Palestinians always wind up being the guilty victims. Many media participate in this role reversal. The victim becomes the executioner, the executioner becomes the victim, the occupier becomes the occupied and the occupied the occupier. But history will decide who the liars are. One day, Ahmed Mansour and many of his colleagues will be in a Pantheon. They will be honoured as heroes by the same western journalists who accused them of working for “terrorist media.” These will have understood that justice and the norms of humanity have neither nationality or colour. They will honour the reporters who are dying one after the other because they report the truth, because they record and transmit images of the massacres. The occupiers don’t want witnesses, they don’t want the massacres and butcheries broadcast to the world at large. First they kill the messengers, then they demonise them.
Translated from French by Noël Burch.
