Jew World Order

THE STENOGRAPHER PARTY took place outside a fancy Manhattan building, and those in attendance, I imagined, were eating veal and aggressively patting each other on the back. Congratulations were due and I, with other writers and journalists, over a hundred of them, waited outside to deliver. The ceremony was supposed to be over by 9:30 pm, but the honorable guests, likely aware of our presence, were slow to leave. We were kept company by the NYPD’s counterterrorism patrol. It was ten-something when they reluctantly began to exit, dressed in tuxedos and cocktail dresses, and we welcomed them with a few chants, my favorite: do your job, tell the truth!

It was absurd, I thought, that this year’s Freedom Press Awards were hosted by the New York Times—the same institution that issued an editorial against a ceasefire in Gaza as Israeli forces, at the time of our protest, had killed 37 Palestinian journalists and one Lebanese cameraman (the number is now 60). I eventually came to the conclusion it was not absurd, but rather a sensible, albeit sardonic, metaphor for journalism in the West. The metaphor expanded when I saw someone I know—a Palestinian journalist, so unmistakably Muslim—walk out of the gala. It was as if her presence, like Obama’s in the White House, debunked the allegations of systemic racism in the institution. We locked eyes for a split second. She offered me a smile I can only describe as awkward and fled the scene.

I don’t want to cast judgment as to why she didn’t join our ranks at the action organized by Writers’ Bloc, a subgroup of Writers Against the War on Gaza. Perhaps it was a nervous reflex, or loss of face, or the absence of a warm invitation on my end. Maybe she had wanted to but thought it would be bad optics to pick up one of the posters shaming the Times’ editorial board and chant alongside us. (There, too, were posters of the slain Palestinian and Lebanese journalists, whose perfect victimhood—killed on-the-job, usually in clearly-marked press vests—could have allowed her to be sympathetic to her fallen colleagues without indicting her complicit colleagues.) Who knows. Protest movements are generally revered in the past tense, once the radical change they demand becomes a boring norm. In real-time, though, they are led by killjoys and looters who don’t know that there’s a time and a place.

Another familiar attendee, also Muslim, approached my friend and me as the protest was coming to an end. “Can’t you see what I am wearing?” she pointed to her green dress (green presumably for Hamas?) in an attempt to explain her attire as a political display of solidarity. I wondered if the waiters had served watermelon, too, in lieu of the flag or if someone wore a houndstooth scarf, hoping it would resemble a keffiyeh from afar. I am sure she has her own critiques, and I won’t excessively ridicule symbolic gestures. Still, can whispering our sentiments in spaces where they are prohibited triumph over our thundering declarations of refusal? What message do we send when we do not boycott the organizations that gloss over our ongoing Nakba?

I TOO WOULD LIKE to have my cake and eat it. However, there is dissonance—a discrediting dissonance—in indulging institutions that we accuse of bias and complicity. It makes those of us who take a principled stance—who say, We will not engage until you cease your omissions and fabrications, until you stop coddling our oppressors with passive voice, until you dismantle your dehumanizing standards, until you treat us as trustworthy equals…—it makes us look like naive teenagers. Naive to reject the golden ticket, the validation, and the platitudes. Naive to reject the readership of millions, even if such readership requires consenting that editors mutilate our voices beyond recognition. I understand the lure of a mainstream embrace. Beyond the attention, it pays the rent and then some. One could even say that it’s a strategy. But is it viable?

We tell ourselves, it isn’t careerist aspirations that drive us to the stenographer party, rather, we want to change things from the inside. That may well be true. We enter these rooms and pander—and be pandered to—to secure a seat at the table. It is for good reason that we shed our skin to assimilate into the world that invisiblizes us: after acquiring respectability and protection, we will finally wear our real faces. But we quickly learn that the inside is already rotten and we, too, run the risk of decay. Once we have protection, we’ll want to stay protected. And once we get some money, we’ll want more and more wealth. When we go back to ourselves after a long career and look deep in our closets for the skin we once wore, we find it shriveled and discolored, foreign to us as we are foreign to it. One could say it is a strategy—but we know what the master’s tools will not do.

Mainstream media institutions, whose approval we so desperately seek, will never accept us as their own. They will not absolve us. Beyond the microaggressions, censure, and editing us while we sleep, if the opportunity arises, they will even give cover to the villains in our stories. And they have. When Israeli forces killed Issam Abdallah, who was reporting in South Lebanon, Western mainstream media behaved as it usually does, parroting official Israeli state narratives and obfuscating what eyewitnesses and local journalists have reported. Even Reuters, Abdallah’s employer, refused to name the Israeli military as the culprit until weeks after his killing. Our likeness—whether on a roster, a masthead, or in between quotation marks—is a currency in this identity-driven world, and it is exploited to legitimize and ‘diversify’ these complicit establishments, to shield them against accusations of bias and racism, all while abandoning us when push comes to shove.

Some might argue that some proximity to the institution is better than none. There is truth in the claim that it was Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha’s affiliation with the New Yorker that brought so much attention to what New Yorker editors called his “arrest” by unnamed forces. But at what cost? The magazine’s editor-in-chief, who proclaimed in an internal memo that he had been “in fairly constant touch” with Abu Toha, did not even name his colleague’s kidnapper and used words that imply legal authority despite Israeli forces having no jurisdiction in the Gaza Strip, and, when Abu Toha was released, the news was just that: he was released. Not that soldiers beat him, or that they stole his and his family’s clothes and passports. Journalistic malpractice aside, is that the world we want to live in? A world where our disappearance can only make noise if we were spectacular people, with bylines in high-brow magazines and resumes riddled with American and European recognition?

IF THERE IS A MOMENT FOR TRANSFORMATION, it is this very moment. We are required, as writers and journalists, to have a backbone, to refuse, to take our reporting beyond the politics of appeal, despite the consequences—for they do not compare to life under occupation—and because the consequences (recrimination, censorship, ostracization, even murder) should terrify us into action. Fear should make our voices bigger and more resounding. One seldom survives if they shrink themselves when confronted with a black bear.

Such bravery is asked of us now, not when gardens grow over our martyrs’ graves, not when the rubble is swept up and sculpted into memorials, and not when the bloodied press vests of our fallen journalists rest eternally in shadow boxes. Now, as our colleagues are killed and censored by the Zionists, whose genocidal campaign in occupied Palestine. Now, as the white phosphorus rains on Gaza’s universities and media infrastructure. Now, as the FBI visits the homes of activists who dared protest and dissent. As white supremacists kill our students on their way to dinner. We must heed the demands made by Palestinian journalists, even if that means skipping on glass trophies and champagne. Those of us with platforms, with some level of protection, with some social capital or actual capital, must dare to shift culture, not only talk about the necessity of shifting culture.

Critiquing media corporations that act as bullhorns for our enemies, and boycotting them if need be, is only part of the task—the challenge is elevating our own journalistic initiatives. We must not wait for Ha’aretz or the New York Times to arrive at the miraculous epiphanies we have long called common truths. I am not saying we should completely abandon them. Instead, we should purge their prestige in our minds, the prestige that renders a New York Times’ acknowledgment of an eyewitness account more valuable than the account itself. Our existence within their halls and conference rooms isn’t without a price—and we shouldn’t be the only ones paying it.

As long as our women are ‘females’ in their newspapers, and our children are ‘persons under the age of 18,’ guilty by birth, and as long as the vocabulary of elusive editors legitimizes our kidnappers, there can be no room for collaboration with the institutions that dehumanize us. Not without reverberating disclaimers that reject the systematic erasure of the oppressed and the systemic collision with the oppressors. Even if that comes at a personal expense.

Of course, there is corruption, gatekeeping, and a staggering lack of resources; however, “underdeveloped” is not the only term to describe our media infrastructure. It is also creative. Stubborn. Citizen journalists in the besieged Gaza Strip—who are usually treated as ‘fixers’ by their international colleagues—have shifted the global narrative and have done so mainly without institutional backing, one, by bypassing the bureaucratic hurdles of legacy media, and, two, by decreasing the psychic distance between the subjects of the news, the reporters of the news, and the consumers of the news.

There are many ways to describe what I am demanding: decolonizing the press or controlling the means of (knowledge) production. One could even describe it as a reductive, identity-focused approach that says, “Nothing about us without us.” For me, it is a lot simpler: engaging in journalism rooted in respect for oneself, one’s people, and one’s craft. It is about journalists refusing to become state-secretaries.

Our testimonies have heft, whether published on Israeli websites or not; our tragedies are real, even if they aren’t televised, and, above all, our struggle for liberation is heroic—no qualifiers needed.

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