Notebook: (2) Writing and War

by Ann Kjellberg, editor

Alex Danzig, Hiba Abu Nada, Mosab Abu Toha, Samer Abu Daqqa

Read Part One of this post here

In Israel and Gaza, of course, the stakes are higher. Holocaust survivor and Yad Vashem historian Alex Danzig disappeared from the Nir Oz kibbutz on October 7; he has been reported alive by released hostages, giving history lectures to those sharing his confinement to pass the time. Palestinian Poet Omar Abu Shawish died in an airstrike in Gaza City on October 7. Hiba Abu Nada, author of three books of poetry and the novel Oxygen is Not for the Dead, died in an air strike while sheltering in Khan Yunis on October 20. Playwright Inas al-Saqa died on October 31 when an Israeli missile struck the building where she was sheltering with her children. Sufian Tayeh, UNESCO chair of physical, astrophysical, and space sciences and president of the Islamic University of Gaza, died along with his family in an airstrike on December 2. Poet and teacher, a professor of English and comparative literature featured in this 2021 New York Times profile, Refaat Alareer, died in a targetted air strike on his sister’s home in Shajaiya, in northern Gaza, on December 7. He left an interview with CNN to play in the event of his death, and the Palestine Literature Festival released a recording of actor Brian Cox reading his poem written during the siege, “If I Must Die.” Two members of a writing project co-founded by Refaat Alareer, We Are Not Numbers, have also died in air strikes: Yousef Dawas and Mohammed Zaher Hammo. Poet Saleem Al-Naffar also died in an airstrike in Gaza City on December 7. Scholar Christian Henderson has compiled a list of academics, researchers, and writers who have died in the assault on Gaza.

Al-Azhar University, Gaza’s Central Archive, its Municipal Library, the Rashad al-Shawa Cultural Center of Gaza City, the Omari mosque, Gaza’s oldest mosque, St. Porphyrus Church, the fifth oldest church in the world, and at least six cemeteries have been destroyed by Israeli bombardment. Municipal authorities in Gaza have called for the intervention of UNESCO to protect cultural centers, condemning the targeting of humanitarian facilities. Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) released a statement saying the university was harboring Hamas infrastructure. The Meqdad Printing Press and Library, one of the oldest in Gaza, has been destroyed, as well as the municipal printing press. The West Bank-based Freedom Theater Company was raided and its director and general manager were arrested on December 13. Mosab Abu Toha, the poet and founder of the two Edward Said libraries, the first English-language libraries in Gaza, who has a US passport, was, while trying to make his way with his family to a checkpoint to leave Gaza, arrested on suspicion of being a Hamas terrorist. He described to New Yorker editor David Remnick how he was beaten and interrogated and held for forty-eight hours before being released. He said he does not know what has happened to the libraries, his life’s work. The Palestine Festival of Writer released a recording of actor Tobias Menzies reading his poems.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, at least sixty-eight journalists have been killed since war began—four Israeli, fifty-seven Palestinian, and three Lebanese—more than in any comparable period of conflict since the Committee began recording data in 1992. Journalists are threatened by the same hazardous conditions facing all Gazans in the densely populated area, trying to care for their families as they labor to report on the war, but their work is made more dangerous because the blockade bars importing protective equipment like bulletproof vests and helmets, and they are challenged by power outages and and communications blackouts in getting information to the outside world.

The Israeli government says that over two thousand international journalists have arrived in Israel to report on the war, but only a small number have been allowed to enter Gaza, and these under the aegis of the IDF, sometimes obliged to submit their reporting to the IDF for review. The IDF has told Reuters and Agence France Press that it cannot guarantee the safety of journalists operating in the Gaza Strip. In October a hundred French journalist signed a petition demanding access to Gaza and protection of their colleagues in the field. One French journalist who signed the petition noted, “We have talked a lot about what happened on October 7, which is necessary because of the revisionism of some people saying what happened didn’t happen. But there is an imbalance because there are only a few journalists in Gaza and [some] have been killed.” In November, eleven US news organizations joined the BBC, Agence France-Presse, ITV, and Sky News to send a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi urging them to allow more journalists into Gaza. Last week US Senators Brian Schatz, Peter Welch, Chris Van Hollen, Tim Kaine, and Cory Booker called on President Biden to urge the same on Presidents Netanyahu and Sisi. They wrote, “The lack of transparency caused by limited journalistic access is at odds with the obligation all governments have to allow citizens to access factual information.”

Al Jazeera cameraman Samer Abu Daqqa was the first Foreign Press Association (FPA) member to be killed in Gaza during the attack following October 7. The FPA protested that it repeatedly appealed to the Israeli military to help evacuate Daqqa, who was sheltering from shelling after being wounded by drone fire in Khan Younis, but it took hours for first responders to gain access as he bled to death. Wael Dahdouh, Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief and “a household name in the Arab world,” kept reporting after learning on air that his wife, children, and other relatives had been killed in an October 25 airstrike. He was wounded himself, and his colleague Samer Abudaqa was killed, in a drone strike on Friday. Journalists Muhammad Sobh and Hisham al-Nawajah died when the building in which they took cover to observe an expected bombing of a Gaza high rise was struck on October 10. Reporters Farah Omar and cameraman Rabih al-Maamari, from the Al Mayadeen TV channel in Beirut, were were killed in Lebanon when an Israeli warplane reportedly fired two missiles on them. Three more journalists in Gaza, Adel Zorob, Abdullah Alwan, and Haneen Al-Qashtan, died two days ago in separate incidents.

On October 10 Reuters photographer Issam Abdallah was killed, and Agence France-Presse correspondent Christina Assi was seriously injured, while positioned, clearly marked “Press,” to cover an exchange of fire between Hezbollah forces and the Israeli army in the West Bank. A second strike blew up a nearby Al Jazeera vehicle, injuring five more reporters. Investigations from Reporters Without Borders, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Reuters, and Agence France-Presse concluded that the strikes were deliberate. Reporters Without Borders has filed a complaint with the International Criminal Court charging war crimes in the death of one Israeli journalist covering the Hamas attack of October 7 and eight Palestinian journalists who have died in the bombardment of Gaza, as well as the deliberate destruction of more than fifty media outlets.

Washington Post opinion editor Karen Attiah recounts that “Anas Al-Sharif, another journalist for Al Jazeera Arabic, reported receiving threats from the Israeli military to stop his work; last week, his family’s home in the Jabalia refugee camp was hit in a strike and his ninety-year-old father was killed.” Israeli soldiers on the West Bank detained a team of journalists from the German public broadcaster ARD at gunpoint on December 10. “The soldiers threatened us with their weapons and asked us if we were Jewish. Our colleague was insulted as a traitor,” said one of the reporters, who later posted on X/Twitter: “Many of the soldiers there are themselves settlers. Journalists are generally not welcome." Later that week ARD journalists, who were clearly identified as accredited press and were far away from military security areas, were detained for two hours by soldiers while reporting on settler violence near Qawawis. The Committee to Protect Journalists has recorded seven instances of groups of journalists being assaulted by Isreali army or police and twenty being arrested. On November 8, the Israeli government X account posted without basis, and then retracted, a claim that “AP, CNN, NY Times and Reuters had journalists embedded with Hamas terrorists” during the October 7 attack. After the claim was debunked Prime Minister Netanyahu’s office called journalists who covered the October 7 assault “accomplices in crimes against humanity”; lawmaker Danny Danon tweeted that “‘photojournalists’ who took part in recording the [Hamas] assault” would be added to the list of perpetrators to be “eliminated.”

The Committee to Project Journalists has called out a “deadly pattern,” over the last twenty-two years, according to which twenty journalists, in the majority of cases clearly wearing clothing or body armor or driving vehicles identifying them as press, have died by Israeli fire and not been held accountable, amounting, in their estimation, to a “wide-scale suppression of speech.” Most notoriously, in September of 2022 the Israeli military, after long denials, acknowledged that Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was likely killed by Israeli fire while covering Israeli reprisals for Palestinian Islamic Jihad attacks from Jenin. On February 25, 2019, a UN independent commission of inquiry said it “found reasonable grounds to believe that Israeli snipers shot journalists Yaser Murtaja and Ahmed Abu Hussein in April 2018 intentionally” while they were covering peaceful protests, that they were clearly marked as press, and their deaths were in violation of international humanitarian law.

A poet or a journalist’s life is not more important than anyone else’s, but one reflects, reading these names, on what is lost when the life is taken of a single truth-teller, trying to witness and convey an otherwise hidden experience, or a creative person who labors to forge a body of work from such slender means—what remains to build an enlightened future when the souls of culture, expression, witness are extinguished. To me it sometimes feels that the arguments in our classrooms and lecture halls and libraries and publishing houses can become dangerously formulaic, too wedded to intellectual team colors of nomenclature and “frameworks.” The facts speak so eloquently. In two chapters of her recent book, Doppelganger, that Naomi Klein posted in response to the crisis in Israel and Palestine, she writes, “It would help if conversations could hold more complexity,” and reminds readers that many of us lead lives whose comfort and security is contingent on the suffering of others—others whose struggles we have to work not to see because they are so close. Perhaps our own stained consciences lend some energy to our denunciations. I wish the battling academic camps could put the effort they put into rampart construction into more effective sanctuaries for listening and sympathy; that the sought-after places of “safety” could be shared, at least from time to time, rather than barricaded; that the habits and skills of understanding could be cultivated alongside the finessing of mutual scorn. A paired set of twin impulses—to render certain words off limits, and to insist that only one’s own words pertain—creates perhaps a taboo proscribing the very thoughts we most need to hear in order to grow.

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Ann Kjellberg is the founder and editor of Book Post.

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