Summary
Palestinian writer, author of Chapter 10 of From the River to the Sea, “Western journalists have blood on their hands” (20 October 2023), and of Chapter 31, “No Moses in Siege”, an extract from his Rifqa (Haymarket Books, 2021) (From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine, lines 671-721).
- Chapter 31, “No Moses in siege” (2021), closes the collection: a poem on the four boys aged nine to fourteen killed by Israeli naval fire while playing soccer on a Gaza City beach on 16 July 2014 (epigraph, line 2372), addressed to the killers — “Was it because there were no more graves in Gaza / that you brought us to the beach to die?” — and ending “What do you say to children for whom the Red Sea doesn’t part?” (line 2412). The poem is labelled poetry wherever used; its events are the poem’s, as printed.
Details
- The industry standard of mainstream Western media “is to dehumanize Palestinians. Our grief is negligible; our rage is unwarranted.” Palestinian guests are invited “not to interview us … but to interrogate us”, opening with demands to condone or condemn, as in Kirsty Wark’s response to Husam Zomlot’s loss of six family members (lines 680-688).
- Unverified claims of decapitation and rape circulated by Western journalists fed Islamophobic tropes and Israel’s equation of Hamas with ISIS, with real consequences including the Illinois landlord’s killing of a six-year-old Palestinian American child (lines 690-696).
- Genocide warnings by the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Raz Segal, and Israeli officials’ genocidal statements and acts, received little or distorted coverage; “The passive voice is king.” (lines 698-714)
- Reporters “resemble stenographers and state secretaries”, and “their hands are bloody as hell” (lines 716-720).
Related pages
From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine, Genocide, Gaza, Representation