“The two witches hurried to the old Crow King’s tree to meet up with their friend for their monthly reunion!“
I didn’t get a lot of time for this one today, so I hope a simplier stylized one is ok! Maybe one of these days I will return to it and redo it in a different palette and style!
A conversation with Gaza-based journalist Maram Humaid about the media’s love of misery, disdain for nuance, and distrust of local sources.
(article published december 29, 2021)
Mohammed El-Kurd: Media representation of Gaza has reduced it to a framework of death, ignoring the daily life and practices of the Palestinians living there. If you had the freedom to escape the news cycle, to write about whatever you want, how would you write about Gaza?
Maram Humaid: In my experience, I don’t think editors and newsrooms are attracted to success stories from Gaza or stories about people’s everyday struggles. They’re attracted to the bombardments and the wars: “Ten people were killed. Let’s go cover that.” They’re not interested in covering a story about a girl starting her own brand or the beauty industry here or the deterioration of mental health or young people pursuing remote work in programming and technology.
I don’t think editors have a deep understanding of the situation. I feel that Palestinian journalists’ absence from global newsrooms has contributed to this. There’s a particular narrative about us, read and reproduced by Western journalists, which shapes analysis around Gaza. You have platforms like the BBC that are absent from reporting on Gaza for long stretches of time, and when they finally decide to interview me, they ignore the siege, the massive problems, and they ask about “Why does Hamas prohibit women from smoking hookah?” They don’t ask about people’s struggles, the poverty, the daily crushing of dreams that people in Gaza live through, the suffering at the border. They don’t care about the beauty either. We’ve lived through 15 years of death, and they only focus on Hamas, as if there’s nothing and no one in Gaza besides Hamas. We have to resolve this through initiating a system that ensures diverse stories from Gaza are on the agendas of news editors.
There is a trust crisis—a general distrust of Gazans. International media doesn’t trust local sources, organizations, and ministries. Not even local journalists. They’d rather send a clueless blond journalist, and you end up just being their “fixer.” They call us fixers, but we’re local journalists in the end. Let’s call things by their name. We give them the data, translate for them, and connect them with local sources. You end up explaining to them basic things like the difference between the PLO and the PA.
…
MK: As Palestinian journalists, field workers, activists, we are the raw materials from which international organizations extract their conclusions—though they don’t give us the authority to cultivate our own framework. Our perspectives are thought to be illegitimate, too biased.
MH: I remember I worked with an American journalist on May 14, 2018, one of the deadliest days of the Great March of Return. Sixty Palestinians were killed, almost 3,000 were injured, thousands with gunfire, and approximately 100 people had their limbs amputated. For 18 days, we went from hospital to hospital, from Rafah to Jabaliah. We saw dozens of maimed children and young men. There was a 16-year-old boy who was shot with a butterfly bullet—those bullets that shatter your bones. He cried and begged the doctors not to amputate his leg. The journalist called me every single day asking me to check whether his limb was amputated, whether she could record the amputation surgery. She wanted a scoop, a photo from the operation room.
There was a 9-month-old girl who suffocated and died due to tear gas. The American journalist would speak to one of her colleagues and say, “This story isn’t logical…there are Israeli sources that deny this.” She was constantly debating and doubting eyewitnesses. They doubt what they see with their own eyes because they’re loyal to their preconceived framing and narratives. There’s an emphasis on neutrality, but to be neutral does not mean you skip over people’s pain.
MK: You covered the Great March of Return and, recently, the national soccer team of amputees, many of whom were maimed by Israeli forces during those protests. What does the spectrum of resistance in Gaza look like?
MH: The young people I saw at the march broke my heart. I’d ask them why they were participating, and they’d tell me, “Electricity is cut off at home, we have nothing to do. Let me go see, let me throw a couple of stones.” I’d ask if they fear getting shot, and they’d answer, “If my leg is gone, goodbye, if I’m gone, so be it, either way, I’m dead.” Is it difficult to lose a leg? Of course, it is. Is it difficult to be shot? It’s very difficult. But people here have reached a level where nothing matters, especially the generation of the late ’90s and the 2000s. When you drive people to this level of misery, you’ve created all the circumstances that push people to try and resist.
But every method of protest is met with excessive force. We don’t even know rubber bullets here, only live ammunition. So, when the homemade rockets leave Gaza, people cheer because, honestly, when there’s a war, you feel lonely. It is important to clarify that these homemade missiles don’t compare to the Israeli arsenal, which, as we have seen, destroyed entire neighborhoods. Still, people cheer—not out of joy but out of the deep frustration and loneliness they feel amid the absence of any solution. You are alone against the Israeli missiles, against the horrors. You wait for your turn to die. Whether people like the resistance or not, we have a right to resist. We have a right to defend ourselves. We tried peaceful resistance [with the Great March of Return], and you saw the results: hundreds of maimed people and thousands of martyrs. So Israel’s targeting of homes, of whole families, shows it doesn’t need an excuse to kill. The rockets or the entirely peaceful demonstrations—they’re only excuses. Nothing else.
areudirty
origamiaround
tangentwithtanner
ellievsbear
prguitarman
2087
gamechangershow
