In Memory of Assassinated Palestinian -American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, and a Vow to Honor her Preservation of Palestinian Identity …and Palestine’s tortured past.
It seemed too impossible to describe the flood of emotions that swept through me — and millions of others — at the news on May 11 that a brave Palestinian-American journalis and veteran reporter for Al Jazeera named Shireen Abu Akleh had been killed by an Israeli soldier as she tried to cover an Israeli raid on the West Bank refugee camp of Jenin. The Israeli government, noted Amos Harel of Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, initially resorted to the usual “self-righteous routine,” trying to blame the Palestinians “because of the terrorism they perpetrate.” But this time, based on eye-witness testimony from her colleagues, the court of public opinion had concluded that she had been targeted for assassination. CNN did its own investigation, and concluded on May 24 that “that there was no active combat, nor any Palestinian militants, near Abu Akleh in the moments leading up to her death.” CNN cited as evidence newly secured videos of the scene, “corroborated by testimony from eight eyewitnesses, an audio forensic analyst and an explosive weapons expert” all of which suggested that Abu Akleh “was shot dead in a targeted attack by Israeli forces.”
Scenes of Israeli forces attacking the pall bearers carrying her coffin at the subsequent funeral procession didn’t help Israel’s image in the world.
But what struck me the most, as an American born in Beirut, as a former reporter for the Beirut Daily Star, as someone who has lived with and railed against biased, pro-Israel reporting in the American media for most of my life, was the outpouring of grief by the Palestinian people for this woman. According to a New York Times headline she was a “Trailblazer in the Mideast, [who] Reported the Human Side” — that is, life of Palestinians under Israeli occupation — as no other reporter dared to do. As mourners gathered at the family home in occupied East Jerusalem, its entrance adorned by Palestinian flags and photos of Shireen, Israeli police showed up demanding the flags come down. Said one witness whose son was beaten at the funeral procession two days later, Israeli authorities “are afraid of the Palestinian flag because it represents our identity, the same way that Shireen, her funeral and life did.”
Accompanying the Times “Trailblazer” article is a photo of eight young women from Hebron, all wearing traditional headscarves and holding posters of the now iconic image of Shireen, honoring her as a martyr. A close friend recalled how “a lot of girls … grew up basically standing in front of a mirror and holding their hair brushes pretending to be Shireen. That’s how lasting and important her presence was.”
Shireen dared to report on the funerals of Palestinians arbitrarily killed by Israeli forces, on the Israeli attacks on Gaza in 2008 and 2014, and, ironically, on the 2002 Battle of Jenin, described by a UN envoy as “horrific beyond belief.” Huses were bulldozed with families still inside. Ambulances could not reach the injured and Palestinians were summarily executed.
She had been asked, back in 2017, by an NBC affiliate if she was ever afraid if she would be shot. She answered truthfully. “Of course I get scared.” But “in a specific moment you forget that fear. We don’t throw ourselves to death. We go and we try to find where we can stand and how to protect the team…” And above all, she tried to get the story.
Barbara Taft, long-time co-chair of WILPF’s Middle East Committee, in a Memorial Day tribute to Shireen at her church in San Jose, California, reminded parishoners that this was not the first time that journalists had been targeted. “Israelis bombed the Press building in Gaza during fighting last year, destroying the offices of Associated Press, Al Jazeera, and several other news outlets that were trying to cover what was happening there. Besides that, a total of at least 19 Palestinian journalists have been killed there since 1992.”
Shireen, Taft added, is known for her [now poignant] quote, “You won’t silence the truth/You won’t kill the idea”
Confessions of another American journalist
I admit that I did not know her — my Middle East reporting was in the early 1970’s, whereas she began her journalist career in 1997 — but more significantly, I did not know of her. How could that be, I asked myself,
Consider the rest an introspection, an attempt to answer why. What comes immediately to mind was an effort, in my writings for American audiences, to cite only mainstream media sources — and Israeli sources rather than Al Jazeera — so as to gain credibility, to not appear as “pro-Arab.” For, as many journalists and historians know, once you show any sympathy for the Palestinians, you are branded as pro-Arab and you are likely to be dismissed as “anti-Semetic.” This smear that has been used successfully for over seven decades by Israeli Zionists and their American supporters to hide the truth about one of the ugliest — and most censored — reigns of oppression in modern history, one that is finally being compared to apartheid South Africa.
South Africa’s Bishop Tutu Foundation likened the attacks on the funeral procession as being “chillingly reminiscent of the brutality meted out to mourners at the funerals of anti-apartheid activists in South Africa during our struggle for freedom.” The UN Secretary General condemned “all attacks and killings of journalists,” and called for an immediate investigation. Surprisingly, so too did 57 members of the US House in a letter to the FBI and the State Department, highlighting, according to Haaretz, “the conflicting reports” on her death from the Israeli military, the international media and eyewitnesses.
To be sure, the killing of a journalist, a famous Palestinian-American journalist at that, has to be a no-no. But how to explain a more muted world reaction to the ongoing destruction of Palestinian villages. The most recent is in the West Bank village of Masafer Yatta. Its residents fought for two decades to prevent the demolition of their homes. Israel’s supreme court answered their pleas by ruling that their land could be used for military use. To its credit, the Guardian called it “one of the most significant expulsions since the occupation began in 1967” — and “paved the way for the eviction of everyone living there.”
More introspection, more reflections.
I returned to Beirut as a teenager in 1963. (My widowed mother had moved back to Massachusetts after the death of my father, America’s first master spy in the Middle East, in March 1947). She invited me to go with her, back to Beirut, as a 16 year-old high school student. I recall reading Exodus to prepare me for that part of the world. I was totally won over to the struggle of Jewish victims of multiple pogroms and the Holocaust to have a state of their own. But visits to local Beirut bookstores gave me another perspective seldom heard in the U.S. Paul Khayat, my neighbor and owner of the Al Khayat bookstore opposite the American University of Beirut, told me story that stays with me to this day. He had produced a beautiful, well illustrated (and expensive to produce) history of the Arab World, only to learn (so he said) that the books never made it to American shores: they were dumped overboard in New York harbor. I could never confirm that story, but it convinced me to write my high school English term paper on the history of the Middle East conflict, relying on sources that were nowhere to be found in the United States. Looking back, Islamaphobia reigned in the U.S. long before 911.
In 1972, after the death of my mother and getting a masters degree in art history in Florence, Italy, I returned to Beirut and took up writing on art and architecture in Lebanon. But inevitably I came to chronicle many aspects of life in the Middle East, including political reporting. I will never forget visiting the Wailing Wall in Israel and overhearing an Israeli tour guide tell some American tourists that the vast paved courtyard facing the wall had been secured by the Israelis in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. What? I had learned that Palestinian homes had been demolished to make room for that courtyard. I recall trembling with indignation.
In 1975, on the eve of the Lebanese Civil War (which would last 15 years and kill over 100,000 people — mostly civilians )I stood on the roof of my apartment and witnessed French Mirage jets flown by the Christian-ruled Lebanese air force bombing Palestinian refugee camps. Several days later, en route to the Beirut airport, I deserted a Beirut taxi when seeing a tank barreling down the road toward us and took cover in a Christian school. I lay on my stomach for most of the day, writing about parents dodging bullets to retrieve their children. A young man spotted me when he rescued his niece, and returned as the sun was setting. He warned me that I had better leave with him as there was no telling who was going to take over the school that night. I agreed. He held out his hand, motioned to his car parked across the street, and whispered “We’ll have to run for it!” at which point his grip tightened as a bullet whizzed by. Needless to say, I survived.
I tell more of that story in my book, but the point is, I chose to leave Lebanon when the civil war broke out with fury several weeks later after a busload of Palestinians was ambushed by right wing Phalangists, killing 27 and wounding 19. I chose safety in the US until the fighting ended, never imagining that the war would last over a decade.
That was my choice. Shireen, who once dreamed of being an architect, chose differently. “She always put herself in danger just to convey the stories of the Palestinians,” said an admirer.
Recovering lost histories
From 1979 to 1994, I focused my attention away from the Middle East, which was so heavily censored in the US press that it seemed pointless to even try writing the truth as I saw it. Instead, I concentrated on investigating the ethnocide and genocide of Amazonian Indians with my husband for our book, Thy Will be Done. The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil. But Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000s reignited my interest. The sheer horror, the unspeakable destruction and loss of human life that followed in Syria, Gaza and the West Bank, then Yemen, then Lebanon again, cried out for an explanation.
What I discovered in my research was the role of oil and pipelines going back to World War I and World War II leading up to these endless wars.Declassified documents in the National Archives, including my father’s OSS papers, followed by research into presidential archives, a FOIA lawsuit against the CIA and scores of interviews resulted in my publication of Follow the Pipelines: Uncovering the Mystery of a Lost Spy and the Deadly Politics of the Great Game for Oil.(2022)
That is the best I can offer to fill in some missing historical context, including some previously hidden strategic military and economic facts about the 1917 Balfour Declaration often cited as Britain’s guarantee of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
Meanwhile, some determined researchers have been able to access declassified documents in Israeli archives. Bernard Avishai, for example, in his The Tragedy of Zionism, reveals on the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration that Britain’s imperial interests in Iraq and Palestine included protection of Haifa, considered “an ideal port — and the natural place for a pipeline terminal bringing [Iraqi] oil from the east.” European Jews were considered more reliable and trustworthy to ensure the protection of that pipeline than Arabs. And protection of pipelines, I had discovered from my father’s reports, had to occur “at all costs.”
Teddy Katz, a history student at the University of Haifa, wrote his thesis on a mass killing of Palestinians in the village of Tantura during Israel’s war of independence in 1948. Having interviewed scores of Arab and Jewish witnesses, he claimed Israeli soldiers murdered dozens of Tantura villagers before others, terrorized, were expelled from their homes.
According to the New York Times, a group of Israeli army veterans sued him, and he “briefly recanted under social pressure, ending the case.” He quickly “retracted his retraction,” but the University of Haifa “later downgraded that status of his degree, citing irregularities in this thesis.” Still, his findings went on to become the source for Israeli documentary filmmakers, whose film, Tantura, has “reopened the furor, setting off a new debate in the Israeli media, the University of Haifa, and among Arab lawmakers” about Israel’s foundational history.
Tantura, the documentary reveals, was leveled, paved over into a parking lot for a seaside resort, its victims buried in a mass grave beneath it. Apparently, according to New York Times reporter, Patrick Kingsley, many Israelis consider such brutality to be “implausible if not impossible,” so soon after the Holocaust. Indeed, the well- chronicled horrors of the Holocaust have been cited over and over again to discourage any thinking that some of its victims could wreak such terror on the Palestinians. But the truth has a way of seeping out, as it did following the 1982 massacres of hundreds of Palestinian men, women and children at Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon by right wing Christian militia allied with Israeli forces. (My husband and I were evicted by our landlord who could not tolerate my cries of outrage over the scenes of carnage portrayed — in many cases, for the first time — by mainstream media coverage),
More outrages followed, including the Israeli assaults on the Palestinian refugee camp of Jenin in 2002, where Shireen would die 20 years later, and the Israeli operations in Gaza in 2010 and 2014, which killed thousands of Palestinians.
With regard to the attacks on Gaza, in my chapter on the “Hidden History of Pipeline Politics in Palestine and Israel,” I reveal the real motivation for the attacks, behind the usual explanation of defeating terrorists: to prevent Gazans from getting access to the enormous deposits of natural gas found off their coast, worth up to $1 billion. According to Israel’s defense minister, the revenues from natural gas would not likely help “impoverished Palestinians,” but instead would “likely serve to fund further terror attacks against Israel.”
Indeed, by “following the pipelines,” from World War I up to this century’s endless wars (and now, the war in Ukraine) I have found that the primary culprits in these horrors are the fossil fuel companies, their owners, and their government apologists and lobbyists, all determined to advance these “arteries of empire” as a State Department colleague of my father once called them, in the deadly Great Game for Oil. When the history of this embattled region is viewed through this geopolitical lens, we can begin to abandon the deliberately divisive “Arab v Jew” meme and now the “Russians v Ukrainians” analysis and come to realize that the same interests who have lied to the world about the dangers of climate change have also perpetrated a legacy of unimaginable damage, suffering, and loss of life. The life and death of Shireen Abu-Akleh, for me and hopefully for others, has brought it all together and will advance a greater international understanding of the need for peace in the Middle East — and beyond.
Charlotte Dennett’s most recent book, Follow the Pipelines (originally published in hardcover as The Crash of Flight 3804 and now out in paperback with a new Afterword) was praised by the Palestine Chronicle for “summarizing the geopolitics of the Middle East historically through to current events. . . . This is an amazing piece of historical writing. . . . Students, foreign affairs ‘experts’ and officials should have this work as required reading.” She hopes Jewish journalists will review the book as well.