Western Journalists Owe Gaza's Reporters Everything
And Reflecting on Ahmad's Death at the Modern Stake
It was a gut punch to my soul, and my stomach too. I FELT it. I swallowed hard. Another journalist fallen, murdered and this time the video captured their death: Ahmad Mansour was burned alive while filing a story in a make-shift media tent.
The Israelis regularly skirt around attacks like these and claim “but Hamas.” It’s getting tired. They aren’t afraid to target journalists or medics anymore. All they’re doing now is trying to shut everyone up.
But I won’t. Drag me out and I’ll still keep squawking against injustice.
Along with the rest of us decrying Israeli terrorism.
Mansour is powerful as a martyr and yet he didn’t seek it, he just knew it was a possibility.
How many more will it take for western news organizations to rage? How many more will it take to start speaking up for our indigenous brothers and sisters on the ground?
We certainly spoke up when Marie Colvin was targeted by Syria’s Assad regime or when James Foley was beheaded by Daesh. Ah, yeh of course, they were white.
I feel a punch to the gut every time another attack against Gaza’s journalists hits the algorithms.
Risking our lives for the truth and actually publishing it is part of the work. And somehow I continue to watch white journalists who just don’t get it. There is still too much humanitarian ignorance on display.
And yet, I will tell you, we the western journalists, especially those of us who have gone in, to Gaza and other areas in the region at war; we would be nothing without our local counterparts.
The colors blurred as I spun around, my camera dropped to my side and I kept a tight hold on the leash. Greens, reds, and flags of every size merged into one blended movement color on the streets leading to the center square under the night sky. Roars of cheers turned to echoes like a reverb vamp on a song.
It was 2014, and I’d entered the Gaza strip during what was called a 50-day war. I stayed for nearly three weeks, until a few days after a truce was called. And for a moment, there was a breath in the space, I felt the rush of joy around me and in my own body too. What was a few seconds felt like hours.
I had never witnessed anything like it and it wouldn’t be the last time. The drones still buzzed overhead, the soundtrack to Gaza.
And I wouldn’t have known Gaza as I did, been able to file one story or learn the history or understand the dynamics of a culture (which is not a monolithic existence) had it not been for local journalists, producers and translators on the ground. They were my sounding board, my ride, my introduction, my education.
I’ll never forget one of the stories I proposed was a follow up to an attack on two grave-yard caretakers. They were digging holes for more bodies. The cemetery sat on the back of a Mosque. An Israelis claimed they were Hamas with guns. They had shovels.
So my fixer/producer took me first to see the families and then to the graveyard. People warned us it would be dangerous. We knew. But I wanted to see where they were hit, I wanted to see what happened.
We entered the cemetery drones above hung above us. He took me to the spot where the missile landed, there was blood. The drones above us got a lot louder, lower, closer, more terrifying. They were watching us.
I also later realized the squeaky beeps and funky sound on what I captured with my camera was the sound interference from the drones, but I’d turned on, took a few snapshots to make sure, and kept it running at waist high as we made our way through.
You can hear both of us breathless, trying to keep composure so we can get in, get out, and try not to get sniped.
The Global Post needed new material. (they were still reeling from Foley’s beheading in Syria) and I certainly wouldn’t have gone in if my fixer and friend said it wasn’t possible, but he wanted the story too. So, we worked to make sure we had a plan, to the best of our ability. We had Gazans watching us at the Mosque and along the street side. There is literally no story we could have done that would have kept us “safe,” but we navigated the risks.
I could recount story after story after story from Gaza to Iraq to the Borders of Lebanon and Syria where one mortar was missed, or we got away before an explosion and worked around it to get the photo, the video. I could tell the stories of the frontline and the lines behind them in the line for fire from a sniper.
In every single case, my fixers and producers helped me make sure I could get there. We, as a journalist community, did lose some of our own in the process.
In Iraq, there was an incident with three French journalists who went in, shared a story with an Iraqi fixer and on their way out, they hit an improvised explosive device (IED). Two were killed, two ended up in critical condition, including the driver. It rocked our entire community.
The local journalists and fixers went into danger for a dispatch story with us, every time, and it was always a risk for the fucking truth, to show the battles, the places, the blood and sweat and the horrors of war.
It came at a time when more and more, journalists were becoming targets around ever corner.
And so,
When western journalists do not make it a top story to rage against the onslaught of Gaza’s reporters, I am enraged and embarrassed.
Western journalists have been prevented from getting into Gaza. On occassion we’ve seen the propaganda runs with Israelis and other journalists emphasize “independent” investigations as if our indigenous counterparts aren’t intelligent storytellers. It’s angering.
Even so, the lack of western journalists have created a brilliant spotlight for Gaza’s journalists. Rightfully, it’s offered some of the more gritty and detailed stories about Genocide against them and their families.
Is it any wonder Israelis want to shut them up?
American networks owe Gaza’s journalists. We all do. They are the only reason we know what the fuck is going on.
To date, it’s estimated over 200 journalists have been killed in Israel’s Genocidal campaign.
These brilliant and brave, many young, men and women have nothing to lose, because they’ve lost it all. They don’t eat, their families died while they are away, and they no longer have homes to sleep.
The press vest is becoming a symbol of rebellion.
I admit when I was on the frontlines, I didn’t wear anything to identify me as press. I wore gear but the risk of being targeted as a woman was already high, better to blend with the fatigues. Adding “press” to my chest would have squared the focus of a sniper and I was already in the line of fire.
Once upon a time press was respected by even the worst of government war lords— until the truth indicted them.
Now they either shoot them or send their rich friends to buy and brainwash the organizations, all to control narratives under a false ideology of objectivism.
Khalas.
I call on every western, white journalist, in every position of the news to demand from their organizations, to protest. Yes, I believe it better to stop covering the lying White House briefings, stop propping up politicians, even with negative “coverage” (they know how to warp their bad press) and start wall to wall coverage of Gaza’s storytellers.
It’s not enough to feel sad and pity, nor pretend we are better, we’re not.
We are nothing without them.
Ash Gallagher is a Veteran War Journalist turned speaker/consult and activist, she’s the Author of the Memoir, Reckoning in the Rubble, My Awakening at the Battle for Mosul. If you’re interested in working with Ash, inviting her to speak or consult, connect to her here and for more information go to: ashgallagher.com
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This article should be getting far more traction! An extremely important post, but of course it doesn’t align with the general public’s scrolling for the sensational. Like they don’t have time to think or care about anything, just react. In any case, I want to point out that it’s not just “white” reporters who are acting this way, but mainstream “journalists” of all colors and ethnicities. What they have in common is getting the “feeling” that saying anything positive about Palestinians can lead to something bad or threatening to them and certainly their career. These are the “mainstream” of course; and even those who occasionally approach the life-threatening (so they’d like us to think or feel) subject of the genocide by Israel of Palestinians (without the forbidden “g-word”) can expect their stories to be downgraded and appear in some obscure page of the print version, if at all. Self-interest usually trumps compassion and courage to do what’s right—what EVERYONE KNOWS is right—because this exact behavior is promoted and deemed A-OK, given examples of entertainers and successful CEOs whose wealth and power is only now being reconsidered as maybe not a sign of their being good or worthy but maybe part of something working to harm us.
Thus you find all kinds of mainstream journalists who are “successful” cautious in their approach. Notably, Jews are allowed to stand for truth without the same level of threat. But not always; remember the brave Senator Paul Wellstone whose entire family was killed in an aerial “accident” that was no accident. He invoked the actual Judaic religion, which most of Zionism has some issues with (those pesky moral commandments), in a powerful speech for NOT going to war with Iraq. Apparently they wanted to make sure THAT didn’t happen again. There may be other issues involved as well.