Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief accuses Western journalists of ‘capitulating to the Israeli narrative’.
Hamza Yusuf is a British-Palestinian writer and journalist whose work focuses on Palestine.
Cross-posted from Declassified UK
Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.
Veteran journalist Wael al-Dahdouh has launched a scathing attack on the mainstream media’s “deficient” and “biased” coverage of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
On a visit to London yesterday organised by Amnesty International, 55-year-old al-Dahdouh spoke to Declassified about his experience of reporting from Gaza where more than 63,000 Palestinians have been killed in the last two years.
Reflecting on how Western media outlets covered the same events, he said: “They all capitulated to the Israeli narrative and adopted it without challenge, without interrogation, without fact checking or a semblance of impartiality.
“These are our industry colleagues around the world from news organisations and institutions that we’ve looked up to and respected throughout our lives.
“They all pride themselves on being apparent shining embodiments and benchmarks of journalistic integrity, transparency, truthfulness – that’s what we were told all these years.
“But that very notion has collapsed completely. They were all proven deficient. We were let down.
“They saw what’s happening to us; the killing, the maiming, the wholesale destruction. This is a campaign of aggression of historic magnitude, a calamity that has befallen more than two million besieged people.
“Journalists were duty bound to rise to this cause for humanity. They did not.”
Asked whether he was surprised at how the Western media ecosystem so uniformly treated Israel’s conduct as legitimate self-defence, he invoked an Arabic saying ‘see with only one eye and hear with only one ear’.
He explained its meaning: “You don’t give consideration to the rounded perspective in a balanced way and instead let biases and pre-established ideas shape your understanding. It was painful to endure.”
Especially, he added, “because the coverage and the scenes from Gaza, of endless massacres, of extermination, were as raw as they were instant. There was no excuse not to showcase the horrors to the world in an undiluted fashion.”
Even at this point, when asked what journalists can concretely do, he identifies an important juncture: “Journalists need to first and foremost be steadfast in their understanding of this as a genocide, as war crimes and a deliberate campaign of erasure. That is the starting point and without it, everything else is redundant.”
Personal cost
Al-Dahdouh, an award winning journalist with more than two decades of experience covering Gaza, paid a devastating price for his courageous reportage.
“I came to the realisation quite early on that I was facing the most difficult challenge, exceeding anything I’ve endured previously.
“The Israeli occupation forces didn’t just want to punish me individually as a journalist for documenting their atrocities. But through targeting my immediate family too – 15 members of my family were slaughtered. The message was unambiguous: stop reporting or we’ll kill you all.”
He was informed while live on air that an Israeli attack on the Nuseirat refugee camp in late October 2023 had killed his wife, his seven-year-old daughter and his 15-year-old son, along with several other family members.
Hamza, another son who was also an Al Jazeera reporter, was killed by a drone attack the following January. “Hamza was not a part of me, he was all of me, he was the soul of my soul”, Wael al-Dahdouh said at his funeral.
Al-Dahdouh was wounded by shrapnel in December as the Al Jazeera team covered drone attacks on a school sheltering displaced Palestinians. His cameraman, Samer Abudaqqa, bled out over several hours as Israeli attacks prevented ambulances from reaching him.
Al-Dahdouh survived and was evacuated out of the besieged territory to receive medical treatment. He emphasised how such attacks on reporters were not isolated incidents, repeatedly mentioning the more than 200 journalists and media workers in Gaza who have been killed by Israel.
“In journalism school, you’re taught that no matter how big a story, no matter how important it is, it’s not worth a single drop of a journalist’s blood,” he noted. “Yet we paid with litres of blood, we paid the ultimate price.”
‘Horrified’
Asked what he felt when witnessing a palpable lack of solidarity from industry peers about this ruthless killing of their colleagues, he was categorical. “Horrified. Disappointed. Upset. Think of whichever other adjective you like and it will fit.
“They didn’t show enough solidarity, plain and simple. How can your brothers and sisters in the profession be killed, their limbs shredded into pieces, and it moves nobody?”
Al-Dahdouh is nevertheless attentive to the Western media’s slow and sudden shift over recent months, though he questions the sincerity of it.
“This change was forced upon them. It was not born of voluntary and genuine awareness of the urgency, nor driven by professionalism and objectivity.”
The veteran Al-Jazeera journalist also drew parallels with the coverage of Ukraine. “When one media colleague in Ukraine gets killed, there is outrage, there is solidarity from heads of state and a chorus of condemnation from the entire international community, and rightly so.
“One life taken is one life too many. This does not need to be said; there should not be a hierarchy. But what is so different about us Palestinians that we are treated so starkly and dehumanised in this way where our killing is deemed acceptable?”
Though he’s clear-cut about what constitutes central pillars of journalism and how absent they’ve been, he insists it survives in some places: “we in Gaza, without exaggeration, are reviving the concept of journalism. Putting the job beyond mere fame and fortune. I just wish others did the same.”
Although he’s under no illusions about failings of the Western media, he specifically touched on the role of Britain’s political class throughout the genocide.
“Without going into detail, everyone in Gaza is aware of the participation of the British state, via surveillance and spy activities,” he commented. “There is a growing sense among the population that Britain is indeed an accomplice in their annihilation.”
He hopes for a robust effort in Britain, not just from mainstream journalists, but across multiple sectors to take responsibility, make sacrifices and pressure the government to shift from its ironclad support.
“I hope there can be some movement from this government that can trigger a policy change and isolation of Israel, but I don’t expect much to be honest with you”, he concludes frankly.
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