“And so we avert our eyes.”
The mirror Palestinians hold up to us.
Some images and press pieces—pictures, videos, media reports—come to me lately. They arrive separately, one to another over a period of a days. And I am moved to share them now because, when taken together, they give a cumulative effect quite beyond their power as individual presentations, which is considerable enough.
Many, many other images of this kind come before us more or less daily. These, as I hope I succeed in explaining, are the ones I am moved to single out. During my years as a correspondent, I found that as one spends time among others—speaking to them, asking questions, coming to see them as they are—the others in one’s life eventually become mirrors in which one sees one’s own reflection. These images and accounts have had this effect on me.
The first of these images arrived last weekend. It comes from Palestine Will Be Free, a group that publishes a newsletter on Substack. The video I have in mind—the video I cannot get out of my mind—shows a man speaking straight into a camera. He is young, somewhere in his twenties or thirties; he is distressed but composed, perfectly coherent. He spoke from Gaza. The video is dated 26 December; I have just now seen it.
Here is part of what Saleh al–Jafarawi, who describes himself as an independent journalist, says:
We are exhausted, by Allah, we are exhausted. We have no strength left. For over 420 days we have been calling out to you. There is no picture we haven’t taken for 420 days. We’ve been documenting, photographing, and showing you the crimes of the Occupation. We’ve been telling you: Look, world, look at what’s happening to us.
We’ve died by fire, by shelling, by sniper fire, by being run over…. There’s no picture we haven’t shown you. And what did we gain? Nothing. We’re just losing our loved ones, losing ourselves, losing our friends. That’s it.
The video continues for some additional minutes. It is what this pained, altogether authentic man says next that prompts me to share this video with Global Bridge’s readers:
Until when? Just tell us, until when? When will the world feel our pain?
Saleh al–Jafarawi’s video seems to have traveled well. At writing, Saleh appears to be the object of one of the Zionist state’s typically disgusting exercises in hasbara, a smear campaign that went into operation several days ago—reportedly with the collaboration of the Palestinian Authority. Meta, the social media conglomerate (Facebook, Instagram), has deleted Saleh’s accounts.
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Last Sunday, as I was still considering the question videoed from Gaza, a report arrived from Drop Site News, a recently started independent website that does consistently good work. The piece appeared under the headline, “DHS detains lead negotiator of Columbia Gaza solidarity encampment after online campaign by pro–Israel groups.” It concerns the Department of Homeland Security’s arrest at the weekend of Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of the protests that erupted at Columbia University last spring in response to the Israelis’ campaign of terror in Gaza.
The case of Mahmoud Khalil has since become a cause célèbre, as it should be. He is a Palestinian legally resident in the U.S. and was detained without charge last Saturday evening, a few days after the Trump administration declared it intends to revoke the visas of “Hamas sympathizers.” As Drop Site reported, “The detention followed a two-day targeted online campaign against Khalil by pro–Israel groups and individuals, including Columbia’s high-profile pro–Israel professor, Shai Davidai.” These campaigns have been common since the Israelis began their invasion of the Gaza Strip. They are a measure of the frightening damage Zionists and their American sympathizers have done to free speech and, altogether, logical discourse. Davidai is a business professor, an Israeli, whose shocking extremism in defense of the Zionist state grew so vicious that the Columbia administration barred him from the campus last October.
The Drop Site piece was forwarded to me by John Whitbeck, the international attorney who, after many years of legal work for the Palestinians, now lives in Paris. “Transmitted below,” Whitbeck wrote, “is a report on yet another instance of the intensifying totalitarian assault on pro–Palestine and anti-genocide militancy in the United States.” It is a good summation of the events Drop Site News reported and their broader implications. We have had since had many more details of Khalil’s circumstances. At writing he is in detention awaiting deportation, unable to confer with his attorneys even as his case is already beot herc courts.
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In the middle of last year, the BBC began filming a documentary it titled, Gaza: How to survive a warzone. This was a bold, unflinching investigation into the lives of children in Gaza as they sustain the physical, psychological, and emotional scars inflicted by the Israeli military. The BBC did something admirably imaginative as it developed the project: Its narrator is a 13–year-old Palestinian named Abdullah.
Abdullah comports himself with admirable poise in the footage. He is the son of Ayman Alyazouri, who at some point served as a deputy minister in the Hamas administration. I do not see that this should have been a point of any controversy, but, covering off the possibility that it might become one given the poisonous power Zionists and their lobbies exert across all manner of Western institutions, the BBC opened the film with a white-type-on-black panel that reads as follows:
The narrator of this film is 13 year old Abdullah.
His father has worked as deputy agriculture minister for the Hamas-run government in Gaza.
The production team had full editorial control over filming with Abdullah.
This is a commendably professional way to manage a circumstance cynics and media manipulators—and these appear not infrequently in my profession—could make a fuss about. The film that follows, fifty-nine and a half minutes, is also done professionally—revealing, effective, properly provocative, leaving the images and the children in them to speak for themselves. Abdullah makes a remarkable guide as he makes his way through the rubble of Gaza—climbing atop the remains of his grandfather’s house, leading us through streets that no longer look like streets. Always, always we see people running—to hospitals, to makeshift shelters, or merely to put distance between themselves and falling Israeli bombs. Gaza: How to survive a warzone is a remarkably well-conceived and well-executed film, not least because of the remarkable young man who tells its story.
And this turned out to be the film’s problem. To put the point simply, How to survive a warzone is too truthful, simply too well-done and too effective: The BBC’s management took it off the air two weeks ago—claiming, but precisely, that it was improper to use Abdullah as narrator because his father was his father.
The BBC has a very disgraceful record of bias in its coverage of the Gaza crisis since it erupted on 7 October 2023. Its blatantly apologist, day-to-day bias in favor of the Zionist state is now infamous due to the work of journalists such as Owen Jones. And as I make clear in my summary of Jones’s work and the work of others, these corruptions are by no means limited to the BBC. They are endemic in Westen media. In the BBC’s case, there appears to be a considerable number of dedicated journalists protesting managment’s suppression of good coverage as a matter of daily routine.
How to survive a warzone is an unassailable case in point. I have mentioned the high quality of the film. We know this because media professionals captured it before the BBC self-censored it, and these professionals now make it available. One of these versions is here. It is worth the hour’s viewing. As I did so, it felt as if I were watching pirated or contraband material passed covertly along by way of some Western version of the old East-bloc samizdat.
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I return to the young man who gazed into the video camera and wondered where we were—where our humanity has been these past 420 days. (And these approach 500 now.) “Just tell us, until when?” he asked. “When will the world feel our pain?” If we have any claim to sentience we had better see ourselves in that man’s face, because he addresses each of us.
Individually, and certainly institutionally, we in the West have averted our eyes these almost–500 days. We sit still as our political institutions silence those around us who speak. This is not true of all of us, but it appears so of most. Too few of us seem willing to look. Too many of our institutions dedicate themselves to encouraging us not to do so, not to see. The New York Times ran a piece the other day under the headline, “We tried 50 kinds of potato chips. Here is what we found.” I have a large collection of these kinds of things. They bring my blood nearly to boiling, each one an unconscious expression of a collective self-absorption and an attendant indifference to others.
It is time for us, we in the West, to face the mirror Palestinians hold up to us and see what is in it without averting our eyes. I do not propose to serve as a scold, but merely to urge that we come to terms with what the Zionist cause and the West’s craven dedication to it has made of us. It is a profoundly good time to come to terms with ourselves in this way, given the Zionist regime has begun to Gazify—a new word—the West Bank. Will we refuse to see once again? I do not welcome answers at this time, for sheer fear of what they are likely to be, but let us see.
Some refuse to avert the eyes. Three examples, each giving an opportunity to think—to think perchance to act in what ways may be available to each of us.
In a piece published in The Independent 10 days ago, a BBC news presenter, a 29–year old named Karishma Patel, announced that she has quit her job in response to the network management’s decision to pull the Gaza documentary.
She wrote in part:
I’m about to make a bold claim: truth exists…. We have passed the point at which Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity are debatable. There’s more than enough evidence—from Palestinians on the ground, aid organisations; legal bodies—to come to coverage-shaping conclusions around what Israel has done.
While Karishma Patel was elucidating her responses to the BBC management’s beyond-belief shamelessness, none other than Abdullah, the film’s young narrator, made a six and a half minute video offering a polite but scathing response of his own. Jonathan Cook, the noted British journalist, carried it in a piece on his Substack newsletter. Abdullah says in part:
I am Abdullah al–Yasuri, and I contributed to the recent BBC documentary Gaza: How to survive a warzone, as a narrator. I was working for nine months on this documentary, and now find it wiped and deleted…. This is my message to the BBC: Anything happens to me, the BBC is responsible for it.
It is stern but gentle, overly so in my view. But it has within it the assignment of responsibility—the non–West holding the mirror of which I write up to the West. There is a whiff of the future in Abdullah’s calmy spoken words.
And finally this, an image with which I wish to end these distressed reflections. It is another video posted by Palestine Will Be Free just a couple of days ago. There are no words, only acts. It shows a little Palestinian girl—what can she be, five, six, seven?—running forward in a West Bank street, at the top of which sits an Israeli military vehicle. She may as well have been scurrying along with friends, but then, as her older brother rushes up behind her, she stops and throws two stones, one from each hand, at the I.D.F. tank (or whatever it is). Then she turns and runs back to her brother, eyes bright, eyes wide open.
This is an updated and re-edited version of an essay that first appeared in Global Bridge.
