The sheer volume of livestreamed death has a way of numbing us to the individuals – named and unnamed – Israel has killed. Today, May 11, marks the anniversary of the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh. She was shot in the head by an Israeli sniper firing into a group of clearly-marked journalists, for the crime of being armed with a camera. The round was a 5.56mm green-tip – armour-piercing, NATO standard, US-manufactured.
Hours later, the Israeli military spokesperson Brig. Gen. Ran Kochav appeared on Army Radio. Shireen and her colleagues, he said, were “filming and working for a media outlet amidst armed Palestinians. They’re armed with cameras, if you’ll permit me to say so.”
In the four years since, Israel has killed at least 262 journalists and media workers – in Palestine, in Lebanon, in Iran, in Yemen. More than any government on record. The figure exceeds the journalists killed in the US Civil War, both World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, the Yugoslav wars and Afghanistan combined. At least 94 Palestinian journalists have been detained, of whom thirty remain in Israeli custody.
Shireen was not the only target that morning. Sharif al-Azab, a twenty-year-old from the refugee camp, tried three times to reach her with first aid. He was fired at each time. Her colleague Ali Al-Samoudi was hit in the same opening burst, shot in the shoulder. Ali has been targeted ever since. He was most recently released from Israeli detention after being tried via video link by the Ofer Military Court – having lost sixty kilograms over twelve months inside.
In Shireen’s case, as in countless others, Israel was not satisfied with murder. At her funeral, mourners were beaten as they carried her coffin, forced inch by inch to bring her to rest in the face of Zionist violence. But the strength of her people held. Her funeral and the memorials in her name were among the largest gatherings of Palestinians in recent memory.
The Palestinian poet and journalist Mohammed El-Kurd describes it in Perfect Victims:
“Everyone was there: the stay-at-homes, the engineers, the stone throwers, the self-described apolitical passersby, the paramedics, the students, the elderly bus drivers, the clergy. For a fleeting moment, the wounds didn’t hurt, the jail-time didn’t matter, the tear gas wasn’t so bad. For a fleeting moment, Shireen Abu Akleh liberated Jerusalem, and Jerusalem, in turn, gave her a funeral fit for a martyr.”
This is what Kochav fears, and what every state that arms and shields him fears. Not the camera as object, but what the camera makes possible: a people refusing to disappear, and the world made witness to the settler-colonial project.
Leave no stone unturned
Israel’s pursuit of Palestinians does not end at life. Funeral processions are routinely brutalised. Cemeteries are uprooted to make way for the Apartheid wall. Bodies are held as bargaining chips, and those returned come back with organs missing. The settler-colonial project has arrived at necroviolence – no stone left unturned in the quest for supremacy, no boundary, not even death, that it will not cross.
So the question presses, and it presses on us. Not on some distant body of international authority that has spent decades declining to act, but on us — those still breathing, still watching, still able to do something with our hands and our voices and our bodies. Have we exhausted every means? Have we turned every stone? Have we, each of us, done what we are capable of doing?
Shireen, were she still reporting, would not say we have done enough. For her, and for every life taken, disrupted, maimed and reduced by Zionism, neither can we.
With the anniversary of the Nakba approaching: be present, bear witness, resist the erasure.
From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.
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