This article is part of the dossier “What is to be Done?“, edited by Himmat Zoubi and Diana Abbani. The dossier, explores the role of academic, artistic, activist, and media practices amid ongoing genocide and the possibilities for action, solidarity, and resistance in Germany and beyond.
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In moments of massacre, a journalist’s duty is tested against its most basic promises: to witness, to record, to tell the truth. For Palestinian reporters, that truth is more than a collection of facts—it is a fight for survival, a defense of identity, and a refusal to be erased.
Out of Gaza, they insist on reporting from inside the suffering, in the language, rhythm, and imagery of the community enduring it. Media here is not simply a channel of information; it is a weapon of presence, an existential act that resists both annihilation and erasure.
Where dominant media theories speak of objectivity, balance, or representation, Gaza speaks of continuance. Every report, every image, every voice transmitted under siege becomes a refusal to disappear.
This insistence is ultimately about asserting the right to be part of history. Erasure works not only by destroying bodies but also by silencing their testimonies, removing them from the archive of humanity. Journalism interrupts this project: it names the dead, describes the destruction, and records the moment in its raw immediacy.
Unlike academic writing, which reflects later, or poetry, which translates pain into metaphor, journalism insists on the now. It bears witness in real time, staking a claim that Palestinians are not just remembered retroactively but are present actors in history as it unfolds.
But this raises a harder question: Has Palestinian media truly confronted the racist images projected onto it by Israeli and Western narratives? To answer, we have to unpack four archetypes the “other” imposes on Palestinians—and how local media has fought to dismantle them.
The Palestinian Who Doesn’t Exist
In Zionist logic, the Palestinian is not just different—they are a threat to existence itself.
This is the “zone of nonbeing” described by Frantz Fanon: a place where you are denied recognition and subjectivity. You are there, but not seen.
In most Western newsrooms, this plays out in language. Israeli deaths are attributed, Hamas is named, October 7 is invoked. Palestinian deaths are passive: “were killed,” “were found under rubble.” No one is named as the killer.
Local news challenged this by naming the dead, one by one. Projects like Gaza Martyrs List, Eyes on Palestine, and countless grassroots Instagram accounts have made it a mission to name every person killed, attach their photograph, and tell their story.
Instead of “50 Palestinians killed,” you get Omar, 12, who loved drawing birds; Rasha, 33, was a nurse who refused to leave her patients. This is a direct counter to the grammar of erasure—turning “were killed” into “was killed by Israeli airstrikes.”
The “Savage” Palestinian
Israeli leaders didn’t just frame the 2023–2024 war as a military campaign. They called it a war between “civilization” and “barbarism.”
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant spoke of Palestinians as human animals”. President Isaac Herzog declared, “It’s not just Hamas, it’s an entire nation.”
This is an old colonial language with a modern coat of paint. In the 19th century, Europe used it to justify empire. Today, Israel uses it to position itself as the West’s “front line” against the barbaric other.
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Just as crucially, journalists insisted on telling the mundane stories of life in captivity: weddings that went ahead despite airstrikes, children playing football in alleyways, families baking bread on open fires when ovens had no power. Coverage of these everyday scenes was not sentimental filler—it was a political act, a declaration that people insist on living even under conditions designed to make life impossible.
Barbarism thrives on erasing intellectual and artistic output. In response, cultural reporters and independent platforms such as We Are Not Numbers, Gaza Poets Society, and Palestine Writes amplified poetry, music, and visual art created during the war.
Broadcasting a rap performance from a refugee camp or publishing a painting made from the dust of bombed homes directly confronts the idea that Palestinians exist outside “civilization.” It asserts: our art exists, even when you try to erase us.
Palestinian media went further. Through stories of weddings celebrated amid airstrikes, children improvising games in rubble, families sharing bread baked on open fires, journalists revealed the values holding Palestinian society together.
These accounts describe not only survival but a cultural world built on solidarity, hospitality, love of land, and devotion to family. Palestinians shape their own narratives. constructing a vision of civilization anchored in care, dignity, and communal resilience.
The Palestinian Who Must Be Killed!
In the Israeli imagination, Gaza is not a home. It is a target zone.
Over and over, the strip, just 360 square kilometers with over two million people, has been painted as a weapons island, a place where life itself is suspect. Israeli officials describe it like a scene from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea: militants lurking like the Nautilus submarine, striking from hidden bases.
This is more than a metaphor. Scholars call it a “moral geography”: remapping a place so killing its people feels not like a crime, but a necessity. Gaza becomes what Achille Mbembe calls a “death-world”—a space where living conditions are so unbearable they mimic death itself.
Under this lens, there are no civilians. Not the journalists, not the children, not the elderly. Homes become launchpads, mosques become armories, kindergartens become cover for rockets.
In contrast, Palestinian media have worked to move beyond partisan and sectarian divides. This shift did not begin with the genocide but had already taken shape in earlier wars and uprisings, when reporters recognized that partisan coverage risked fragmenting the very people they sought to defend. During those moments, destruction and loss transcended faction: a bombed school was not Hamas’s or Fatah’s, but Palestinian.
Journalists, whether tied to official outlets, party-affiliated platforms, or working independently, shared a common task: to document daily life under siege, to challenge a narrative that stripped Gazans of their humanity, and to portray Palestinians not as seekers of death but as people determined to live until their last breath.
The Palestinian Body as Target
Palestinians know that sexual violence is not an accident of war, it is a tool of domination. Israeli television has aired confessions defending rape as a form of “pressure” on the enemy.
The killing of Dr. Adnan al-Bursh, a renowned surgeon, is one of the most brutal examples. He was raped and beaten to death in Israeli custody. His attackers were released. Israel’s national security minister called them “heroes”. This statement comes from an incident covered by Middle East Eye, where Itamar Ben-Gvir publicly defended settlers suspected of killing a Palestinian.
Western media barely touched the story. When CNN reported his death, it left out the rape entirely—even though UN investigators had evidence. Yet Israeli claims of “mass rape” by Hamas, unsupported by UN findings, were repeated by U.S. and European leaders without question.
Israeli outlets have broadcast detainees stripped, beaten, branded with slogans—humiliation turned into a public spectacle. The dead are often displayed in ways that feed voyeurism or pity, stripping them of individuality and agency. Palestinian media countered with a different image: freed prisoners smiling, standing tall, reclaiming their dignity.
In this way, Palestinian witnessing is distinct: it refuses voyeurism, refuses pity, and insists on agency. The camera becomes a tool not just for documentation, but for affirming life and reimagining presence under conditions designed to erase it.
Rethinking Journalism in Palestine
The idea of “neutral journalism” itself can be a colonial myth. Framed as objective, it pretends to stand above power, yet it often serves to conceal it. In Eurocentric media traditions, neutrality is a claim about detachment, but it implicitly enforces the status quo: whose lives matter, whose deaths are acceptable, whose suffering is worthy of attention.
In Gaza, claiming neutrality often means accepting the logic of extermination, documenting destruction without naming responsibility, and treating systematic erasure as inevitable.
This approach transforms journalism from a passive record into an active claim: Palestinians are present, they endure, and they continue to act even under conditions designed to render them invisible. It is not about “balancing” perspectives, but about confronting power and asserting reality. Neutrality here is a luxury the world cannot afford; truth-telling becomes the instrument of survival, resistance, and historical inscription.
To report from Palestine is to confront not just the violence of bombs, but the violence of words, frames, and silences. Local media has made its choice: to reject the image imposed by the “other,” and to tell the truth of a people who refuse to disappear.
The journalism Palestinians aspire to thrives: a media that protects against erasure, cultivates civic and cultural memory, and affirms the right to presence, agency, and joy. It is a journalism that does not merely survive violence but insists on a future where life, creativity, and humanity flourish despite all attempts at annihilation.
