On September 12, 2021, at Israel’s Reichman University, then-Foreign Minister and current Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid presented his vision for a long-term settlement between Israel and the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. Lapid’s plan— dubbed “Economy for Security”—outlined two stages: the first addressing the immediate humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and the second outlining a comprehensive development plan for Gaza, at the center of which was constructing a new Gazan seaport and providing a transportation link between Gaza and the West Bank.

Movement and access of people and goods into and out of Gaza has been an important topic in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations for decades. Establishing and providing access to a maritime trade hub would represent a major step toward expanding the Gazan and the overall Palestinian economy. However, to date, security, political, and economic barriers have prevented the development of such a port. A variety of models for this idea have been proposed, but none have been realized.

Any future effort to develop a Palestinian port will need to consider several factors: Palestinian national aspirations, Israeli security, institutional cooperation, costs, and location, among others. A port for Gaza has significant potential for good—expanding opportunities and building trust—but it is in all parties’ long-term interest for policymakers to be rigorous and methodical in evaluating options. This article examines the historical background of the Gaza seaport idea, the port’s treatment in the Oslo Accords and subsequent Israeli-Palestinian understandings, and reviews the main alternatives for developing a Palestinian seaport. It also identifies an optimal solution that maximizes the main actors’ preferences and that is worth consideration as policymakers seek fresh ideas to improve lives and rebuild confidence between Palestinians and Israelis.

Gaza has never had its own commercial cargo seaport, historically only accessing the sea through a small fishing port in Gaza City. Fishing has long been a central part of the Gazan economy, and Gaza City’s port is primarily used for fishing boats. Gaza’s port is shallow (about 5 meters, or 16 feet, deep) and lacks the docks, cranes, and warehouses necessary for handling modern cargo ships. With these limitations, virtually all goods that enter Gaza arrive over land from Israel and Egypt.

Prior to the Israeli occupation in the 1967 Six Day War, Gaza was administered by Egypt and all its foreign trade moved through Egyptian ports. After 1967, Gazan foreign trade shifted to Israeli ports, primarily Ashdod. Since 1994—following the Oslo Accords and establishment of the Palestinian Authority (PA)—Gazan exports and imports have relied on Israeli ports, usually moving through the Karni border crossing in north Gaza. The Egyptian seaports of El-Arish and Port Said have also been used to import and export a smaller volume of goods through the Rafah crossing on Gaza’s southern border.

A Palestinian Seaport in the Oslo Accords and Subsequent Negotiations

A seaport for Gaza was low on the agenda during the 1993 Israeli-Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) negotiations in Oslo, which ultimately resulted in the Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements (DOP). The DOP did not address the construction of a seaport in Gaza during the envisioned five-year transitional period of Palestinian autonomy. Instead, it simply stated that, along with several other organizations, “upon its inauguration, the [Palestinian] Council will establish…a Gaza Sea Port Authority” (DOP, Art. VII.4), and that a joint Israeli-Palestinian Continuing Committee for Economic Cooperation would “define guidelines for the establishment of a Gaza Sea Port Area” (DOP, Annex III, Art. 5). The parties recognized that building a seaport for Gaza would require significant investment and a construction timeline far beyond the five-year transitional period.

In negotiating the first Oslo implementation agreement—the 1994 Gaza-Jericho Agreement—the parties again pushed the issue to a later date, stating that until the construction of a Gaza seaport, “entry and exit of vessels, passengers and goods by sea would be through Israeli ports” (Art. XI.4.c.). The 1995 Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and Gaza, also known as “Oslo II” (the “Interim Agreement”) repeated verbatim the provisions of the Gaza-Jericho Agreement regarding a Gaza seaport (Interim Agreement, Annex II, Art. XIV.4). In sum, while the Oslo Accords reflected a Palestinian aspiration for developing a seaport in Gaza, they recognized that until it is constructed, Gaza would need to continue using Israeli (or Egyptian) seaports.

In October 1998, in the Wye River Memorandum, the parties again acknowledged the importance to the Palestinians of building a seaport in Gaza and committed themselves to quickly concluding an agreement regarding the construction of this port (Id. Art. III.4.). And finally, on September 4, 1999—four months after the contemplated end of the five-year transitional period and target date for concluding a permanent status agreement—the parties signed the Sharm El-Sheikh Memorandum, with detailed provisions regarding establishing a Gaza seaport. According to these provisions, construction of the Gaza seaport would begin on October 1, 1999, and once completed, the port would operate pursuant to the Interim Agreement, including its provisions related to customs, subject to the conclusion of a detailed, joint protocol regarding port operations, including security arrangements (Id., Section 6).

Following the unsuccessful Camp David summit in July 2000, Yasser Arafat’s PA— without coordination with Israel—began constructing a new seaport, using funds provided by the international community. The selected port site was near Nuseirat, about 5 km (3 miles) south of the existing fishing port in Gaza City. Subsequently, the PA agreed to negotiate with Israel, and on September 20, 2000, reached a detailed agreement called “Gaza Seaport Construction Understanding,” enabling construction to move forward with the aim of completing the port within eighteen months. A few days later, however, the second Intifada (also known as the “al Aqsa Intifada”) began, an outbreak of violence which lasted more than four years and led to the deaths of thousands of Israelis and Palestinians. During the fighting, Israel bombed the Gaza port construction site, destroying it.

In September 2005, after four years of violence and seeing no prospect for a comprehensive Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement, Israel unilaterally withdrew its military forces and civilian settlements from Gaza. Weeks later, on November 15, 2005, Israel and the PA entered into an “Agreement on Movement and Access,” which stated that the construction of a Gaza seaport may commence, and that Israel would not interfere with its operations. The agreement also stated that the two parties and the United States would establish a tripartite committee to develop security and other arrangements for the port prior to its opening (Id., Section 5).

However, in June 2007, before the construction of a Gaza seaport resumed, Hamas wrested control of Gaza from the PA. Because Hamas recognized neither Israel nor the Oslo Accords, all agreements and plans regarding the Gaza seaport were suspended. Because of Hamas’ hostility to Israel and its attempts to smuggle arms into Gaza, Israel and Egypt have since 2007 monitored and controlled the movement of goods and people across Gaza’s borders.

Considerations for a Future Gaza Seaport

The future of a seaport for Gaza remains unclear, but proposals like Prime Minister Lapid’s may be back on the table. In considering the location and operations of a future Gazan seaport, four factors must be evaluated: Israeli security; Palestinian national aspirations; safe passage between Gaza and the West Bank; and the current status of the divide between the PA-controlled West Bank and the Hamas-controlled Gaza.

Israeli Security

Israel’s primary security concern regarding a Gaza seaport is preventing the movement through it of terrorists, weapons, and explosives. The Oslo Accords included provisions for Israeli security personnel to participate, alongside PA officials, in inspecting passengers and goods crossing through all Palestinian land and sea borders. Pursuant to these provisions, Israeli security personnel operated at crossings between the Palestinian Territories and Israel, as well as all land crossings between the West Bank and Jordan and the crossing point between Gaza and Egypt.

The 2005 “Agreement on Movement and Access,” which was signed between Israel and the PA and followed the Israeli disengagement from Gaza, included principles for operating the land border crossings between Egypt and Gaza. After Hamas took over Gaza from the PA, important components of this agreement fell apart—notably the PA-Israel-Egypt partnership at the Kerem Shalom border crossing and European Union assistance in inspecting goods at the Rafah crossing. For many years after Hamas’ takeover of Gaza, Egypt imposed severe restrictions on the transit of goods and people at the Rafah border crossing, some of which have been lifted in recent years. In 2009, following an intense round of fighting between Israel and Hamas (Operation Cast Lead), Israel imposed a naval blockade on Gaza, extending twenty nautical miles into the sea. Since that time, all vessels carrying goods or passengers to Gaza are required to offload them for inspection in Egyptian or Israeli seaports, from where they are transported to Gaza by land.

As long as Hamas controls Gaza, it is hard to imagine an Israeli sign-off on a seaport inside Gaza, which would prevent inspections by Israeli, PA, or acceptable third-party security personnel. Thus, Israeli security considerations mandate that the inspection of incoming cargo and passengers be conducted outside Gaza.

Palestinian National Aspirations

National aspirations drive a Palestinian desire to have a seaport inside Gaza managed and operated exclusively by Palestinians, free of any Israeli control. The Palestinians consider a free Palestinian seaport a critical symbol of sovereignty and independence. However, Hamas’ control of Gaza complicates matters. Unlike the PLO, Hamas does not accept the Oslo Accords, including their security provisions, and its hostility to Israel would certainly preclude any role inside Gaza for Israeli supervision on the movement of goods and people to and from the Strip. Hamas’ control of Gaza would likely also make impossible the operation inside the Strip of third-party inspectors that are acceptable to Israel. This likely outcome was demonstrated when, following the unilateral redeployment of Israel from Gaza, arrangements were made between Israel and the PA where the Rafah land crossing, located on the border between Egypt and Gaza, would be operated by the PA under the supervision of a third-party—the European Union Border Assistance Mission Rafah (EUBAMR). After the Hamas takeover, however, the PA could not guarantee the safety of the EUBAMR observers, and they left.

West Bank-Gaza Safe Passage

The seaport envisioned for Gaza in the Oslo Accords was intended to serve the Palestinian Territories as a whole—the Gaza Strip (365 square km or 141 square miles) and the much larger, but landlocked, West Bank (5,655 square km or 2,183 square miles). The Oslo Accords expected arrangements to be made for safe passage between the West Bank and Gaza through Israel, subject only to Israel’s security considerations. Thus far, however, the parties have failed to negotiate a safe-passage arrangement. Going forward, planning for a Gaza seaport, especially its location and capacities, must take into consideration a safe passage regime between Gaza and the West Bank which would facilitate direct movement of goods.

Intra-Palestinian Divisions

The Gaza-West Bank divide makes most components of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict more challenging, not least of all efforts at economic development. More specifically, Hamas’ control of Gaza since 2007, its non-recognition of Israel and the PA, and its rejection of all Israeli-Palestinian agreements have been barriers to development. In the case of a Gaza seaport, without reunification of the West Bank and Gaza under a single government which abides by past agreements, numerous questions emerge around the operations of the port, the population it will serve, and the governmental authority that will be responsible for running it.

One possibility is to delay any further planning of a Gaza seaport until the fundamental issues around the Israel-PA-Hamas triangle have been resolved. Another, perhaps better, option is to begin the planning process, using it as a catalyst for incrementally resolving the more fundamental issues, while also alleviating the dire humanitarian conditions faced by the two million residents of Gaza.

Alternatives for a Gaza Seaport

In 2016, a group of American and Israeli experts in ports, shipping, economics, security, and Middle East affairs conducted a comprehensive study of options for providing the Palestinians with a seaport. (See Figure 1 for the main alternative locations proposed for the port.) The study identified several options for a Palestinian seaport, which can be grouped along two sets of criteria—location and size:

1) An autonomous Palestinian pier (that is, a dedicated Palestinian section within

an existing or a future port) vs. a new, separate Palestinian port.

2) A major port designed to handle large ships and volumes of cargo vs. a small port, designed to handle small ships and cargo volumes.

There are a number of options for the parties to consider in seeking to build a Palestinian seaport, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. Among the primary options are: 1) continuance of the status quo where Palestinian foreign trade is accomplished through Israel’s and Egypt’s seaports; 2) establishing a Palestinian pier in Israel’s Ashdod Port; 3) building a seaport in Gaza; 4) constructing an island off Gaza’s coast that will serve as a port; 5) establishing a Palestinian pier in Cyprus’s Larnaca Port; 6) establishing a Palestinian pier in Egypt’s El-Arish Port. But it is the final option, Option 7—proposing the construction of a port for Gaza on Egyptian territory adjacent to the Strip’s border—which may hold the most promise.

Figure 1: Alternative Port Options

Option 1: Continue the Status Quo, Using Israeli Seaports for Palestinian Cargoes

Today, most foreign cargo destined for Gaza is shipped to Ashdod and trucked 90 km (56 miles) to the Kerem Shalom Border Crossing, located on the border junction between Egypt, Gaza, and Israel at the southern tip of Gaza. At Kerem Shalom, Israel has constructed a vast and sophisticated terminal on about 50 hectares (123.5 acres), with high-wall inspection cells, steel gates, and surveillance towers. The imported cargo is unloaded from Israeli trucks and inspected by Israeli inspectors. The cleared cargo is then loaded onto secured Gazan trucks and moved through steel gates across the border into a Hamas-controlled Palestinian inspection terminal. Gazan exports follow a similar process, but in the opposite direction.

Despite tense Israeli-Hamas relations, over the years a close operational cooperation between the Kerem Shalom terminals has developed. Special “sterilized” trucks— which do not leave the compound, thus limiting any threat from the outside—move the goods back and forth between terminals. While Hamas controls the Palestinian terminal, PA representatives are also present in the terminal and observe the process. The PA—in coordination with Israel—also issues all export and import licenses related to Gaza (as it does for West Bank licenses), and—in accordance with the 1994 Israel-PLO Paris Protocol—it informs Israel of each import request. From the standpoint of Israel’s security interest, the status quo is perhaps the optimal option. Existing Israeli ports can easily continue to accommodate the Gazan foreign trade, which accounts for only 5 percent of Israel’s overall trade. Israel has recently inaugurated two new, modern ports which double the overall capacity of Israel’s port system, allowing it to handle all Israeli and Palestinian foreign trade for many years to come. The current Israel-PA-Hamas operation at Kerem Shalom is quite efficient, processing about 1,000 trucks daily. The present system satisfies Israel’s security concerns and is not dependent on developing West Bank-Gaza safe passage arrangements since West Bank goods are trucked directly to and from Israeli ports. However, the overall Ashdod/Kerem-Shalom/Gaza process is long and costly due to the relatively high labor cost in Israel and the 90 km (56 miles) of trucking required between Ashdod and Kerem Shalom. Importantly, this option also does not meet Palestinian national aspirations for a Palestinian-controlled port.

Option 2: Designate an Autonomous Palestinian Section Inside the Ashdod Port

If the parties were to seek to build on the current system while providing for more Palestinian responsibility in handling port operations, they could negotiate a “Palestinian Pier” at the Ashdod Port. In such an arrangement, a dedicated section of the Ashdod Port would be leased to the PA for a long term (e.g., 99 years). The Palestinian section could include 2-3 berths, storage sheds, and a gate (collectively, a “pier”). The PA would be responsible for the operations of the pier and would collect port dues. The PA would employ Palestinian labor, which, like many other West Bank and Gaza Palestinians already employed inside Israel, would be bussed daily (or weekly) from the West Bank and Gaza. Israel would remain responsible for overall security, including inspection of imported goods. The transfer of cargo between Ashdod and Kerem Shalom would be carried out by Israeli-approved Palestinian drivers and trucks. Limited, additional inspection would be conducted at the Kerem Shalom Border Crossing.

To the Palestinians, this option partially satisfies their national aspirations, creates more Palestinian-held jobs, and provides for savings in costs of port handling, trucking, and inspection, as all such services would be provided by lower-cost Palestinian labor. Further, the need for investments is also minimal. For Israel, this option poses some security risks, as Israel would be ceding a degree of control over the import-export process and—by granting Palestinian access to Israel—may be raising risks in Israeli civilian spaces and security areas, such as at the Israeli Naval Base in Ashdod.

Option 3: Develop a New Palestinian Seaport in Gaza

A third option is the construction of a new seaport in Gaza, operated by Palestinians. The port would presumably be located at the Gaza City/Nuseirat location. A rough cost estimate for constructing such a port is $300–400 million.

A new port in Gaza would meet all Palestinian requirements, serving as a symbol of Palestinian sovereignty and self-reliance. However, this option is also one of the most expensive and politically complex. As of this writing, there seems little chance for the parties to achieve the degree of progress in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict necessary to make a Palestinian port in Gaza feasible. Israel’s position remains that it must retain the ability to inspect—directly or through an acceptable third party—all imports to Gaza, which cannot be done if the port is located inside Gaza. Furthermore, the current proposed site at the Gaza City/Nuseirat location is cordoned by densely populated refugee camps, making land access difficult and limiting the availability of nearby areas for necessary port-related development, rendering this option impractical.

Option 4: Build a Palestinian Port on an Artificial Island Off the Coast of Gaza

In 2011, former Israeli Minister of Transportation Israel Katz proposed that a large, 8 sq km (3 sq mile) artificial island be constructed off the coast of Gaza, with a port for the Palestinian Territories. This island would be connected to the shore by a 4.5 km

(2.8 mile) fixed bridge with a drawbridge section able to cut-off the port in case of a security emergency. Under this proposal, the inspection of trucks and cargoes would be conducted on the bridge by international inspectors. Additionally, Katz proposed that the island would also accommodate a Palestinian airport, a power generation plant, a desalination plant, and a marina. As indicated earlier, Prime Minister Lapid recently adopted this plan.

For Palestinians, this option provides the advantage of a seaport in Gaza, but with more operational difficulties due to limited access through a single bridge. The Palestinians would forgo some sovereignty in the process due to international inspections, but Israel would likely find this option more acceptable than a port in the Strip. However attractive, this option carries a huge cost, estimated at $5-10 billion with a construction time of five to ten years. The island is also likely to adversely impact Gaza’s and Israel’s coastline, creating considerable resistance from environmentalists.

Option 5: Dedicate a Section for Palestinian Use in Cyprus’s Larnaca Seaport

In 2018, former Israeli Minister of Defense (currently Israel’s Minister of Finance) Avigdor Lieberman proposed his own solution: that Gaza-destined cargo be discharged from foreign ships at a dedicated section in the Port of Larnaca, Cyprus. Once there, cargo would be inspected by Israeli officials and reloaded onto small Gazan cargo ships sailing to the existing Gaza fishing port (or a new Palestinian port to be built in Gaza), with Israeli Navy escort. The Cypriot Government expressed interest in this idea, in part because of the jobs it would create for Cypriots.

This option allows for Israeli security inspection of Gaza-destined goods, and for Palestinians it allows for the development of the existing fishing port of Gaza, turning it into a cargo port. The disadvantage, however, would be the additional costs of double-handling and additional shipment distance between Cyprus and Gaza. Further, the potential expansion of the fishing pier located in front of Gaza City is quite limited.

Option 6: Use the Egyptian El-Arish Seaport for Palestinian Foreign Trade

The Palestinians could also seek to use a section of an Egyptian seaport—El-Arish— under a long-term (e.g., 99 years) land lease. This follows a common worldwide practice in which coastal countries provide landlocked neighbors with autonomous ports (e.g.,

Tanzania/Zambia, Peru/Bolivia, and Uruguay/Paraguay).

This option is similar to the proposal for a Palestinian section in Israel’s Ashdod Port—mirroring Option 2 above—but would be accomplished through Egypt rather than Israel. It could be developed as part of a forthcoming expansion of the El-Arish Port planned by the Egyptian government. From El-Arish, Gaza-destined imports would be trucked to the Kerem Shalom Crossing Point, with exports moving in the opposite direction. As in Option 2, the PA would be responsible for the operations of the Palestinian pier in El-Arish and would collect port dues. The PA would employ Palestinian workers, who would be bussed in daily from Gaza. Egypt would be responsible for security, including inspection of imports and exports.

The primary difference between this option and Option 2 is capacity: Egypt’s El-Arish Port is much smaller than Israel’s Ashdod Port and currently cannot accommodate an autonomous Palestinian section. This alternative, therefore, can be applied only when the new El-Arish Port, still in early planning, is built. The new port, estimated by Egypt to cost $1.3 billion, will probably take five years to construct. Further, trucking Gazan cargoes 45 km (28 miles) on Egyptian roads may require special arrangements in terms of licensing trucks and drivers and providing Egyptian security along the route.

Option 7: Build an Autonomous Palestinian Seaport on the South Gazan Border

Finally, access to a seaport for the Palestinians can be achieved through the construction of a new, autonomous “South Gaza Port” on Egyptian territory adjacent to the Gazan border, consisting only of ship-handling facilities. The cargo would be transported from ships directly to the Kerem Shalom Crossing, which would be expanded to become a “dry” port, providing all the services of a seaport except for loading/unloading ships. A 10-km (6.2 mile) road connecting the seaport to the dry port would be constructed in the half-kilometer-wide (one-third of a mile) Egyptian security zone that runs along Gaza’s southern border. Figure 2 illustrates the seaport/ dry-port concept proposed for the South Gaza Port plan.

This conceptual port would be relatively small—requiring only the capacity to meet Palestinian import/export needs—including a breakwater, three berths, and a 650-meter (2,132 foot) dock with 12 meters (39 feet) of water depth alongside. Such a port would cost an estimated $200-250 million and take two to three years to complete, including planning. The autonomous South Gaza Port would be managed and operated by Palestinians, including the trucking to Kerem Shalom. If found more desirable by Egypt, the actual port concession could be granted to a Global Port Operator, which, in turn, would contract with the PA, Hamas, or both. Granting a concession to such an operator is a common worldwide practice, currently in use by both Egypt and Israel.

For Palestinians, the primary advantage of this port is location: for all practical purposes the port would function as if it is in Gaza, despite being just outside the Gaza Strip. To facilitate operations, this port could have a special nearby border crossing to allow easy access to Gazan employees. The port location, 10 km (6.2 miles) away from Kerem Shalom, would also provide significant savings in land transportation costs compared to the 45 km (28 miles) distance of the El-Arish Palestinian Pier and the 90 km distance to Ashdod. This option also satisfies Israeli and Egyptian security concerns, as the proven Kerem Shalom Crossing Point operations would be maintained. Egypt would also benefit from the payments by the port operator for leasing the port site and using the intra-port road, and from fees charged for ship services (such as pilotage, towage, and channel fees) and peripheral security services.

Figure 2: The South Gaza Seaport Plan

An Opportunity to Think Bigger: The Case for a Tri-State Free Trade Zone

None of the options reviewed above can satisfy all the opposing requirements and concerns of the Palestinians (sovereignty) and Israelis/Egyptians (security). Israel and Egypt are not likely to agree to a Palestinian port inside Gaza, and the Palestinians will not be satisfied with a port outside Gaza. However, it seems that the South Gaza Port option could be the compromise most acceptable for all sides. For the Palestinians, its location outside of Israel and as close as possible to Gaza makes it the best option outside of the Strip. For Israel, retaining the current system of inspections at Kerem Shalom should satisfy Israeli security concerns. For Egypt, constructing a port on its sovereign territory would generate substantial economic benefits and pose almost no risk. Another advantage of the South Gaza option is its practicality in terms of investment and construction time, especially when contrasted with the artificial island and El-Arish port options.

The development of a port for Gaza along the South Gaza Port plan has potential far exceeding the logistical savings in moving goods. The port project could be an important “confidence building measure,” expanding trust and cooperation among the PA, Hamas, Israel, and Egypt, while also relieving some of Gaza’s economic stress. It may also be a powerful incentive for Hamas to maintain calm—or perhaps a disincentive to launch attacks which might disrupt the Gazan economy. Such a step may fit into the Bennett-Lapid government’s commitment to “shrinking the conflict”.

Further, taking advantage of the nearby seaport, the expanded Kerem Shalom could become the logistical and industrial hub of Gaza (indeed all the Palestinian Territories), which could attract export/import-related activities. Kerem Shalom is located at Gaza’s widest and least populated point, where land for industrial development is still available and where Israel could consider land-swaps as a part of future Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Moreover, due to Kerem Shalom’s strategic location at the meeting point of Gaza, Egypt, and Israel, it could be declared a tri-state Free Trade Zone (FTZ). A future Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement is likely to diffuse many of the parties’ security concerns and facilitate an uninterrupted flow of trade among these countries.

Kerem Shalom could also be connected to the Israeli rail system which, in turn, could be extended to the West Bank, providing safe passage between the South Gaza Port, Kerem Shalom dry port/FTZ complex (and Gaza, more generally) and the West Bank. Eventually, should Kerem Shalom be integrated into the Egyptian rail system, it could become the hub of a regional transportation system. Additionally, the Kerem Shalom FTZ could be expanded into Egypt, generating employment opportunities for Egyptian residents of North Sinai. Moreover, qualifying Egyptian products manufactured in the FTZ (in addition to qualifying Palestinian products) could be imported free of customs duties to the United States under the American Qualifying Industrial Zone (QIZ) Initiative adopted in 1996 to support the peace process in the Middle East. However distant a comprehensive negotiated peace may seem, the ripple effects of peace could be momentous. Developing the infrastructure and institutions to prepare for that day can be a step toward making that potential a reality.

While plenty of obstacles remain, the years ahead may be an opportune time to revisit options for developing a Gazan port. Policymakers on all sides should not delay discussion around a Gaza seaport until the conflict’s fundamental issues have been resolved. Rather, weighing all political, economic, and security dimensions, this idea can be seen as a vehicle with the potential to generate momentum around some of the more fundamental issues, thus creating incremental progress that improves the political landscape and helps reset the stage to negotiate a long-term peace.

Building a seaport in the Gaza Strip, amid the current Palestinian political, economic, and social climate at the internal and international levels, may seem unrealistic. Such a project is predominantly subject to political and security considerations rather than economic ones. Most important of these is the issue of Palestinian sovereignty in light of the internal division, as well as the suspension of the negotiation process between Israel and Palestine. In addition, the Israeli restrictions imposed on economic development prevent most international parties, and even the Palestinian private and public sectors, from investing in the Gaza Strip or the West Bank.

Even the best development plans, especially in the Gaza Strip, are doomed to fail as long as the Palestinians are deprived of their land and natural resources, and are denied the right to build a port that allows them to engage in the most basic commercial and economic activities. International parties have not concerned themselves with the restrictions imposed by the occupying power, as much as they have with the repercussions of the recurrent rounds of violence between Israel and Gaza or the West Bank. The international community’s reaction has remained limited to de-escalation attempts and pumping humanitarian aid or reconstruction funds through indirect, slow, and costly mechanisms to avoid dealing with Hamas. This has allowed Israel to prevent the entry of materials and equipment into Gaza. In other cases, international parties provided aid through the so-called UN-led Gaza Reconstruction Mechanism, launched in 2014; the mechanism gives the government of Israel a “security veto over all items”. Economic development has therefore become subject to Israeli security concerns, regardless of the welfare of the people of Gaza.

Israeli security concerns, and their aggravating economic effects, have become a serious obstacle. Overcoming this obstacle requires quick action, a political outlook that prioritizes the need for a port, and a new mechanism that is agreed upon by the major stakeholders, emphasizing Palestinian ownership of the process. Indeed, the Palestinians have no shortage of ideas on how to invest in available, albeit limited, resources. They are capable of coming up with a development vision, with regard to the Palestinian-administered lands, to facilitate their lives and improve their economic conditions.

In the context of Gaza’s difficult conditions—where its people are isolated, and development and mobility are severely restricted—it is necessary to discuss the possibilities of building a port as an economic tool, because the Palestinians need much more than humanitarian aid to achieve long-term stability. Rather, the Palestinians need a sustainable development plan, the ability to trade, create jobs, and address the environmental damages caused by successive Israeli attacks, not to mention drinking water and sanitation issues.

From Accepted Idea to Halted Construction

For Palestinians, a port in Gaza is a necessity on the way to establishing a Palestinian state, and the basis for its economic development. For a coastal state like Palestine, the construction and operation of the port is an important economic lever and means of transportation for import and export. Palestinians aspire to sovereignty, independence, and improvement in living conditions. Hence, the main motives behind establishing the port are both political and economic. A port will provide services to all Palestinians in the various governorates and will serve the Palestinian territories as a whole, and would serve to bolster the network of nearby ports and other land crossings. This necessitates studying the Palestinian needs in establishing the port for commercial and humanitarian transport.

Prior to 1967, Gaza had access to a port from which it exported and imported what it needed. The issue of building a seaport and an airport in Gaza was also raised in the peace process—first in the 1993 Oslo Accords, and then in the 1999 Sharm El-Sheikh Memorandum. The implementation was supposed to start through the Sharm El-Sheikh Memorandum signed in September 1999.

Throughout the years and despite the many proposals, Israel only expressed official approval for the establishment of a port in Gaza in the agreements signed in Oslo and Sharm El-Sheikh. These agreements were followed by Palestinian governmental procedures and decrees to organize the construction and management of the port. Pursuant to the Palestinian Presidential Decree No. 47 of 1999, the Palestinian Sea Ports Authority was established. On April 30, 2000, Presidential Decree No. 1, was issued for the establishment of the Gaza Sea Port. The Palestinian Sea Ports Authority’s main task was to provide a highly efficient maritime transport system in Palestine and establish, manage, and operate the marine facilities, including commercial, tourist, and fishing seaports in Palestine.
At the beginning of 2000, the Palestinian Authority (PA) began building a small port on the coast of the center of Gaza City with European funding, but the port was bombed and destroyed by Israel in the second Intifada, only three months after its construction began. After the 2005 Agreement on Movement and Access, after the unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, the PA started construction again. The agreement also included a clause guaranteeing that the port would not be destroyed by Israel again.

Yet, after Hamas won the second legislative elections in 2006 and took control of Gaza, and the PA’s influence declined and became limited to the West Bank, the Israeli-imposed blockade and the Palestinian political division in 2007 halted the Palestinian development process in various fields, including the construction of the port.

In light of the deteriorating economic conditions and despite the escalation of the conflict and Israeli attacks on Gaza throughout the past years, there have been renewed talks about the port in Gaza. This came either in the context of breaking the blockade, or through the attempts to improve the economic conditions in Gaza, which suffers skyrocketing unemployment rates that reached 46.9 percent in 2021, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics.

During the 2014 war on Gaza, Hamas, during ceasefire negotiations, demanded the establishment of the port, but Israel rejected the idea categorically. Hamas’ spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri told Al Jazeera at the time that “the Israeli response delivered by the Egyptian side to the Palestinian delegation did not mention the commercial port that the Palestinians demand, nor the airport they demand to reactivate.” Then, the debate about the port expanded, and several reconstruction proposals emerged.
Israel’s refusal is based mainly on security pretexts, although achieving security requires reducing the conflict and improving the economic conditions of Palestinians, not the opposite. Moreover, the Palestinians’ need for Israeli ports will remain, especially when it comes to the bulky goods that require major ports.

Options Moving Forward

A group of alternatives were proposed in academic and political circles to reactivate a “sea channel” in Gaza. The issue of the seaport falls under the larger issue of borders and mobility, which includes the land crossings, but given Palestinian and regional considerations, there have been talks about an alternative solution to provide a sea channel for Gaza as an alternative to the port. Former Mossad Director Meir Dagan proposed an artificial island off the coast of Gaza that would serve as a seaport and an airport. The idea was later adopted by the former Minister of Transportation, Israel Katz. However, the Israeli government rejected the proposal on August 5, 2016, for security reasons. Ismail Haniyeh, then-deputy head of Hamas’s political bureau, responded by describing the construction of a port in Gaza as “an inherent right of the Palestinian people,” adding that it should have been fulfilled after the 2014 Israeli war on Gaza ended.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian Sea Ports Authority said that it was studying proposals to use Egypt’s El-Arish Port temporarily and develop maritime transport lines between the Port of El-Arish and Gaza’s harbor to dispense with the Israeli ports, which charge the PA high costs and affect the development of the trade sector in the Palestinian territories.

The Israeli government re-discussed the port after the security, political, and economic developments in Gaza in 2018, following border protests known as the Great March of Return. During his visit to Cyprus, former Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman discussed a sea bridge from Cyprus to Gaza on June 21, 2018.

Other proposals were discussed, including a “spatial vision for the governorates of Gaza”, which focused on raising the economic standards by the year 2050. Seventy stimulus projects were proposed, including a “floating port” to confront the challenges mentioned in the United Nations report “Gaza in 2020: A liveable place?”

According to the Sea Ports Authority, the PA has studied all the presented alternatives, but it has not given any official response. In addition, all these proposals were not formally presented by decision-makers. Give n the Gaza Strip’s small area (362 square km), the massive population density, the limited agricultural lands, and the environmental repercussions of building the port, these proposals can be discussed under four main categ ories: establishing a p ort in the Gaza Strip, establishing sea passage lines, leasing a pier in an already-existing port, and building an artificial island off the Gaza coast.

A port can be built in central, northern, or southern Gaza. The Palestinians accept establishing a port in Gaza, regardless of its location, as long as it serves their economic interests and maritime sovereignty, especially if the construction specified in the Oslo Accords and Sharm el-Sheikh Memorandum is resumed. Such a port would be accepted and funded by the international community.

Israel does not want to build or activate the port in the south under security pretexts, while the Palestinian political situation, where Hamas and the PA compete for influence and legitimacy, further complicates the issue. Although the establishment of a port in the north of Gaza facilitates Israel’s security control over it, it could cause environmental problems, especially coastal erosion.
Sea passage lines, on the other hand, are mainly political rather than economic. Unlike the port, they are temporary solutions that do not bring about economic development. And despite having zero environmental and geographical problems, they need international approval and security guarantees. Israel proposed the Cyprus-Gaza maritime line, whereby a port is built in Cyprus and goods are shipped to Gaza, an indication of its initial approval, but the idea has not yet turned into an official project.

Neither Hamas nor the PA have objected to the establishment of a sea passage line as long as it is a temporary solution until the construction of the port is resumed. Moreover, the Palestinian Prime Minister’s Council submitted a proposal studying the establishment of a sea line between the Gaza port and the nearest Turkish port under Turkish sponsorship and supervision.
When it comes to leasing a pier, the options are Israel and Egypt. Leasing a pier is essentially a temporary solution and does not eliminate the need for a port in Gaza and its development to handle commercial and humanitarian transportation.

Israel may accept leasing a pier in the Port of Ashdod because it meets its security requirements. And since it is an existing port, there will not be any additional environmental or geographical damages. However, Israel will not accept that it be administered by the Palestinians. In addition, just leasing a pier will not fulfill Palestinians’ political and economic aspirations, and it will incur large land transportation fees through Israel. On the other hand, Egypt, which already has the only land port with Gaza and deals with Gaza’s humanitarian needs, may agree to the proposal. The Palestinians accept this proposal and have studied it. It will not conflict with Palestinian aspirations since it is only a temporary solution. It will generate financial returns for Egyptians and Palestinians and will eliminate the need for the high transportation costs via the Ashdod Port. There will be no additional environmental and geographic problems since the port is already standing. As for the Israeli position, it may be positive but only with international and security arrangements. To succeed, there must be regional consensus, a political solution, and the approval of the PA.

Alternatively, building an artificial island off the coast of the Gaza Strip that contains a seaport and an airport is one of the best ideas on the environmental, geographical, and operational levels. However, its costs are very high, and there may be a political and security dilemma imposed by Israel since the island would be part of the Palestinian territories, but the operational and security control would lie with Israel.

Any solution needs political approval from the main parties and an international agreement. A port is not just a commercial enterprise, but an expression of national sovereignty and operational government administration. Ships and tankers operate in line with the regulations of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and other international regulations, such as the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea of 1982, the Convention on Facilitation of International Maritime Traffic (FAL) of 1965, and other international agreements that address international trade at sea, which may qualify the Palestinians to manage the port.

In the meantime, the Sea Ports Authority is following up on Palestine’s accession to the IMO to ensure the development of the maritime transportation sector in the Palestinian territories. This raises questions regarding Gaza’s ability to operate the port on an international level. The PA would reject any proposal that would establish coexistence between the Hamas-ruled Gaza and Israel without a political solution. Moreover, Palestinians’ lack of a unified vision for the port shows that they are unable to move forward in its construction and operation, which is what Israel is trying to promote internationally.

Establishing the Port Is in Everyone’s Interest

In general, seaports between neighboring countries are established under international agreements. Moreover, a port project is not a matter of construction only, but a matter of operation as well. Given the Palestinian situation, the issue of building a seaport and an airport was raised within the political solution and it was discussed in bilateral agreements. Reactivating those agreements is the only realistic alternative, especially since European funding has already been allocated, and in 2016 was estimated at $200­250 million according to the Gaza Seaport Group of Experts. In comparison, the costs of establishing an artificial island are estimated to be a whopping $7-10 billion. Who would bear these increased construction costs, in light of the decline in the financial aid allocated to the Palestinian people?

Security concerns may be a point of departure for the resumption of the construction of the port. Yet without the provision of the requirements for economic stability, the political situation will remain in crisis. Resuming construction is a Palestinian priority because it reduces the high transportation costs. Currently, five to eight thousand truckloads of goods enter the Gaza Strip every month from Israel. The Gaza seaport would save extra costs for the benefit of the Palestinian economy.

Furthermore, Gaza imports all its requirements and needs. Reducing import costs would support the economy on the one hand, and provide employment opportunities on the other, which will reduce the skyrocketing unemployment rates. Thus, the establishment of the port will bring about a boom in the Palestinian economy as a whole. Accordingly, the solution remains primarily political, because Israel’s security complications would doom any proposed alternative to failure. The first steps to restart the construction of the seaport begins with reactivating international agreements, which are the guarantor of the port’s international operation.

Given the current internal Palestinian political division, it is possible to rely on a temporary solution under UN and international auspices to confront the Israeli rejection, which would change the prevailing Palestinian mindset. Establishing the port and maximizing economic gains would push all parties to achieve common interests while benefiting the Palestinian people at the same time.
The construction of the port is an important solution that would help alleviate the humanitarian crises in the Gaza Strip, which are the main cause of tension and wars between Israel and the Palestinian military factions. A port in Gaza would be a powerful incentive for reconciliation between Gaza and the West Bank, as the interests of both sides could be realized. International organizations can be involved in the management and supervision of the port, as was the case with the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt, where a European monitoring mission once supervised the crossing to provide security guarantees for all parties. A port in Gaza should not wait for reconciliation. It should be an incentive for it. A new perspective must be adopted based on the fact that a port in Gaza is an important factor for stability, development, and peace in the region.

Zahra Hankir is the creator and editor of the best-selling anthology Our Women on the Ground, which gathers the essays of nineteen women reporting from conflict zones in the Arab World. The book has been critically acclaimed, and described as a groundbreaking work of journalism that cuts through old stereotypes about the region, and the work of women reporters within it. It is also a moving collection of stories that, in its Best Books of 2019 list, the Guardian said “showcases journalism at its bravest. Determination, grit, and humor shine through”.

Hankir credits her start in the region to working as an economics correspondent for Bloomberg in Dubai. Her time there coincided with the beginning of the Arab uprisings, and later their fallout. With a dearth of Arabic speakers in her office, she also helped monitor local media; according to her, that was how she began following and developing a passion for the work that Arab women journalists were doing in their own countries to cover an unprecedented era of change and upheaval. Noting the discrepancies between how the Arab World is covered by Arabs and Westerners, and the nuance of those differences, became an inspiration for the book she would later publish.

Hankir has returned numerous times to her family’s home in Lebanon—where she lived half her life—throughout her career, both as a freelance journalist and as a reporter for the local Now Lebanon. She continues to write with compassion and clarity of the harrowing struggles people in that country face. But she also writes of culture, identity, and small moments of recognition and personal triumph people find in their everyday lives. Hankir sat down with Cairo Review editor Leslie Cohen to discuss her work, how experience has shaped her journalism, and where she is headed next.

Cairo Review: First of all, your book Women on the Ground is a captivating read. How have you felt its impact in the years since you published it in 2019?

Zahra Hankir: I’m very proud of that book. I started work on it five years ago, but it still feels so relevant to the current moment. Looking at the state of journalism and the state of politics in the Arab World, and in particular looking at, for example, Shireen Abu Akleh’s death in Palestine, the stakes that women face are very high. So, I receive a lot of messages from young Arab women journalists across the region who are often seeking advice or just reaching out to say how inspired they are by the women in the book. It gives me the most fulfillment and gratification to know that it still has this ripple effect on inspiring women across the region, despite the fact that there are so many risks, that people are still committed to doing that truth-telling and that storytelling.

Have the stakes gone up for women reporting in the region? And speaking further to Shireen’s death, and whether any justice is served, will this affect morale for women reporting in the region?

Of course there is that question of justice and accountability and that does weigh on people, not solely in covering Palestine and the nuances around Palestine, but around the region as well. We are continuing to see journalists being detained, threatened, and assaulted on the job. The region continues to lag compared to other regions in terms of both press freedoms and women’s rights issues. So when you bring those two together, it creates a difficult situation for women journalists. People often ask me, “Well, is it unique to women? Or do men face the same issues in the region?” I would say that men face similar issues when it comes to security, but that there are many factors that are intensified for women.

That might have to do with access, with family, with sexual harassment; that might have to do with workplace discrimination, with being targeted solely because you are a woman in specific situations. I would also add to this that there is substantial risk for women journalists online. A lot of women have online presence on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, because they turn to that type of journalism to have an immediate relationship with their audiences and immediate access to their audiences. But oftentimes that opens them up to trolling and online abuse, which some of the women in Our Women on the Ground have experienced. Aida Alami, the Moroccan journalist, is one of them. I personally experienced it myself. That is also another front of harassment that women are being subjected to.

There was a UN report not too long ago that specifically focused on the trolling elements. And it goes even beyond trolling: it is harassment that can sometimes turn into real-life threats.

Do you feel in the years that you’ve been doing this work, that you’ve learned tricks or ways of making it a bit easier for yourself as a female journalist? How would you say that you’ve adapted or that you’ve learned or changed as a journalist?

I am not currently based there, but when I do journalism in the region—and the most recent substantial bit of journalism I did was in the aftermath of the Beirut blast—I have learned to become a lot less, or have tried to be a lot less emotionally involved with all the sources that I speak to or that I interview. And that’s extremely difficult to do because often these are people from your own country; sometimes they’re from your own neighborhood. Sometimes they might be people that you know, that are suffering in a way that is really, really profound.

It’s hard, but I did learn from the women in Our Women on the Ground that sometimes having that distance can be beneficial because otherwise the trauma begins to impact you and settle within you, and that can then impact your work. So I throw myself into the reporting and I do what I need to do and I don’t give myself time to think about it in the moment. And then I sort through my own feelings after I’ve done the work. But as a journalist, my primary goal is to report these stories, to do what I have to do on the ground to ensure that I’m getting stories from the people themselves rather than talking heads or officials; that I’m actually witnessing what they’ve experienced, the sights, and the sounds and smells, and all that kind of thing.

I personally have not experienced similar threats or violence, that a lot of the women in the book have experienced—for those who have covered warfare, for those who are from countries in which it’s more difficult to move around as a woman. So I do not claim to have experienced any of those difficulties myself. That said, I did notice and I think this is worth saying that you do see some of the women experiencing very similar challenges. So one of the ones that came up a lot was guilt. Am I doing enough to tell the story? Am I disappointing the people that I’m writing about? Am I doing the story justice? Am I betraying my family? Am I betraying my husband? Am I betraying my children and betraying my role as a mother, as a wife, as a potential partner? Is me being a journalist preventing me from getting married and having children? There’s this very, very heavy sense of guilt across all the chapters, that I personally have not found with male reporters who cover the region.

The risks are different from country to country. So we have had brazen attacks on journalists across the region, both female and male, in the past few years. You see what happened to Jamal Khashoggi, obviously, it’s of a different nature, given how highly politicized that was and how his commentary from DC agitated certain forces in Saudi Arabia, but it still speaks to this element of speaking out. And speaking truth to power can often land you in very difficult situations and put your life at risk. Similarly, in Lebanon, there was a journalist called Lokman Slim who spoke out against certain political forces in Lebanon, namely Hezbollah, and he was assassinated in broad daylight. We don’t know who the perpetrators are, but people speculate as to who they are.

And then you saw in Egypt, Lina Attalah, who is in my book; she’s an excellent journalist. She was detained outside the prison where her colleague Alaa Abdelfattah was being held in 2020. And she was detained for some of that journalism that she was doing. She was then released, but I think that’s partially because she has such a high public profile. Again, this is somebody who was detained for doing her job. So as you can see, it does impact both men and women. But I would say there are unique challenges for women.

Even in Lebanon, where you could say it’s more liberal or easier to operate or live in as a female journalist, you still do see and experience harassment. There still are security issues. You do have to engage in some self-censorship. You do have invisible red lines that you shouldn’t be crossing. And these are things that I experienced as a journalist myself as well. At that time. I certainly experienced sexual harassment there. I certainly experienced or chose to engage in self-censorship at various points.

It’s interesting how you reference starting to build something of a wall or a way to distance yourself. I thought your piece on a Lebanese man named Elie was so sensitive to the honesty of that human connection that you had with someone, even though they were a source and you a journalist. I can see you needing to have that wall in yourself, but does having it influence your work as well?

I appreciate that. I still have a picture of him on my wall. I know that I just spoke to the importance of having that distance. And I really did try to have that distance with Elie, who was a survivor of the Beirut blast, lost his home, and then died from COVID-19 a few months later. I did try to maintain the distance with him, but he very much continued to communicate with me over the weeks and months to the extent that I could not ignore it. He needed somebody and I was present to the best of my ability and attempting at the same time to be professional as a journalist. But it’s almost impossible to remove your humanity. You can’t.You have to engage with empathy and understanding. And it wasn’t really until much later on that I realized that he’d become my friend, no matter how hard I tried to maintain that distance. And I was extremely moved and saddened by his death, and I continue to think of him quite frequently.

I don’t think I would have handled it any differently. And I don’t in any way regret that we eventually became friends. I think it was just natural for it to happen. But that was one example of that delicate balance of being professional, but also being human and having natural reactions to what you’re witnessing.

It’s also easy, I think, in some cases, to slip into activism as well, when you become close to victims where you might want to help them or facilitate them rebuilding their lives. I know this happens a lot with the refugee community and refugee coverage. Nour Malas writes about this in her chapter in the book. She’s a Syrian journalist who, like me, tried to maintain a distance, but found it very difficult to do so when you’re trying to show empathy. So I think that this is a dance that a lot of journalists in the Middle East deal with quite, quite intensely and quite regularly. And I find reports throughout the community of women who face similar situations. We’re always there for each other as a sisterhood and helping each other through these situations. But that’s probably one of the most difficult stories I’ve covered, and I still haven’t actually sorted my feelings out when I think about Elie.

This issue of the Cairo Review spans the subject of global journalism under assault, and perhaps that human element is why it matters so much. What makes your work interesting is the subtle notes of the human experience you capture.

I try my best. And I learned from great journalists before me. You know when I think of people who capture the human experience, I think, of course, of Anthony Shadid. And I think many of us do. And I always try to bring that human element into my reporting. And I think you can’t do stories justice in the region without telling the stories of its people. So I went from doing very dry reporting on stock markets in Dubai to really throwing myself back into some human interest stories. Cultural stories too—I do love to write about culture.

There’s a lot of tragedy across the region. But when I can, I try to write about literature; I try to write about travel—uplifting, different pieces. I wrote a piece once for Vice about Om Ali in Egypt. You know, the dessert. So I do try to find interesting or different types of angles in my coverage that aren’t all focused on tragedy and destruction, because that’s not the truth of the entire region. There is tragedy and destruction, but there’s also a lot of beauty in the culture, too.

Of course. And your new book is on the history of eyeliner. Is that right?

I went fully in that direction with my next book. But I really do want to be candid there: I think it was a reaction to the first book in the sense that the first book was very heavy. It was very filled with trauma and tragedy and all of the themes that I mentioned: guilt and exile and identity politics and so on. And it did weigh on my mental health, which I think is important to talk about: to talk about journalists in the Middle East and mental health and how fragile it can be. And I obviously also felt my own sense of guilt, because I was editing this book from the comfort of my flat in London at the time, and I had all of the security and the protections and the passport—the privilege of a British passport. So I felt like I was a bit of a fraud and I was dealing with all of these incredible journalists. And I just felt, okay, the next book that I do, I want it to be slightly different in tone.

It turned out to be very different in tone, and to celebrate, a layered story of culture from across the region that’s not necessarily rooted in the current moment of geopolitics. In the Middle East and North Africa particularly in Egypt, there’s a rich history of the origins of eyeliner—which is technically kohl—and I open my book with Queen Nefertiti, who I argue is the first beauty influencer. You could find her bust in small hair salons across the United States as far as one hundred years ago after [the original] was unveiled. So I’ve always been interested in cultural practices and how they carry over from decade to decade and century to century, and the fact that the story of kohl started in Ancient Egypt for me was fascinating.

Eyeliner is ubiquitous across the Middle East. It is also known as kajal and sormeh. Bedouins wear it in the desert to protect their eyes from the sun. It’s worn for beautification practices, as well as for spirituality. The Prophet Muhammad was said to have worn ithmid in his eyes, which is a substance that darkened his eyes.

So I thought, okay, if I write this, I don’t want it to be a coffee table book. I want it to be very rich, layered, entertaining, and different. And I wanted it to be a story that focuses on communities of color around the world and credits them for their contributions to the beauty industry. So I’ve traveled so far to Chad. I spent twelve days in the desert, which was quite an experience, writing about a nomadic community called the Wodaabe. Every year they host a beauty contest where the women judge the men for how beautiful the men are and then the winning men can become the sexual partner of the woman that nominates them. It’s a very fascinating cultural practice, but they wear kohl in pots that they dangle in necklaces, and they darken their eyes. I went to Jordan and spent time with the Bedouin community; India as well and the Kathakali community who use extravagant eyeliner. And I will go to Iran and Japan.

So there’s so much history there and I’ve already learned so much. I do have a couple of chapters on the West. It’s been really fascinating just to see how this one object has so many cultural practices around it. So I’m hoping that people will feel excited about the book. There’s not yet been a mainstream book written about eyeliner. I don’t even think there’s been an academic one. I interviewed seventy-five people in Jordan about eyeliner. And I thought to myself, I don’t think anyone’s ever done this kind of questioning on this one, single object!

The way you describe it, it’s almost as if your own need to not burn out and to manage your mental health leads you down a path that more holistically represents the region in your reporting.

That’s absolutely true. And people, I think, also have an image of the Middle East through the media that they consume, whether that’s online or in television or in books, of a very obviously troubled region, which it is in many ways. And I don’t think it’s celebrated enough for its cultural beauty. And to have the ability to write about that and to celebrate it to me is a real privilege.

If you had to give advice to readers, in an era where journalism has in many ways lost its reputation, and people are burned out by the media, have lost faith in it, what would you say? How can people stay engaged when it can be so painful and difficult?

I have my own way of doing this. I’m very, very strategic and intentional with how I consume news. I follow particular publications, and I turn to those publications for updates. But I also at the end of every week, make sure to read long reads, the longer magazine pieces, to slow down a little bit, be a little bit pickier with what I’m consuming, and to allow myself to read a really good long piece of journalism to take it in and then to put it aside for the weekend. Just to know that if I’m going to turn to Twitter, I’m going to be getting the fast-paced updates. If I’m going to go to Instagram, I’m going to be getting some visuals, but I’m still going to be probably inundated with the heavier themes of the day. Especially in America, as you know. If we want to talk about what’s happening with journalism in this country, it’s a whole other thirty or forty minutes of discussion.

You are Lebanese and have reported extensively there in the past and, of course, Lebanon has seen hard year after hard year. Is that still a focus of your journalism today?

It’s a sensitive question, and I think you’ll find that most Lebanese people will answer similarly that it’s hard to live there and make a living there right now, especially if you have family that rely on you, and if you have the privilege of a passport that allows you to work elsewhere. And I do have family in Lebanon that I have to support. And I do have to think of my future. So there’s always this sense of guilt that you’re failing the country and its people by leaving because you’re capitalizing on your own privilege.

My heart is always there, and I will write about Lebanon whenever I can. There are some excellent journalists doing excellent work out of Lebanon and I really admire them. They are working against all the odds, really. And if you’re in a country where electricity isn’t guaranteed, your safety isn’t guaranteed, clean water isn’t guaranteed, food prices are through the roof; it’s really difficult. The friends who are journalists who do work there that I know are struggling with their mental health for sure. So it’s a sensitive subject for me. I always romanticize the idea of returning and living in Lebanon, but for the foreseeable future I feel like what I’m doing from afar is meaningful and I wouldn’t be able to do it from there. So this is going to have to work for a while now, but it’s a painful reality to face.

June 13, 1971: The New York Times (NYT) published the Pentagon Papers. Researcher Daniel Ellsberg had leaked these documents to the NYT, which detailed how the former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara lied to the American public about the Vietnam War. McNamara had secretly commissioned a report on the history of the Vietnam War, known as the Pentagon Papers, and admitted within these documents that American troops in Vietnam were not making progress against the Vietnamese communist force, despite public pronouncements of the opposite. The documents also contained historical information about the original decision by former U.S. President Harry Truman to support French rulers in Vietnam and opinions from the American intelligence community that there was no Russian plot to take over Vietnam.

June 17, 1972: Burglars broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, DC. Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein subsequently began investigating the incident and learned that the burglars were employed by the Committee to Reelect the President, which was organized to assist the Nixon administration with efforts to win the 1972 presidential election. They uncovered evidence of illegal political espionage carried out by the White House and the Committee to Reelect the President, including the presence of a secret fund kept for financing political spies hired by the committee. Woodward and Bernstein were tipped about the scandal and were provided with valuable information by a whistleblower, known to the public at the time simply as “Deep Throat.” These leaks were published in a series of articles in the Post. Years after the event, former FBI agent Mark Felt identified himself as this key source.

November 13, 1974: Whistleblower Karen Silkwood died in a car accident after emphasizing the need for nuclear power plant safety at the Kerr-McGee plutonium fuels production plant in Crescent, Oklahoma.  Some journalists have said that Silkwood died under suspicious circumstances, but speculations about foul play have not been confirmed.

February 4, 1996: The former director of research for U.S. tobacco company Brown & Williamson, Jeffrey Wigand, exposed the tobacco industry in a 60 Minutes interview. Wigand revealed that Brown & Williamson executives lied to Congress about the addictiveness of their cigarettes, specifically that they were aware that their company chemically altered nicotine to make cigarettes more addictive.

January 18, 2002: TIME named whistleblower Sherron Watkins the Person of the Week for exposing Enron, an American energy and commodities company, as a corrupt corporation running a fraudulent financial accounting system, similar to a Ponzi scheme. Watkins had previously worked as Enron’s vice president of corporate development.

July 23, 2002: The Downing Street Memo was a leaked record of sensitive discussions within the British government by former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair about the 2003 Iraq invasion. Within the memo, it is suggested that former U.S. President George W. Bush explained to Blair that the U.S. military would attempt to overthrow the regime of Saddam Hussein and that the United States would craft the intelligence to support this move. Blair subsequently supported the 2003 invasion and war efforts even though the memo highlights the acknowledgement that the Bush administration used false pretenses to justify the invasion.

2003: Lawrence A Franklin, who previously worked as an official for the Pentagon, passed classified information about Iran to employees of the pro-Israel lobby the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), who then passed this information on to Israeli diplomats. The information pertained to a presidential national security directive about U.S. policies against Iran. Franklin’s actions initiated a conversation within the international community about allies spying on allies.

January 2004: Army specialist Joe Darby turned in photographs to U.S. Army investigators that showed the torture of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Subsequently, American news media published the photos, which sparked outrage and discussion around these human rights abuses.

November 30, 2004: In June of 2004, a Red Cross inspection team investigated the American military prison at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba and found evidence of torture and human rights violations. While the Red Cross initially distributed the report to U.S. government entities, the NYT was able to obtain a leaked memo about the report and exposed these findings in a November 2004 article.

2006: Julian Assange founded the website WikiLeaks, an online library of leaked documents that currently holds over ten million restricted official documents and other material involving war, spying, and corruption, mostly connected to the United States.

February 3, 2010: Chelsea Manning leaked classified information to WikiLeaks via a secure file-transfer while stationed as an intelligence analyst in Iraq. Manning provided WikiLeaks with approximately 250,000 American diplomatic cables and 480,000 Army field reports from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. According to the NYT, Manning’s disclosure of declassified documents ushered in the “age of leaks.”

April 5, 2010: WikiLeaks leaked a classified 2007 U.S. military video of U.S. soldiers killing Iraqi civilians indiscriminately near New Baghdad from an Apache helicopter. In an additional leak on October 22, WikiLeaks released more files that contained accounts of U.S. Army soldiers and their experiences on the ground in the Iraq War.

January 23, 2011: Al Jazeera obtained documents about the Palestinian–Israeli conflict, known as the Palestine Papers, and released this information to the public. The documents are dated from 1999 to 2010 and disclosed confidential records of meetings between Israeli, Palestinian, and U.S. leaders. These papers also contained details from 2007 meetings where negotiations eventually failed after Israeli leaders refused to freeze settlement activity in the West Bank.

April 25, 2011: Seven years after the initial Guantánamo Bay leak, WikiLeaks released documents detailing the cases of prisoners detained at the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay.

July 15, 2011: Former National Security Agency (NSA) executive Thomas Drake was sentenced to one year of probation and 240 hours of community service for leaking to the press information about mismanagement, fraud, and abuse at the NSA. One of his concerns was that the NSA’s Trailblazer program violated the privacy rights of U.S. citizens.

July 5, 2012: WikiLeaks released searchable email files from Syrian leaders, ministries, and companies, exposing communications between the government of Bashar Al-Assad and other Syrian government leaders. The leaks exposed the inner workings and interests of the government in the period between 2008 and 2012.

June 11, 2013: The Guardian revealed the identity of whistleblower and document leaker Edward Snowden. Snowden worked as a government contractor for the NSA and exposed the U.S. government’s mass surveillance program via a document leak. He explained, “I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong.”

June 19, 2015: Global corruption by Saudi Arabian leaders was revealed when WikiLeaks released an archive of searchable diplomatic cables from the Saudi Foreign Ministry and Saudi embassies around the world. This leak contained information about how the Kingdom manages relationships with other countries “through bribing and co-opting key individuals and institutions”. The cables also demonstrated the bureaucratic structure of the Saudi government and how top leadership will typically provide input for small or mundane government decisions.

September 24, 2015: Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha held a press conference where she sounded the alarm on unusually high levels of lead in the blood levels of children in Flint, Michigan. She published her findings, but they were initially dismissed by the Michigan government. Dr. Hanna-Atisha’s whistleblowing efforts assisted in exposing the unsafe levels of lead in Flint’s drinking water.

November 16, 2015: In recorded tapes and transcripts, WikiLeaks revealed that U.S nonprofit SourceAmerica was embroiled in a corruption scandal with the U.S. government regarding employment funding for people with disabilities.

February 5, 2016: WikiLeaks published documents revealing how Western and Chinese companies had been conducting a financial war to obtain mining rights in the Central African Republic. In 2020, Amnesty International reported environmental damage and human rights abuses related to this.

February 23, 2016: WikiLeaks revealed that the NSA had intercepted communications between world leaders, including at the United Nations and European Union. Specifically, the NSA bugged a climate change strategy meeting between former UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and former German Chancellor Angela Merkel. WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange commented that the bugging of the meeting by the NSA reflects how U.S. leadership is protecting “big oil” interests of the fossil fuel industry.

April 3, 2016: The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, along with over a hundred newspapers, released their first major data leak known as the Panama Papers, which contained details about the offshore accounts of world leaders. The documents showed that major banking entities assisted in the clandestine concealment of hard-to-trace assets in locations such as the British Virgin Islands and Panama.

July 19, 2016: WikiLeaks revealed communications of Turkey’s Justice and Development Party, which is still the country’s ruling political party. The leak exposed how Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s son-in-law was a shareholder in the oil trading company Powertrans.

July 22, 2016: WikiLeaks released documents from the U.S. Democratic National Committee. This was a part of a WikiLeaks series relating to former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The leak contained emails from Clinton’s private email server, spanning the period from 2010 to 2014. Clinton explained that she set up a private email so she would not need to carry around two mobile devices, one for a government email and another for personal emails. Some of the emails included excerpts from Clinton’s paid speeches to Wall Street investors and donations to Clinton from foreign governments, known as “Clinton Cash.”

November 28, 2016: WikiLeaks published a library of historical diplomatic cables from the U.S. Department of State, including the Kissinger Cables, the Carter Cables, and Cablegate. These included U.S. foreign policy decisions during the Nixon and Carter administrations. Cablegate specifically—released six years earlier—refers to confidential documents that WikiLeaks obtained from U.S. embassies between 2003 and 2010 and is claimed to be the largest to have been released into the public domain.

March 7, 2017: WikiLeaks again published U.S. government documents, this time code-named Vault7, which detailed CIA hacking capabilities. According to WikiLeaks, this was the largest publication of classified CIA documents on the platform.

September 19, 2017: WikiLeaks released documents in a leak dubbed “Spy Files Russia,” which detailed information about surveillance contractors in Russia and the surveillance of Russian citizens.

November 5, 2017: The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists again released another data leak, this time known as the Paradise Papers. The papers revealed further assets connected to world leaders that are maintained in the shadow economy. Specifically, the papers provided records relating to former U.S. President Donald Trump, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and major campaign donors to Trump.

September 28, 2018: WikiLeaks published a document from the International Chamber of Commerce that revealed information involving a French state-owned company and the United Arab Emirates. This document detailed an arbitration dispute regarding a $3.6 billion arms deal, in which UAE businessman Abbas Yousef Al Yousef claimed he was not paid his agreed-upon commission for the deal.

October 11, 2018: A whistleblower provided WikiLeaks with an internal document from U.S. company Amazon that detailed where the company maintains data centers across the globe.

August 12, 2019: An anonymous whistleblower submitted a complaint to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence regarding the Trump administration’s interactions with Ukraine leading up to the 2020 U.S. presidential elections.

February 6, 2020: Chinese doctor Li Wenliang passed away after contracting COVID-19. He had attempted to warn colleagues in Wuhan, China about the outbreak of a virus similar to SARS. The Chinese Public Security Bureau forced Dr. Wenliang to sign a letter stating that he had disturbed the “social order” and suppressed any further efforts by him to warn the public about the novel coronavirus.

August 5, 2021: WikiLeaks published an archive entitled “The Intolerance Network,” which detailed the practices of international rightwing campaign organizations.

October 3, 2021: The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists assisted with efforts to leak massive data and documentation known as the Pandora Papers. These records uncovered economic inequality and wealth disparities in the world by exposing world leaders’ offshore assets. The papers highlighted assets owned by King Abdullah II of Jordan and the Czech Republic’s prime minister, among other leaders. Specifically, it was disclosed that the King of Jordan secretly obtained ownership of fifteen homes since 1999. This information was of a secretive nature because the King used offshore companies to make these purchases, even accepting money from Western donors. This news aroused much controversy in Jordan and the wider region because the King was not previously known to have amassed this level of wealth.

February 20, 2022: A whistleblower leaked data from Credit Suisse, a bank that holds accounts for controversial heads of state and intelligence officials. The whistleblower exposed documents that revealed millions of dollars in assets of wealthy individuals, which confirmed and supplemented information from the Panama, Paradise, and Pandora Papers. It also exposed a Vatican-owned account that was used in spending 350 million euros in an allegedly fraudulent investment.

March 10, 2022: Internet hacking group Anonymous hacked a federal Russian database and released documents that revealed how Russian media censored information about the Russian military’s role in Ukraine.

May 2, 2022: POLITICO obtained an initial draft majority opinion that detailed how the U.S. Supreme Court planned to strike down the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision regarding the right to abortion access. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the opinion, stated, “The inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions.”

July 11, 2022: The Guardian published information about leaked documents relating to ride-share company Uber. Former chief lobbyist for Uber Mark MacGann leaked the documents, which cove r the period between 2013 to 2017. The files exposed iMessages, WhatsApp messages, and other communications between former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick and other members of the company, where they discussed how their operations in Europe and Asia, among other regions, negatively impacted the global taxi market.

The company stakeholders also put Uber drivers at risk by sending them to dangerous protests and acknowledged that ridesharing regulations were nonexistent. Moreover, the documents raised ethical questions about partnerships that government leaders maintained with Uber. For example, French President Emmanuel Macron used his political clout to assist Uber’s advance in France during his role as minister of the economy by influencing other policymakers in the French cabinet.

Our Women on the Ground: Essays by Arab Women Reporting from the Arab World. Ed. By Zahra Hankir, Penguin, 2019, 304 pp.

Our Women on the Ground: Essays by Arab Women Reporting from the Arab World, edited by Lebanese-British journalist Zahra Hankir, is a poignant collection of nineteen journalistic anecdotes. CNN’s Chief International Anchor Christiane Amanpour provides a brief but succinct foreword as an opener to the anthology. Her account of her own journey into the world of correspondence, as well as her mention of the formidable women she has come across in that time, provide the perfect backdrop onto which Hankir builds her own introduction. Female journalists of Arab origin, known locally as sahafiyat, are “twice burdened,” Hankir explains in her introduction. Not only does their status as women in Iraq, Egypt, Syria, or Lebanon often denote little access to the sociopolitical rights and freedoms their fathers and brothers enjoy, but they are also grossly under- and misrepresented within the field of journalism itself. Their desire to report regularly stems from their own traumatic, first-hand experiences with corruption and violence in Arab countries, leading to an unquenchable thirst for justice. Despite the dangerous, and often deadly, nature of their work, little is known or said of these sahafiyat beyond their localities. Their bravery is not perceived or celebrated in the same manner as male and/or white reporters. As Hankir articulates, “Arab and Middle Eastern women aren’t heard enough in this space. But they’re living and breathing the region, reporting on it from the front lines.”

Divided into five distinct sections—“Remembrances,” “Crossfire,” “Resilience,” “Exile,” and “Transition”—Our Women on the Ground reflects the tenuous state not only of those affected by conflict in the region, but also of the women who are brave enough to pursue and tell their truths. Despite its varied authorship, a thread of selflessness and sacrifice runs through each essay, resulting in a cohesive, and intensely human, narrative.

Our Women on the Ground is the first essay collection of its kind because it aims to shift this skewed reality, as well as shake the stereotypes of meekness and oppression that plague Arab women. Despite the hardships they face as they rise into journalism, Hankir highlights the curious privilege that comes with being a sahafiya. The very fact of their womanhood is central to the journalistic craft; victimized women will often only talk to other women, so female reporters can reach these and other places, asking questions that men simply cannot. Sahafiyat are, therefore, integral to Middle Eastern journalism, because, without their contribution, “the full picture simply cannot be painted.” For the thousands of families that “rely on journalists for updates on the calamitous situation” in their countries, a woman’s perspective fills in the remaining gaps, providing a more holistic image of what is unfolding around them.

All nineteen essays are approachable and engaging, even for readers with little knowledge of the historical contexts underpinning each catastrophe. As each essay is written by a sahafiya with first-hand and intimate knowledge of each conflict, the texts come across as genuine, informed, and heartbreaking. What truly stands out about Our Women on the Ground, and what may be missing from other accounts of political situations in the Arab World, is that it reflects the stories of ordinary people. Sahafiyat are dedicated to telling the raw experiences of citizens, rather than focusing on vague political entities, because it is the truest way to measure the devastating effect of a conflict on a nation.

The first essay is “The Woman Question” by Hannah Allam, a national security reporter at NPR, who decided to write about her experience reporting on the Iraq War. Her account sets the tone for the rest of the collection; her heartfelt depiction of the resourceful, resilient women of Iraq, who have had war thrust upon them, yet maintain their strength and spirit, is notable. Our Women on the Ground is not just about the women at the frontlines; it is about the mothers, the sisters, and the caretakers who have had to hold together their communities in the face of atrocity. This is Iraq as Allam knows it, not the image painted by the media, but one she has felt and breathed.

Lina Sinjab—foreign correspondent for the BBC—does something similar in her essay “Breathing Fear.” Syria, in her words, and from her experience, seldom resembles the Syria the Western world sees on television. The heart of the civil war, and its causes, are far more nuanced than most realize, and she makes it her mission to articulate her truth. She lived it, and now others can, too, through her account.

Lina Attalah, co-founder of Egyptian news website Mada Masr, provides a more internal view of her struggle as a female journalist. She begins “On a Belated Encounter with Gender” with a flashback—her, as a child, nurtured by the “tender softness [of] a loving, gift-carrying father”. She then contrasts this image of her father with that of “the strictness of a man, a patriarch, and a policeman once [she] became a young woman, journalist, and activist”. By leaving behind the traditional feminine sphere, and choosing for herself a career in journalism, she feels a sense of “estrangement” from her father. As a woman and as a daughter, her emergent values work in stark opposition to her father’s, a man’s. Alongside the struggles and dangers of working as a sahafiya, Attalah has to grapple with the familial pain her profession entails. Whether these female journalists face adversaries within their homes and/or beyond, their dedication to their mission never wavers. Such are the beautifully diverse accounts of our Women on the Ground.

Allam, Sinjab, and Attalah are just three of the nineteen perspectives that populate the anthology. Our Women on the Ground sweeps the reader across much of the Arab World, through several nations, and unravels the lives and tragedies of a host of men, women, and children. Each sahafiya has her own unique background and experience—whether she is a citizen of the country she is reporting from, has family there, or has faced violence herself—that informs and authenticates her account. As such, Hankir’s placement of each essay, in the order that they are in, makes intuitive sense; they build on one another, despite the differences in tone, authorship, and subject matter. Our Women on the Ground is, therefore, a wonderfully arranged mosaic of loss, determination, and hope. Although the sahafiyat above often provide acute details and extensive information regarding the conflicts they have reported on and are now, with hindsight, writing about, more context is often necessary. While readers will have no issues grasping the severity of war in the Middle East, or the human aspect of each story, more background information and context would have provided a more holistic reading experience. Without adequate information of the atrocities committed in the region, readers, especially those with little to no knowledge of politics in the Middle East, may miss valuable insight that would bolster and inform each account. The narratives themselves do not need to accommodate this suggestion; simply expanding the glossary would allow readers to seek and absorb additional context.

Our Women on the Ground is the nineteen sahafiyat’s attempt to inject humanity into crises where the people involved are often overlooked or forgotten. This grounded, humanistic approach which “brings attention to underreported tales and the women who tell them” is rarely seen, yet so important. This anthology thus contains all the tools to overturn how the West perceives Arab women, societies, and conflicts, as well as pave the way for further marginalized voices to speak. Arab women are the glue that binds together their nations, and their unshakeable morale, coupled with each journalist’s courage and heart, forms a timely and unforgettable narrative.

Shireen Abu Akleh’s calculated murder at the hands of an Israeli military sniper is an all too painful reminder of the dangers facing journalists in areas of conflict, occupation, and open warfare. Sadly, Shireen’s murder was not the first nor will it be the last. Journalists around the world either inadvertently or purposefully have been targeted to silence them from shedding light on the complex and often messy realities that prevail in disparate war zones, whether in terms of refugees streaming across borders; the deliberate targeting of civilians as a tactic of war; or the decisions taken in far-off capitals to intervene in various conflicts in pursuit of narrow national interests.

The 2003 illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq by the United States seemed to open a Pandora’s box of such hazards for journalistic coverage, ushering in a new era of violence, intimidation, and death against journalists from all backgrounds (where their murders were perpetrated by different sides to the conflict). Often, it would not need to be a military confrontation, but a political one. In countries like Lebanon, the Philippines, and in South America, journalists put themselves at risk in order to uncover the intrigues and corruption perpetrated by publicly elected officials as well as by authoritarian regimes.

But given the great strides in surveillance technology and the monitoring of online communications, it is not only in the battlefield or in the political debates that journalists find themselves under threat. In this day and age, reporters can be silenced online, whether through intimidation by armies spewing hate speech, through monitoring of their communications, or by hacking of their secret files.

It is in honor of the courageous journalists around the world who choose to be brave in spite of such dangers that we dedicate this issue of the Cairo Review. In pursuit of their mission, they offer inspiration to others who will join the ranks of their profession to inform audiences around the world about what is happening in often forgotten conflict arenas.

The targeting of journalists is not to be regarded as collateral damage. The damage is to the time-honored profession of reporting and journalism, and is indeed a threat to every democratic principle and the free exchange of ideas and information. The killing of journalists is the most brutal form of censorship there is, and a collective effort must be brought against those who perpetrate crimes against reporters, journalists, editors, photographers, cameramen, and designers, wherever they may be.

Journalists must also bear the responsibility of abiding by the strictest code of professional conduct, and nowhere is this more important than when journalists are forced to operate in the thick fog of disinformation, propaganda, and media suppression that shrouds today’s wars.

In an in-depth interview with Zahra Hankir, we learn of an emerging united front of journalists who have bonded through their time-honored profession. In this issue’s timeline, we look at the history of whistleblowers, those bold individuals who act in the best tradition of the public interest despite knowing full well the retribution that they will face. We also look at the barriers journalists must break through to defy the muzzling of their profession; how the Shiite-Sunni conflict was used to explain all the troubles of the Middle East in Western media, and wrongly so; and the growing impetus for a new form of journalism in climate reporting.

Firas Al-Atraqchi & Karim Haggag

Cairo Review Managing Editors

Sensationalism, short attention spans, commercialism, and fake news are familiar tropes raised when discussing the problems of mass media. Yet another and more profound issue with mass media, articulated by scholars such as Niklas Luhmann, Ulrich Beck, and others, is its role in constructing the realities of its consumers, creating prisms through which people understand and relate to the facts around them. Mass media is no monolith; it presents competing, even contradictory, realities and prisms, but at times and for specific topics, it taps into the same reservoir of cultural, intellectual, and historical references. Through this, it constructs parallel realities and can privilege a single lens above all others. This is quite true of mainstream Western media and the “truths” it creates about Arab countries, Muslim societies, and Islam. The examples are many, and the case is well-established. One such reality that Western media imposes and presents to its consumers is to view conflicts in contemporary Arab and Muslim societies through the Sunni-Shiite divide, that is, they are mostly or mainly about sectarianism.

Most media outlets seek to present their audience with a simple, easy-to-understand reality, void of too much nuance or complexity. Thus, the insistence on the Sunni-Shiite prism should neither be surprising nor assumed to be intentionally biased. Reductionism is the inevitable collateral of the medium. Nevertheless, this reductionism obscures understanding of the region’s politics, leads to bad policy, and relieves Western powers from responsibility for the bloodbath in the region. The fallacies and danger inherent in this supposed reality and its associated prism must be raised and dealt with.

Sectarianism: A Straightforward Explanation
By and large, Western media offers a straightforward explanation of the complex and multi-layered factors shaping the region’s politics: that the Middle East is divided into Sunni and Shiite Muslims and that they had a dispute 1,400 years ago that continues to this day. Understanding the old dispute is required to understand contemporary disputes. Thus, the wars, conflicts, terrorism, and proliferation of militarized non-state actors in the Middle East, the Saudi-Iranian confrontation, the regional alliances, disputes, and security challenges in Bahrain, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen are all reduced to a 1,400-year-old schism.

To explain the post-war conflict in Iraq in 2014, the Washington Post presented a two-minute video tracing it back to the division of Muslims into Sunnis and Shiites centuries ago, as though little time had passed. The New York Times echoed this in 2016, presenting a map of the conflicts of the Middle East titled “Behind Stark Political Divisions, a More Complex Map of Sunnis and Shiites.” Thomas Friedman, a journalist with decades of coverage of the Middle East, reduces the complicated and multi-layered issues in the Yemeni conflict to “the 7th century struggle over who is the rightful heir to the Prophet Muhammad—Shiites or Sunnis.” Likewise, The Wall Street Journal points its readers to the theological differences between Sunnis and Shiites to help them understand regional politics, asserting in 2016 that, “While the dispute appears politically grounded, it also derives from Islam’s central ideological division.”

After the resignation of Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Al-Harriri in November 2017, media outlets quickly framed the crisis as one between the Sunni Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Shiite Republic of Iran. Political analysis of Middle Eastern affairs almost always starts by highlighting the existence of Sunni states whose natural position is to be against Shiite states and proceeds from thereon.

It is not just the media. The Council on Foreign Relations once came to a similar conclusion: “An ancient religious divide is helping fuel a resurgence of conflicts in the Middle East and Muslim countries. Struggles between Sunni and Shiite forces have fed a Syrian civil war that threatens to transform the map of the Middle East, spurred violence that is fracturing Iraq, and widened fissures in a number of tense Gulf countries. Growing sectarian clashes have also sparked a revival of transnational jihadi networks that poses a threat beyond the region.” And it seems that there is a continuous feedback loop between Western media and Western think tanks, leading to the persistence of this oversimplified version of reality and method of analysis. There are critics of the Sunni-Shiite prism who have described it as “cringe-worthy”, simplistic, misleading, and lazy, and have presented more realistic approaches to understanding regional conflicts, analyzing them as one would analyze disputes elsewhere, that is, by considering political and economic factors such as oppression, injustice, discrimination, unequal access to opportunities and resources, incompatible territorial claims, among others. But such critique is mainly found among scholars and researchers, and while some are reaching mainstream media, it is not enough to break the iron grip of the sectarian narrative.

Sectarian Narratives: A Dangerous Self-fulfilling Prophecy
Niklas Luhmann, German sociologist and philosopher, stated, “Whatever we know about our society, or indeed about the world in which we live, we know through the mass media.” This is as true of politicians and policymakers as it is for average citizens. In his 2016 State of the Union Address, President Barack Obama—after pointing to the intelligence briefings as his source of information—said: “The Middle East is going through a transformation that will play out for a generation, rooted in conflicts that date back millennia.” A fundamental problem with the Sunni-Shiite prism is that key Western policymakers of the Middle East adopted it, overlooking all the complexities of current social and political affairs, the dynamics of alliance building and power balancing, relying instead on the simple Sunni-Shiites dichotomy. In Iraq, such a view came to play with destructive consequences in 2003. The U.S.-led invading coalition saw Iraq through a Sunni-Shiite prism and subsequently created the conditions for the devolution of existing religious differences into hard-set sectarian identities. The U.S.-led coalition decided to divide the Iraqi Governing Council seats based on Iraq’s religious differences, leading to a formalization of sectarianism. One story from journalist Dahr Jamail encapsulates this process, where a foreign power imposed its views on local actors with a devastating consequence:

“Back in December 2003 Sheikh Adnan, a Friday speaker at his mosque, had recounted a recent experience to me. During the first weeks of the occupation, a U.S. military commander had showed up in Baquba, the capital of Diyala province located roughly twenty-five miles northeast of Baghdad with a mixed Sunni-Shiite population. He had asked to meet with all the tribal and religious leaders. On the appointed day the assembled leaders were perplexed when the commander instructed them to divide themselves, Shiite on one side of the room, Sunni on the other.”

This action, which stemmed from an American-enforced “sectarian apportionment system”, was based on a skewed understanding of the social reality of the communities. It, and others like it, led to a formalization and institutionalization of sectarian identities, linked access to resources and power to one’s sectarian affiliation, developed sect-based polarization and discrimination, consolidated a dysfunctional political system, and challenged the sense of Iraqi nationalism, leading to violence and fragmentation of the state and society.

What the American-led coalition did in Iraq was done by other colonial powers in the past. In Rwanda, Hutu and Tutsi differences devolved into hardened ethnic identities due to Belgium empowering one over the other. This foreign-made category became fundamental to the Rwandans and shaped their distribution of power and wealth, ultimately leading to the civil war and the ensuing genocide. In other places, such as Lebanon, it was the Ottoman Empire and European colonialism, as scholar and author Ussama Makdisi has elaborately demonstrated. This issue is not merely about media inaccuracy, but about the media nourishing and sustaining a narrative with material consequences on the region.

Why the Shiite-Sunni Prism Is Wrong
To begin with, there has never been a Sunni-Shiite war in Islam’s 1,400-year history, and certainly not in recent memory. Of the two cases usually conjured in this context— the Salahuddin-Fatimid wars in the 12th century and the Ottoman-Safavid wars in the 16th/17th century, (where the former were “Sunnis” and the latter “Shiites”)—the Sunni-Shiite prism has been imposed on them by contemporary political and cultural actors. They can more accurately be read as a competition between strongmen, Christians, and Muslims, over control of Egypt’s riches in the case of the former conflict (which ended the Fatimid empire), and great power competition between the expanding Ottoman and Safavid empires in the case of the latter. Even if we were to find a war driven by a Sunni-Shiite divide in some corner of history, it would be wrong to claim that it has any contemporary relevance. There is no such thing as a collective Sunni-Shiite memory of conflict. There are no significant historical memories of hatred or fear between Sunnis and Shiites. Moreover, Sunnism and Shiism have never been considered national identities, and Sunnis and Shiites never considered themselves or each other in terms of nations.

There is no doubt that some version of this narrative exists in that some individuals consider themselves Sunni/Shiite, some speak ill of the other, and hate or exhibit animosity based on that difference. But there is no homogeneity among Sunnis nor among Shiites. Sunnism or Shiism does not entail any sense of group identity, nor does it lead to group loyalty, nor define roles and expectations between Shiites or between Sunnis—all of which are necessities for sectarian conflicts. There are simply none of the critical components and pre-conditions of sectarianism in the Middle East. Sunnism/Shiism are, of course, important to individuals who subscribe to them. But they are one value among others, such as class, ethnic, cultural, historical, regional, and ideological identities.

The problem is not that the media claims that Sunnism and Shiism matter. They do. The problem is when the media overlooks and obscures the multiple identities, affiliations, class differences, and the inherent diversity of the individuals subsumed in this religious affiliation. It is when the media assumes the existence of monolithic groups whose members are somewhat equal in their commitment to the group and its founding theology. All Shiites/Sunnis, according to the media narrative, adhere to and equally understand their respective theology and prioritize theological commitment in determining their social and political interests. This is false. Sunnism and Shiism matter but not in the ways the Sunni-Shiite prism assumes.

When Western media considers relations between a Sunni and Shiite majority country, it discounts the nationalities, the different cultures, historical memories, and the economic and security interests within the different countries, as well as their regional and international alliances, thereby reducing the whole relationship to Sunnism and Shiism. This reductionism simplifies, distorts, and obscures our understanding.

This is surprising considering the historical relations between so-called Sunni states and Shiite states. During the Iran–Iraq war, Iraqi Shiites were ardently opposed to Iran. Iran supported Christian Armenia in its war against the predominantly Shiite Azerbaijan. Saudi Arabia supported the “Shiite” Royalists in Yemen’s 1962-1970 civil war against the “Sunni” Egyptian intervention. The crisis in the Gulf Cooperation Council between Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt on the one hand, and Qatar on the other was a telling example. Four “Sunni” states turn against another Sunni state, which then turns toward a Sunni state— Turkey—and a Shiite state—Iran—and finds support. The relationship between Iran, Turkey, and Iraq challenges Sunni-Shiite prisms. Such examples, of which more exist, demonstrate that material strategic interests define states’ positions, not religion or sect. The very notion of a Sunni/Shiite state is, therefore, useless.

The Sunni-Shiite Divide Is Always Local
This is not to claim that a Sunni-Shiite divide is non-existent in the region. There are Sunni-Shiite tensions, even conflicts, within some Arab countries, but they have little to no regional consequence. Sunni-Shiite tensions and conflicts in the communities of Bahrain, Iraq, Lebanon, or Syria do not imply nor mean Sunni-Shiite conflicts between the countries of the region. Sectarianism may be an internal problem for some countries, but it is not a regional problem. And if one must use Sunni/Shiite as terms of analysis, one should consistently localize them. A Lebanese Shiite or Sunni is Lebanese first and foremost. Their interests are primarily constructed by the structure of Lebanese socio-politics and economy; thus, their social/political/economic decisions primarily stem from that local Lebanese structure.

This also applies to the relationships between parties such as the Lebanese Hezbollah and Iraq’s Hashd Al-Shaabi with Iran. The foundation of those relationships is not a common theology of Shiism, but rather the opportunism, pragmatism, and realpolitik of local actors that leverage external support to further their own agenda, be it ideological—such as anti-American hegemony, anti-Israel, Islamism—or political or economic. Being Shiite is secondary in the foundations of those relationships, which explains why other Shiite movements and parties have had different relationships with Iran due to a different calculus, why relationships exist between Iran and “Sunni” Palestinian resistance movements, and why contention exists between many Arab “Shiite” political actors and Iran. Sectarianism must always be localized and rarely used in regional analysis, and even then, should be problematized and used only very carefully. To speak of a Sunni bloc that stretches from the western coasts of North Africa to the Eastern coasts of Indonesia, or a regional Shiite alliance, is baseless.

Time to Stop Talking of the Sunni-Shiite Divide
The Sunni-Shiite prism is a confused concept without a precise definition and is thus unqualified to be a helpful tool. It creates more obscurity than clarity and has led to mistakes with tragic human consequences, as in Iraq after 2003. Yet it is still used over and over again. Some scholars, such as Fanar Haddad in his excellent analysis of the Iraqi Sunni-Shiite context, suggest that we not drop the sectarian prism despite its lack of definition, but rather use it between quotation marks “followed by the appropriate suffix: sectarian hate, sectarian unity, sectarian discrimination….” His suggestion is helpful in an academic context, where there is room for nuance and high-level abstraction. But in media analysis of politics, interests, identity, distribution of power, competition, and conflict in the Middle East, such a term is an unneeded distraction and distortion. We are better off dropping it and disregarding any coverage that uses sectarianism, Shiism, and Sunnism. We should reject all narratives that present contemporary regional conflicts as rooted in ancient hatreds, historical grievances, or collective Sunni-Shiite memories.

In May, The New York Times Magazine published a story on the guilty plea of environmental activist Joseph Mahmoud Dibee for his role in a series of arson attacks organized by the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The group, later labeled as domestic terrorists in the United States, was founded in the United Kingdom in 1992. Their modus operandi was to destroy economic and infrastructural symbols of environmental degradation. Having emigrated from Syria to the United States as a boy, Dibee had been motivated early in his life by deforestation taking place close to his adopted home. After his indictment in 2006, he fled the country, only to be picked up in Havana and handed over to the U.S. authorities in 2018. What makes this story particularly compelling is its optics in today’s uncertain environment. As author Matthew Wolfe puts it, “climate change, no longer an abstraction, has begun to transform American life in the form of heat, fire, floods and smoke.” Wolfe argues that the story of the ELF and Dibee’s role in the actions perpetrated by the organization “may sound different to some listeners now than when prosecutors first told it”.

Indeed, the conversation around climate change is not what it was in the 1990s or even the early 2000s. The clock seems to be running out on the shadowy, fossil fuel industry-funded world of climate denialism. In the United States at least, the beginning of the end of this era perhaps occurred in 2009 when a 1995 internal document from the ironically named Global Climate Coalition, a lobbyist group tied to the fossil fuel industry, was revealed. The document indicated that the coalition’s own experts had shared the irrefutability of the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions with industry members, who concealed the information. While steeped in nebulous language, the report stated that “the scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO₂ on climate is well established and cannot be denied.”

However, carbon-emitting industries continue to have massive political sway despite the public’s patience for greenwashing and deception having been exhausted. During COP26 in Glasgow, for example, the fossil fuel industry had the single largest delegation, with more than 500 industry representatives taking part. More recent examples of corporate deviance have included the revelation that the concept of the carbon footprint was introduced at the behest of fossil fuel companies to transfer blame from the corporations to the individual. This maneuvering and deception by corporate interests and government complacency with respect to the urgency of the crisis, coupled with the very real consequences of our warming planet, have sparked outrage and fear, and simultaneously altered the terms by which climate change specifically, and the environment in general, are discussed.

While in the West, conversations around the environment and climate change have long been taking place and have gone through many permutations, the dynamics of reporting on these topics in the Arab region are beholden to a vastly different political, cultural, and socioeconomic context. In his 2017 article “Climate Change Communication in Middle East and Arab Countries”, published in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate Science, Mikkel Fugl Eskjær writes that while the region is heterogeneous in terms of resources, socioeconomic conditions, and political priorities, shared conditions and similar government-controlled media systems have resulted in a relatively uniform approach to covering climate change and environmental issues in the region. Eskjær and others articulate that the majority of climate coverage encompasses protocol news or nearly verbatim publishing of official statements. “There is little if any critical journalism about official climate change policies, including national strategies in climate change negotiations,” Eskjær writes. And often, there is no coverage at all.

Meanwhile, scholar and broadcaster Nadia Rahman writes in her chapter in the Routledge Handbook on Environmental Journalism that environmental issues are relegated to the back of the list of priorities by news organizations in much of the region. “Most people in the Arab world are preoccupied with earning a living, safety, education, freedom, social justice, and development,” she writes, “the environment is often an after-thought.” While citizens are beginning to feel the effects of climate change impacting their lives and livelihoods, there are no systematic examinations of public awareness of climate change in the Arab region.

Despite the changing narrative around climate change and the environment, it is little surprise, given political and economic interests, that environmental journalists have faced challenges in reporting. Despite the existential nature of this crisis, decisive and comprehensive political action on climate has been continuously blocked or diminished, in large part due to the lack of popular support for concrete measures, such as increasing taxes on high-emission goods and services. We need only glance at the response to soaring gas prices from the war in Ukraine to see that when more immediate crises take hold, climate action, and with it tolerance for environmental reporting, takes a backseat.

The changing perception around Dibee’s story illustrates how the urgency of the climate crisis has transformed the narrative. It also hints at another point: that the line between journalism and activism, while in theory well defined, is often blurred—if not in the eyes of journalists themselves, then in the eyes of those for whom the story is costly. Pulitzer Prize-winning media scholar Eric Freedman writes in a 2020 article published in the Journal of Human Rights that the “boundaries between activism and journalism, even as practiced by trained professionals, are not always clear.” Freedman, whose article outlines the heightened risk of murder, arrest, lawsuits or other threats to journalists covering the environment, points out that the medium and location of coverage also impact where the line between journalism and activism falls. “Scholars and journalism professionals have long acknowledged that ethics standards, expectations, and on-the-ground realities differ from country to country and from time to time,” Freedman writes. It is of course necessary to note here that any blurring of those lines often carries different types of risk in the Arab region, where by and large, tolerance for activism tends to be low.

In recent years, the extent of the risks associated with environmental reporting have been increasingly brought to light. In a 2020 article for the Century Foundation, Peter Schwartzstein, an environmental journalist who regularly reports on the Arab region, details the risks of harassment, violence, and even death for reporters working on this beat. Schwartzstein cites the increasingly political nature of environmental reporting as the reason for the backlash. “Environmental reporting is more important than ever—for economies, societies, and peace and stability,” Shwartzstein writes, “but precisely because speaking the truth about the environment is increasingly and unavoidably political, governments and powerful businesses are fighting coverage of this decline like never before.”

A 2015 Reporters Without Borders report, “Hostile Climate for Environmental Journalists,” includes an account by Egyptian journalist Abeer Saady, who was beaten up by thugs hired by the factories she was investigating for dumping toxic waste into the Nile. Saady, whose career has spanned several decades and who reported on the wars in Iraq and Syria, said that her greatest difficulties arose when she decided to report on pollution.

As Egypt gears up to host COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh in November, and with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) set to host COP28 in 2023, the conversation around climate change, at least for the next two years, has landed squarely in the Arab region. This is a shift in attention for several Arab states, many of whom rely heavily on fossil fuel revenues. The UAE, notably, neglected to send their most senior officials to COP26 in Glasgow.

The Arab World is characterized most commonly by dry heat and desert, and for this reason, among other socioeconomic and political reasons, is particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. According to UNICEF, the region has ten out of the seventeen most water-stressed countries globally.

In the lead-up to November, Egypt has been working overtime to prepare, promoting its sustainability projects and kicking regional collaboration efforts into high gear. For several years, Egypt has been working on increasing sustainability efforts and sources of renewable energy. The 2035 Integrated Sustainable Energy Strategy, unveiled in 2019, outlines intentions to increase renewable energy generation to 20 percent by this year, and 42 percent by 2035. Egypt has also announced multifaceted cooperation with other African countries and the African Development Bank, among others.

As the conference draws nearer, reporting on environmental and climate issues in the region has increased substantially, particularly in Egypt. This focus is a departure from the usual dearth of environmental journalism in the region; however, its content has not tended to deviate from the status quo, with virtually all coverage consisting of official statements on meetings and activities around climate cooperation. This has included, for example, climate-related cooperation within Africa, with China, as well as details about the many COP-adjacent initiatives currently underway.

In truth, the extent of the risks for environmental and climate journalists in the Arab region are unclear, given the lack of prioritization of these topics in the media. In their inaugural 2008 report, “Arab Environment: Future Challenges,” the Arab Forum for Environment and Development found that only 1 percent of Arab news programs focused on environmental news and less than 10 percent of newspapers employed an environment editor. Given the reduced budgets allocated to scientific topics in the years since this report, it is unlikely these numbers have increased in any meaningful way.

The hosting of COP27 and COP28 in the Middle East presents an opportunity to change how climate change and the environment in general are covered in the region. Eskjær points out that most editorials and op-eds on climate change published in the Middle East reflect international news and quote international sources, and thus do not necessarily speak to a local audience, nor reflect meaningful public engagement on the topic. This lack of locally focused reporting may be interpreted as “a token of how climate change still has not become integrated into the cultural vocabulary the same way as in Western media,” he writes. This, however, is an undeniably temporary state of affairs, as the direct effects of climate change on populations everywhere are becoming increasingly salient. More than ten years ago, the World Bank found that populations blamed extreme weather events for the loss of income, crops, and livestock in half-a-dozen Arab countries. Still, for the general population, the link between these experiences and the reality of climate change seems to be fairly weak, although not yet quantified. Reporting on COP27 and 28 in meaningful, relevant ways is likely to change this, at least in part.

Scholar Marwa Daoudy, who focuses on climate security in the region, writes that “no one should downplay the importance of climate change in today’s Middle East or the region’s future.” Daoudy argues that “policymakers must also understand that the worst outcomes related to environmental stress and scarcity in the region are not caused by long-term shifts in the climate, which are difficult to control, but by short-term choices made and actions taken by powerful people and institutions, which are far easier to influence.” In other words, poor governance and a myopic, self-interested outlook will have the largest negative effect on the environment and social stability, despite being easier to control than larger climate-related phenomena. This gives further credence to the important role of environmental journalism in shedding light on these practices to combat greed and complacency.

This sentiment is particularly relevant in the Arab World, because, unlike many of the other entrenched issues the region has long faced, there has, above all, been under-reporting on environmental issues. Increased space should be created for local journalists to report on environmental and climate-related issues that impact society. Such issues should not only be important in terms of setting the news agenda to reflect local circumstances and from local perspectives, but also for ensuring local populations are informed about the risks and challenges moving forward as we increasingly face the consequences of a warming planet. This will require the development and implementation of clear and transparent media laws relating specifically to environmental and climate reporting. It will require protections for journalists reporting on industrial malpractice, and increased access to environmental data, which tends to be held closely by governments in the region. And, finally, it will require investment in training journalists to report on these issues in an informed and balanced way.

The global conversation around climate change is evolving, and now is the opportunity to determine what that conversation looks like from the Arab World. After all, we have seen how denial and ambiguity have backfired in climate conversations elsewhere. Scholars and analysts have already partially attributed unrest and conflict in the region to the effects of climate change, some have even linked it to potential growth in militancy and terrorism. Avoiding the fulfillment of these ominous predictions must take place through local and regional cooperation, and by equipping populations with the information they need to manage and adapt to the changing climate through professional, rigorous journalism.

On the morning of Shireen Abu Akleh’s shooting on May 11, 2022, I woke up to a phone call by Al Jazeera producer Rania Zabaneh. “Shireen’s been shot,” she said, and dissolved into tears. My first thought was that she had sustained an injury to her limbs, maybe because I often worry about that happening to me. But the voice on the other end of the line was shaky and despondent. “I’m afraid she won’t make it,” Rania added. Six minutes after the Health Ministry officially announced Shireen’s death, I was on air. I tried to collect my thoughts, manage my emotions, and share the little information I had about what happened. At the same time, journalists were flocking to Al Jazeera’s offices. Despite the anger and shock they felt over the unjustified murder of a colleague, they also felt compelled to report on it. At a time when they were supposed to be grieving the loss of a friend, mentor, and idol, they wanted to do Shireen’s story justice.

To say that Shireen Abu Akleh is a household name is an understatement. She rose to fame in Palestine and the Arab World as she covered the largest Israeli invasion on Palestinian territory during the second Palestinian Intifada in 2000. She was there when Palestinians were killed, when homes were demolished and when an entire nation was placed under curfew. Palestinians, myself included, were glued to their TV screens as Al Jazeera provided live 24/7 coverage of the Israeli invasions into the West Bank.

It was devastating and extremely ironic now to be the one covering the aftermath of Shireen’s killing, a voice I grew up listening to, a figure I highly respected, a journalist like no other. As my colleagues and I searched for meaning in Shireen’s loss, we began to examine the reasons why the Israelis targeted her. For one, it was to silence us, the journalists, from covering and exposing the realities of the occupation. Also, as Israeli authorities mounted a campaign to shift the blame from them, saying that Palestinian gunmen killed Shireen, journalists were reminded once again that their role as the messengers of truth was paramount.

The former realization came a few days after Shireen’s death. We were in Jenin on the day of her funeral to cover it and, for a few hours, we couldn’t advance into the refugee camp to report from inside. Israeli forces raided the outskirts of the city as they had been doing in the past few months. Still, we discussed the idea of attempting to go in to report. What were the odds of Israeli soldiers killing another journalist in Jenin on the same day Shireen’s body was going to be laid to rest in Jerusalem? Should we take the risk and go inside the camp? The trauma of Shireen’s death was still fresh and raw. In the end, we decided to report from Ibn Sina hospital on the edge of the camp, where ambulances brought one injured Palestinian after another.

Journalist Ali Samoudi, who was receiving treatment in the same hospital, was busy reporting as well. Wearing a hospital gown and sitting in a wheelchair, he received one phone call after another and shared information he had. A few minutes later, Shatha Hanaysha came to the hospital from inside the camp. In her press vest and helmet, she had been inside the camp, working, when her colleagues urged her to take a break and work from the hospital. Days prior, Hanaysha was filmed crouching next to Shireen after she was shot, trying to reach her, but not being able to because she was in the direct line of fire . . . and the bullets did not stop coming.

“They want us to stop reporting and I just won’t give them that,” she said.

When we arrived next to the tree where Shireen was murdered, I made a similar vow. “We won’t be silenced. We will keep telling the story. This is also what Shireen would want us to do”—that is how I ended my report from Jenin. It aired on Friday on Al Jazeera after Shireen’s body was laid to rest in Jerusalem.

It is a promise I intend to keep. But as days go by, I do not know if I can live up to it. I love telling stories; I believe that it is my calling and passion. I love reporting from the field so much that I often underestimate the dangers associated with it. My team and I try to take as many precautions as possible, relying on our field experience and safety courses. However, Shireen’s killing, and the absence of justice and accountability that followed, blurred the red lines for us, and only indicated that the situation was getting worse for journalists. Not only is it easy for Israeli forces to target and kill a journalist, but they could get away with it and with zero accountability. This continues to happen despite the fact that Israeli violations against journalists constitute war crimes and that these violations are constant, ongoing, and even documented.

I met journalists who told me that they view their careers differently now. “The world doesn’t see us as equal humans,” one of Shireen’s friends told me. “What’s the point of telling stories that don’t change our reality? Our lives don’t matter, let alone our deaths,” she said, adding that she wanted to quit journalism. I also had moments when I felt that what we do is not important, that no one is listening no matter how loud we spoke or how well we did our jobs. The lack of accountability in Shireen’s death not only had ramifications on the purpose of our work but also on how we personally deal with the traumas of reporting.

“No Time to Deal with Traumas”
I can argue that no one had the time and head space to process Shireen’s murder and what it meant, starting with Shireen’s closest colleagues, to those who were with her when she was shot, to those who tried to rush her to the nearest hospital but could not amid the hail of bullets.

Journalists do not have the luxury to deal with traumas, either from their daily reporting or from incidents like these. Palestinian journalists work and live a different reality than all other journalists: they cannot escape the fact that their friends, family, and nation are still living under a decades-long military occupation. For example, a foreign journalist covering Ukraine could go back home after their reporting is done. A Palestinian journalist has nowhere else to go.

Detachment from this reality is impossible. What is worse is that Palestinian journalists cannot even apply PTSD therapies of war journalists because they live in a continuous cycle of trauma. The “P” in PTSD doesn’t reflect their reality. There is no Post trauma, it is continuous. And that trauma is only exaggerated when we are reminded that the Palestinian narrative is often not believed.

It took six independent investigations to confirm what witnesses recounted all along about Shireen’s killing: it was a targeted attack. Let’s also not forget that some of those investigations were carried out by traditionally non-pro-Palestinian media organizations such as The New York Times and CNN.

Now imagine that after all the public uproar and the independent investigations, the shooter did not even come close to being held accountable. The Israeli army only conducted a preliminary probe and until the writing of this essay refused to launch a criminal investigation.

Moreover, when U.S. President Joe Biden visited the West Bank for a few hours in mid-July, journalists covering the press conference were not allowed to ask questions. Nevertheless, they wore black shirts with Shireen’s picture, demanding justice for her murder. A picture of her took up a chair during the visit that she would have been covering.

Even when Biden spoke about Shireen, he couldn’t pronounce her name correctly. He reiterated the need for “stopping the daily killing and arrests on daily basis; and holding the killers of the martyr journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh—they need to be held accountable”. However, on July 4, the United States had already issued a report saying that the bullet came from the Israeli soldiers’ side but couldn’t determine whether it was intentional, and that the bullet was “badly damaged”.

Such evasion of responsibility makes the United States appear as if it is aiding Israel in getting away with murdering a well-known Palestinian-American journalist. This could only lead to more intimidation and the targeting of more journalists.

Seeing Attacks on Journalists in a Different Light
Attacks on journalists did not start with Shireen. Media sources say that since 2000, Israel has killed forty-eight journalists in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. You’d barely find a field journalist who has not been either beaten, intimidated, or arrested, if not tear-gassed or hit by rubber-coated bullets, or even live ammunition.

Palestinian photojournalist Muath Amarneh, who lost his left eye to a rubber-coated bullet while covering a protest in 2020, bears witness to how journalists are attacked for the very reason that they’re journalists. This type of Israeli intimidation only makes Palestinian journalists more adamant to continue to report on the ground. Our voices will get louder each time we feel they are pushing us away. We know that our mere presence in the field exposes the brutality of the Israeli army, even if our side of the story is constantly questioned or disputed. For example, the story of the killing of young Palestinian Nadeem Nouarra only made headlines after a CNN video disputed the Israeli narrative and showed how an Israeli sniper killed the 16-year-old boy.

Even with the relative space and importance that Shireen’s story occupied, it is not common for Palestinian stories to make it to the headlines of international media outlets. The stories of Thaer Al-Yazouri or the other seventy-six Palestinians killed by Israeli forces since the beginning of 2022, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry, are not widely known. These stories are the driving force behind why Palestinian journalists continue to do their jobs. But the issue of safety has resurfaced now, raising fresh concerns.

Before Shireen’s murder and in spite of all the risks detailed above, each one of us felt a relative security, particularly when we worked and moved as a group. One could be taken aback at the number of social media groups that have been created specifically for journalists to discuss coverage, share where the Israeli army is stationed, ways to maneuver Israeli road closures, and where it was safest to stand and report, and so on.

Many Palestinian journalists thought Israel would not be able to get away with deliberately killing a journalist while the cameras were rolling. But apparently, it could . . . and it is. The Israeli state is now emboldened by the lack of accountability. It is as if this killing has given Israel a free hand against any Palestinian.

We know what it means when the world turns a blind eye. The only way Israel interprets this is that the world does not care. Shireen’s killing has only confirmed that no one is safe.

Much like the introduction of most new communication platforms, the rise of social media conjured hopes that it would foster democratic conversation, but also skepticism on its limitations and shortcomings. Social media has minimal boundaries to entry; anyone who is literate and has a smartphone and an internet connection can sound off on social media with little mediation. But much like other public spaces and traditional media, while anyone can speak up on social media, not everyone will get heard. Social media empowers people to become storytellers with minimal technical skills and cost, but just whose voice gets heard online is far less simple.

While the internet and social media are in theory inclusive and provide room for the existence of plural voices, they still maintain some aspects of the exclusivity of traditional media, despite the far lower barriers to entry they present.

Who gets heard online is further complicated by the fact that most of the major social media platforms are owned by private corporations which control what stories get told and who tells them, depending on whether these narratives align with their commercial and political agendas. For example, the fact that Meta, which owns Instagram, is a private company gives it the right to moderate any content that it deems does not adhere to its community standards. Last year, during the conflict in Sheikh Jarrah (where Palestinians in an East Jerusalem neighborhood faced home evictions), users reported that Instagram removed and blocked pro-Palestinian content. This sparked debate on just how free social media content is from political pressures. Instagram claimed the posts were mistaken for content promoting terrorist organizations, but dozens of users argued their #AlAqsa-hashtagged posts were removed because Instagram mistakenly believed they were inciting violence or were part of dangerous organizations. Not only does ownership of social media platforms affect which messages will get censored, but their algorithms dictate that users who maintain a high level of activity are those who are noticed, which might not necessarily reflect the habits of the average social media users. This indicates that most users who do maintain an active profile on social media either aim to make profit off their content, which means they are subjected to commercial pressures, or are celebrities or media personalities who are already heard, both offline and online. This leaves no room for the average users, who wish to use social media as a platform for journalism and advocacy, to effect social change, or for their individual story to gain visibility on the internet.

The Transformative Effects of Social Media: A Historical Perspective
Since the birth of the internet, there have been utopian and dystopian views on the democratic potentials of Web 2.0. The discourse over social media as an agent of change and driver of democracy has been equally divided. Since the 1990s, there has been a significant body of literature arguing that the internet will bring a real information revolution that would free mass media from state and corporate controls and provide a space for everyone to speak and be heard. In Egypt and the Arab World, influential scholars like Mark Lynch wrote about the internet’s potential for democratization and social change. Other scholars like Evgeny Morozov, for instance, argued in 2011 that the internet will replicate the offline model where only a handful of people will be heard and where state or economic constraints are inescapable. Morozov maintained that the idea of the internet favoring the oppressed rather than the oppressor is marred by what he calls “cyber-utopianism: a naïve belief in the emancipatory nature of online communication that rests on a stubborn refusal to acknowledge its downside”.

Then the Arab Spring happened in 2011 and from it grew a body of literature arguing that “the revolution will be Tweeted.” For the most part, the 2011 Arab uprisings were, in fact, Tweeted. Twitter and Facebook were spaces where online and offline activism converged and thrived. New media stepped in—where traditional media failed—and allowed for more visibility for different voices as well as mobilization, organization, and coverage of the demonstrations. Even before the Arab Spring, people revolted online before taking to the streets. New media, including both blogs and microblogging websites like Facebook, even sometimes pushed the limits of traditional media and forced taboo issues such as sexual harassment and police brutality into mainstream media agenda. In Egypt, it was bloggers, for instance, who broke the news of mass harassment incidents in downtown Cairo on the eve of the Eid (feast) holiday in 2006. As a result, traditional media found no alternative but to report on such incidents.

Moreover, in 2007, it was through Facebook that activists called for a general strike in Egypt to oppose a wave of mass privatization of the public sector which left thousands unemployed. The 2011 uprising was similarly called for on Facebook and Twitter. Egyptians used these platforms to mobilize the masses, as well as to organize the demonstrations and communicate the needs of the demonstrators, from essential medical supplies to organizing protester meeting points and gatherings. They also resorted to them for the latest updates and coverage when local television stations in Egypt showed footage of a deserted bridge downtown and ignored the clashes between police forces and demonstrators a few meters away in Tahrir Square. During the earlier days of the Egyptian uprising, people turned solely to social media for credible coverage of events on the ground, and it was social media that eventually forced print and broadcast media to stop downplaying the street protests and report on the situation.

More recently, new media were able to push social boundaries and make way for an Egyptian iteration of the #MeToo movement in 2020, encouraging victims of sexual harassment to come forward. It started on a Facebook group for American University in Cairo students where one young woman came forward with her account of harassment by a fellow student, Ahmed Bassam Zaki. From there, dozens of women found the courage, and the medium, to come forward with their own testimonies. Social media provided women with a platform that was easily accessible through the touch of a button, anonymity, and a support network that was subsequently formed to provide legal and psychological aid, sometimes online.

But the Arab Spring and subsequent movements, including #MeToo, also opened up many questions regarding the limitations of these platforms to tell unheard stories. They raised the issue of whether they replicate offline divides and even the traditional media model whereby a few are speaking, and are heard by the many on the receiving end.

Many leading scholars, including Jurgen Habermas and Robert D. Putnam, argue that the media can feed readers large amounts of political information, creating the illusion of civic engagement, when in fact it promotes rather passive political and civic involvement. Social media has the power to destroy that notion, because it can easily promote a two-way conversation where the “traditional reader” has the space to become a content creator themselves. The reader has the tools, the space, and thus the power, to create content and tell their own story and share their opinion.

Historically, the discourse on social media has been more pluralistic than in traditional media, because the former allowed topics like sexual harassment or police brutality that the latter would not cover. This plurality has often even spilled over to traditional media.

Yet, much of the same offline limitations exist online and just who really gets heard online, especially on social media, becomes a tricky question.

Who Gets Heard Online?
In his 1989 influential work, German philosopher and sociologist Habermas discussed the emergence of a public sphere in eighteenth-century Europe as a space that is outside state control and where there is a liberal exchange of views. But Habermas argued that this public sphere was a bourgeois one, where entry requirements included education and property ownership. His work has since been criticized, adopted, and updated by others. Nancy Fraser, for instance, proposed in 1992 a post-industrial model of multiple counterpublics, alternative spaces for discussions away from mainstream platforms like traditional media. These spaces are formed by, and provide room for, voices excluded from the main public sphere. Various scholars have since drawn parallels between Habermas and Fraser’s views of the public sphere and online communications platforms today. They looked first at blogs and now social media, arguing that they both present alternative spheres for dissident and excluded voices to be heard.

Fraser argued that for these counterpublics to contribute to democratic reform and social change, they need to be inclusive, operate independently of the state of the economy, and disregard the status of its participants. These three conditions, however, are not always met on social media channels.

For example, the #MeToo movement in Egypt, for one, was started by students of an elite university who are fluent in English. One of these students was Nadeen Ashraf, who sparked the movement by starting Assault Police, a page that provided a platform for women to speak up and come forward with their own stories of abuse. She was later named one of the BBC’s “100 Women of 2020”. Ashraf received a private university education which the majority of the population cannot afford, and is fluent in English. This gave her the advantage of being able to effortlessly sit for interviews with international media outlets. Even the social profile of the perpetrator affected how much attention the story first exposed on Ashraf’s page received. Zaki, who was accused of assaulting over seventy women, ran in mostly privileged circles, at school, at university and even in the gated residential compound where he lived. Consequently, his victims too came from similarly privileged backgrounds.

Subsequent stories or cases that gained traction, like the Fairmont case which brought to light the drugging and gang-raping of a woman in an upscale hotel in Cairo, involved high-profile names and country elites. That is not to say that this is the case with every single story, but the incidents of the #MeToo movement, the ones that received enough national attention to spark a movement, often included privileged actors. The strong English-language skills of the founders of the pages, or the women, allowed them to communicate their messages and ideas well, thus gaining press attention locally and internationally and expanding their reach. Their use and accessibility to social media meant that victims of sexual harassment that came forward were from a higher social class, which is also a strong factor contributing to who wants to be heard on that specific front online.

Similarly, a new social movement in Egypt has been gaining ground online to raise awareness about reproductive health and empower women to take control of their own bodies. Akin to the #MeToo movement, the main figures behind these initiatives, including its pioneer Nour Emam, come from similarly privileged backgrounds.

Emam, for instance, has had a private education all her life that culminated with a master’s degree from a university in London. Her education likely afforded her the knowledge and skills to lead an online movement that garnered more than 390,000 followers in two years, and various headlines in local and regional media outlets.

It is important to remember that the illiteracy rate in Egypt remains at 26 percent, and that 40 percent of its population live under the poverty line, making private education and even consistent high-speed internet access luxuries many cannot afford. Yet, it is not only a question of education and communication skills, but also about affording time to be active on social media, especially when first building an online presence when it is not yet monetizable. The power of financial stability provides the luxury of dedicating much time online and the cushion to “try out” being heard or creating content online without expecting immediate pay. One of the less-prominent bloggers I interviewed during past research, Loai Nagati, said that dedicating extensive time to be active on social media to gain followers and work the algorithms of social media to his favor for reach is “a luxury that is only available to very few people”. Social media, in many ways, remains a sphere dominated by a few who were born into relative privilege and have the skills to communicate with the unheard many.

Monetizing Social Media
Social media offers unprecedented reach for content creators through unlimited access to new users who are actively online and scrolling through their feeds. This gives content creators a steady follower base on the platform where they publish their content—if the gods of the algorithms favor them, of course. Algorithms determine what users will see as well as what and who will be heard, and consequently who can monetize their created content.

For someone to be “seen” by even their friends on Facebook, they need to be active, relevant and posting frequently. Different guidelines suggest various frequencies for optimum reach on social media, but most advise content creators to post once or twice daily on Facebook, three to five times daily on TikTok, and between five to thirty tweets a day and once or twice daily on Instagram. This frequency means that most social media users are rather passive receivers of content rather than active creators. This also means that the majority of those who are not able to maintain high online activity are most likely only reaching a handful of people when they post. To be noticed on most channels—and so to be able to make it financially sustainable through sponsors or advertisers—there needs to be more consistent activity than the average user can maintain.

Those who invest time in creating content on social media often expect to monetize that investment eventually when they gain sufficient reach. Once they do, and they are able to get sponsors and create paid-for content, they fall under the same pressures and limitations which exist in traditional media: advertorial pressures to remain afloat. Financial sustainability of online content creators is key to their long-term existence, and with brands forecasting to spend up to $15 billion on influencer marketing this year, that sustainability is possible, but not simple. In Egypt, the earlier forms of social media, the blogs, saw their demise when most bloggers stopped being active as they found financial sustainability in mainstream media or grew more career-oriented and thus had less time to maintain their online activities.

Historically, free market constraints placed on traditional media to attract advertising in order to remain financially viable ultimately contributed to its demise. If we look at the history of the American Labor Movement press, for example, we can trace a similar pattern. In the nineteenth century, the Labor Movement attempted to circumvent mainstream media, which had traditionally denied access to dissident voices. In a bid to be heard, the Labor Movement created newspapers to cover news of the workers and echo their grievances. Ultimately, however, it was not state crackdowns that led to the censoring of labor newspapers, but rather, free market dynamics that led to the death of the labor press. In a capitalist U.S. market of the nineteenth century, advertising was the only financing model available to newspapers. The labor press, however, did not provide content supporting corporations and capitalism, as they often criticized the state of workers and called for their rights. This meant that it was difficult to attract the same advertisers they criticized. As they failed to attract advertisers and achieve sustainable financial models, many of the popular labor newspapers had to shut down.

Similarly, creators on social media in Egypt who have more full-throated radical voices or stances—whose platforms push the boundaries on social or political issues—will unlikely find financial sustainability from advertisers and sponsored content. Rather, they likely have to modify or mellow their message to appease advertisers, or cater to the needs of a general audience for wider reach and more financial gain. This means that those who do not care much for monetizing their social media presence often go unheard because they lack the support that sponsorship would bring.

While it is generally acknowledged that social media created unprecedented potential for people to be heard independently of mainstream media, there remains a need to take a deeper look into how and whether that can practically happen. Not everyone has influence on social media, and those who do often find themselves on the wrong side of the algorithms and the financing and monetizing rules of the platforms they wish to be heard on.

It was quite an absurd arrangement. In 1988, as Margaret Thatcher’s government was embroiled in the violence in Northern Ireland, it decided to ban British media from broadcasting the voices of Sinn Féin representatives (the leading Northern Irish republican group) as well as a number of other groups. The point was to prevent these groups from using British TV and radio networks as platforms to spread what the government considered to be messages of terrorism and violence.

However, the ban extended only to the voices of these groups’ representatives—not their actual words. And so, it was only a matter of time before broadcasters found a workaround: they would hire actors to perform voice-overs and dub the original voices using the exact same words. BBC viewers would, for example, be watching Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams speaking on the screen, only to hear him in the voice of an actor rather than the republican leader.

Decades later, the British government, along with the European Union and the United States, would attempt once more to mute the voice of a different adversary through direct censorship. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, a variety of sanctions would be imposed by these countries on Russian media outlets they consider to be spreading Kremlin propaganda and disinformation.

Yet in liberal democracies, such instances of explicit government censorship are few and far in between. More commonly, the media is restricted by a variety of laws, including privacy, libel, and national security legislation, which set the boundaries for exercising the right to freedom of expression. Besides media laws, many other factors govern and restrict the free practice of media and journalism, including public image in countries with a freer press, and ambiguous red lines and repressive politics in countries lower on the press freedom scale.

Western versus Middle Eastern Media Laws
In mid-May 2022, London’s Metropolitan Police arrested a Conservative Member of Parliament on suspicion of rape and sexual assault. Despite the gravity of the charges against him, up until this essay was being written in late June, British media had not publicly revealed the identity of the man, because of legal and procedural restrictions on identifying suspects who are under investigation but have not yet been charged. Critics point to the absurdity of continuing to hide the identity of a politician suspected of such grave criminal behavior, particularly if he is allowed to continue to meet with his constituents and act as their representative.

The degree of restrictiveness of the laws varies from one country to another within Western liberal democracies. Journalists in the United Kingdom are generally seen to be subject to much more stringent legal restrictions than their American counterparts, for example, where the First Amendment provides a constitutional protection of free speech.

While these laws are ostensibly apolitical, their application often reflects the power structure within society. Litigation is extremely costly, which means that entities with limited financial resources (whether individual journalists, small media organizations, or average people affected by media coverage) are automatically at a disadvantage when it comes to enforcing media-related laws. On the other hand, those who can afford a substantial legal war chest are in a better position to use these laws to protect their own interests.

Another political implication is the fact that the application of these media laws is often affected by the disposition of the government in power. Between 2009 and 2017, as the Barack Obama administration maintained an aggressive posture against leaks to journalists, the United States slipped from the 20th to 43rd place on the World Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders. At the end of Obama’s tenure, a piece in The New York Times would lament that “the administration has prosecuted nine cases involving whistle-blowers and leakers, compared to only three by all previous administrations combined. It has repeatedly used the Espionage Act, a relic of World War I-era red-baiting, not to prosecute spies but to go after government officials who talked to journalists.”

And yet, prosecuting journalists in liberal democracies is a rare occurrence when compared to the Middle East. According to the latest census by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), there were fifty-nine journalists in prison in Arab countries in December 2021 while the corresponding number in the European Union and North America was zero.

Laws affecting how journalists work have been tightened in many Arab countries in recent years, resulting in a more restrictive media environment. Publishing “false news” is now a criminal offense punishable by fines and possibly a prison sentence in several Arab states such as Arab Gulf countries, as well as Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Algeria, and Sudan. Anti-terrorism and sedition laws have also been used frequently against journalists. New licensing requirements have been introduced to increase government control on both traditional as well as digital media outlets. In some cases, applications for licenses are denied or left pending, thus forcing the applicants into a legal limbo where they remain exposed to the risk of being prosecuted.

Arab Media in a Tense Political Context
The number of imprisoned journalists in Arab countries is significantly higher than it was a decade ago. According to the CPJ, in December 2011 the total number was twenty-one, almost a third of the figure for 2021. This is not surprising given the political context. Tightening their grip on the media has been an integral component of the process by which regimes across the Arab World reasserted their authority over their populations following the 2011 uprisings.

In the ensuing years the region also witnessed major geopolitical realignments, as tensions rose and conflicts intensified between various players, dividing the region into rival—and sometimes overlapping—camps: Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates versus Iran; Qatar supported by Turkey versus the quartet of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, UAE, and Bahrain; Jihadists versus Shiites; Kurds versus governments in Ankara, Damascus, and Baghdad, to name a few.

A battle of narratives went hand in hand with these political conflicts, as governments intensified their use of media as a propaganda tool. One study, for example, documents the increase in negative coverage on Al Jazeera English of the Saudi-led war in Yemen following the outbreak of the crisis between Qatar and the Quartet in 2017. This crisis in particular had significant implications on the regional media scene, as three of the most important pan-Arab networks are controlled by one of the Gulf rivals: Al Jazeera by Qatar, Al Arabiya by Saudi Arabia, and Sky News Arabia by the United Arab Emirates. Media on both sides of the divide expended substantial energy attempting to undermine their patron’s rival. Indeed, they often engaged in mudslinging fights with their journalist peers on the other side, in an attempt to neutralize their opponent’s media arm. (A typical tactic is to mock the other side’s coverage of a certain event to show its lack of professional journalistic standards).

The rise in regional tensions made governments nervous that their rivals would use the media to sow internal dissent and undermine their stability, as part of what officials increasingly started referring to as “Fourth Generation Warfare”. As a result, online censorship intensified in many Arab countries. Dozens of news websites have been blocked in recent years, often without an official explanation and sometimes even without official acknowledgment of website suspension or blockage on orders of the government.

Public Image as a Third Rail
The state is not the only source of media restrictions. In fact, in liberal democracies, some of the most publicized penalties imposed on journalists in recent years have not been instigated by the state at all. A public outcry against a journalist, or sometimes even the risk of such an outcry, is becoming a common cause for media organizations to sanction members of their staff.

The story of BBC 5 Live presenter Danny Baker is a case in point. In May 2019, he posted a tweet in reference to the newly born baby of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex Prince Harry and his wife Meghan. The tweet was a photograph of a couple holding hands with a well-dressed chimpanzee, with the caption: “Royal baby leaves hospital.” The tweet was interpreted as a racist slur because of Meghan’s mixed race, and caused a stir on social media. Baker deleted the tweet, apologized, and insisted that he meant to “lampoon privilege & the news cycle” and that he would have used the same image had the baby been born to any other celebrity white couple.

“Once again. Sincere apologies for the stupid unthinking gag pic earlier. Was supposed to be joke about Royals vs circus animals in posh clothes but interpreted as about monkeys & race, so rightly deleted. Royal watching not my forte. Also, guessing it was my turn in the barrel,” he said on Twitter. Nevertheless, the next day Baker was fired by the BBC, which said he showed “a serious error of judgment” by posting the original tweet.

Another BBC journalist, Tala Halawa, was also fired because of comments she had made on social media, only this time, the comments were made years before she joined the corporation. As part of the BBC’s coverage of the escalating conflict in Jerusalem and Gaza in May 2021, Halawa, a Palestinian journalist who worked at BBC Monitoring at the time, presented a video entitled “Israel-Gaza: What Bella Hadid’s stance says about changing conversations”. The video discusses why many celebrities such as Hadid are deciding to remove their posts in support of Palestine.

That same day a Twitter account with the handle @GnasherJew highlighted the report as an example of what it described as “one of the most disgustingly one sided @bbc videos, whitewashing antisemitism”. Later during the day, @GnasherJew, which describes itself as an organization using open-source intelligence “to unmask Jew haters”, went on to check Tala Halawa’s Twitter feed. Eventually it found a 2014 tweet by Halawa in which she wrote: “#Israel is more #Nazi than #Hitler! Oh, #HitlerWasRight #IDF go to hell. #PrayForGaza”.

A few hours later, the pro-Israel media watchdog Honest Reporting put out a report publicizing the findings of @GnasherJew and condemning the BBC for employing Halawa. Mainstream media outlets picked up the story, which gained widespread coverage throughout the rest of the day. The next day the BBC announced it had launched an investigation and three weeks later Halawa was sacked.

She issued a statement in which she apologized for the “offensive and ignorant tweet” which, she maintained, did not reflect her political views. She explained that she had posted it during “the traumatic Israeli bombing of the Gaza Strip in 2014… where 55 Palestinian civilians, including 19 children and 14 women were killed in 48 hours by Israeli strikes… [and] Israeli settlers had also kidnapped and burnt alive 16-year-old Mohammed Abu Khdeir in East Jerusalem.” She continued: “I was a young Palestinian woman tweeting in the heat of the moment… and used a popular hashtag at the time without thinking”.

However, Halawa criticized the BBC for “capitulating to pressure from external pro-Israel interest groups”, whose efforts are aimed at “setting the parameters of acceptable journalism to suit Israel, and policing international media to maintain institutional pro-Israel bias”.

This last sentence might have been in reference to other high-profile cases in recent years, where journalists have been sanctioned by their international media organizations after they had been accused of holding anti-Semitic views. A few weeks before Halawa was sacked, Emily Wilder, an Associated Press journalist on the other side of the Atlantic, was fired. Wilder, a young Jewish graduate of Stanford University, had joined AP only three weeks earlier. The reason that AP gave for firing her was that she had violated the company’s social media policy, but the news agency did not disclose which social media posts it was referring to.

In fact, the furor had begun just a few days earlier, when a right-wing group, the Stanford College Republicans, in a Twitter thread said that it “discovered” that AP had hired “the former Stanford anti-Israel agitator, Emily Wilder,” and went on to list examples of her pro-Palestinian activism while in college.

In a statement following her dismissal, Wilder criticized AP for throwing her “under the bus” and penalizing her for her prior activism, warning that “the asymmetrical enforcement of rules around objectivity… has censored so many journalists— particularly Palestinian journalists and other journalists of color.” In all the cases outlined above, journalists were not censored because of their work, but rather for other activities they conducted—or had conducted in the past—outside of their job. Their news organizations felt that these activities risked compromising their public image and took action against them accordingly. However, while it is true that anti-Semitism and other forms of racism and bigotry exist within the media, and that news organizations should be expected to root out this behavior from their ranks, it is also true that accusations of such misconduct can be weaponized by organized groups to censor journalists.

Non-State Actors in the Arab World
In the Arab World too, journalists often have to contend with restrictions imposed by their own organizations. These organizations are often directly owned by political players (governments and to a lesser extent other powerful political parties), or by their affiliates, who exercise editorial control. Journalists who work at these organizations understand that they are bound by the political agenda of their employer, and that crossing red lines could jeopardize their career or indeed result in immediate dismissal.

In recent years some countries such as Egypt, which had previously enjoyed a degree of diversity in media ownership, have witnessed a process of consolidation through acquisitions that brought more media under direct or indirect state control. What remains of independent media are mostly digital outlets on the fringe.

Moreover, non-state actors other than news organizations have been active in attempting to restrict journalists in Arab countries. Coordinated campaigns of online harassment and intimidation are common, and the plethora of armed militias in the Middle East has meant that threats made online can materialize into real physical harm.

The case of Lebanese journalist and publisher Lokman Slim is sadly not uncommon. A prominent Shiite critic of Hezbollah, Slim was often subjected to online and physical threats by supporters of the paramilitary group. On February 4, 2021, he was found shot dead inside his car at a remote spot in southern Lebanon. Similar cases of journalists being targeted by armed groups are found in other Arab countries where no central government is able to exercise full control, such as in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Libya.

The effect of the physical harm to journalists, whether it is instigated by state or non-state actors, clearly extends beyond the individual cases of those who have experienced it themselves. The true impact of these actions is that they create an environment of fear in which the wider community of journalists is intimidated into falling in line.

Navigating Red Lines in the Region
One of the challenges for journalists in the region is to figure out exactly what the media red lines are and how to navigate them. The room for maneuver varies between countries. In Kuwait, for example, criticism of government ministers is generally tolerated, whereas other Gulf countries keep their media on a much tighter leash. However, even within the same country figuring out the boundaries can be tricky. Stories that seem to be pushing against perceived red lines are sometimes tolerated, while others that appear to be benign have landed their publishers in trouble. This might be mere coincidence, but it might also be the result of a policy of deliberate ambiguity intended to keep journalists unsure of what is acceptable, thus pushing them to err on the side of caution and strengthening self-censorship.

Another factor is the relationship between the news organization (or the political entity that controls it) and the subject of its reporting. For example, local journalists working for Saudi and Emirati-based news organizations in Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen are often threatened and/or targeted by Iranian-backed groups who yield vast power in these countries.

The Al Jazeera network, which is generally seen as an extension of the state of Qatar, is another case in point. For example, as relations deteriorated between Cairo and Doha after 2013, Al Jazeera was banned from reporting in Egypt and a number of its journalists were prosecuted on several occasions. As the relationship thawed in 2021, one of the journalists was released, and the Qatar-based network was allowed to do a live report from Cairo with a visiting correspondent. And yet, the volatility and complexities of state relations mean that they can be a poor guide for journalists to predict the boundaries in which they are allowed to function. Only one month after Al Jazeera was permitted to deliver its live report from Cairo, an Egyptian journalist working for the network was arrested upon his arrival at Cairo Airport, and despite the release of one of its journalists in 2021, other journalists who worked for Al Jazeera remained in prison. Incidentally, the visiting Al Jazeera correspondent who did the live report from Cairo in 2021 was Shireen Abu Akleh whose name would make headlines a year later. In May 2022, she was shot and killed as she reported on an Israeli raid on Jenin in the occupied Palestinian West Bank. According to multiple investigations, including one that was conducted by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, she was killed by Israeli forces.

Abu Akleh was a veteran journalist with twenty-five years of experience reporting in the Occupied Territories. According to her colleagues, she was a safety-conscious journalist who knew how to report boldly while navigating the red lines imposed by the high-risk environment in which she functioned. On the day she was killed she had taken all the usual precautions, and thought she was operating within safe boundaries. She would end up paying with her life as a result of an arbitrary and ambiguously enforced red line.