It would be the last piece I ever received from him. On Oct. 2, 2018, Jamal was brutally murdered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, by Saudi agents.
We headlined the column “What the Arab world needs most is free expression.” Editing it without Jamal was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done — like preparing a body for a public funeral, laying his year of work for The Post to rest.
For months after that, U.S. media institutions, democracy organizations and press freedom groups decried Jamal’s killing, parading their commitment to ensuring the safety of journalists and protecting Arab voices for freedom and dissent. Organizations such as Freedom House and the Human Rights Foundation (HRF) were highly vocal then; HRF eventually produced a feature-length documentary film about his case.
Compare that with some of these institutions’ silence or relative muted-ness today on the record-shattering death toll of journalists covering Israel’s assault on Gaza, and it is hard not to feel as if the parades for Jamal were for show.
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), at least 64 journalists have been killed in the Israel-Gaza war; 57 were Palestinian, four were Israeli and three were Lebanese. This war “has been the deadliest conflict for journalists that CPJ has ever recorded, in terms of documenting attacks on the press,” CPJ President Jodie Ginsberg said in an interview with the New Yorker.
For context, nearly as many journalists have been killed in two months in Gaza as were killed worldwide in 2022.
It’s not just that the journalists are being killed: Some believe they have been explicitly targeted, even outside Gaza.
On Oct. 13, an Israeli strike in Lebanon killed Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah and injured six others. Reuters, Agence France-Presse, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International assert that the Israeli strike was most likely deliberate and therefore a war crime. Israel has said that the strike was in an active combat zone and that the episode is “under review.”
On Nov. 21, reporter Farah Omar and cameraman Rabih al-Maamari, from the Al Mayadeen TV channel in Beirut, were killed in Lebanon. According to Al Mayadeen, an Israeli warplane fired two missiles on them. Israel’s goal, Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati said, “is to silence the media that exposes its crimes and attacks.”
Journalists in the region have continued to work even though their families are also at risk. Al Jazeera Arabic’s Gaza bureau chief, Wael Dahdouh, kept reporting after learning in October that his wife, son, daughter and grandson had been killed in an Israeli airstrike. On Friday, Dahdouh himself was wounded — and Al Jazeera journalist Samer Abudaqa was killed — in what media outlets reported was an Israeli drone strike.
Anas Al-Sharif, another journalist for Al Jazeera Arabic, reported receiving threats from the Israeli military to stop his work; last week, his family’s home in the Jabalia refugee camp was hit in a strike, and his 90-year-old father was killed.
These killings are part of a pattern of impunity when it comes to “the only democracy in the Middle East.” In the roughly two decades leading up to the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, CPJ recorded at least 20 journalists killed by Israeli military fire. Eighteen were Palestinian; none were Israeli. In the majority of these cases, CPJ reported, the journalists had clearly worn clothing or body armor, or driven in vehicles, identifying them as “press.”
Although it has been heartening to see individual American journalists organizing vigils for their fallen Palestinian colleagues, the lack of public outrage from journalistic institutions has been conspicuous. And then there is the punishment.
At the Los Angeles Times, staff members who dared to show solidarity with journalists in Gaza were suspended from coverage of the war after signing an open letter supporting their fellow journalists and criticizing Western coverage of Israel’s actions. The paper argued that signing such a letter — which to date lists the names of nearly 1,500 verified and former journalists — was in violation of its ethics policy. Although no prohibition on signing open letters exists in that policy, Semafor reported that the Times’s executive editor, Kevin Merida, reminded staff that the policy does state: a “fair-minded reader of the Times news coverage should not be able to discern the private opinions of those who contributed to that coverage.”
In an addendum, the open letter’s creators noted that after the letter’s initial publication, more than 30 journalists “asked to have their signatures removed, fearing reprisal from their employers. Those employers include the Associated Press, the Washington Post, Bloomberg, McClatchy, the Chicago Tribune, LAist, the Modesto Bee, KCRW, and KQED.”
And what of the Biden administration and its past pledges to support press freedom? On Dec. 10, CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Secretary of State Antony Blinken about the death toll of Palestinian journalists presumably killed by IDF strikes. “We want to make sure that that’s investigated,” Blinken said, and that “we understand what’s happened and there’s accountability.”
What a nothingburger of a response. As CPJ has reported, there has never been true accountability for Israel when it comes to journalist killings. And the consequences are devastating: The slaughter of Palestinian journalists is an erasure of those attempting to record the first rough draft of history in Gaza.
Like the destruction of art and archives, the killing of journalists is an assault on memory, truth and Palestinian culture. The tacit blank check given to Israel to eliminate civilian targets, including journalists it doesn’t like, puts anyone covering the region in danger.
If Jamal were here, I would mourn today’s grim reality with him. Unless our institutions change course, Israel’s campaign against Gaza could — among other terrible outcomes — mark the moment when the myth of American commitment to global press freedom met its death.
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