Roundtable: On Gaza and the War on Palestinian Journalism
Interviewee
Author: 
Ghousoon Bisharat
Sherif Mansour
Mahmoud Mushtaha
Interviewer: 
Amahl Bishara
Diana Allan
Digital Section: 
Interviews and debates
Keywords: 
Journalism
Gaza
free expression
genocide
Purchase
Abstract: 

This virtual panel discusses Israel’s war on Palestinian journalism, which has been part and parcel of its war on Gaza since October 7, 2023. Israel’s killing of Palestinian journalists has made this the deadliest period for journalists since the establishment of the Committee to Protect Journalists in 1992. Israel has also targeted and destroyed the instruments integral to reporting, including journalists’ equipment, cars, and communications technology, and it has imprisoned Palestinian journalists in unprecedented numbers. It has tried to limit coverage of the war by prohibiting foreign journalists from entering Gaza independently. This panel presents firsthand accounts from journalists and free speech advocates of their experiences covering the war on Gaza from their respective locations, including while living in constant danger in Gaza. It expresses Palestinian journalists’ commitment to speaking the truth despite extraordinary risks and conveys the importance of presenting reporting from Gaza under Palestinians’ own bylines.

Author biography: 

Diana Allan is an associate professor of anthropology at McGill University. She is a filmmaker, codirector of the Critical Media Lab and cofounder of the Nakba Archive, which has documented histories of the 1948 expulsion with Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. Allan holds a Canada Research Chair in the anthropology of living archives. 

Amahl Bishara is a professor of anthropology at Tufts University. She is author of Crossing a Line: Laws, Violence, and Roadblocks to Palestinian Political Expression (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022) and Back Stories: U.S. News Production and Palestinian Politics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013). 

Ghousoon Bisharat is editor in chief of +972 Magazine, as well as a strategic communications and international cooperation expert. She has more than twenty years of experience working with leading international broadcast news outlets and the European Union. 

Sherif Mansour is an Egyptian American democracy and human rights activist. Until spring 2024, he was Middle East and North Africa coordinator at the Committee to Protect Journalists, and before that, he worked with Freedom House in Washington, DC. In 2010, Mansour cofounded the Egyptian Association for Change. 

Mahmoud Mushtaha is a Palestinian journalist and humanitarian worker. His writings have appeared in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, the New Arab, +972 Magazine, Revista Contexto, and the Globe and Mail. He is an assistant manager and contributor to We Are Not Numbers.