Wednesday, March 27

Shireen Abu Akleh and the double standard with Israel, by Joan Cañete Bayle


Run through social media a video of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in which she recalls what it meant for her to cover Israel’s great military operation in 2002 in the West Bank, one of the crucial moments of the Second Intifada. “I will never forget the scale of such destruction and the feeling that sometimes death was very close. (…) And, despite the danger, we kept working. (…) In difficult times I have overcome fear. I chose journalism to be close to human beings. It may not be easy to change reality, but at least I have been able to bring this voice to the world.”

This week, Shireen Abu Akleh, a legendary correspondent for Al Yazeera in the occupied Palestinian territories, was shot dead in Jenin while covering the umpteenth routine Israeli army incursion into the area. Shireen was dressed in a journalist identification vest and wearing a helmet. Her death has generated the usual propaganda cycle in these cases, a model so old that when it was invented, fake news had not even been heard of: the Israeli Army promised an investigation (of those that never get anywhere) and spokesmen, -official, unofficial and disguised-, trolls, the Israeli press and part of the international press began to talk that the bullet that killed Shireen was actually Palestinian. Shireen’s murder became the umpteenth swamp in which the equidistant splash.

low echo

One difference from the years of the Intifada is that Shireen’s death It has hardly caused a scandal beyond some very specific circles. The scarce echo is logical given the situation in which the Palestinian-Israeli conflict finds itself: forgotten and relegated in the sphere of international public opinion, without influence on the global agenda, turned into a matter of internal security of Israel. It is the logical consequence of the Israeli victory (military, political, territorial, narrative) to the pulse that the Palestinians launched at the beginning of the century with the second Intifada. Today, the zionist project is a success story, since Israel dominates with an iron fist all the land of British Mandate Palestine between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. Out of the international spotlight, with diplomacy deactivated by the Trumpian Abraham Agreement, Israel expands its population through the growing colonies of the West Bank and it locks the Palestinians in their shrinking population centers. Unpunished and immune to international scrutiny, any hint of resistance is lethally suppressed.

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To intuit the ferocity of the Israeli occupation today you just need to read the report that Michele Bachelet, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, presented in Geneva in March 2022. Bachelet speaks of a “deteriorated situation in the occupied territories”; “continued and increasing violations of international law” by Israel; increase in deaths and the disproportionate use of lethal methods by the Israeli Army. In the occupied territories, usually everything happens when it seems that nothing is happening. This is when Palestinians die and settlements grow. It is when there are Israeli victims that spirals of violence are decreed.

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In his acclaimed book ‘Say Nothing’ Patrick Radden Keefe talks about whataboutism: that phenomenon that leads to, in a conflict, when someone censures the excesses of one side, they are questioned with “and what about that other atrocity committed by the alleged victims?”, thus entering a spiral in which it is impossible to dialogue and that, above all, is a breeding ground for impunity.In these months of the murderous invasion of Ukraine by Russia, many have tried not to fall into whataboutism every time that European and The USA censors Russia for the occupation of the Ukraine, the methods of its Army and the audacity of its propaganda, all immoral and criminal. But the strength of the defense of rights and freedoms of Ukraine and its people by Western countries and governments loses strength when it falls into incoherence, when double standards become unbearable. Because Shireen’s death reminds us that in this stage of silence and oblivion with the Palestinians, it is worth asking more than ever What about Israel? For when the end of equidistance and firm policies to end the occupation of the Palestinian territories? Shireen Abu Akleh is the latest in a long list of victims. And nothing ever happens, the perfect definition of impunity.

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It remains, yes, the consolation of his work: “It may not be easy to change reality, but at least I have been able to bring this voice to the world.”


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