6 days ago
Some questions for Avichay Adraee
Avichay Adraee, spokesperson for the Israeli occupation forces, posted on X in the first hours of August 11, addressing a dead Anas al-Sharif in Arabic.
'Anas al-Sharif: Your truth has been unveiled. The documents of Hamas and Jihad which were found in Gaza and which we reveal today do not leave a place for doubt. Anas al-Sharif is active in the military wing of Hamas. You may present yourself as a journalist pained by the pleas of the people of Gaza. But now everyone knows you are a Hamasawy, by belonging and by profession. Everyone knows now that you joined Hamas's East Jabalia Brigade in 2013, and that you were hit in a training incident as part of the brigade in 2017. You were the head of a cell in the field of firing rockets. You were a fighter, I have no idea if you were a good or a bad one, in the elite units of Hamas. All the support statements that will be published by Al Jazeera for you don't matter. Now everyone knows the truth. You, who were supposed to be a journalist from the north of Gaza, have been exposed: Your real job is among the most terrorist, criminal and assaulting movements for the people of Gaza. I am not surprised that you work for a media organization that covers up Hamas's crimes and its use of the people while lying to the world — ayb w ar [disgrace and shame].'
Parking one's disdain for the man for a moment, a few questions:
Why is he speaking to a dead person his military just killed? What compels him to address the lifeless? Is it guilt, fear, the need to hear himself justify the death? Is he haunted? Would he be able to deliver these accusations face-to-face to an alive Anas?
What kind of evidence is this — held up to a supposedly enlightened civilized world? And why is it being circulated in an animated social media world, with Adraee blasting his 'facts' into the void, only to be recycled by his army's mouthpieces, as well as most international media? It betrays even the pretense of professional, credible, Western-style journalism. With this genocide, has Israel given up on posing to the world as the luminous democracy in the midst of the darkness of our jungle that is the Arab World? Or does it need a different spokesperson? Or perhaps there is really no propaganda possible for genocide.
Does Adraee's opinion on whether Anas was a good or bad combatant matter, was it part of the decision to kill him? There is a demeaning suggestion in the statement 'I have no idea if he was a good or a bad combatant.' Maybe if he was a bad combatant, he could have been spared being targeted and killed? Is the killing in Gaza a moral punishment or a functional strategy? Or are these two categories collapsed in the scheme of genocide, manifesting in the killing of those who tell the world about it [1]. Is it simply a vulgar slip from Adraee, mobilizing a whole chain of imperial vulgarity in the mainstream media apparatus? Not that imperialism is polite, but in trying to lock itself within some modern boundaries of reason, it seems unable to contain its own vulgarity.
Does time matter in military calculus? Adraee admits that Anas is a journalist at the end of his post, and that said military activities are in the past. Is this a retroactive punishment for military activity (for which we have no evidence), or a current punishment for thinking? And if it is a current punishment for thinking, is the plan to keep killing all those who hate Israel? What will be the evidence and the means to justify the killings, in a world brewing Israeli hatred?
Why is Adraee concerned with disgrace and shame — ' ayb w ar ' as he put it in Arabic — when he could have simply applauded the bravery of his military for ending the disgraceful and shameful life of Anas? Is it because the way Anas was killed by the Occupation doesn't quite end the disgrace and shame, because essentially, Israel's aerial and technological supremacy are sites of shame, primarily for Adraee and his people, as they fight the land at a distance from the sky?
And is there 'evidence' as well against Mohamed Qraiqea, Ibrahim Zaher, Moamen Elewa, Mohamed al-Khalidi and Mohamed Noufal, the five other journalists who were killed alongside their driver by the airstrike that targeted Anas? Or is it a lack of precision on the part of Israel's supreme aerial and technological capacity that made them collateral damage? And where does more shame lie: in the distant cold killing from above or in the lack of precision?
The truth is that these questions may be rhetorical, repetitive and naive. They might be a waste of time, when the coverage needs to continue, as Anas would say. Perhaps they carry a not-so-invested invitation to stop the PR accompanying the killing and just stick to the killing. But more importantly, they signal the mountains of anger. They are also a way to note the shame (my own) and the powerlessness. It is the anger at such direct witnessing of imperial brutality, of its boundlessness and capacity to introduce new frontiers, while still dressing it up in the rational language of evidence and justice. It is the shame of being a journalist, a five-hour drive away from Gaza, and surviving Anas. It is the powerlessness of journalism in the face of the military state.
I joined the journalism squads in a moment of danger, that of the second Palestinian intifada, followed by the United States invasion of Iraq. Too colossal for my early introduction to politics, the events demanded to be captured, to be translated. Becoming a journalist was an act of belonging, of being in the midst, of staying. It was an act of understanding the scope of what is happening by giving it a language. Such were the politics of truth in this journalism. It wasn't an aspiration to belong to an aerial category called 'journalism,' where the truth descends from above like bombs. Like its own subject of coverage, the event, and its own channel of mediation, language, the truth was always fragile, chaotic, experiential, constantly unfolding, morphing, shocking, distressing and rarely reassuring. It was personal, full of sedimented histories, and we admit it. The truth about the truth is that it was never ready-made or pre-written. In a temporal horizon, this truth holds a future, unknown, uncertain. Adraee and Israel's truth about Anas, Gaza and Palestine hold no futurity. They are in the captivity of their ready-made truth [2]. It's the doom of repetition in the face of uncertainty.
Anas is resting in the powerlessness of death ceasing his journalism, just as we are resting in the powerlessness of our lives as journalists. Perhaps there is a truth there too, a power to this powerlessness: the only journalism possible today is that of Anas and his colleagues broadcasting the genocide from the ground until they themselves are swallowed up by it. They say in the enlightened world that journalism is not a crime. But in ours, especially after Gaza, journalism is not a profession. It's a commitment to an enmeshment of people and land in crisis, the messy here and now where history crashes into the present and its capitulation to power. That's how Anas, Hassan Eslaih, Hossam Shabat, Fatima Hassouna and the rest of the over 240 journalists killed in Gaza did the job. That's what I learn from them.
One tries to stick to a hope that a new world must be born to counteract this carnage, a rewriting of civilization from the flaws of our times, or at least of the catalog of journalism, because of all the happy endings we were force fed in popular culture. But this is not a film; it's the reality of living a life unto death.
A life unto death holds space for dreamworlds, our own version of a ' Riviera ' in Gaza: a newsroom by the sea for all the surviving journalists, a universal school of journalism in the mainland, a place from which philosophy might begin again.
Footnotes:
[1] In Sarah Rifky's edit, she responds in the place of Adraee: To me the admission is also a revelation, without moral discernment, where Hannah Arendt's 'banality of evil' meets Achille Mbembe's 'necropolitics,' and death comes from a system that knows nothing, cares nothing, except that it can.
