For a year, Bisan Owda, 25, has been documenting his daily life in Gaza: from one bombing to another, from one displacement to another. Last month in Los Angeles, the Gazan reporter and content creator won an Emmy award for a story titled I am Bisan from Gaza and I am still alivebroadcast by AJ+. The images, the interviews, were captured at the beginning of November 2023, in the wake of the bombing of Al-Shifa hospital, where thousands of displaced people had taken refuge.
This report, like the other daily capsules produced by Bisan over the past year, has been viewed millions of times all over the world. Unsurprisingly, the reporter’s Emmy nomination created waves. Immediately, a campaign was organized to have her removed from the list of nominees. She was accused of having links with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, with Hamas; to promote terrorism.
A legitimate charge, not very original anyway. The process is simple: dirty, place in the threat camp. We silence voices by discrediting them in the eyes of Western audiences, then normalize passively watching these people die.
At the Emmy ceremony, Jon Laurence, executive producer for AJ+, accepted the award on Bisan’s behalf. He recalled that a week earlier, Al Jazeera offices in occupied West Bank territories had been closed at gunpoint by Israeli soldiers. On stage, we held photos of journalists killed by Israeli soldiers or bombings in recent years: Shireen Abu Akleh, in 2022. Hamza Dahdouh, earlier in 2024. More than 100 journalists killed in Gaza over the past year, a- we recalled.
In May, Bisan also won a prestigious Peabody Award for his reporting. Responsible for awarding the prize, the presenter, Mo Amer, a comedian of Palestinian origin, was visibly moved: “Obviously, Bisan couldn’t be with us this evening,” he said. She accepts the Peabody from Gaza, here she is. » In a brief video speech filmed in front of a pile of ruins, the reporter reacted to the nearly 42,000 people killed by Israel in the preceding months. “Maybe I’m luckier than them, maybe not. Regardless, I feel better today, because I feel that our stories, our struggles, our resistance are seen and heard. »
This gap between the honors and the reality of the Palestinian people trapped and massacred in Gaza is dizzying. The splendor of the ceremonies; the lighting effects, the tuxedos, the dresses, the solemn music, all this to introduce images captured in the rubble, scenes of massacre, famine, indescribable human suffering.
This contrast sums up what we have been doing for a year now, and says everything about our hypocrisy. We watch people die, handing out hugs to those who, risking their lives, expose the horror.
Watching die. It’s been a year that Western citizens and media, above all, have been watching. A year of watching crying mothers hold up the bruised bodies of their children in front of the cameras; as if more transparency, more exhibition, would end up convincing. Nothing helps.
At best, we award trophies, while persisting in doing, and saying, the minimum. A year later, it is not even possible to directly describe what is happening before our eyes. In the street, perhaps, but in any case not in the more official channels where we still have to add two hundred nuances to blur the reality that all this violence depicts. We must take a thousand precautions in emphasizing its programmed and unlimited character; a thousand precautions, too, to evoke the political ambition hidden behind it.
A year of nameless horrors, of images that defy understanding; a year of open disregard for the principles of international law and escalation of aggression, and here we are again hesitant about the nature of what we see, of what we choose to tolerate.
A year of counting the dead and distributing empathy and dismay in cruelly unequal portions. One year of a humanitarian crisis of a gravity that no one denies – but, apparently, the misery which is falling is without cause. The crisis is disproportionate in its effects, everyone agrees on that. Despite everything, we appear timid and hesitant when the time comes to examine what produces it. We quickly resign ourselves to its supposedly inescapable nature. You know, it’s very sad, but it’s complicated…
One year, and now the exercise is extended and continues in Lebanon. A million people displaced, residential neighborhoods bombed, a military ground invasion in the South. A new assault that we tolerate with a frown, at most, while our fellow citizens of Palestinian and Lebanese origin worry about their families left there; of what memories will remain of their childhood or of a whole life left behind.
This is unforgivable. This laissez-faire, these double standards in the distribution of solidarity and empathy for the lives lost and torn apart, is unforgivable. It must be said again and again: we will be ashamed, for a long time, of what we have tolerated and allowed for almost a year.