Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Aqleh, a prominent reporter for Al Jazeera who has been one of the most well-known faces conveying the current situation in Palestine in Arabic-language media for over 20 years, was shot dead in the early morning hours of Wednesday, 11 May by Israeli occupation forces invading Jenin. She was shot in the head as she wore her “Press” vest, sparking outrage at her murder and at the systematic attacks directed against Palestinian journalists.

The assassination of Abu Aqleh drew comparisons to the killing of Palestinian journalist Yasser Murtaja and Ahmed Abu Hussein in Gaza during the Great March of Return in 2018, as well as the 50 Palestinian journalists killed since 2000 by the Israeli occupation. There are also dozens of Palestinian journalists held behind occupation bars, including Bushra al-Tawil, jailed without charge or trial under administrative detention. Abu Aqleh was a fixture on Al Jazeera, famed throughout the Arab region for her reporting of four wars on Gaza, the Israeli war on Lebanon, and the ongoing Palestinian liberation struggle. On many occasions, she covered the stories of the thousands of Palestinian prisoners, their families, their lives and their resistance. Indeed, her final tweet reported on the death of the mother of one of the longest-serving Palestinian prisoners, Karim Younes, only eight months before his scheduled release:

Salutes to Shireen Abu Aqla, martyred as she continued to report on the ongoing colonial assault on the Palestinian people. Her final tweet, like much of her work, told the stories of Palestinian prisoners of freedom, continuing to resist behind bars for a liberated Palestine https://t.co/XvEnwvx7rq

— Samidoun Network (@SamidounPP) May 11, 2022

She joins a long line of Palestinian martyrs whose lives have been taken by a colonial force attempting its futile effort to defeat the Palestinian people. Her legacy, like that of all of the martyrs of Palestine, must inspire all to organize, struggle and resist for the liberation of Palestine, its prisoners and its people, and to turn our eyes to Jenin, a daily site of assassinations, extrajudicial killings, armed raids, home demolitions and relentless occupation assaults — and a daily site of an undaunted and undefeated resistance that continues to struggle for justice and freedom, to defend the land and people from colonial aggression.

We urge all to salute the martyrs of Palestine and their aspirations by joining the marches and rallies for Palestine around the world marking the 74th commemoration of the Nakba, the Day of Palestinian Struggle, and the ongoing movement for liberation and return. See the list of actions here. 

The below article by Shireen Abu Aqleh was published in “This Week in Palestine” (in English) in September 2021. She writes of her return to Jenin after her previous coverage there, specifically because of the heroes of the “Freedom Tunnel,” who liberated themselves from Gilboa prison, and weaves the story of imprisonment in Jenin with that of life and resistance:

“Reporting in a Time of Legends”

by Shireen Abu Aqleh

It was probably a coincidence that brought me back twenty years. When I arrived in Jenin in September, I did not expect to relive this overwhelming feeling. Jenin is still the same inextinguishable flame that is home to fearless young men who are not intimidated by any potential Israeli invasion.

The success of the escape from Jalbou’ Prison was the reason I spent a number of days and nights in the city. It was like going back to 2002 when Jenin lived something unique, unlike any other city in the West Bank. Towards the end of Al-Aqsa Intifada, armed citizens spread out all over the city and publicly dared the occupation forces to raid the camp.

In 2002, Jenin became a legend in the minds of many. The battle in the camp against the occupation forces that April is still powerfully present in the minds of its inhabitants, even those who were not yet born when it happened.

Returning to Jenin now, 20 years later, I encountered many familiar faces. In a restaurant, I met Mahmoud who greeted me with the question, “Do you remember me?” “Yes,” I replied, “I remember you.” It is difficult to forget that face and those eyes. He continued, “I was released from jail a few months ago.” Mahmoud was wanted by the Israelis when I met him during the years of the Intifada.

I relived those feelings of anxiety and horror that we experienced every time we met an armed person in the camp. Mahmoud is one of the lucky ones; he was imprisoned and released, but the faces of many others have been turned into symbols or mere memories for the inhabitants of Jenin and for Palestinians in general.

During this visit, we did not face any difficulties in finding a place to stay, unlike ten years ago when we had to stay in the homes of people we did not know. At that time, people opened their homes to us since there were no hotels.

At first sight, life in Jenin may appear normal, with restaurants, hotels, and shops that open their doors every morning. But in Jenin we have the feeling that we are in a small village that monitors every stranger that comes in. On every street, people ask the crew, “Are you from the Israeli press?” “No, we are from Al-Jazeera.” The yellow Israeli vehicle plates raise suspicion and fear. The car was photographed and the photograph was circulated several times before our movement in the city became familiar to inhabitants.

In Jenin, we met people who have never given up hope; they have not allowed fear to infiltrate their hearts and have not been broken by the Israeli occupation forces. It is probably not a coincidence that the six prisoners who managed to escape are all from the vicinity of Jenin and the camp.

To me, Jenin is not a one ephemeral story in my career or even in my personal life. It is the city that can raise my morale and help me fly. It embodies the Palestinian spirit that sometimes trembles and falls but, beyond all expectations, rises to pursue its flights and dreams.

And this has been my experience as a journalist; the moment I’m physically exhausted and mentally drained, I’m faced with a new, surprising legend. It might emerge from a small opening, or from a tunnel dug underground.

About  Shireen Abu Aqleh

For 24 years I have been covering the Palestinian-Israeli conflict for Al Jazeera. In addition to the political issue, my concern has been and will always be the human story and the daily suffering of my people under occupation. Before joining my current channel, I was a co-founder of Sawt Falasteen Radio. Throughout my career, I have covered four wars against the Gaza Strip and the Israeli war on Lebanon, in addition to the incursions into the West Bank. Furthermore, I have covered events in the United States, the United Kingdom, Turkey, and Egypt.

Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network condemns in the strongest terms the smear campaign targeting Palestinian Canadian leftist writer and community organizer Khaled Barakat as well as the work of Samidoun, by the right-wing National Post, intentionally forwarding the agenda of pro-Israel lobby organizations in Canada. It is clear that this is not a random attack; the content, far from its packaging, is in reality warmed-over retreads of various attacks from the Israeli occupation regime and Zionist publications over the years, with an added attempt to sensationally criminalize and stigmatize Palestinian organizing and activism in Canada.

Let us be clear. We will not be deterred by Israeli’s designations or by smear campaigns such as this. We stand with Khaled Barakat. We stand with the Palestinian people, their resistance, and their 4,500 Palestinian prisoners, leaders of the resistance and of the movement for justice and liberation in Palestine, from the river to the sea.   

The front-page placement of the article coincided with multiple Israeli-government-backed campaigns internationally targeting Palestinian community and Palestine solidarity organizing. It is clear that this reflects these forces’ growing anguish and concern about the reality that the majority of people around the world, and even inside countries like Canada and the U.S., where governments provide the Israeli occupation with significant military, diplomatic and political support, stand with the Palestinian people and their efforts to throw off colonialism, occupation and apartheid.

Why did the National Post publish this article? Of course, the National Post has never hesitated to engage in right-wing, pro-imperialist and anti-Palestinian argumentation and attacks. Most recently, in the past two months, four major Canadian university student bodies and/or student governments have passed new resolutions and policies in support of Palestinian rights and implementing boycott, divestment and sanctions policies against the Israeli occupation: at McGill, Concordia, University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University. This comes in addition to multiple resolutions that have been adopted over the years by Canadian labour unions, student unions and student bodies, and even the limited resolutions adopted by the federal New Democratic Party (NDP).

In May 2021, during the Unity Uprising in Palestine, tens of thousands of people took to the streets in cities and small towns across Canada, as they did around the world. At the same time that the Palestinian people’s resistance on the ground in Palestine was making clear that the occupation would not be able to freely commit its ongoing war crimes and crimes against humanity, people here were taking action to demand a change in Canadian policy and an end to complicity in these crimes — along with accountability and real justice for Indigenous peoples of this land.

It’s quite clear: Israeli colonization, occupation and apartheid are losing ground. Major human rights and legal institutions have spoken out, from Human Rights Watch to Amnesty International to the Harvard University Law School legal clinic to the United Nations’ ESCWA. Millions of people are taking to the streets for justice in Palestine. The Palestinian resistance is perhaps stronger than ever before, amid a growing resistance camp in the region and internationally.

The response of the occupation has been to escalate their use of the “terrorist” label to the extent that international advocacy groups like Samidoun, Palestinian community organizations in Europe, and six major Palestinian NGOs like Addameer, Defense for Children International and Al-Haq, are currently being labeled as “terrorist” by the Israeli occupation regime. Israeli president Isaac Herzog has even labeled an ice cream brand not selling in illegal settlements “a new form of terrorism.”

This has been combined with efforts pushed by various official entities, including Israeli intelligence, the “Ministry of Strategic Affairs,” the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, etc, with the marketing of “dossiers” so thinly evidenced that even Western governments have found them lacking (yet appear to be relied upon in the National Post report). The attempt to silence advocacy for Palestine by using the “terror” label is failing. In fact, Samidoun has grown more since our designation in one year than in any single year prior.

In France, where exactly these same types of smears were used to push for the French government to ban the Collectif Palestine Vaincra and other pro-Palestine associations, the French government has already lost the first legal challenge — not only is the Collectif once again actively marching for Palestine, but the government was required to pay 4500 EUR for the violation of its rights. A German court found in March of this year that it was illegal for Berlin’s interior minister to ban Khaled Barakat’s speech on U.S. foreign policy, Palestine and the Arab countries. Nevertheless, we see the National Post, working hand in hand with expressly Zionist organizations, in an attempt to push the Canadian government down a similar failed path of criminalization through an astroturfed campaign of smears and attacks.

As Samidoun, we know first and foremost that attacks on us are primarily aimed at the Palestinian prisoners, seeking to isolate them from international solidarity and support. As we write today, there are 4,500 Palestinians jailed in occupation prisons. Of those, over 500 are jailed without charge or trial under administrative detention. They have been engaged in a boycott of the military courts since the 1st of January 2022. Two are currently on hunger strike to end their arbitrary detention, Khalil Awawdeh and Raed Rayan. They are joined by hundreds of Palestinian children locked behind bars. Every one of those Palestinian prisoners deserves front-page coverage in Canadian mainstream media — not a smear campaign, but a real look at their suffering and steadfastness and the injustice against them, which is enabled by the complicity of governments like Canada’s. While the National Post can find plenty of column inches and front-page space to smear Palestinians in diaspora, Canadian journalists face silencing and have apologized for so much as mentioning the word “Palestine.”

Further, this is clearly an attack on Palestinians organizing in exile and diaspora. The Israeli colonial regime has already forced Palestinians from their homes and lands for over 74 years of Nakba, denying their inalienable right to return, and yet, is unable to throw these Palestinians in Canada, the U.S., Europe, Latin America and elsewhere in administrative detention or invade their homes in midnight raids. Its inability to do so is apparently frustrating, especially as new generations of Palestinians come forward to lead the struggle inside and outside Palestine; this type of smear campaign is a transparent attempt to silence the voice of the Palestinian people in exile and specifically the Palestinian-Canadian community.

We also see these campaigns as an attempt to undermine our collective solidarity through the targeting of individuals and specific organizations and to police the movement, as well as to instrumentalize and deploy anti-Palestinian racism and incite state and individual violence against Khaled Barakat and other Palestinian activists. These attacks underline more than ever the importance of a collective defense of all of us against the perpetrators and promoters of colonialism, imperialism and racism. This is not a lone example; far from it — it reflects the attacks on Prof. Rabab Abdulhadi in the United States, hundreds of mostly Palestinian and Arab Canadian and American students profiled on smear websites like Canary Mission, educators like Javier Davila and Nadia Shoufani, or restaurants like Foodbenders in Toronto.

Similarly, we note that this front-page National Post smear campaign comes one day before the ADL in the United States announced an escalation in its decades-long campaigns attacking organizations advocating for justice in Palestine. It comes days after B’nai Brith Canada released a spurious “audit of antisemitism” that highlighted the slogan: “Israel and Canada: Partners in Apartheid, Partners in Colonialism”, indicating that their real target is the anti-racist movement that stands with Palestine. This report was nonetheless given favourable and unchallenging coverage in Canadian media.

It also happened at the same time that the occupation (with the apparent complicity of the U.S.) was denying travel to two Palestinian human rights defenders — part of the “designated six organizations” — to attend the World Social Forum in Mexico. All of this is an attempt to silence the voices of the Palestinian people — but if 74 years of Nakba, state violence, colonialism and mass imprisonment have not done so, escalating smear campaigns are certainly bound for failure.

The most important response that we can make is to build the movement for Palestine. One of the goals of such campaigns is to divert our compass away from our ongoing campaigns and instill fear in the community. By organizing and building the movement for Palestine, we can show our support for Khaled Barakat and the Palestinian people and cause as a whole. Certainly, we will work to hold the National Post accountable — but it’s the movement for Palestinian liberation that is at the core of the issue.

We urge all people in Canada to take to the streets on May 15 and the Week of Palestinian Struggle, remembering 74 years of ongoing Nakba and celebrating the ongoing struggle for liberation. (See the events in Vancouver and Montreal here — more to come!) We further urge everyone to join us on June 1-4 in Ottawa for the International League of People’s Struggle Assembly. Khaled Barakat will be speaking on behalf of the Masar Badil, the Alternative Palestinian Revolutionary Path, and we’ll also hear from Charlotte Kates of Samidoun, Hanna Kawas of the Canada Palestine Association, and many more strugglers for justice — and discuss how we can build and strengthen our anti-imperialist movement.

We also want to invite supporters of justice and liberation in Palestine to get involved with Samidoun. We’re organizing in Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa and elsewhere, and we can be even more effective and stronger as we grow and build. We want to work together with your organizations and groups, develop new chapters and welcome new members, and we invite you to join us in struggle. Contact us at samidoun@samidoun.net to learn more about how you can get involved, or click here to donate to support our work.

From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!