I long believed that change was necessary and possible in the journalism industry, which operates frequently on constant deadlines and rushed decisions, emphasizes “going with your gut” and provides little time to interrogate assumptions and prejudices. Its very processes made it an effective litmus test for society; I believed if journalists could learn to pause at critical push-comes-to-shove moments, anyone could.

But I’m afraid the situation unfolding around my peers in Gaza is throttling that conviction. My industry’s inability to stand for the simple — and standard — matter of acknowledging that Palestinian journalists are being killed in unprecedented numbers, and condemning it, even with weeks and months of time to reflect on the situation, is forcing shifts in my consciousness.

What’s happening to Palestinian journalists is beyond grim: 79 journalists and media workers confirmed dead since Oct. 7, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists: 72 Palestinian, four Israeli and three Lebanese. It reports there are “multiple assaults, threats, cyberattacks, censorship, and killings of family members.”

Wael Dahdouh, 53, was reporting live on air on Oct. 25 when he received news that his wife, two of his eight children and a baby grandson had been killed, along with eight other relatives, in an Israeli air raid that struck a house in which they were sheltering. He returned to work the next day.

A few weeks later, he and his cameraman, Samer Abudaqa, were covering the aftermath of Israeli strikes on a UN school in Khan Younis that was sheltering displaced people. Surveillance drones hovered overhead. Then came a drone strike. Dahdouh escaped with injuries. Abudaqa bled to death. On Monday, an Israeli missile killed his eldest son, the photojournalist Hamza Dahdouh, and journalist Mustafa Tharaya. A third, Hazem Rajab, was seriously wounded. Hours later, there was Wael Dahdouh, puffy-eyed, hoarse, speaking at a makeshift funeral, then returning to work.

“We will not stop for a moment, as long as we’re alive,” Dahdouh said on camera in Arabic.

Not for nothing is Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief called “Al Jabal” or “the mountain” in Arabic. The grey-stubbled man with blue helmet and flak jacket marked PRESS worn to identify journalists in Palestine has become an icon, a much-needed voice of moral clarity. A symbol of persistence amid devastation at the hands of Israeli forces.

Journalists often don’t like to become the story, and I won’t do Dahdouh the disservice of calling him a hero, or offer a feel-good inspirational story that elides the scale of horrors unfolding on the ground.

Photojournalist Motaz Azaiza sounded a caution, when he told Mehdi Hassan on MSNBC on Sunday: “I don’t want you to call someone a hero and forget the people who are under tons of rubble and they died there.”

Azaia’s photo of a young girl trapped under rubble made it to Time Magazine’s Top 100 photos of 2023.

Canadian journalism groups have risen frequently in support of press freedom. The frequent feting of the incredibly brave Maria Ressa and the shuddering revulsion expressed toward the repressive practices of the Philippines’ government comes to mind. It’s standard to hear the cliché “As journalism goes, so goes democracy” in a speech at a media event here.

In 2015, when gunmen targeted staff of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and killed 12 people, journalists joined the rallying cry of “Je suis Charlie” en masse; even those who viewed the cartoons as bigoted stood in solidarity with the slain journalists because nothing justifies murder.

Our industry is capable of empathy. The Pulitzer Board awarded a special citation to the “Journalists of Ukraine” for their “courage, endurance and commitment to truthful reporting,” in 2022.

“Despite bombardment, abductions, occupation and even deaths in their ranks, they have persisted in their effort to provide an accurate picture of a terrible reality, doing honor to Ukraine and to journalists around the world,” it said.

But where is the solidarity with Palestinian journalists working in impossibly hostile environments? Instead, newsrooms have warned journalists not to sign petitions of support claiming it would malign the organizations’ reputation for balance and objectivity.

Foreign journalists have been barred from entering Gaza, which means the vital role of documenting the war has fallen to Palestinians, the very people often dismissed in western media as being unreliable interlocutors of their own condition.

Not for these journalists the protection afforded to our reporters who get to be “embedded” in western or western-aligned armies. Nor even, it seems, basic protections under the laws of war.

In November, Honest Reporting, a group that monitors criticism of Israel in media, raised questions about whether photojournalist Yasser Qudih and three other photographers had prior knowledge of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack. Reuters, which used his photos, rejected this speculation. Still, the Israeli prime minister’s office tweeted that the photographers were “accomplices in crimes against humanity.” Five days later, four missiles struck Qudih’s home in South Gaza, killing eight family members.

In October, my former Toronto Star colleague Fares Akram lost 18 members of his extended family to Israeli airstrikes. A few days later, his three nieces and their father were gone.

As recently as Monday, Israeli airstrikes are reported to have killed the mother of Ahmed al-Batta, correspondent of Qatar-based Al Arabi TV, his sister and her children.

More Palestinian journalists have been killed in 100 days than the total number of journalists killed in the two-decade Vietnam War. Israel, which has a long record of killing Palestinian journalists, denies it is targeting journalists or their families. It instead often justifies its actions by slapping a terrorist label on them, as it is doing in the case of Hamza Dahdouh and  Mustafa Tharaya.

The United Nations human rights office, meanwhile, has called for an independent investigation into the killings.

These reporters risk death raining from the sky and in ground assaults, they witness hospitals and bakeries being bombed, limbs being blown off, parents gathering children’s body parts in plastic bags, the starvation, sickness, humiliations and deaths of their own loved ones and somehow still share the developments in words, images and videos. They do so with no safe place to work out of, amid frequent power outages. Even as they are themselves displaced, themselves hungry, themselves in trauma.

They do so, surely, with the expectation that, faced with such irreprovable evidence, the world won’t, can’t, turn away.

But the Palestinian journalists could not have accounted for the violent iteration of racism that renders their lives unworthy of note.

Nor had many of us media workers in Canada. It has been stunning to work amid this silence. So many Canadians are hurting, especially those whose identities are implicated in the Israel-Palestine issue; predominantly Arabs, Muslims and Jews, those who have loved ones in peril and those who risk facing hate here.

But the pain of this indifference to journalists is becoming personal to many more of us. Many journalists of colour had assumed the industry had learned a few embarrassing lessons after the counterproductive “war on terror” hysteria post-9/11 and would not again simplistically align with their governments.

For decades we, and those who came before us, built relationships, educated our peers on social and racial justice, sometimes challenged but often ignored the racist humiliations meted out to us, looked out for each other, and continued to pitch stories and offer edits on the assumption that progress was inexorable. We believed our relationships — we even thought some were friendships — established that we were just as human as everyone else, and that it would be enough. We thought the learnings from the racial reckoning of 2020 — while wholly inadequate — had moved the needle at least a little.

But we had clearly underestimated the lure of the bandwagon.

For while certainly some allies have stayed true, the belated and anemic statements from some Canadian journalism organizations that for the most part can’t bring themselves to either name Israel, or criticize it, tells another story.

Palestinian journalist Anas El-Najar has hung up his boots. “Seeking safety with my family is a thousand times better than seeking news to convey to a world that knows neither feeling nor humanity,” he said in a statement. 

I don’t blame him. Better to spend the little time one may have left with loved ones than try to appeal to others’ dead conscience.

Our silence is complicit in these deaths.

I don’t know how we can ever undo the damage of this unnatural hush. Many of us who advocated for equality are having our own reckoning, with what our instinct told us, what anecdotes revealed, what the statistics confirmed but what our damned hearts had refused to accept. That our individual relationships, the little privileges we enjoyed, of education, of income, of language offer little buffer when push comes to shove.

If one white journalist went through what our Palestinian peers are experiencing, or if it was not at the hands of a western-aligned nation, there would be an uproar, stinging columns, even movies made out of it. But the journalists in Gaza could have been any of us non-white journalists.

Our industry’s response tells us our bodies, too, would have fallen in silence. The Muslims among us would be particularly susceptible to false “terrorist” labels. 

So now I take inspiration from Wael Dahdouh. Non, je ne suis pas Charlie. Instead, I say in Arabic: Ana Wael. I am Wael. Say it with me.

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