For 25 years war after war it was the face of a land as tormented as it was unknown, it was appreciated for bringing Palestine to the homes of Arabs who could not visit it.
Rakza, say the Palestinians. Shireen Abu Akleh was a reporter rakza, stable, an angular word that holds within the quiet strength of the most popular narrator and the need of a people to be narrated. For twenty-five years, day after day, war after war, Shireen Aru Akleh has been the face and voice of a land claimed as a symbol by half the world but little known in the depths. And she told it as a reporter. A Palestinian reporter with a Jordanian passport, because those born in East Jerusalem do not have the right to an Israeli one, but adamant in declaring their precise point of observation, without the somewhat haughty arrogance of supposedly objective journalism.
Shireen Abu Akleh told the story of the Palestinians.
“You heard that something had happened, you turned on the Jazeera and she was already there, on the spot, notebook in hand and camera in tow, always the first, very fast in bringing the spectator to the center of the event” recalls Father Ibrahim Faltas, the Franciscan of Egyptian origin who today holds the role of Discrete of the Custody of the Holy Land. He got to know her professionally in the early 2000s, during the siege of the Basilica of the Nativity in Bethlehem, the height of the second intifada, when he was negotiating from inside the besieged church. Shireen Abu Akleh was there for al Jazeera, where she had started working in 1997, exactly one year after the debut of the Arabic CNN, the reversal of the orientalist perspective. Until then, Arab journalists had been little more than stenographers of the propaganda of their respective regimes, let alone journalists.
To browse backwards the Facebook page of Shireen Abu Akleh – already transformed into a sort of no sacred place as the journey of the corpse from Jenin to Ramallah was yesterday, a funeral procession along dozens of villages – there is the whole chronicle of this last Palestinian quarter century. Anger, hope, violence, passion. And in the foreground she, a broad smile, detailed speech, presence rakza, stable. There are the funeral of Yasser Arafat and the symbolic burial of an era, there is the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and then the fratricidal feud between Hamas and Fatah, the blockade of the Strip, the political divide with the West Bank after which it became more and more difficult for the Ramallah reporters to cross the Erez crossing and she did not return, merely following the wars in Gaza from the outside, day and night, 2008, 2009, 2012, 2014, 2021. The day before yesterday, yesterday, the volcano that still thunders in these hours and threatens new eruptions, new victims.
The fixed network the instant, a frame always declined in the present. And you see it, alive. He often met her at press conferences, at meetings of UNRWA, the UN refugee agency she had worked with at the beginning, when, after her specialization in journalism in Amman, she collaborated with Voice of Palestine. But most of all she happened to meet her on the street. And there was no Palestinian family from the most remote village that didn’t know it. Because if Shireen Abu Akleh has brought a piece of the world into the homes of her people, following Brexit or the walk of refugees fleeing Trump’s America and heading to Canada, she has above all done the opposite, pushing on the stage the stories and people who were instead only abstract icons, the families evicted from the homes of Sheik Jarrah, the quadriplegic and brilliant student of Birzeit University, the fans of the Tarband Band unleashed in the spotlight of the Palestine International Festival, the children of the poor valley of Abziq, north of Tubas, stones without olive trees, life, pain, contradictions.
“Shireen began to be a reporter when, in the Arab world, this profession was a kind of press office of power,” her friend Muzna Shihabi explains to the Guardian. A chronicler, in fact: eyes, ears, smell. For some time she had begun to study Hebrew well. It is this image that remains, powerful, today that over all the stories told in twenty-five years the one burned in a few moments on the outskirts of Jenin stands out. A first burst of blows, a second, she on the ground among the plants with her face unmade under the helmet that says “Press”: the end.
At some point we will know coit went to me exactly, or not. While his brother Tony returns from Africa where he has lived for work since both parents died, Palestinians and Israelis blame each other. The conflict of words which, in Jerusalem as in Kiev, prevents the spilled blood from drying out and fading.
Shireen Abu Akleh was just 51 years old, an American passport as well as a Jordanian one and a white dog. He had history in his hand. Too many of her have died telling her like her.
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