In times of genocide, people ask: who is human? This is the question Israel asks—and savagely answers—a question that has been repeated every single day since October 7th by the media, either explicitly in the case of Israeli outlets, or more surreptitiously by Western outlets with their omissions and subtle turns of phrase. It lurks at the bottom of all other questions: who can live and who must die, who can defend themselves, who can be trusted, and, crucially, who can speak.
Since the beginning of the genocide in Gaza in October 2023, Israel has barred international media from entering the Strip unless they are embedded with Israeli forces. Local Palestinian journalists have been systematically killed, often alongside their families. Electricity was cut off on the fifth day of the Israeli assault, and by the end of the third week there had been a “collapse”—really, a deliberate destruction—of telecoms connectivity. More recently, Gaza has suffered intermittent internet blackouts after Israel targeted the Strip’s last remaining fibre optic cable.
Still, even as the Israelis attempt to seal Gaza in darkness, Palestinians have found ways to speak. Solar panels have been retrofitted into phone charging stations, with people traveling long distances to connect. Activists around the globe have been donating eSims to provide internet access through Egyptian and Israeli networks. And yet, the voices of Palestinians in Gaza remain conspicuously absent from most discussions of the Genocide in Western media.
Often I have felt, over the last 21 months, that if only someone in the mainstream media would make the effort to speak to people on the ground, if only they would allow the people of Gaza to give testimony, perhaps something would shift. I was piqued, then, to read that NPR had conducted an interview with a man in northern Gaza in the middle of May. What had not occurred to me, however, was that exposing Palestinians at the epicenter of the genocide to a largely hostile media could, in fact, be more harmful than beneficial.
The segment, a Morning Edition interview by veteran NPR reporter Steve Inskeep entitled, “Palestinian writer Yousri Alghoul describes life in north Gaza,” quickly garnered backlash from Palestinians and their supporters.
The transcript is, quite simply, bad. Inskeep introduces Al-Ghoul with the following: “He says he’s a writer. Years ago, he worked for the Gaza Ministry of Culture. He says he doesn’t support Hamas today and favors releasing hostages while also repeatedly accusing Israel of genocide—a charge Israelis deny. We asked him to describe daily life, and as you will hear, the conversation took a turn.”
Al-Ghoul is a writer, no qualifier needed. A simple Google search pulls up details of his two books, six collections of short stories, essays, and policy papers. In 2002, he won the Short Story Award from the Palestinian Ministry of Culture. He is a member of the Palestinian Writers Union and is deeply involved in Palestinian civil society. Whether any NPR staff actually bothered to search for this information remains a question.
After Yousri tells him about the levels of deprivation he and his family are experiencing, Inskeep twice asks him his feelings about Hamas. It is a clunky transition, and the question feels entirely inappropriate to put to a man whose concerns are far more immediate than governance. Al-Ghoul himself seems puzzled by the question, telling Inskeep, “There were no Hamas here, my friend. Just to let you know, the Israeli killed all of them. They destroyed the whole buildings of Hamas. They destroyed even the buildings of the civilians.”
But edification of the audience is not the point of the question. “Do you condemn Hamas,” and its numerous variants function as a litmus test in the Western media for who is allowed to speak. If Al-Ghoul had said he supported Hamas or the resistance more generally, he would have been written off as a terrorist and Inskeep would likely have wrapped up the interview or faulted him for the ruin around him and his own family’s suffering. It is only once he declines to support Hamas that the interview is permitted to continue.
The “turn” Inskeep refers to in his intro appears to be the moment his interviewee, while expressing the extent of his deprivation and suffering, offhandedly mentions his desire to escape the destruction. Inskeep seizes on the point asking him to clarify that he wants to leave Gaza.
ALGHOUL: My friend, we are in a famine. We just have some bread, and that’s it. And even the bread, I’m always telling my children, please, don’t eat all of this bread. This is for the morning, and that is for the evening. And that’s it. We don’t find water. We don’t find electricity. We don’t find internet. They’re saying that they want to evacuate us. Please, come and take us out of Gaza. We want to leave it. We want to leave Gaza because you destroyed everything.
INSKEEP: Did you just say if you had an offer to go live somewhere else, you would take it?
Inskeep goes on to press Yousri about whether he would leave Gaza twice more. The second time, Inskeep asks Al-Ghoul specifically about President Trump’s “Gaza Riviera” plan. “Listen to me, my friend,” Yousri responds, “I think—I’m sorry to that. I know that I’m talking to American people, but this is a lunatic idea.”
I listened to the audio of the interview in the hopes that perhaps there was something in the tone of their voices or their rapport that would make the interaction seem less absurd—if anything, the audio only made it worse. Inskeep comes across as dismissive and unsympathetic.
Perhaps the worst moment in the entire farce is when Al-Ghoul tries to explain, in response to the first question about his feelings about Hamas, that Israeli violence did not begin on October 7th, and extends to the West Bank where Hamas has a significantly smaller presence. Inskeep interjects and dismisses him with astonishing hubris.
“I want to assure you that I’ve covered that region for years, that I’ve been to the West Bank and Gaza. I understand the argument that you’re making, your side of the story about the history. I’m just interested now, in this moment, what your attitude is toward Hamas…” What is the value of Al-Ghoul’s testimony in the face of all this regional experience?
Incensed, I posted about interview to Twitter. Within a few hours, someone sent me Yousri’s Instagram profile and I was able to send him a message, asking to speak to him about his interview with NPR. The day he got back to me I was moving houses with a raging ear infection. In my excitement and distraction, I sent him back a voice note in which I called him Younis. “Yousri,” he corrected me. Not a great start with someone who had just been insulted on national radio.
In time, I was able to gain Yousri’s trust, and he opened up to me about the experience. He was startled by the coldness with which he was met during the interview. Speaking with Inskeep felt like speaking with a robot, he told me. After the interview was broadcast and the transcript published, he was upset. He estimates that they spoke for around 15 minutes, of which under five minutes made it to air.
He wrote a letter to Inskeep and NPR expressing his dissatisfaction with how he was depicted. “I was deeply saddened,” he wrote, “to discover that key parts of my message were removed and, even more troubling, that the framing of the segment conveyed a misleading and, at times, harmful image of who I am.”
In the letter, Al-Ghoul told the broadcaster that he felt diminished by the final edit, which reduced, “a complex reality into a narrow frame,” and removed the heart of what he was trying to share. He is particularly distressed at any suggestion that he is not a writer. “My novels, short stories, and essays that were translated into multiple languages and published internationally, speak for themselves.”
“What hurt me most, however,” he wrote, “was the subtle but damaging suggestion that I am affiliated with Hamas or work with the local authorities in Gaza. This is entirely false. I am an independent writer and not a political figure, not a government representative, and certainly not a threat. Such insinuations, even if unintended, put me at personal risk, and worse, they strip away the dignity of a writer whose only tool is his pen.”
He has reason to be concerned. Smear campaigns alleging that Palestinian journalists and writers are somehow affiliated with Hamas have previously laid the groundwork for their assassinations.
This was the fate of Hossam Shabat, the 23-year-old journalist from Beit Hanoun who was killed this March, five months after Israel put a target on his back, alongside five other Palestinian journalists. Hassan Eslaiah, one of the most well-known journalists in Gaza, was first injured by an airstrike in April and then subsequently killed when Israel bombed Nasser Hospital, in which he was recovering (it is perhaps worth noting that even if Eslaiah had been a combatant, as Israel falsely claimed, this killing of an hors de combat still would still have been a war crime). The Israeli journalist Amit Segal, regurgitating the Israeli military’s line justifying the targeting of Eslaiah said, “his weapon was his camera”—a thread he probably shouldn’t pull too hard. Early in the genocide, Palestinian writer Refaat Alareer was killed for taking his quick wit and acerbic humor to social media.
Thus far, Inskeep and NPR have not responded to Al-Ghoul’s letter.
Yousri primarily communicates with me using voice notes. The wind often blows into the mic and the ominous hum of drones and war planes can be heard in the background most of the time. His voice rises and falls like a little song and his speech is frequently punctuated with “yani,” a common Arabic filler word, similar to “I mean.” Sometimes his voice swells indignantly when reflecting on his current situation and sometimes it is flat with dejection. He is, by his own admission, a sensitive man.
After we connected, he began sending me clips and photos of the atrocities being carried out against his people, poems by other Gazan writers, and snippets of his own writing. His words ask the reader to imagine. “Imagine that the little girl screaming, her skin burning from an Israeli missile, were your daughter. Imagine her clothes turned to ash, her tiny hands trembling, her voice calling for you but you can’t reach her. Not because you don’t want to, but because the fire, the rubble, the war, have torn your world apart. What would you do? … Imagine your mother, your sister, or your wife being forced to flee her home with nothing, no clothes, no shelter, no destination,” he demands of his reader. “[Imagine you are injured and] are rushed to the hospital, but there is no bed for you, every bed is already occupied by bleeding bodies, some still breathing, some who died waiting.”
He reflects on the soul of his oppressor. “What kind of heart presses a button to launch a missile toward a sleeping child’s bed, then returns home to cradle his own child in his arms?” Occasionally he gives me a glimpse of the horrors he has witnessed, scenes that bring the taste of batteries to my tongue.
My sense is that Yousri sends me these things both to check my responses after being burned by Inskeep, but also in an attempt to almost will me to understand his situation. “The people of Gaza do not seek sympathy,” he tells me. “They seek the right to live with dignity, the end of collective punishment, and the freedom to rebuild their lives.”
Through the course of my correspondence with Yousri, it became more and more apparent and striking how little Inskeep asked him about his life and his experience.
Inskeep could have asked him, for example, about what was lost, what life was like before.
“How I yearn for the old routine,” Yousri texted me one evening. “For the life whose sun set the day my home and dreams were destroyed. For waking up in the morning and walking down Al-Rasheed Street, all the way to the Al-Suwadaniyah area, listening eagerly to a cultural podcast or a dramatic cinematic mix on SoundCloud, through an earbud so gentle it wouldn’t disturb the birds in their morning prayer.”
“Then heading back home in Al-Ghoul neighborhood, where my wife would be preparing breakfast. I would shower while Fairuz’s voice sang along with me, and we’d sip our coffee slowly in the garden. I’d kiss my children goodbye before they ran off to their schools’ the very schools that are now in ruins. Then I’d leave for the job I loved.”
“Everything has vanished from existence, even the voice of my beloved Fairuz and the cup of coffee, after hunger and thirst besieged us, and the days betrayed us.” We spoke for a brief moment of our mutual love of Fairuz, and how much I wish he could have been my tour guide in Gaza before the genocide. He tells me he is convinced the Palestinian people will be able to return some day and he believes Gaza will be a museum, which he will be able to show me.
Inskeep could have asked Yousri about his children.
He has four. The eldest is 19 and Al-Ghoul laments to me that he is not at university despite him being, “one of the talented boys in the Gaza strip.” He has a 17-year-old daughter and two more boys who are 15 and 13. Yousri, a man who clearly loves words and writing, is acutely aware of the educations of which his children are being deprived. He tries to compensate at home in the tent, but the reality of life in a genocide —“just waking up, searching for wood, if we didn’t [find any], searching for plastic to burn for cooking … and then we hurry for getting the water”—often interrupts his pedagogical efforts.
Inskeep could have asked him about his books, or his community work. But it is clear that Inskeep was completely disinterested in Al-Ghoul. The result is this bizarre interview in which the subject recedes almost entirely, pushed down beneath ludicrous lines of hypothetical questions. Inskeep demands political analysis from a starving man. “I wish I could see a tomato,” Yousri’s voice replies.
The question I keep asking myself is, what was the point? Why bother going through the effort of placing a call to a man in northern Gaza only to dismiss his perspective?
Charitably, this was simply an exercise in futility. Less charitably, it appears that Inskeep cannot see Yousri as a full human being. The staticky voice at the end of the line seems like an abstraction to him. He is interested in suffering only insofar as it has produced resentment towards Hamas. Beyond a passing interest in how the Al-Ghoul family is obtaining bread, more a question of logistics, there is no interest in the reality of starvation, what it does to the body, what it does to the mind. Israeli suffering is newsworthy, while Palestinian suffering, like Yousri’s, barely registers.
Less charitably still, the NPR interview is part of an effort to manufacture consent for forced displacement. What is the function of asking Yousri over and over whether he wants to leave Gaza, if not to normalize this displacement in the minds of NPR’s audience? There is no alternative. See? The Palestinians want to leave. See? Inskeep places all of the emphasis on the desire to leave, little on the destruction that informs this desire, and none on those responsible for that destruction.
While Inskeep makes sure to stress that Israel denies that it is committing a genocide even as Al-Ghoul states that he is living through one, he did not think to mention that forced displacement is a war crime, even when referring to Trump’s Gaza Riviera scheme. The plan involves the US taking control of Gaza, expelling the millions currently living there, and developing it into a Trump-themed resort town. Such a plan would be an obvious breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention, a fact that would seem of note to listeners.
The language used by Inskeep matters: he asks if Yousri would “give up” Gaza, but makes no mention of any right to return. Touching on such a right would bring up questions of other displacements and returns, all anathema to NPR’s liberal audience.
It is tempting to write off Inskeep’s failure as his loss. He and his audience will never read about the grief Yousri feels over the destruction of his homeland’s cultural centers and works of art, the contents of his personal library, or his brushes with death winding through the wreckage of Gaza to find flour. But then, it is this very dehumanization and erasure of Palestinians that helped to create the conditions for Israel’s genocide in the first place.
If liberals were to acknowledge Yousri and other Palestinians as fully human, they would have to contend with the violence Israel has inflicted upon them. They might then have to wrestle with the fact that Joe Biden, addled with dementia, endorsed and materially facilitated a genocide. They may even begin to question why so much of the American order is built on the spilling of Arab blood, and the way such blood invisibly stains their lives.
I probably should have known that exposure of Palestinian voices to Western audiences would not guarantee they would be heard in any meaningful sense. After all, Palestinian writer Mohammed El-Kurd has warned us of the pitfalls in putting too much stock in Western “humanization” of the Palestinians in his scorching treatise Perfect Victims. For his people to become human in the Western mind, he writes, they must undergo what he calls a defanging.
“Palestinian victims must be wounded and weak: too wounded to fight and too weak to frown or furrow their eyebrows. And if they are bereaved, they can only be the wailing widows whose grief is too inexplicable to contextualize, the orphans whose slain parents’ obituaries omit ‘cause of death.’ … If they advocate for themselves, they must narrate only their personal tragedies. Neither political ideology nor, God forbid, nationalist ambitions should ever incentivize their campaigning.”
Western gatekeepers like Inskeep, El-Kurd writes, have boxes to tick when determining whether Palestinians are able to speak. “Once the criteria are conquered, magically, marvelously, the Palestinian can finally escape the circumscribed category of he terrorist and find refuge in the even narrower node of victimhood.”
In a segment broadcast soon after the interview with Yousri, Inskeep interviews former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Olmert is treated with deference. There are no criteria he must meet before he can speak, no conditions are placed upon his entry into humanity. Again Inskeep asks about Trump’s forced displacement plan for Gaza, but only as to whether it is “desirable or practical,” not legal or moral.
I receive a voice note from Yousri while finishing this piece, his voice cracking on the verge of tears. “We are starving. I’m not caring about myself, I just care about my neighbors, the children who come to me. They think that I have a kitchen or I have goods or whatever, and they are asking me to help them. What shall I do? Walla, I cry every time.” He is terrified, he tells me, that his son will die while out walking to visit their extended family.
Only days later, an Israeli strike on the Al Shati camp in Northern Gaza resulted in the martyrdom of Yousri’s nephew, Uday, and the serious wounding of Yousri’s brother. Shrapnel pierced Uday’s heart; he died with his eyes open. There will be no mention of his name on Morning Edition.
I look at a photo of Yousri in Gaza City in the middle of the genocide while listening to the voice note. He is sitting on a curb surrounded by six young girls, a wan smile hangs over the mole on his chin. Most, including Yousri, are in plastic slides, but two are sporting rollerblades and impish looks. I am painfully aware of how little I can offer Yousri beyond a sympathetic ear. I have no means of bringing him food or sheltering him from the bombs and bullets. None of us can penetrate Israel’s siege, so we are forced to watch in horror.
I want to slam the photo of Yousri on Inskeep’s desk and force him to look at it. He purports to be a journalist, one who bears witness and yet, when it mattered, when he was presented with a subject brimming with humanity and pain, he flinched. He could not meet Yousri’s gaze. Inskeep is but one functionary in a machine running exactly as intended. The segment is a small drop in a sea of coverage that has failed to rise to the moral moment; it is far from the most egregious example and will likely be forgotten amongst all the others. The horror of this segment and others like it is that their journalistic failures all but ensure that their subjects will be forgotten too.
In Yousri’s book John Kennedy Sometimes Hallucinates, he imagines himself interviewing the victims of famous assassinations such as Kennedy, Shireen Abu Akleh, and Pablo Neruda. He told the Washington Report in an interview that he began to conceive of the collection when he was reading about this common ending for many political and literary figures and began asking himself, “Why don’t I reformulate history?” Yousri did not like the endings, so he carried on the stories.
Here I believe he has shown the path forward for those of us who refuse to flinch and look away. Yes, we must highlight the dehumanization and complicity of the Western media, but also we must write over them with our own reformulations. Why let them have the last word? ♦