Our Women on the Ground

by Zahra Hankir

  Less than two months after my first arrest, I was arrested again. It was March 15, 2011, a date that would mark Gaza’s attempt at the Arab Spring. We demonstrated, calling for an end to the political polarization among the Palestinians. Perhaps our slogan should have specifically called for the fall of the ruling parties—it would have been a stronger and more pointed message. Supporters of Fatah in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza took to the streets to oppose our demonstrations. In Gaza, men in tracksuits and pajamas—since they weren’t in uniform, no one could accuse them of being part of Hamas—attacked us with knives and sticks and hurled profanities at us. Some of the protesters got into skirmishes, and, sure enough, by the end of the day, a number of activists, including me, had been arrested in both Gaza and the West Bank. While I was in jail, I saw those same men in the tracksuits and pajamas handing cameras and other items they had confiscated from protesters, journalists, and street vendors to the authorities.

  That was the same day the revolution in Syria started. We even shared the same hashtag, #mar15, leading an electronic stampede in cyberspace, but their struggle went on for years, whereas ours quickly dissipated. Those in power defamed, interrogated, and beat the family members of activists in an attempt to pressure us into backing down. My father was among those targeted. I began to lose hope.

  * * *

  —

  The tension escalated to the point that by the end of March 2011, I felt I had to leave. I moved to Cairo, Egypt. While living there, I traveled to attend workshops and conferences in various European cities, meeting young activists from all over the Arab world. I soon met an Egyptian journalist in Cairo, and we got married in October. I continued to blog, but I was starting to miss the neutrality of journalism even more.

  I grew tired of traveling and longed for Gaza. Over a period of three years, from 2011 to 2013, I moved between Egypt and Gaza. Every time my family traveled to or from the strip, we suffered enormously at the Rafah Border Crossing. That suffering weighed on my marriage, which by that point had already become fragile.

  Eventually, I gave up on adapting to Egypt and boldly made my way back to Gaza to stay. I was pregnant with my daughter then and had to start from zero yet again. I continued reporting on breaches against journalists for SKeyes and worked on research papers about the youth and the Arab Spring. I began reading again, engaged less and less in politics, and didn’t go to demonstrations.

  My husband came back to Gaza for the birth of baby Zeina. Her arrival lessened the rift between us ever so slightly. The lingering tensions became more obvious after the start of the fall of the Arab Spring in 2012, however. It was as if our personal project were intractably linked to the Arab Spring project.

  Despite our marital troubles, my husband and I traveled together that year to Los Angeles, where I was to receive the Courage in Journalism Award from the International Women’s Media Foundation. While we were there, I sensed a new war was creeping up on Gaza. I feared for my family and my son, whom I had left there. My husband remained in America, while I returned to Gaza with my infant daughter.

  A week later, the 2012 war erupted. The air strikes were ferocious. I left the house during the bombings to take photos. I posted them on my Facebook page, which was even more popular than my blog. I also continued to report for SKeyes, the only organization I remained committed to throughout.

  During the war, I wondered how life might have been different had I been a regular mother who wasn’t living and working in a war zone. I watched my daughter, Zeina, recoil in fear for the first time at the noise of the shelling. My son, daughter, nephew, and I all slept in the foyer of the house. The war brought us ever closer—we were scared together, and we laughed together. We didn’t leave home for UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees) schools, like hundreds of families did. We sometimes argued over what was better: to stay or to leave. But we stayed.

  I decided after that 2012 eight-day war to stay away from politics, and also to stop believing in change. It was hard to admit that I hated what I used to love. I took off my political and social hats, and focused again on journalism. I didn’t just want to be a journalist again—I needed it. Despair was eating me up.

  * * *

  —

  But after my protests against the government in Gaza, no one wanted to employ me. I had been labeled a troublemaker and a rebel.

  Eventually, I found a job with Al-Monitor, a U.S.-based news website. I trained myself to be objective again. Journalism forced me to focus on what was right in front of me. I wrote daring reports. I was still fighting the Palestinian divisions, mind you, but this time with investigations, not protests. I also secured a book deal for my book, A Rebel in Gaza.

  Even though I’d occasionally felt as though the only things I knew I wanted in life were to write and to become a mother, and at this point I had done both, my moments of doubt were constant. After my book was published, people sent me letters of appreciation and admiration, but I often felt like I couldn’t see what they described as my accomplishments.

  My husband returned from the U.S. to settle with us in Gaza, but the professional jealousy between us, both in literature and in journalism, peaked. It’s difficult for a woman who has succeeded in one particular field to live with a man looking to succeed in the same field. This certainly was not the sole cause of the escalating tension between us, but it was definitely one of them. Our relationship came to an end and we separated in early 2014. Love came to an end and the Arab Spring came to an end and dreams came crumbling down.

  When Facebook reminds me of what I posted back then, I laugh at my illusions. We thought that we were going to change the world. Where did I get all that confidence from? How did I come to think I was so influential, and that my thoughts, and the thoughts of my generation, would make a difference in the world? Our entire generation believed in change. We were out on the streets protesting. We resisted and we insisted. Perhaps it was our youth and our first loves that gave us such hope. But then everything stopped moving. Politics became filthier than ever before. We were the victims of a whirlwind of emotions, social media, and the people we met in this revolutionary environment. How I pity the generation that will have to go out to do it all over again.

  We were delusional. That is why we woke up and found our lives in complete chaos. What our revolutionaries lacked was not ideology but practical means. Life is not built on nor does it change through Facebook or social media. Those changes come through streets, schools, colleges, and other educational institutions.

  My personal pain was indeed immense. Little did I know that a bigger pain was around the corner, waiting for me.

  * * *

  —

  The 2014 war lasted for fifty-one days. It was like nothing before. I had experienced fear, danger, death, and sadness in the previous two wars, but in this war, we experienced a fear of everything and a fear for everything. We didn’t eat, sleep, or walk without a lump in our throats and a knot in our hearts.

  I chased death; I even felt like I was looking for it. I took risks. I traveled all over Gaza, both alone and with other journalists, in taxis whose drivers would call their families and say their good-byes before setting off on the journey to dangerous places. I didn’t contact anyone. My family didn’t even know where I was sometimes. My friends learned of my whereabouts only when my stories were published on Al-Monitor. My mother would get angry because she was so worried; she would even cry. I’ve always left a trail of tears behind me, like when I left tears in my son’s eyes during the first war, which I now regret deeply.

  I wanted to gather the pain of the war’s wounds into my arms so it could join my old wounds, but the war had burned the air in my chest. I couldn’t breathe or protect my son and daughter. My son, Nasser, lost his speech when the tower next to our house was bombed repeatedly. During that bombing, I was wounded by shrapnel and stones when I rushed to bring my
father into safety from the balcony.

  * * *

  —

  Israeli forces attacked Rafah on August 1, 2014. I was flooded with dozens of messages telling me that it was my duty to cover the invasion since it was my hometown. I was the only journalist from Gaza to visit Rafah, along with three reporters from the New York Times whom I’d convinced to join me, despite the fact that any car traveling to or from the area was a target for the Israel Defense Forces. Our driver gave me his bulletproof vest and helmet to wear. It was the first time I wore a bulletproof vest in the three wars that I covered.

  As soon as we entered Rafah, we watched a plane shelling the home of a local family, the Abu Tahas. We went to the Kuwaiti hospital straightaway, where we witnessed some family members carry in the dead and wounded. Among them was a tiny baby, dressed in pink.

  I went into a room and saw people lining up the dead bodies. Everything in that scene pointed to the fact that those corpses had been alive just moments earlier: their clothes, the position of their bodies, and their white feet. I thought that if I talked to them, they would talk back. I recognized the baby from moments earlier. He was dead. His name was Rizk Abu Taha.

  I went into another room, where a distraught and hysterical mother was wailing. She asked if I had come across a baby dressed in pink—the dead baby on the floor that I had just seen. She didn’t know he was dead, and everyone was hiding the tragedy from her intentionally. She held me as if she knew I wouldn’t lie to her, begging me to tell her the truth as she sobbed. I couldn’t lie, because if it were me, I wouldn’t want to be lied to. When I told her that her child was among the dead, the woman collapsed, and so, too, did my role as a journalist—in those very moments, I acted beyond my role as a journalist. I acted like a mother.

  The woman held me tight, not believing what I had just said, screaming and asking me again and again if it was true. The child was her firstborn. She held her breasts and wailed: “What will I do with these now?”—referring to her breast milk.

  I returned to Gaza with my father, who had been visiting my grandma in the south during a ceasefire. He warned me about the risk of being bombed, so I distracted him with family stories until I looked out the window and realized that we were safely out of Rafah. But Rafah wouldn’t leave us.

  The next morning, Sunday, August 3, 2014, I woke up to a phone call from a journalist who had called to inform me that my uncle’s family home had been hit in a missile attack. Their house had been built by my grandfather when he moved to Rafah in 1948 after the Israelis occupied his home village, Sarafand Al-Ammar. I was born and grew up in that house.

  Two missiles fired by an F-16 aircraft hit the house at 6:20 a.m. that fateful morning. Those two missiles killed my uncle, Ismail al-Ghoul; his wife, Khadra al-Ghoul; their two sons, Wael and Mohammad; their two daughters, Hanadi and Asmaa; and my cousin Wael’s three children, Mustafa, Malak, and Ismail. All nine of my family members were martyred by that Israeli bombing.

  I saw their pictures on social media. My youngest cousin’s corpse was placed in an ice-cream freezer, the only available freezer in the entire hospital.

  I was lucky that I had been able to say my farewells to all the victims before they passed away. On the fifth day of the war, I had taken a risk and gone to Rafah to write about the bombing that killed the Ghannam family. While I was there, I visited my uncle’s family and took pictures. Amal, my cousin’s wife, had just given birth to twin baby boys, Mustafa and Ibrahim. They were tiny, much like two angels. When I saw them, I felt they were a window of hope and light.

  I didn’t know then that that would be the last time I would ever see some of them. We laughed and talked about the coincidence that had allowed us to meet. How I wished I’d stayed longer and talked more. The picture I took of the twins is now priceless, since one twin, Mustafa, was martyred while the other twin, Ibrahim, survived, along with his mother.

  * * *

  —

  Life is full of surprises, and so, too, is writing. When we look at the past, it seems like it’s begotten by today—like it happened to facilitate everything that’s happening at this moment. As Svetlana Alexievich says: “We look at the past from today. We cannot look at it from anywhere else.”

  Looking back, it’s hard to believe that all those experiences were mine. I moved to France in the summer of 2016, perhaps in part due to the stress and pressure I had endured while on the field.

  I constantly wavered between my job and my family—wanting to ensure my family’s safety on one hand, and wanting to cover conflict in a distinguished way on the other. I was caught between being a mother soothing a son’s and a daughter’s fears and, at the same time, writing about other women’s children who were being killed by the hundreds. That struggle never went away, and I would face it in all three conflicts that I covered. Those strong memories persist. My family and I often speak about them; they have become a part of our personal history.

  What I do know for certain is that exceptional circumstances have put me in many different situations. Often, the choices I made in those situations were out of my hands—I probably wouldn’t have made the same decisions had I been living under “normal” circumstances. Back then, the exceptional was often “normal,” although the “normal” now feels like it’s a terrible exception that I’m not as good at handling.

  Starting anew is daunting. It’s more than I can bear. There are questions I carry with me every second, when I’m asleep and when I’m awake, regarding war and peace, literature and journalism, blogging or writing: Is this me? Am I doing what others want from me, or what I want? I still don’t know the answer.

  TRANSLATED FROM ARABIC BY MARIAM ANTAR

  Fight or Flight

  Heba Shibani

  I never set out to become a journalist, and I certainly didn’t anticipate that one evening in 2012 I would be pulled over by thugs while driving home from my job at a private TV station. The incident happened in the Gergaresh district of Tripoli, of all places, one of the city’s most prominent and posh neighborhoods. I’d just finished a long day of work at the station. It was early in the evening, on the cusp of sunset, and the main streets were busy. Those were the good old days, before the Libya Dawn party—a grouping of pro-Islamist militias—took over the capital, when Libyans still felt safe enough to go out after dark.

  I had decided to take the back roads to avoid traffic, not noticing that I’d been followed by two cars with black-tinted windows that pulled over in front of me, blocking my path and barricading the narrow road. Two men dressed in military-style clothing with long hair and large beards got out and rushed to my car. In shock, I froze. The thugs—who wielded machine guns—went straight for my SUV’s doors. They screamed at me and pounded the car with their fists, saying they’d shoot unless I opened the doors. Luckily, I always keep my doors locked when driving. I clenched the steering wheel, thinking that I might never see my loved ones again. The men started shooting into the air.

  In the seconds that followed, a mystical force came over me. (Whatever it was, I’m thankful for it.) I snapped out of my frozen state, putting my car in reverse and flooring the accelerator. I’d never focused on anything as intensely as I did in those few minutes. I drove quickly along the winding streets, cutting through traffic and coming dangerously close to causing multiple accidents as I made my way back to the office—not to the police, not to my apartment, but to the office, where I knew I could summon the help of armed security guards. All I could think was that I needed protection from men with guns as big as the ones that were pointed at me.

  The locked car doors probably saved me that night. The next day, when my fear and shock had subsided, I wondered why the men hadn’t shot me, given that I was in plain sight. My husband theorized that the thugs must have wanted either to scare me or to steal the car, which is why no physical harm was done to me or the vehicle, apart from a broken window. (The window had been bro
ken at some point during the attack, although I’m not sure exactly when, as I was so traumatized by the entire experience.) We both knew, however, that due to my reporting choices, I had enemies who wanted to hurt me; some probably wanted me dead.

  I had intended to file a police report the night that I was attacked, but friends advised my husband and me not to, for several reasons that mostly seemed understandable at the time. I was fine; the police had no actual power over militias or thugs; and if they opened an investigation into the incident, they would have to question potential witnesses, meaning the armed men would likely find out and plan to retaliate. Besides all that, as a woman, I should not be seen at a police station. That point, in particular, infuriated me; male-dominated spaces like prisons are often considered off-limits to women in Libya, even if a woman is a victim of a crime and wishes to report it. Everyone around me thought silence was the best course of action, so I agreed.

  I didn’t want my family to find out about the threats I faced as a reporter, so I didn’t speak about the situation publicly until Human Rights Watch approached me for a report on Libyan journalists who had come under attack during and after the revolution. Had my family found out, they would surely have told me to quit my job. To this day, they still don’t know about the incident—they haven’t seen the report, and I haven’t ever mentioned it to them.

  * * *

  —

  My first job was as a teacher. I studied English literature at university and started teaching the language while I was still a student. My family harbored the hope that I would ultimately become a university professor—being a teacher was deemed a socially acceptable job for a woman in a conservative society. It didn’t take me long to realize I wasn’t passionate about what I was doing, and that I didn’t want to settle into a career just because it was considered woman-friendly.