‘If I’m staying silent, I’m being complicit,’ says fired Palestinian-Canadian journalist [video]

A Palestinian-Canadian journalist is speaking up about how the Canadian news media has failed in its coverage of Israel’s genocide in Palestine.

Zahraa Al-Akhrass was fired from Global News on Oct. 17, 2023, after three years on the job. She says her social media posts on Palestine caused her termination.

Al-Akhrass shared the story of her firing at the NB Media Co-op’s 15th annual keynote address on September 26. The talk is now available for viewing here:

Al-Akhrass started her talk by sharing footage of her family’s ancestral village in historical Palestine.

During her talk, held virtually via Zoom, she said her ancestors were “forced to leave their homeland” during the Nakba in 1948. That’s when the Palestinian village of Umm Al-Shaqaf, once home to 800 people, was completely destroyed.

Now located in Israeli territory near Haifa, Umm Al-Shaqaf is little more than a pile of rubble, a historical landmark, and a tourist attraction.

Al-Akhrass expressed shock about how her family was violently uprooted. She scrolled through images on Google Maps showing tourists posing for photos in the ruins.

“This was probably a house of somebody, a relative of mine, maybe my own family, my own grandfather,” she said.

Stories told by her father and grandfather greatly affected Al-Akhrass, and she is trying to make sure they are not forgotten. For Al-Akhrass, “this is not some far-away conflict” and the people suffering now in Palestine are no different than her grandfather.

Al-Akhrass cannot return to her family’s village, and her two-year-old has no place to call home, except Canada.

During her work as a journalist, Al-Akhrass says she was a target of the pro-Israeli media monitoring group Honest Reporting Canada, which lobbied Global News to fire her.

Global News terminated Al-Akhrass during her maternity leave for being in violation of unspecified policies in her social media posts, she said.

Al-Akhrass asked attendees: “How could any media that does not recognize that Gaza is going through a genocide right now be fair and balanced?”

She added: “It would be meaningless for me to be a journalist and not speak up.”

She also called out her former employer for hypocrisy, noting that Global’s management said nothing about her social media posts on Ukraine.

Al-Akhrass wrote a full account of her firing for Briarpatch magazine. Her social media post on being let go from Global News was viewed some 3.6 million times around the world.

She said she wanted to “start a conversation on how audiences should be critical of media… and stand up to the intimidation of newsrooms.”

Al-Akhrass noted especially the pressures on Black, Indigenous, and other people of color in these situations.

She said that mainstream media is very gradually moving away from the prevailing pro-Israel stance, but that “low and slow” is the name of the game for journalists who stay on.

In mainstream media, “it is a deliberate choice to disinform the public on Palestine,” Al-Akhrass said. She studied journalism at Sheridan College in Toronto and has had multiple experiences in newsrooms.

Al-Akhrass sees several reasons for disinformation or misinformation about Palestine, starting with ignorance about its history.

“There is a huge lack of knowledge about Palestine in Canada,” she said. Hard questions like settler colonialism and apartheid are often met by superficial coverage, she said.

Al-Akhrass shared an anecdote from her experience as a journalism student. She said one of her instructors was David Common, a well-known CBC journalist. He told students there always “needed to be a Canadian angle” for the audience to care about international stories.

She expressed respect for Common, but said this approach assumes that the public is “selfish and ignorant.”

“It feeds into this idea that people in Canada who are already far away from the Middle East… live in some sort of a bubble, should be incentivized to care about lives of Palestinians, as if the fact of a human life is just not enough.”

“Our taxpayer money is being used in this conflict,” Al-Akhrass added. “That alone should be enough to care.”

Finally, most Canadian news organizations just don’t have any reporters on the ground in Palestine.

“The image they always have is a bit distorted” because they generally rely on journalists in Israel who don’t speak Arabic, she said. Journalists like Al-Akhrass are told they are “too emotional” or “too close to the story.”

Al-Akhrass asserted courageously that “it’s okay for me to lose my job” over the Palestinian genocide. “If I’m staying silent, I’m being complicit,” she added.

She ended her talk by quoting an excerpt from the poem “If I must die” by Palestinian writer, poet, and educator Refaat Alareer: “You must live / To tell my story.”

Alareer was killed in Gaza by an Israeli airstrike on December 6, 2023. Al-Akhrass encouraged all those present to keep telling the story.

Sophie M. Lavoie is a member of the NB Media Co-op’s editorial board.