Understanding the meaning of ‘shell-shocked’ in a context of war, conflict and gross human rights violations often allows us to negotiate with a complex of emotions and stories that move beyond journalistic ethos of ‘objective reporting’.
The term was once used during the First World War, referring to soldiers who suffered from a particular state of mind on their return from the battlefield, which in contemporary usage has been coined as post-traumatic stress disorder. Today, however, the people of Gaza, as Rod Such would connote, are inevitably shell-shocked on account of their experiences of inhumane conditions of living.
The question pertinently asked then, is how does the popularly conceptualized ‘journalistic ethos’ account for something as intangible as loss, pain and deprivation on a day-to-day basis, in a situation of warfare? The intention of maintaining an unbiased and objective reporting even in a situation charged with opinions brings to contestation the very foundations, rather the defining limitations of ‘objectivity’. Internationally-acclaimed war journalist Mohammad Omer once explained the peculiar manifestation of journalism oblivious to the human fabric of warfare, thereby reducing the total vulnerability and losses of the contending group down to statistics and concrete data.
By exemplifying through the Vietnam war, Omer remarks on the manner in which Vietnamese victims and civilians were featured in American journalistic projects in an idiom of realist paradigm that often equates the objectivity to the ‘nationalistic limits of empathy, which highlights sufferings of our side, and essentially ignores the losses of the other side’. War journalism equally holds the ability to be transformed into a tool to reflect upon a partisan perspective under the garb of factual objectivity and liberal ideology that inherently retains a binary opposition between us-versus-them as the foundation of ‘truth’.
Journalistic ethos is therefore defined in accordance to the foreign policy of the nation-states thereby developing a ground for the justification of mass scale devastation and violent attack as a situation qualifying for ‘exceptionalism’, and inherently making us indifferent to the larger humanitarian concerns and brutality inflicted upon the civilian population. The reportage of situations of conflict and warfare only through the vocabulary of facts reduces the possibilities of incorporating feelings or opinions deemed of lesser significance on account of their inherent subjective character.
Mohammad Omer’s journalistic efforts is witnessed in his book – ‘Shell Shocked: On the Ground Under Israel’s Gaza Assault’ , which moves beyond the convention of journalism as ‘the news without the spin’, in order to acknowledge his own embeddedness in the history and stark realities of Gaza. Despite his Dutch citizenship, Omer gives a broader understanding of objectivity through the very acknowledgement of his roots as a Palestinian in Gaza only to state that the option of detachment is far from being an absolute achievement for any individual with a socially carved identity.
As Omer explains: “..I’m a journalist, and I owe it to my people and the Israeli people to get to the truth. I choose to stay in Palestine, my beloved home, with my wife, son, mother, father, siblings. I am not willing to let Israel or Zionism exterminate me.”
In describing the effects of the war, Omer minimises his own struggle to stay alive, courageously confronting life-threatening dangers on an hourly basis so as to fulfill his role as the eyes and voice of the Palestinian people enduring the ultimate horrors of war.
The evidence of authenticity in his works is therefore derived from that element of embeddedness and self-reflexivity, as evident in his words: “…I am offended, not only as a human, as a Palestinian in Gaza and as a father, but also as a journalist in Gaza”.
The narrative of this book accounts for the destruction and mass-scale death that shook the entire Gaza – with dead bodies stuffed in refrigerators in the absence of electricity because people fear of being attack in their attempts of burial; the bodies of infants stored in ice cream coolers, the attack on donkeys as per instruction on “targeting anything that moves” and the overall dehumanizing experience of witnessing shell bombings on graveyards so mourners cannot locate their deceased relatives.
At another level, war journalism poses imminent threat to the reporters in a context of conflict, wherein they too become potential targets of attack. Omer’s testimonies account for his personal experience of being stripped by Israeli officers in police uniform to the extent of his collapse on interrogation among other details. The question therefore arises on the mandate that operates to account for human rights violations in a situation of armed conflict inherently marked by instability of power positions and mechanisms.
One is even convinced to revisit the principles outlined as per International Law and International Humanitarian Law and the limitations in reinforcement of the same in conditions of warfare. To what extent can the United Nations operate to ensure protection of reporters and civilians in conflict-marked territories? Can we assign universal responsibility to contending groups in areas under occupation, to adhere to principles of human rights and international law over national or sub-group interests? Is humanity after all, universal or conditional?
A transition from the ethics of journalism to a more humane and ethical journalist reportage can indeed account for the untold subjectivities and silenced stories of the victims of war. #50Days4Gaza attests the significance of war journalism in a vivid manner.
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