For more than two decades Shireen Abu Akleh, Al Jazeera’s veteran television reporter, has been a fixture in Palestinian and Arab living rooms. Intrepid, empathetic, and intelligent in equal measure, her narration of developments in the occupied territories since the late 1990s—and there have been many—serves as a collective Palestinian memoir of this turbulent and often tragic period.
To her people she was one of their increasingly rare champions, her heart demonstrably in the right place, her reporting invariably trustworthy. Her summary execution by the Israeli military in the West Bank’s Jenin refugee camp in the early morning of 11 May instantaneously produced shock, grief, and outrage on a national scale and indeed throughout the region. Although Israel has killed in excess of forty-five journalists since 2000, the case of Abu Akleh seems to take this practice to an entirely new level.
The facts of the matter are not in doubt and are clear as daylight. On her last morning, Abu Akleh, along with several colleagues, all clearly and visibly identifiable as members of the media, went to Jenin refugee camp to report on Israel’s latest armed raid on this symbol of Palestinian dispossession and defiance. There was no crossfire, and there were no clashes in or near the area where the reporters set up to do their job. From a distance of approximately 150 meters, a trained Israeli military sniper fired a single bullet at the exposed area between her flack jacket and helmet. A second reporter, Ali Samudi, was subsequently wounded by a single bullet to the back, as was—in what has become standard Israeli military procedure - a Palestinian resident who attempted to come to their rescue.
Whether the sniper was acting on his own initiative or following orders, and whether those responsible were aware of Abu Akleh’s identity or simply had the summary execution of a journalist as their goal, remains unclear. But snipers as a rule shoot after receiving authorization, Abu Akleh had been a thorn in the military’s side for decades, and she had previously expressed concern she might be targeted.
Perhaps apprised that Abu Akleh is a US citizen, Israel resorted to its tried and true damage control methods of misdirection and obfuscation. It initially claimed that Abu Akleh had been killed by one of “dozens” of Palestinian gunmen “firing wildly” in the vicinity of the incident, and quickly circulated a video clip of several shooting Palestinians to lay the matter to rest. Yet geolocation reviews confirmed that, unlike the sniper who killed her, the nearest gunmen were in a different area of the camp, lacking not only a line of sight but also the weapons to precisely hit three separate individuals with only three bullets. More to the point, her surviving colleagues were emphatic that they had been fired upon by Israeli soldiers, whom they could clearly see, without warning or provocation.
Israel subsequently called for a joint investigation with the Palestinian Authority, its primary goal being sole custody of the bullet that killed Abu Akleh. Yet Israeli investigations—routinely announced, rarely conducted, and never transparent or impartial—have been dismissed by human rights organizations the world over as exercises designed to protect the impunity of perpetrators and thwart accountability. Its options narrowing, Israel allowed that, pending further investigation, it was now uncertain who precisely killed Abu Akleh but confident this could not have been a deliberate act by its army of occupation.
A more telling indication of Israel’s calculated and comprehensive inhumanity towards those it has systematically brutalized as a matter of policy was provided that same day. In scenes that have played out with disturbing regularity in the occupied Palestinian territories since 1967, Israeli forces stormed into the Abu Akleh family home in Jerusalem where mourners had gathered, physically assaulting a number of them and tearing down Palestinian flags. The incident would prove but a precursor to her 13 May funeral in Jerusalem.
Abu Akleh’s funeral procession was the largest in East Jerusalem since the 2001 burial of its political leader Faisal Husseini at the Haram al-Sharif at the height of the second Intifada. If at that time Israel chose not to intervene out of fear for the consequences, on this occasion its security forces ran amok in a manner that would have done Bull Connor, the infamous white supremacist police chief of 1960s Birmingham, Alabama, proud.
From the moment the coffin departed St Joseph Hospital to receive the last rites at the Cathedral of the Annunciation in the Old City, police began systematically attacking the cortege, viciously beating even her pallbearers, teargassing and firing stun grenades at the huge assembly of mourners, and going berserk at every sighting of a Palestinian flag—including one forcibly removed from the hearse. With extraordinary fortitude, her coffin was somehow kept aloft by those who had come to ensure she would be buried with the same dignity her reporting had without fail extended to them. As the shocking images were transmitted around the planet, Abu Akleh had in death succeeded in revealing the realities of Israel’s colonial occupation as poignantly as she had when broadcasting for Al Jazeera.
When the brutalized but thoroughly unbowed procession finally arrived at the cathedral, Israeli police demanded to know the faith of individual mourners, refusing Muslims entry in an effort to abort what had become an unmistakable national commemoration. Where Israel once more sought to divide in order to facilitate its domination, the leaders of Jerusalem’s various Christian denominations, often fiercely protective of their distinctions in this holiest of cities, in an unprecedented gesture rang their church bells in unison to honor the slain legend. True to form, the Israel police that evening cynically claimed it had acted only “so that the funeral could proceed in accordance with the wishes of the family”.
The bitter reality is that there will be no justice for Shireen Abu Akleh under the prevailing circumstances. Assured of the active support of the United States, and no less active acquiescence of the Europeans, Israel is right to believe it can go on killing without consequence. It will remain free to target not only ordinary Palestinians but also journalists and medical workers, including those who hold US or European citizenship. Just as Israeli “investigations” are designed to pre-empt accountability, so too statements by Western leaders and officials - particularly those that carefully venture to note that she was killed rather than “died”, and was killed by a sniper rather than “clashes”—are designed to substitute for rather than ensure a meaningful response. In this broader scheme of things Washington, London, and Brussels may not have Abu Akleh’s blood on their hands in the literal sense, but they have collectively placed a target on the back of the next journalist whose murder by Israel is only a question of time.
When I worked at Al-Haq, the leading Palestinian human rights organization in the occupied territories, during the height of the 1987-1993 popular uprising, a prominent member of its board had a consistently succinct response whenever confronted with the latest act of depravity performed by Israel’s security forces or settler auxiliaries upon those they occupied: “Savages”. The description seems particularly apt with respect to the summary execution of Shireen Abu Akleh and the attempted desecration of her burial.
[An earlier version of this article first appeared in London Review of Books.]