Courageous martyr for truth honoured at Goldsmiths

Shireen Abu Akleh - wiki image

Husam Zomlot, Palestinian Ambassador to the UK, paid homage to Catholic journalist Shireen Abu Akleh at Goldsmiths, University of London, on Wednesday.

Shireen was revered around the world for her courageous reporting for Al Jazeera, covering stories across the Palestinian territories. On 11 May 2022, she was fatally shot by an Israeli soldier while on assignment in Jenin, West Bank, despite wearing a clearly identifiable press jacket.

Speaking to a packed audience at the inauguration of a lecture theatre named in her honour, Ambassador Zomlot said Shireen Abu Akleh was unwavering in delivering her heavy responsibility - "telling the story of a people too often silenced."

"She humanised the news, giving names to the nameless, faces to the forgotten and dignity to those living under the brutality of the colonial occupation. Her voice entered every Palestinian home and millions of homes around the world. It was a voice people loved and trusted."

He said: "Her murder was a collective wound. It was part of deliberate assassination in which truth itself is targeted."

The ambassador attended her funeral. "What I witnessed there will stay with me forever - the unwavering love of a people. Shireen that day liberated Jerusalem. Thousands upon thousands poured into the streets. But even in her death she was not left in peace. The world saw the violence that accompanied her final journey."

The manner of her death and the subsequent violent disruption of her funeral drew widespread international condemnation of Israel. During her funeral procession, the Israeli police attacked the pallbearers at St Joseph's Hospital in East Jerusalem with batons and stun grenades. The hospital itself was also stormed by Israeli police officers, who assaulted patients and threw stun grenades, wounding and causing burns to medical staff in the building.

The facility issued a statement from the Christian Churches of the Holy Land, stating that the Israel Police's actions constituted invasion and disproportionate use of force and a violation of the 'right of freedom of religion' for the Palestinians.

Shireen Abu Akleh was born in Jerusalem in 1971, to Louli and Nasri Abu Aqleh, a Palestinian Arab Christian (Melkite Catholic) family from Bethlehem. She attended secondary school at Rosary Sisters high school in Beit Hanina.

Ambassador Zomlot said that the world was then confronted by the reality that she had died exposing. In recent years and in particular the last two 'hundreds of journalists have been targeted, silenced and killed.' As of 10th March, according to Middle East Monitor, 261 journalists have been killed since the start of the Gaza war, and Israel has been found responsible for 81 per cent of those conclusively deemed intentionally targeted across the world.

Ambassador Zomlot said the targeting went even further, "targeting anyone - youths, children and elderly parents - who would be a voice, a correspondent, documenting the genocide in real time.

"Israel wanted to commit the genocide in darkness and that is why they banned the international media from Gaza. And that media was complicit by accepting Israel's ban and not pushing against it. The only crime for our journalists is carrying a camera, holding a microphone and insisting that the world must see. I tell you, Israel's biggest enemy is the truth.

"But Shireen taught us something powerful, resounding, everlasting. Truth does not die when those who carry it do. It multiplies, it inspires others to tell the same story, to refuse erasure. That is Shireen's legacy: a legacy of courage without theatrics and professionalism without compromise. She fought to bring the voices of Palestinians to the world and today it is our responsibility to ensure that those voices are not only heard but protected. Her killers must face justice. The murderers of every Palestinian must face justice. Accountability is the first step to a just peace. Since the beginning of this decade, not one member of the occupation forces or settler terrorist groups has been prosecuted. Such impunity is unprecedented in human history. Injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere."

The ambassador saluted all the student activists and especially two of the Palestine Action Filton 24 activists who were present - Fatema Rajwani, a Media Studies student at Goldsmiths and Kamran Ahmed who had spent 66 days on hunger strike - saying: 'The Palestinian people see you and many who are like you. They have been left alone by the so called international community, they have been deceived by the so called mainstream media but they were not alone because of people like you.'

Ambassador Zomlot spoke of his pride in the Palestinian students studying at Goldsmiths and elsewhere and in the poets whose poems had been recited at the event. He said: "These words are very important. We have to fight on multiple fronts."

He recognised that the Palestinian people had suffered due to the monopolizing of the narrative but "today, we have two narratives. We have the true narrative that is now advancing. Keep at it, because culture, poetry, intellectual engagement are major parts of the story. Shireen was killed for a cause, not only the direct cause of conveying the truth, but for the cause of her people - the freedom of Palestine. The best way of honouring her is to continue to walk in her footsteps.

"As a nation and as a people we have been marching steadily towards our goal. Israel has been using genocide to depopulate Gaza and in the West Bank we are subjected to the most horrific oppression completely sponsored by the state. But we are not going anywhere. I see the tide turning, thanks to Shireen and her colleagues. Nelson Mandela said the journey to freedom is very long but I have a strong feeling that we are closer to that finishing line of freedom and justice than our enemies want us to be. Shukran. Thankyou."

Several other speakers honoured Ms Abu Akleh, including the journalist Peter Oborne and members of Forensic Architecture who carried out an investigation into the murder in 2022. The historian Tareq Baconi denounced a 'manufactured ignorance, a commitment to avert the gaze from the genocide' across most of the Western media.

It was the Goldsmiths student activists who had resolutely refused to avert their gaze. They had occupied the Professor Stuart Hall building (named after a pioneering postcolonial theorist) for 37 days back in 2024 as part of their denunciation of the genocide and the UK government's complicity in this. And it was they who had demanded that the lecture theatre be renamed in Shireen Abu Akleh's honour.