When writing about death

In my various roles and jobs here, I become the framer of pain. I am the one who packages it into a report, or a web story, or a presentation. I create media campaigns to create awareness. I take the life of a human being, snip at it according to my narrow understandings and experiences, and make it into something presentable.






I have to memorize birthdays and days of death. Today I wrote for Rachel Corrie, yesterday it was Tom. Constant reminders of Vic. Those are the internationals.


I have to watch for these on the calendar and remember to highlight them. And I somehow have to remain positive.


There are thousands of anniversaries for dead Palestinians. Should I name them? Or is it redundant to the world, to know the differences between the deaths, because it is assumed it happens everyday?


Last week I wrote an official letter of condolence.


This becomes almost mechanical.
Death should not be mechanical.
Writing should not be mechanical.
The life of the struggle should not be mechanical.


I am just the girl in an undisclosed location, who predicts where the stories are, organizes people to go out to get them, gives them whatever resources I can, and then I frame it on the wall of the internet for the world to read and to discuss, to use in their books, in their movies, in their research on death.


I create themes to cover on how my people are dying, how communication of tragedy should be pursued.


I remain anonymous because webbing together stories of tragedy puts me at risk of my own tragedy: blacklisting and exile. So hardly will you see me in the office. The Palestinian Authority has stated numerous times, "We are watching everything you do."


And so I weave these stories with haunting privilege, that I dare use the limited word to express what death and oppression must feel like.


The situation gets worse with time.
More people die and feed the death.
Israel has created a furnace out of people.












And I sit and wait to hear about it.












Some people make a living out of what I do. They email me their completed works and tell me to spam the world and buy their book from Amazon. They are your brand name bloggers and photographers, the ones who leave and come back to sell a dying people some books.


I just want to tell them, the binding of their book is our blood. Why bother pitching it here.


And then there are your war tourists who get some odd adrenaline rush seeing people fight for their lives. And after a few weeks, they move onto Africa or some other Disneyland war zone.


I edit and write because  it is all I can do. And this blog is just a venting space.  I came back to my homeland from the US to somehow help, and I have been marginalized as a person who is "undocumented" in her own homeland. So while this blog can help humanize the anonymous person working on these news stories, I do not even have a name to share with you.




If you notice on my blog and Twitter, I do not adhere to the rules of objective writing and grammar and punctuation. Because that is what I have to do most of the day. This blog is a space to be free of these rules.  It is a trick I play on myself so that I think, this writing is not the miserable writing, it is a casual hobby.




Because editing stories on Israeli Occupation is a very serious matter. Every word has the potential to inspire.


I tell our volunteer activists to humanize, to project the Palestinian voice, to include at least two quotations. To ask soldiers for their names. To keep records of any incidence of oppression. To caption their pictures. I train them and off they go into dangerous areas of Israeli occupation.


I talk about the privilege we have. I set up these dumb criteria to at least stay away from streamlining what Palestinian pain or livelihood is, to try and uphold Palestinian diversity.


But I cannot control the pen. I get awesome stories and sometimes I get summaries. Sometimes I get nothing.  Those are the good days, because I make the assumption that things are calm-until the next explosion when countless stories fill the inbox, and I edit and piece and verify.




Everyday I pray that there is no headline story. That the person who writes does not come back the person being written about. It is a labyrinth of oppression I work in.


People put themselves at risk to report. They get chased by navy ships. They get tear gassed. They get their cameras stolen. They get arrested. They get denied entry. I call and say, "Hello" to make sure they are alright as if I do not live here.


Who am I to edit their experiences?