The Gaza I knew survives only as stories
On the publication of her novel Vulture — a satire of war journalism set in Gaza — Hyphen’s Phoebe Greenwood says the human cost of the conflict is too great for the news to process
In 2015, almost two years after I left Palestine, I started work on my first novel. I had covered the region as a correspondent for four years but apparently there was a lot I hadn’t managed to say. When I sat down to write, Gaza poured out.
Reporters aren’t meant to have feelings — in our mouths, they sound too much like bias — but I had lots of unresolved feelings about Gaza, knotty and complicated. News articles don’t have time for human complexity. No room for the dark humour that’s endemic in war zones and necessary to survive them. That reality could only be described as fiction.
I started to tell the story of Sara Byrne, an ambitious young reporter, trying to make a name for herself in the 2012 war in Gaza. A dark satire of the war news industry, it felt much closer to the Gaza I knew. But by the time I finished Vulture nearly 10 years later, that Gaza no longer existed. I’ve been looking again to the media to tell me what happened to it, but it can’t.
Israel hasn’t let foreign media into Gaza to cover this war and the Palestinian journalists there are being killed in extraordinary numbers. They showed us incomprehensible destruction until Israel cut off the internet. Palestinian health authorities say the death toll since 7 October 2023 has passed 55,000, others put the number closer to 64,000. More than half of Gaza’s buildings have been damaged or destroyed. The entire population is at risk of famine. But outside of these horrifying figures, the British and US media discourse is mostly political: is the killing of this many Palestinians a genocide or not? Are the protests against Israel’s military action in Gaza so big because of antisemitism? Is this war getting too much attention compared to others in Yemen or Sudan?
The news industry has strict rules for conflict reporting. In the interests of balance, every accusation should offer a right of reply, every opinion a counter-opinion, every alleged atrocity provided with a defence or justification. These rules are in place to insure fairness and secure trust in the media.
But their application isn’t always consistent. Few western outlets feel obliged to offer Moscow’s justifications for the bombing of Kiev while, in the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they are meticulous about impartiality. In the interests of balance, a BBC journalist asks a Palestinian man beaten by both Israeli soldiers and settlers near his home in the West Bank why, if he feels so unsafe, doesn’t he leave? A senior Guardian journalist compares the tactical starvation of two million Palestinians by an occupying power with the tragic murder of two Israelis by a lone gunman. This parity doesn’t reflect the conflict I reported.
As Vulture landed in bookshops last week, I didn’t want to argue any more about the definition of genocide. I wanted to talk about those 64,000 people, the family homes built over generations, now gone, the individual tragedies the news will never have time for, the stories I couldn’t even tell as fiction.
The businessman and his British wife who always had me over for dinner when I made reporting trips to Gaza. I’d bring them a smuggled bottle of whiskey if I could and they’d spoil me with a home-cooked dinner. She ran a popular beauty salon. Within hours of a war or escalation ending, she told me, women would flock to get their eyebrows threaded and their legs waxed. “They want control of their bodies again,” she explained.
The businessman had been successful until 2007, when Hamas took over the Gaza Strip and Israel and Egypt imposed their blockade. Suddenly, the work he had thrived on was next to impossible. He was struggling. The last time I visited in 2018, he was experimenting with a new bakery venture. He stuffed my pockets with buns as I waddled back to the Al Deira hotel where I always stayed in Gaza, overfed and happy. I haven’t been able to reach either of them since 7 October, but from satellite images, I can see that the well-to-do area near the beach where their apartment building stood has been flattened by bombs.
The perfume-maker and sometime poet who found himself working as my translator during the 2012 war. A careful, sensitive man used to quiet days spent balancing scents and reaching for metaphors, he was stunned by the cynicism of western journalists who had descended on the Al Deira to report on the conflict. He urged me to protect my heart from being hardened by this bleak business of covering wars. His child was sick with a condition that hospitals in Gaza were unable to treat. When that war ended, his child died.
The cleaner at the hotel who tried valiantly to teach me Arabic. Despite my lack of aptitude, he rewarded me with a jewellery box from Jerusalem. He didn’t comment on the irony that I was living in Jerusalem at the time while he was unable to get a permit from the Israelis to leave Gaza and visit family there. The Al Deira hotel was bombed into non-existence at some point in December 2023.
I wondered what happened to the fisherman the size of a nursery rhyme giant, known at Gaza Port as the Rais (chief). He explained to me how he kept himself strong, even in the tough times that had been so relentless since 2007. Gaza’s fishermen had been obliged to fish in an ever shrinking stretch of sewage-polluted sea, hemmed in by a flotilla of Israeli naval boats that sporadically shot at them. But the Rais made sure to drink a cup of olive oil every day, consumed radishes for the heart and ate bunches of spinach for the blood, like Popeye.
The young, bright women from the local NGOs who came to my media training workshops and were outraged by the idea they should have to package their suffering to make it attractive to western journalists. Surely, they argued, the suffering was enough.
What would they say to the newsroom editors who warn of “Gaza fatigue”?
When I can’t bear to read any more about the Hamas, Israeli, Arab, US and European leaders that dominate the headlines with their failure to end this impossible catastrophe, I take myself back to the coffee shops where the teenagers met to eat cakes pumped full of cream, the seafood restaurants on the beach that families would dress up for on Friday nights. I imagine the wedding parties that filled downtown streets with dancing, the jokes I heard while being taught how to cook musakhan one happy Saturday years ago.
I try hard to keep hold of this Gaza, which now only exists as stories.
Vulture is available to buy online and at bookshops from 3 July in the UK and 12 August in the US.
