Then she went to Gaza…
JVL Introduction
CNN producer and war correspondent for eighteen years, Arwa Damon also founded a humanitarian organization, the International Network for Aid, Relief and Assistance in 2015, which now works in Gaza and elsewhere.
She finally left journalism in 2022 to concentrate on her humanitarian work. “We have,” she says “a commitment to the people whose story we tell.”
In an extensive interview with Shany Littman, Damon tells how she thought she had seen it all: death, destruction, devastation, in Iraq and elsewhere.
What marks Gaza out is not these – all there in abundance – but in addition, the psychological wreckage, what Damon calls the “death of the human soul”.
Despite everything she has witnessed, she remains cautiously upbeat about a possible future for Gaza.
RK (h/t NW)
This article was originally published by Haaretz on Fri 21 Jun 2024. Read the original here.
As a CNN War Reporter, Arwa Damon Thought She Had Seen Everything. Then She Went to Gaza
In the Syrian civil war she entered Homs through a sewer, and later witnessed the horrors inflicted by ISIS in Mosul. As a senior correspondent for CNN, Arwa Damon covered the worst war zones in the Mideast. But none was as scary as Gaza, which she visited as head of a humanitarian organization: ‘I saw the death of the human soul’
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The final paragraph baffles me; it’s very close to both-sidesism. But the problem is, the only history one side are willing to accept is one with an eighteen-hundred-year-old hole in it and to make sure everyone else accepts this, they have attempted, and are still continuing to try to obliterate the evidence of another culture and another people.
The logic of settler-colonialism is eradication; it’s not a question of “teaching hatred”, but facing the truth. Gaza is truly different; the horrors of war, wherever it is occurring, do have many things in common, but this is the first time a country has openly expressed the intention of promising its people to deprive a completely captive population of food, water, fuel and shelter in order to annihilate it.
I can understand if Ms Damon, in the midst of carnage, filth and despair, just wants a practical, human way forward and to hell with the posturing theory and politicking, but her version of realism seems to want to appeal to the schizophrenic position that Haaretz occupies rather than spell out to its readership what a Rubicon their country has crossed.
Paul W has it right.
That would be some wand, but the result would only be a stop-gap. The Israeli perspective would shape the outcome, and with little chance of a viable re-emergence of a Palestine acceptable to the Palestinians, resulting from the wand’s limited vision of what would have little chance of rectifying the terrible on-going plainly advertised destruction of a people. BDS.