In a recent series of videos, Avichay Adraee, the Arabic-language spokesperson for the Israeli military, relentlessly attacked Anas al-Sharif, an Al Jazeera correspondent in northern Gaza. On July 20, while reporting on a particularly harrowing scene from the courtyard of al-Shifa Hospital, al-Sharif broke down emotionally when an emaciated woman collapsed from hunger beside him, as an ambulance arrived carrying some of the dozens of people killed by Israeli soldiers that day while waiting for bags of flour. Adraee accused him of shedding “crocodile tears.” When al-Sharif called for a ceasefire, Adraee called him a “mouthpiece of intellectual terrorism.”

To nearly all who watched him, al-Sharif’s reporting has been nothing short of heroic and awe-inspiring. But to the Israeli government, he is culpable for having the audacity to document the starvation campaign it has engineered and imposed by brute force. It is not enough to enjoy the impunity afforded by U.S. and European cover: there should be no bad optics, either. Given the history of Israel’s smearing of journalists in Gaza as a precursor to assassinating them, the Committee to Protect Journalists publicly called for al-Sharif’s protection. But on August 10, an Israeli airstrike assassinated him and four other Al Jazeera journalists in a targeted attack on a tent outside al-Shifa Hospital.

Journalists, at their essence, epitomize the intellectual in Edward Said’s telling, especially now when fascism plagues the country in which he lived and genocide threatens the existence of the people to whom he belonged. Said passed away twenty-two years ago, but he left us a trove of contemplations on what it means to live in exile and to be maligned and occluded in language and representation. He also probed the role of the intellectual in terrains plagued by violence, tumult, and catastrophe, often against the backdrop of stunted liberal understandings of peace.

In Representations of the Intellectual, his classic work from 1994, Said defined an intellectual as “an individual endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public”—what he called “a vocation for the art of representing.” “This role,” he continued,

has an edge to it, and cannot be played without a sense of being someone whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to produce them), to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations, and whose raison d’être is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug. The intellectual does so on the basis of universal principles: that all human beings are entitled to expect decent standards of behavior concerning freedom and justice from worldly powers or nations, and that deliberate or inadvertent violations of these standards need to be testified and fought against courageously.

Said often spoke of the need for testimonials and facts to be recorded because, as he wrote, “human beings must create their own history.” For no people is this more true than Palestinians. A robust archive of their existence, he felt, would counter the Israeli drive to silence and flatten it. Indeed, since the creation of the State of Israel, Palestinians have been construed as an inconvenient and breakable thorn in Israel’s side, rather than an entire other people entitled to rights and aspirations. Instead of being allowed to articulate their own needs, desires, or liberation, Said explains, “Palestinians are expected to participate in the dismantling of their own history.”

Thus when Said writes of the “vocation for the art of representing,” he could have been speaking about Palestinian journalists. “Whether that is talking, writing, teaching, appearing on television,” he writes, “that vocation is important to the extent that it is publicly recognizable and involves both commitment and risk, boldness and vulnerability.”

Like al-Sharif, my cousin Shireen Abu Akleh, a journalist who worked tirelessly to bring attention to the unceasing wave of human rights violations against Palestinians, produced a collection of work that embodies Said’s words. For that, on May 11, 2022, Shireen was shot and killed in Jenin by an Israeli soldier. Between 2000 and 2022, Israel killed at least twenty-six journalists and injured more than 300. Still, the assassination of Shireen was, at the time, notable; the killing of a high-profile, well-recognized figure, wearing a clearly marked press vest and helmet, was an especially egregious and attention-generating act even by Israeli standards.

I believe Israel intentionally killed Shireen, for three main reasons. One, she told the stories of Palestinians in their own words, thereby producing an ongoing record of Palestinian existence. Two, she provided Palestinians and other Arabs comfort and hope on both the bleakest and most ordinary days. And three, she was a voice that represented the unity and continuity of Palestinians across space and time.

Over three decades of reporting, Shireen created a narrative of Palestine and Palestinians. She consistently documented the contours of life under occupation—the excruciating details of imprisonments, killings, house demolitions, bombing campaigns—and she did so all while living in its midst. She spoke to the people who, in the West, had been relegated to largely nameless, faceless numbers and tagged with the label “terrorist” or “militant,” rendering any subsequent detail or nuance irrelevant. But Shireen lived in those details, and she brought them to life.

Since her death, we’ve been told countless stories of what she meant to so many: those who met her once, those who knew her well, and those who saw her only on television. All reported their overwhelming sadness at her absence, her ability to make every person she interacted with feel seen and heard. In her telling of other people’s stories, people recognized themselves and their neighbors, and in that, they found refuge. She told the truth—even when it was dangerous to do so—and documented the lives of people amid their suffering, as well as their more mundane moments. Journalists throughout Palestine, and especially in Gaza, have done the same: despite all odds, they have created a record of resilience and vulnerability, of love and community, in a time defined by cruelty, violence, and fragmentation.

The last twenty-two months have rewritten everything. Although Palestinian reporters have managed to narrate some stories of hope and return and reunions, the overwhelming reality is one of perpetual torment. Journalists have reported with courage and integrity under constant fire, knowing that they and their families could be targeted at any time. Unfortunately, Shireen’s killing has also served as a harbinger of the onslaught against Palestinian journalists—in the last 662 days, Israel has killed 233 of them in Gaza.

And now, as bombs continue to fall and plans for ethnic cleansing are openly bandied about, there is the weaponization of starvation. On July 24, Agence France-Presse (AFP), the Associated Press, BBC, and Reuters issued an unprecedented statement expressing concern for journalists in Gaza who are being starved alongside their families and communities. The Society of Journalists at AFP stated that while they “have lost journalists in conflicts . . . none of us can ever remember seeing colleagues die of hunger.” Meanwhile, a collection of Palestinian journalists—gaunt and nearly unrecognizable from their images of two years ago—are on the eleventh day of hunger strike, which will not end, they say, until every child in Gaza has access to food and water. Still, these reporters and their colleagues continue to rush toward buildings just hit by air strikes, searching for survivors, looking to document the losses and the crimes. When al-Sharif began crying that heartbreaking day in front of al-Shifa Hospital, you could hear the people around him comforting and encouraging him: “Continue! Continue! You’re our voice.”

What is the role of intellectuals when the erasure of words is matched by the erasure of bodies? During a genocide, everything takes on new significance. Palestinian writers, journalists, and poets have demonstrated the urgency of creating meaning while faced with existential precarity. Palestinian educators, and artists also do this work, as do the health care providers, rescue workers, and civil defenders who hold press conferences, conduct interviews, and insist on remaining in besieged hospitals despite the risk, their very presence a testament to the ongoing horrors.

Palestinians facing extermination navigate language and insist on survival and representation. Alaa Alqaisi, a Palestinian writer in Gaza, has recently shed light on the importance of documenting one’s experiences despite the increasing difficulty of doing so in the face of starvation:

It is not a matter of forgetfulness but erosion, a steady unraveling of everything I believed belonged to me. And yet I persist. I speak. I write. Because silence would be a deeper form of defeat. Testimony, even if cracked and uncertain, is the only offering I can still give. To keep it locked inside would be to let this hunger consume even the voice that names it. 

Although Said is not with us today to inveigh against the genocide of his people, he left us with this prophetic framing: “The major choice faced by the intellectual is whether to be allied with the stability of the victors and rulers, or—the more difficult path—to consider that stability as a state of emergency threatening the less fortunate, the experience of subordination itself, the memory of forgotten voices and persons, with the danger of complete extinction.”

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