By Rima Najjar
The detention of Nasser Al-Lahham Is About More Than Press Freedom
Palestinian journalism isn’t just a fight for visibility — it’s the unburnable archive of survival, and it will outlast the occupation that seeks to silence it
Before dawn on July 7, 2025, Israeli forces stormed the Bethlehem home of Nasser Al Lahham — veteran journalist, editor-in-chief of Ma’an News, and head of Al Mayadeen’s Palestine bureau. Dragged from his apartment without charge, he became one of dozens of Palestinian media workers held under administrative detention. But Al Lahham is no ordinary reporter. For decades, his work has chronicled the pulse of Palestinian resistance. Israel now seeks to silence that pulse.
They will not succeed.
His arrest is not a rogue act. It’s part of a calculated campaign to erase Palestinian journalism altogether.
Since 2023, Israel has waged a sweeping offensive against journalists in Gaza, the West Bank, and beyond. The toll is staggering: 217 reporters killed in Gaza alone — many in press vests, many mid-broadcast. Al Mayadeen’s Farah Omar and Rabih Al Maamari were assassinated in a precision strike in southern Lebanon. Shireen Abu Akleh, Ghufran Warasneh, Fadel Shana’a — their names fill cemeteries and legal petitions. These are not tragedies. They are policy. (See Israel’s war on Palestinian Journalists in List of journalists killed during the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, a compilation of incidents across decades.)
International law is explicit. Journalists are civilians under Article 79 of the Geneva Conventions. UN resolutions demand press protection. Yet in Palestine, these safeguards collapse like the bombed-out newsrooms they were meant to shield. Media offices are razed. Press tents shelled. Outlets like Al Jazeera and Al Aqsa TV are banned outright. The goal is not just to destroy infrastructure — it is to obliterate the Palestinian narrative itself.
So where can Palestinian journalists turn? Not to the Palestinian Authority. Fragmented by geography and bound by security coordination with Israel, the PA lacks both the capacity and the political will to defend them. Gaza’s journalists work under siege. Exiled voices are drowned out.
Civil society groups like Al-Haq, Addameer, Samidoun, and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights have long fought to document abuses and push for justice. Now they, too, are targets. Israel brands them as “terrorist organizations,” shuttering their offices, jailing their staff, and criminalizing their networks of solidarity abroad.
This assault stems from fear on the part of Israel. Palestinian armed resistance, despite overwhelming odds, has chipped away at Israel’s claims of military invincibility. Meanwhile, global solidarity is swelling around Palestinian voices. That’s why the crackdown has intensified. Israel isn’t just suppressing facts — it’s manufacturing a myth: of unchallengeable dominance, of Palestinian voicelessness, of a conflict without witnesses.
But the archive will not burn.
Epistemic Violence → Erasure of Narrative
Across courts, campuses, and transnational movements, a new framework is taking shape. Palestinian organizations are reframing media destruction as epistemic violence — a systematic assault on memory, knowledge, and communal voice. Legal briefs now do more than count casualties; they expose an entire architecture of erasure.
Scholars and activists worldwide are rallying around terms like epistemic apartheid and narrative suppression (for example, refusing to believe Indigenous knowledge systems are valid, erasing histories of oppressed groups from textbooks, discrediting someone’s testimony because of their race, gender, or class.) These aren’t just academic concepts — they’re calls to action in a battle for epistemic sovereignty: the right of a people to preserve and proclaim its truths.
Even within the UN, shifts are underway. The 2025 Commission of Inquiry accused Israel of trying to “erase Palestinian cultural memory.” Special Rapporteurs have warned that the destruction of archives, schools, and media amounts to cultural extermination. The language of epistemic violence hasn’t yet entered international doctrine — but the floodgates are opening.
This moment demands more than appeals to press freedom. It requires recognizing journalists, poets, and archivists as frontline defenders of collective survival. It demands that epistemic violence be named, condemned, and prosecuted. And it insists, unflinchingly: If international law won’t protect Palestinian truth-tellers, then global conscience must speak through them, through their words, through their media.
Wesley Lowery, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, wrote a book titled They Can’t Kill Us All, popularizing that phrase, a phrase that emerges from grief and rage and asserts refusal to be intimidated by systemic violence.
Palestinian resistance to erasure does not end with arrests or assassinations. It lives in those still filming, still writing, still teaching — they can’t kill us all. The archive breathes. And its guardians are done asking for permission.
Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa.
10 July 2025
Source: countercurrents.org