Why I am rooting for Bisan Owda to win a news Emmy

Tafi Mhaka

Bisan Owda, a young Palestinian journalist, activist and filmmaker from Gaza, deserves the highest accolades for the excellent work she has done in the past 11 months to expose the realities of Israel’s genocidal war on her people. From the very beginning, she has been a reliable, informative and trustworthy voice from the ground in a conflict that killed more journalists than any other in recent memory.

At significant personal risk, she reports on the plight of the tens of thousands of children who have become orphans in Gaza. She sheds light on the extensive destruction wrought by the advanced weaponry supplied to Israel by the Biden administration. Despite Israel’s best efforts to hide the truth, she shows the world how Palestine is undergoing another Nakba.

As such, I am delighted that she has been nominated for an Emmy Award in the “Outstanding Hard News Feature Story” category with the short documentary she made for AJ+ titled “It’s Bisan From Gaza and I’m Still Alive”. The poignant and incisive eight-minute feature follows her journey as she is forced to leave her home in Gaza City and displaced numerous times amid Israel’s continuing assault on the Strip.

Regrettably, almost immediately after the announcement of her nomination, defenders of Israel’s war – and its simultaneous assault on journalism –  embarked on a campaign to prevent Owda from receiving the recognition she deserves for the exemplary work she managed to do under the most difficult conditions.

First, an Israeli communication consultant accused Owda of being a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – a left-wing Palestinian political movement that is designated a “terrorist organisation” by several Western countries, including the United States – a charge she denies. This led high-profile pro-Israeli accounts on social media to attack her journalism as terror propaganda and condemn her Emmy nomination.

Consequently, on August 20, pro-Israel entertainment industry nonprofit “Creative Community for Peace” issued an open letter to the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS), the body responsible for the News and Documentary Emmys, requesting Owda’s nomination to be retracted based on these accusations.

Thankfully, the academy stood behind the decision to nominate Owda. Adam Sharp, NATAS president and chief executive, stated that his organisation has not seen any evidence of Owda having any active ties to the PFLP. He further noted that the award has a history of recognising works that have been controversial, “in the service of the journalistic mission to capture every facet of the story”. He also underlined that Owda’s work was selected for nomination by independent judges from the industry, and from among 50 submissions in one of the year’s most competitive categories.

The suggestion made in the open letter that Owda has “terror ties” and thus her journalism should not be honoured but discarded as propaganda, is preposterous. For anyone with a little knowledge of the history of the Palestinian people and the relentless abuse they suffered for decades under Israeli occupation, it is clear that, like many others before her, Owda is being targeted for reminding the world of the humanity of Palestinian people and exposing the truth about Israel’s brutal ethnic cleansing operation.

Israeli narratives, which frame Palestinians as inherently violent, unreasonable sub-humans – as anti-Semitic savages who attack benevolent and civilised Israel for no reason – have dominated mainstream media without challenge for so long that they have become an accepted reality. With many media outlets almost never giving Palestinians a platform to talk about their reality under Israeli occupation, the humanity of an entire people has been erased in the eyes of the international community, with devastating consequences.

Recently, the advent of social media, and the rise of Global South media voices like Al Jazeera, began to disturb this sad status quo.

Since the beginning of this latest and most violent chapter in Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people, honest, direct and courageous Palestinian voices like Owda’s broke through the mould of a once tightly controlled media landscape that habitually panders to colonial narratives.

Her work, marked by a raw intensity and immense emotional debt, reached people around the world and exposed many of them to the painful reality of being a Palestinian in Gaza for the first time. Indeed, many Africans like me, who for too long depended on the biased output of Western news outlets to understand the so-called “Middle East conflict” found Owda’s authentic account of the Palestinian reality both informing and refreshing.

In a media landscape where Israeli military spokespeople get both the first and the last word in news reports on the genocide they are committing, where Palestinians who lost dozens of family members to Israeli bombing are made to condemn any efforts at resistance to be allowed to speak about their loss, where Palestinians inexplicably “die” but Israelis are “killed” and “slaughtered”, voices like Owda’s should be appreciated, honoured and protected at all cost.

Since Israel’s very inception, Western media have been complicit in its crimes against Palestinians. Especially leading British and American media organisations, which for decades, held a monopoly on deciding what is accepted as “truth” about Israel-Palestine, helped Israel legitimise its violence and land theft by pushing narratives that dehumanise Palestinians.

But now that Owda, and other courageous Palestinian journalists like her, are able to reach large audiences, these organisations have lost the power to act as the sole arbiter of truth on Israel-Palestine. Israel can no longer silence Palestinian voices and make the world accept Israeli narratives as the indisputable truth of the conflict.

Owda, at just 26 years old, made much more significant contributions to journalism, and the global understanding of the conflict in Palestine, in the past 10 months, than the seasoned Western journalists parroting Israeli talking points have done in many decades.

Owda’s reports are neither dramatic nor thrilling; they do not indulge in colourful sensationalism. Rather, they present the stark realities of Palestinian existence, imbued with the inevitability of profound suffering, anguish, and death. These accounts are unembellished reflections of a people and a land devastated by Israel, revealing the depths of human failure and Western moral corruption.

Through her short films, Owda reveals how more than 40,000 Palestinians, mostly innocent women and children, have not suddenly “lost their lives” amid a “conflict” between “Israel and Hamas”, but instead have been brutally killed by an occupying military force armed with the state-of-the-art weapons provided by Western powers. Owda conveys the stories of the dead, reminding the world of their humanity, and the humanity of the Palestinians who so far survived this genocide.

This is what journalism does at its best. This is what journalism is for. And this is why, I am with all my heart rooting for Owda to win an Emmy Award on September 25. I know Owda does not do what she does to win Western awards. I know her work will remain as valuable and noteworthy even if she never wins another award or important accolade. But if she wins, it will still be a slap in the face of those who, like the signatories of the open letter to NATAS, want Israel to continue shaping the narrative of this  “conflict” singlehandedly. It will show that the work of Palestinian journalists cannot be ignored, and the truth of Palestine – and this genocide – will not remain hidden.