Interviewing Arafat, fending off Israeli settlers: A day in the life of a Palestinian journalist

From his new home in Toronto, Walid Batrawi reflects on a lifetime of reporting in the West Bank and Gaza

Walid Batrawi gives journalists hostile environment training in Gaza at the Mathaf Hotel in 2019. The hotel was destroyed by Israeli shelling. Nidal Al-Wahidi (the man in the cap, left) went missing on Oct. 7 near Eriz checkpoint. (Photo courtesy of Walid Batrawi)

Harrowing footage and photos of family members and friends have flooded — and continue to flood — Palestinian journalist Walid Batrawi’s phone since Oct. 7, 2023, the day Hamas gunmen infiltrated Israeli communities outside the Gaza Strip last year. 

The images coming from Gaza as a result of the Israeli retaliatory assault are grisly and relentless: Colleagues killed on the job, cemeteries desecrated, mosques, hospitals, schools, universities, hotels, entire neighborhoods, refugee camps and villages razed to the ground. Amidst the onslaught of negative news, Batrawi one day came across the video of a father reacting to the news that his three-day-old twins, his wife and her mother had been killed by an Israeli rocket in the apartment they had been sheltering in last August. This one especially jolted him.

Batrawi knew this father. Mohammed Abu Al-Qomasan was his cousin’s son-in-law. His cousin was the woman  who had been killed with her daughter and grandchildren.  

In his next column in the Ramallah-based Al-Ayyam newspaper, Batrawi wrote about his cousin: “She went to help her daughter who had given birth to twins a few days earlier.” This tragedy, he wrote, was “the shortest story in history, the fastest death to claim three generations, and the shortest period between a birth certificate and a death certificate. Perhaps it would be worthwhile to include this in the Guinness Book of Records.”

Batrawi has a long career as a journalist. He is the recipient of the European Commission and the International Federation of Journalists Natali Prize for Excellence in Reporting Human Rights, Democracy and Development.

Today Batrawi lives in Toronto with his wife and daughters. He arrived last April from the West Bank city of Ramallah, and took advantage of the Canadian government’s special measures program for Palestinians and Israelis to get an open work permit.

While it is the first time he has lived in Canada, Batrawi has a history working for Canadian media. As a freelance producer for CBC in 1993, he reported on the Oslo Accords, an agreement between then Palestinian Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin signed on Sept. 13, 1993, to lay the foundations for Palestinian self-rule.

“This was an era when Israeli settlements had really expanded across the West Bank,” he says. “I was a freelance producer for CBC Paris with Céline Galipeau [news anchor for Radio-Canada]. We did some filming in East Jerusalem and vox pops asking what people thought about the peace accord.”

It was a moment full of hope and opportunity for Batrawi. “As a Palestinian, I was full of emotions that day. I wanted this conflict to end. This was a shift for my generation, living from a status of occupation and war towards the building of a state.”

He recalls another memory from that day: A group of Palestinians in Ramallah handing olive branches and Palestinian flags to Israeli soldiers as a gesture of peace. 

“The Israeli soldiers were shocked, because they had orders before to shoot anyone with a Palestinian flag,” he said. “I was also shocked that all these kids who used to throw stones at these soldiers were climbing and giving them olive branches.”

Interviewing Arafat

In 1994, while working for BBC News, Batrawi was presented with the journalistic opportunity of a lifetime: He was asked to produce an interview with Arafat. 

“I remember in the interview Arafat asking his personal bodyguard to leave,” he says, and that he told him: “‘These are the BBC, they are friends’. So the bodyguard left and Arafat was so relaxed. I remember him standing up and opening the window and saying: ‘Do you hear all these cars and all the joy in the streets? This is what we want. We want Palestinians to live in joy. And I want to turn the Gaza Strip into Singapore.’ This was his dream.” 

Since Oct. 7, 2023, relentless attacks in Gaza have erased entire groups of people who had led relatively normal lives there, like the Khorshid family. “They owned the only optician shop in the whole of Gaza,” Batrawi says. “I bought my glasses from there back in 1994.”

He remembers that moment distinctly because it was four days before his wedding, which also happened to be the day he interviewed then Palestinian President Yasser Arafat for the BBC to mark the one-year anniversary signing of the Oslo Accords. 

“While we were awaiting our first interview in Gaza with Arafat, I broke my glasses. So I went to the (Khorshid’s) glasses shop and made my glasses. They are in my wedding photos,” he says. 

“But now, the whole family was erased from the civil registry.” He pauses, and the enormity of this thought seems to hang in the air. “There’s no Khorshid family anymore in Gaza.”  

Language matters

It’s hard for Batrawi to think back to those gestures of peace after the Oslo agreement was signed. Like so many other false starts for peace in the region, they were short-lived. Rabin was assassinated by the far-right Israeli extremist Yigal Amir, and Israel’s illegal settlements only expanded between 1993 and the second intifada in 2000.

A few months after the second intifada, which erupted following the visit of then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to Al-Aqsa mosque, Batrawi and his colleagues began pushing the BBC, CNN and international news organizations for a change in terminology when describing events that took place in the occupied territories. They wanted news organizations to use language that adhered to international law. 

“For example, there is a settlement next to Bethlehem called Har Gilo. In news reports, they would say ‘a shooting took place at Har Gilo neighborhood’. But it’s not a neighborhood. It’s an Israeli settlement built on occupied Palestinian confiscated land — an illegal settlement according to international law.”

Batrawi has always been frustrated by the way in which journalists can obscure facts by misusing certain terms or accepting official terminology without question. References to the wall that Israel built in the West Bank in 2002 cutting through Palestinian territory, for example, was described by media as one that divided the West Bank from Israel.

However, “the wall is not on the borders of 1967,” says Batrawi. “If it was, then this is a two-state solution, because then you are separating Israel from Palestine.”

In fact, the wall separated Palestinians from Palestinians because it slices through neighbourhoods, agricultural fields and farmland in the West Bank, including Ramallah and East Jerusalem.

“Some reporters have also called it a security wall,” Batrawi says, based solely on Israel’s official description of it as a security “fence” against terrorism. “It is a separation wall … When you see an 18-metre height wall, this is not a fence.”

In the hopeful era of the 1990s, Batrawi describes his interactions with Israeli journalists as positive and cordial, saying he considered many as friends and would sometimes call them to ask for information.  

“At that time, there was this feeling that we are going to make peace. Before Oct. 7, I would meet Israelis when I go on public transportation and shopping in Tel Aviv and take my daughter and speak Arabic. If you’re away from people in uniform, you can find really good people among the Israelis.” 

But reporting from Israeli settlements and near Israeli soldiers often came with risk. He was attacked more times than he can remember by Israeli soldiers when filming with international crews — more so than his foreign counterparts, he says. 

In one instance, he was beaten by an Israeli settler while reporting for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation just outside of Ramallah. An Israeli journalist who was also on the scene, who now hosts an Israeli news channel, pointed out Batrawi to the settler, saying, “‘This is a Palestinian journalist’ … so they attacked me and I was beaten. I began defending myself but then Israeli soldiers took me away and put me in a car and said, ‘just go away.’”

At that time, Batrawi notes, the soldiers protected him. Now, though, he is appalled by how openly soldiers are protecting settlers and shooting media workers. “If you see (recent) footage from Jenin, they are shooting at Palestinian journalists.”

‘Get to know both sides’

From Toronto, Batrawi is working remotely as a media consultant and a trainer for a number of local and international media-development organizations. He’s also writing a book about his career covering major events in Palestine and is keen to continue educating current and future generations of journalists on how to report on one of the most troubled regions in the world.

“First of all, go there and see it for yourself,” he says earnestly. “Not necessarily to the Gaza Strip where it is almost impossible to go due to the Israeli restrictions, but go see what’s going on the ground in the West Bank. Get to know Palestinian journalists. Get to know Israeli journalists like Amira Hass, Gideon Levy and Yoram Binur. There are real heroes and courageous journalists on the Israeli side. Get to know both sides.”

He wishes journalists would spend more time understanding the history of the region before focusing on current events.  “Read Palestinian media outlets. You don’t necessarily have to agree with what they’re saying. Don’t just stick to what you know. Educate yourself.”

This article was first published in J-Source, a news and resource platform for the Canadian journalism industry.