While in Dublin, a journalist offers a talk on using Instagram to document ethnic cleansing in the West Bank

“There are a lot of buzz words that people abroad hear,” says journalist Leila Warah, who lives in Bethlehem, “like they’ll hear checkpoint, or apartheid or occupation.” 

“But there is no image in their brain of what that looks like, or how that plays into daily life,” she says.

Getting across those realities fast is the focus of her work, she says. Hence her 60-second video clips on Instagram showing the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the West Bank.

The videos by the Palestinian-American journalist document life in the West Bank, in the face of the Israeli settler colonial project.

In each short, Warah chooses one experience of life under apartheid and focuses on it, she says. 

“Here is one feature of it, and this is how it plays out,” she says. “I try to make things easy for people to see.”

An audience has tuned in. She has more than 184,000 followers on Instagram.

In one recent video, she films people packing up and leaving their homes. 

These Palestinian people are leaving their village, she says, after two years of violence, their animals stolen, and without water after the Israeli authorities cut off the supply. 

Warah is due to talk about her work in the Pearse Centre on Pearse Street in Dublin on Tuesday 9 June at 6:45 pm (no registration required) together with another Palestinian journalist, Zena Tahhan. 

Tahhan is a writer and TV reporter. Her work focuses on life under occupation in Jerusalem, and how Israel’s system of military occupation operates through legal structures that undermine basic freedoms.

Documenting ethnic cleansing 

Warah grew up in the United Arab Emirates, but her father was born and raised in a refugee camp in Palestine, she says. 

That was after his family were evicted and displaced from a village called Dayr Aban, in the district of Jerusalem, during the Nakba in 1948, she says.

Some of her family still live in refugee camps in Palestine. At times, they feature in her short films. In one video, Warah shows her artist uncle using Israeli tear gas canisters to make wall hangings. 

Warah studied journalism in Bristol and writes articles as well as making the videos. 

It is handy that she speaks English fluently and physically resembles many in her audience, she says. “I grew up abroad, I know what Western audiences don’t necessarily understand.”

Some of her recent videos are in collaboration with Mondoweiss, a US-based news website that is critical of Zionism. 

Mainstream news reporters cover the major events, says Warah. But important things also don’t make the headlines. 

Big military operations and arrests of well-known people will be reported, said Warah, but the arrests of those less known, and smaller military operations and evictions, might not be well documented. 

“Things happen really fast,” she says. 

She gets tips through WhatsApp and Telegram groups and from local contacts, and she collaborates with other journalists. “I wouldn’t have the career I have without other Palestinian journalists,” she says. 

Palestinian journalists tend to work in collaboration, not competition. “With Palestinian journalists, there is much more of a camaraderie,” says Warah. 

Journalists are focused on getting the stories out and will work together to reach wider audiences, she says.

She thinks she faces less harassment than some of her colleagues because she has a US passport. But “I also work with a fully Palestinian crew”, she says. 

The talk on Tuesday

The two journalists are visiting Ireland as part of the Genarration project, which is organised by the Spanish NGO Mundubat.

“The goal is to raise awareness about the situation of Palestinians, young people living under occupation in Jerusalem,” says a spokesperson for Mundubat. 

“To have a conversation about human rights, solidarity and encouraging connections with the audience,” they said.

The experience of Palestinian people living in occupied Jerusalem can be overshadowed, or the narrative often dominated by the Israeli perspective, she says. 

As well as the public talk on Pearse Street, delegates are also meeting with public representatives, academics and community leaders while they are in Dublin. 

Warah says she sees the public engagements as an extension of her work, to illustrate what life is like in Palestine under apartheid.  

“It's a space for people to ask questions, be curious and get a better understanding of what life is like on the ground,” she says. 

The economic situation in the West Bank at the moment is dire, she says. Many are struggling to survive and the Israeli occupation is becoming more suffocating. 

“Right now, there is no work; the job market has completely crashed,” she says. Many people who were working inside Israeli territory had their permits revoked after 7 October 2023, she says. 

On 7 October 2023, Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups attacked southern Israel from Gaza, killing more than a thousand people, most of them civilians. 

In retaliation, Israel bombarded, invaded, and blockaded Gaza, killing more than 70,000 people there, most of them civilians.

Where Warah lives in Bethlehem, about 150km north of Gaza, many people relied on tourism, which has also collapsed since the start of the war, she says. 

And of course the farmers are being pushed off their lands. “A lot of them cannot access their land because of Israeli land grabs, Israeli settler attacks and Israeli restrictions on accessing private land,” she says. 

Warah says she sometimes feels as if she is just contributing to a media echo chamber. People share her work, but sharing information is only the first step in the process, she says. 

“We need direct action, economic boycotts,” says Warah. “To make change, there has to be direct action in the physical sphere.”