Shireen Abu Akleh and Jamal Khashoggi: a Lesson in Feckless Hypocrisy
In 2018, when the United States Democratic Party was at the nadir of its federal power, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia murdered Jamal Khashoggi, an American resident and journalist for The Washington Post, inside the Saudi consulate general in Istanbul. The Democrats responded to the assassination with relative ferocity: the War Powers Act was invoked apropos Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, top Democratic officials discussed ending arms sales to Saudi Arabia, and debates over the nature of the US-Saudi alliance began within the party in earnest. Though little came of the Democratic Party’s response, given that the party was in opposition at the time, there was some hope that perhaps Khashoggi’s murder would represent a shift in the Democratic Party’s foreign policy outlook. There was hope that under a Democratic administration and legislature, that perhaps some of the United States’s least savoury allies would be held to account for crimes, such as the murder of a journalist, one who as a permanent resident was under the protection of the United States.
Following the 2020 elections, the Democratic Party gained a federal trifecta for the first time since 2010. Joe Biden, who during his campaign criticised the Trump administration’s lacklustre and feeble response to the Khashoggi murder, now sat behind the Resolute Desk. In May of 2022, an Israeli sniper assassinated Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian-American journalist with Al-Jazeera covering an Israeli raid in Jenin, Occupied Palestine despite Abu Akleh clearly wearing a near universally recognised vest marked “PRESS” at the time. Israel’s initial response was to blame Palestinian protestors for the death of a widely recognised and respected Arab journalist. The results of multiple analyses reject the veracity of the Israeli claim.
While a few Democratic Party Senators have pushed their party’s President to tangibly respond to the situation, the Biden administration thus far has sat on its hands. What was the administration’s response to a purported ally murdering a journalist under the expressed protection of the United States? Was it to demand that Israel accept responsibility for the horrific and unjustified assault on a fundamental democratic institution and to compensate Abu Akleh’s family and organisation? Was it to cessate American arms shipments and sales to Israel? Did the Biden administration call for the snipers who killed Abu Akleh to face charges? No, no, and no. The murder of a non-combatant American citizen by a foreign military went entirely unpunished by the United States. When faced with the same opportunity as his predecessor to express the United States’s commitment to a free press and to justice by holding an “ally” accountable for murdering an American journalist, Biden abandoned all responsibility.
The question must then be asked - what is the difference between Saudi Arabia’s murder of Khashoggi and Israel’s murder of Abu Akleh that would lead to a feckless response by the Democratic Party regarding the latter? Is it that Saudi Arabia is a totalitarian theocratic petro-state whose close ties to the United States are based entirely on geopolitical and economic convenience, and therefore it is within the realm of possibility that Saudi Arabia would murder a journalist whereas Israel would not because Israel is supposedly a liberal democracy whose ties with the United States are forged in the fraternal bonds of that institution? No, it cannot be, for any close inspection of Israeli policy should disabuse readers of the notion that Israel is a liberal democracy. Abu Akleh is not the only journalist Israel murdered recently. In 2018 alone Israel killed two journalists and injured 254, and over the past 10 years, it has killed 14.
But even putting aside the many journalists that the IDF has injured or killed, the notion that Israel is a liberal democracy in any meaningful sense of the word falls flat when inspecting who that supposed democracy extends to. The citizens of East Jerusalem, whose city has been occupied by Israel following the Six-Day War in 1967, do not have any say in who represents them in the Knesset. The Palestinians living under Israeli occupation in the West Bank do not get a say in the government currently occupying their land and restricting their rights. The Palestinians who were forcibly removed from their homes in territory that Israel now governs in order to make way for Jewish settlers do not get a say on a government or policies that determine whether or not they receive any justice or compensation for the wrongs enacted upon them. This is a situation entirely different from an immigrant without the right to vote in her country of residence - an immigrant chooses to voluntarily enter the country in which she now resides and chooses to accept that government’s civil jurisdiction and governance. The Palestinians in the West Bank never made that choice. The citizens of Occupied Jerusalem never made that choice. No Palestinian made the choice to accept Israel’s jurisdiction over Palestine.
The point of juxtaposing the Democratic Party’s response to Saudi Arabia’s murder of Khashoggi and Israel’s murder of Abu Akleh is not to defend Saudi Arabia’s actions or to claim that the extent of Israel’s issues with regard to press freedom is to the same extent of Saudi Arabia’s, nor is it to say that the Democratic Party’s response to the Khashoggi assassination following its ascension to the White House has been particularly inspiring. Rather, it is to point out that neither murder is acceptable and that the fact that the party is treating the two as categorically different is absurd. The fundamental issues that exist with Saudi Arabia’s murder of Khashoggi are present in Israel’s murder of Abu Akleh. If it is wrong for Saudi Arabia to murder a dissident journalist whose reporting is critical of state policy, it is equally wrong for Israel to murder a journalist whose reporting is less than charitable to state policy.
Abu Akleh’s murder and the responses to such are the intersection of various tangible issues that all deserve their own pieces. Her nationality, that she was Palestinian, the very issue she was reporting on, and the location where she died are emblematic of Israel’s imperialism. That she was an American citizen intentionally killed by a foreign army ought to question what Israeli-American relations ought to be. But one aspect that ought to be particularly salient with the Democratic Party is the inherent anti-democratic nature of gunning down a journalist. In the 2022 midterms, the Democrats ran their campaigns on a variety of issues, such as the right to choose and defence of the minimal welfare programs that exist in the US, but perhaps outstanding among these was that the Democratic Party was the party that would defend democracy and democratic institutions against the GOP’s election denial and voter suppression. A free press is one of the most vital democratic institutions: it provides an outlet for those affected by policy to publicly levy their criticisms and inform the public of the state’s wrongdoings without fear of retribution or consequence from the state. Claims about the Democratic Party’s commitment to democracy should be met with scepticism when it is unable to condemn an ally for violating that basic democratic principle.
Neither Khashoggi nor Abu Akleh have received the justice that they deserve. The people responsible for their murders have yet to face any significant consequences for their actions. In both cases, the United States has done little to exert the influence it has over its proxies. Any hope that the United States and the Democratic Party would exercise the influence it has over its proxy in the name of justice unfortunately has been quenched, but the sweltering injustice that stems from that inaction ought not to be forgotten by those who care about a free press. Justice for Shireen.
Image courtesy of Al Jazeera Media Network via Wikimedia, ©2022, some rights reserved.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the wider St. Andrews Foreign Affairs Review team.
