Some months back I wrote a post on LinkedIn about Maryam Abu Daqqa, a Palestinian photojournalist killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza. It sat on my profile for less than a day before I took it down.

I took it down because a former close friend, an Israeli I had known and worked with for years, came at me in the comments. Not a disagreement. A long, angry follow-up accusing me of antisemitism, of being a traitor, and a few other things I will not bother repeating here. We had been friends. It rattled me. I deleted the post and walked away.

I have regretted that ever since.

A while later I had a look at the same person’s X profile. It is a sewer. Raw anti-Muslim hatred and racism, Palestinians referred to as “sand n*****s”, the whole performance. The friend whose anger had got under my skin enough to make me pull my own writing down had, somewhere along the way, become someone I no longer recognised. And I had let that version of him shut me up.

That is the part that bothers me most. Not the disagreement. Disagreement is fine; I have spent thirty years in security engineering arguing with people, sometimes wrongly, and being argued with. The thing that bothers me is that I was right, and I deleted it anyway, because someone shouted loudly enough at me.

So I am putting it back up. Below is the original, exactly as I wrote it. I have not softened a word, walked back a line, or hedged a claim. If anyone wants to come at me again, they can. I am not going to be shouted down twice.

The original post

🕊 “We were greatly blessed to have some of the most gifted journalists and brilliant photographers. They helped to tell the story. They captured some riveting moments on film, such as a gruesome necklacing (Kevin Carter), and the barbaric turning on a helpless victim by a baying crowd from one or other side of the conflict (Greg Marinovich).” – Desmond Tutu

I grew up in South Africa. I remember the work of the Bang Bang Club — Kevin Carter, Greg Marinovich, Ken Oosterbroek, João Silva. They showed us the horrors of apartheid through their eyes, and through their lens. And they paid the price. Oosterbroek was killed. Marinovich was shot four times. Silva lost both legs. Carter won a Pulitzer, but the weight of what he saw drove him to take his own life.

The apartheid regime tried to suppress the truth, to keep the world from seeing what was happening in our townships. But the Bang Bang Club broke through that wall of silence. Their images stripped away denial and forced the world to look.

Today, in Gaza, Maryam Abu Daqqa carried that same burden. With her camera, she bore witness to life under siege. She, too, paid the ultimate price. Her camera — pulled from the rubble after the airstrike that killed her — is more than shattered glass and metal. It is a reminder that even when the witness is silenced, the act of witnessing endures.

Israel’s blackout — no foreign journalists allowed into Gaza, no independent reporting — will not hold forever. When this horror is over, it will be Maryam’s images, and those of her colleagues, that reveal the truth of what happened. No airstrike, no propaganda campaign, no government statement can erase what they saw.

Freedom of information is not abstract. It is survival. Without witnesses, the powerful write the story unchallenged. Apartheid fell because the world was forced to look. Gaza will be no different.

Why I am posting it again

Because I believe it. I believed it when I wrote it, and nothing that has happened since has made it less true. The journalist body count out of Gaza is now the worst in any conflict the Committee to Protect Journalists has ever recorded. The blackout on foreign reporters is real and ongoing. The targeting of Palestinian press, in their flak jackets with PRESS in big white letters, is documented and undisputed by anyone outside the Israeli government’s own briefings.

I also believe the South African parallel holds. I am not a neutral observer of apartheid; I grew up under it, and I watched it end because, in the end, the world was forced to look. The Bang Bang Club did not get to decide whether the cameras stayed on. Maryam Abu Daqqa did not either. Drawing a line between those two things is not antisemitic. It is the most basic kind of moral arithmetic, the kind any historian will be doing in twenty years’ time without anyone batting an eye.

The accusation of antisemitism, levelled at people criticising the conduct of the Israeli state in Gaza, is one of the most cynical rhetorical moves of our era. It collapses a state, a government, an army, and a people into a single category, then dares you to criticise any of them without being accused of hating all of them. It is designed to make you exactly what I was the first time around: someone who quietly takes the post down rather than wear the label.

For the record, since apparently this still has to be said: I am not antisemitic. I do not hate Jewish people. I have Jewish friends, Jewish colleagues, and a long history of working alongside Israelis I respect and still respect. None of that is in tension with believing that what is being done in Gaza is grotesque, that the killing of journalists is policy rather than accident, and that the people doing the documenting deserve to be honoured rather than memory-holed.

The friend who came after me last time will probably see this. He may come at me again. He is welcome to. I am not the same person I was the first time around, and I am not going to delete the post this time.

While I am at it, a quick update on what I have been doing in the time since you tried to make me shut up. I founded a team that won a grant to build a product for protecting press freedom in conflict zones. I built thetoll.memorial, a memorial for the journalists, photographers, fixers, medics, and aid workers killed doing the work, so the people who paid the ultimate price are not forgotten. If you are reading this, this sub-tweet’s for you.

This is what witnessing is for. The Bang Bang Club did not get to choose whether the world looked. Maryam Abu Daqqa did not either. The least the rest of us, sitting safely in our offices with our LinkedIn profiles intact, can do is not flinch when someone shouts.