"Nothing has compared to what we're seeing": Hala Gorani on the toll of covering Gaza war

Award-winning journalist Hala Gorani was "born in one country" and "raised in another with parents from somewhere else entirely," as she tells us in her new book "But You Don't Look Arab: And Other Tales of Unbelonging." Gorani, who became the first Arab-American to host a primetime cable news show, told me in our recent “Salon Talks” conversation how this unique background has informed both her decades-long career as a journalist — sometimes covering devastating conflicts in the region of her ancestry — and her personal search "to try to figure out who I am."

Gorani, who is Syrian-American, worked at CNN for decades and now reports for NBC News, had recently returned from the Middle East, where she covered an evacuation flight of wounded Palestinian children from Gaza who she describes as "completely traumatized." She said that while previous conflicts between Israel and Hamas have been brutal, “nothing has compared to what we're seeing now.” 

She cited the unprecedented scale of death among women and children in Gaza, along with the massive destruction of civilian infrastructure. But Gorani also noted another important — the role of social media. “A lot of younger people, especially who are watching it on their apps, on their phones, are getting another side of the narrative,” one typically not seen from legacy media organizations, she explained. 

Gorani also candidly discussed the emotional toll of covering war zones as a journalist, saying that “a human brain is not designed to be exposed to this much misery and bloodshed every single day.” Because her family comes from Syria, she said, covering the conflict there "did, in the end, take a huge mental health toll on me, in the sense that I started really getting a lot more anxious and panicky.” When she was anchoring coverage about the bloodshed in Syria, Gorani told me, she would take her earpiece out so “I couldn't hear any of the crying anymore.”

Watch the “Salon Talks” interview with Hala Gorani here or read a transcript of our conversation below, lightly edited for length and clarity.

In your book you write about being born in one country but raised in another one, "with parents from somewhere else entirely." Tell us about that journey, and how it all makes sense.

Well, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me, and it didn't growing up. Now of course, I've come to make peace with my set of overlapping identities. My parents are from Syria, originally. They were born in Aleppo. They moved to Seattle before I was born. My parents split up when I was six years old. My mom moved to France, so I moved with her there. French became my native tongue, even though English is now my strongest language because I've been working in English as a journalist for 25 or 26 years. 

And then Arabic, of course, was the language spoken at home — and there was Arabic food and going back to Syria for summers, at least before the war,. I'm married to a German, who's right there sitting off-camera. I live in London. I was partly brought up in Algeria. There is so much going on that it's always been a lifelong search for me to try to figure out who I am. Really it's a natural human impulse, I think, to know what makes us who we are.

And have you figured that out?

Writing this book, I figured out that the journey itself is maybe where I belong. It's what attracted me to journalism. It's what attracted me to being a foreign correspondent, to trying to find my story reflected in other people and the people that I cover. I write in the book about being in Haiti and meeting this shopkeeper, recognizing the pale-skinned man and asking him where he was from. When he said "Syria," I was like, "Brother." In the middle of this post-apocalyptic, miserable situation, recognizing something in a perfect stranger of yourself.

In your book you write about your great-grandmother who was in the Sultan Abdulaziz's harem. I've never met anyone who had a family member in a harem, but I don't think it's exactly what people think. Share a little bit more about that and your great-grandmother.

I did research into my family, and women are very poorly covered in history. We have photos of my male ancestors wearing the fez and the Ottoman military uniform, but women were rarely photographed. Their stories were rarely highlighted because they weren't stories of typical accomplishment, in the male sense. They don't rise in the ranks of the military. They don't become ministers of security. 

I went down that path and I learned this story through the female members of my family. My great-great-grandmother, during the Ottoman Empire, had been taken against her will, kidnapped and then inducted into the sultan's harem. This was not uncommon. Women who came from the Slavic areas of the Ottoman Empire, which extended all the way into the Circassian mountains, in what is now Bulgaria, would be taken because of how they looked. This was the effect of colorism at the time, which still exists today. The pale skin, the blue eyes, the high cheekbones, this is where some of my physical features come from.

Being abducted against her will was horrible, obviously. But it's not like in the movies where there's just women in a tent waiting for the sultan. These women are educated , almost to be women of society. I never knew about that part of it.

It's very interesting, because the word slavery has a connotation in this country, which is a little bit different. Obviously these women were the victims of a form of sexual slavery. There's no doubt about that. But they were slaves and at the same time women of society. They were masters of other slaves, but at the same time, they were the toys, the objects of the will of the men, of the sultans and of the higher-ranking women. So there was this constant contradiction in their lives, but ultimately they were not the mistresses of their own destinies. That much is very clear.

You go through the history of Syria and the role that colonization played. Why was that important, to share the real history of a country that doesn't get much press except during the time of the civil war?

I think the history of colonialism in that part of the world informs a lot of what we're seeing today. So much of what causes the tension, the strife, the sectarian wars — some of that is the responsibility, of course, of the leaders of the region. Not everything is the result of the colonial history of those countries, but it is the starting point that led to where we are today. These artificially created countries that don't always make logical sense. Lebanon is an example of a country where you have a north, a south, and a center that are three very disparate sectarian groupings cobbled together by the French colonial masters. That's true in Syria as well. 

There's a certain nostalgia for the French mandate among my mother's generation, where they were educated in French schools and the Jesuit religious institutions, which were the high-level elite academic institutions in Syria. I talk about that also, to share with the reader some of what makes Syria a more complex story than what we see in the news every day.

Your book title, “But You Don't Look Arab,” is something I've gotten all the time. I'm half Arab and half Italian, so I'm Mediterranean looking. It tells you what people think Arabs should look like when they say that. What has it been like for you when people say that to you? Do you have a response you usually give?

I have a whole paragraph rehearsed. “I was born there …” — exactly what we discussed here at the beginning. I try to tell people that like in any population, any ethnic grouping, people don't all look the same. It's not like we're all flying in on a carpet and all come right out of Aladdin. I like being able to tell people that this part of the world is actually very much the product of human migratory flows that have come in and out of what we call the Near East from Europe, and then on to other parts of Asia and the Far East for centuries. Of course, ultimately, you are going to have people who look like you and me.

I think so much of our fellow Americans' understanding of what an Arab should look like is from film and TV, especially from pre-9/11 movies where they were casting Indian and Latino actors to play Arabs because they wanted them to look darker, when in reality there's a mix, there are very dark-skinned and very light-skinned people.  

It's like northern Italy as well, where you'll have blonde, blue-eyed people.

How did those attitudes impact you as a journalist? You talk about in your book a little. You go to the Middle East and Arabs see you, but perhaps you don't look Arab to them. How did that affect you, and how did it affect you within the world of media? Did it help or hurt?

I think you never know if anything has helped or hurt you when it comes to your ethnicity or your origin because nobody's going to come up to you and be like, "You know what, your name's a little weird, we're not going to put you in prime time." I don't know if it had an impact. I can only wonder if I had been more typically European or Western in my name, in my origin and my religion, whatever it is, would that have made the path easier for me or was it more of an uphill battle? 

I write in the book that I was raised in France, and when I was sending out my résumés and my friends were sending out their résumés as well, I had in my "other" category the fact that I spoke Arabic and I wasn't getting any callbacks. A friend from university said, "Listen, if I were you, I'd remove that because it might not be helping you," which is kind of abject when you think about it. I did remove it. I slapped on a picture and I changed my name from Basha, which is my dad's name, to Gorani, which is my mom's name and sounds more European, Italian, Balkan or whatever. Then I got a lot more callbacks. Anecdotally, you can come to the conclusion that perhaps having Arabic as a spoken language and a typically Arab-sounding name, in France in the '90s, wasn't necessarily an advantage.

You are born in one place, and raised in others. You have this journey looking for who you are. But you write about your sense of pride that in November 2017, you got to be the first Arab-American to host a show on prime time on CNN International. Why did that matter to you? Obviously it's a great honor, and it's a testament to your work ethic. 

Well, it's two things. First, people remind you of it. So you get a lot of, "I'm so proud of you," from people you've never met, Lebanese, Jordanian, Syrian. I think it's a part of the world that's going through a major crisis and having someone who represents accomplishment, in the eyes of people who are from there, is something that they celebrate. I never take that for granted. I think, for that reason, it's a part of me I don't forget. 

Second reason is, Amin Maalouf, the Lebanese-French novelist and writer, said, "You recognize yourself most often in the most attacked facet of your identity." So if someone is more critical of the Arab side, for whatever reason, because you're lumped in with terrorists, because you're considered rejectionist or violent or whatever, then you hold on a little bit stronger to that part of your identity because that's where you feel you need to prove yourself the most, to tell people, no, you're wrong about this. How can hundreds of millions of people all be cast in this same way or described with similar negative attributes?

Well, that comment really resonates with me because pre-9/11 I was really a white guy. I tell people, on Sept. 10, I went to sleep a white American, and on Sept. 11, I woke up an Arab. But in the post-9/11 world, as time went on, I got more and more in touch with my Arab heritage because of the demonization of the community. Even with my faith as a Muslim — my mom's Catholic and my dad's Muslim, and as time went on I gravitated more to Islam. That was part of the demonization — you become emotionally invested in what you're defending.

That's exactly how Amin Maalouf explains it: It's that facet of who you are. For me, it's been more a question of trying to find or to explore that facet of my identity rather than embrace it more, because I've always been very international, very secular, non-practicing in the sense of religion. I can absolutely respect everyone's practice and everyone's religion, whatever it is. But for me, it's more a question of trying to figure out what the life of my great-great-grandmother was in the harem of the sultan, something that I didn't necessarily feel I needed to do 20 years ago.

You've done a lot of work in the Middle East. You've covered war zones. What is it like? Is there an emotional toll at times when you're seeing things that are just horrific?

I've thought about this a lot. I've always thought of myself as someone who can compartmentalize horror, in the sense that I just came back from Rafah in Egypt where I covered a evacuation flight of children wounded in Gaza. Some of them were amputees, completely traumatized children. And you do that, you write the piece, the piece airs, you fly back to London, and then that night I have dinner in a restaurant and I'm able not to think about that. 

However, I will say that I think it lives somewhere in there. With Syria, to give you an example, because Syria is where my family comes from, I think it did in the end take a huge mental health toll on me, in the sense that I started getting a lot more anxious and panicky at one point, at the tail end of six or seven years of watching every frame of video coming from Syria. I associate those two things.

It's not that I immediately react. I think there is a delay and when that happens, you put two and two together and you realize that a human brain is not designed to be exposed to this much misery and bloodshed every single day. That's me, I can only imagine the people who are actually going through it, what they're experiencing and what mental health toll that will take on them. But some of the most hardened conflict reporters end up breaking down, who are much tougher than me. I'm not a conflict reporter, in that sense. I don't go out and cover only war. I do a whole lot of other stuff. But yeah, it does take its toll. And what I saw on that flight, it went to the back of my head, and then another little piece will come on top of it and come on top of it, and one day it'll all come out and you'll start crying. 

For a while, I couldn't watch a single frame out of Syria. When I was anchoring my show, I would take my earpiece out when there was a Syria story because I couldn't hear any of the crying anymore. I couldn't do it. I’d tell my producer, I'd be looking away, "Tell me when the story has three seconds left," and I'd put the earpiece back in and go to the next story. There was a whole year where I had to do that.

You've covered a lot of conflicts in the Middle East. What's happening now in Gaza, is this different?

It's different in that we are not in Gaza. There is definitely a push from my colleagues to get inside the Gaza Strip to be able to report. This is not to say that the reporters on the ground aren't doing a heroic job. They really are. There is absolutely no doubt that their work has brought to light some of what's going on inside of Gaza, but there needs to be independent, international journalism happening inside Gaza right now, and it's not. There have been letters written, appeals made, yet that's not made any difference so far.

Who controls who can enter?

You have the Egyptians controlling on one side and the Israeli government as well, not allowing access.

Neither one will allow journalists in?

The Egyptians, no. If you want to go into Gaza with the permission of the Israeli government, you go in embedded with the IDF.

You live in London now. When you see the coverage of the Middle East, of this conflict specifically, is it different from what we see in the U.S.? I know you can't watch everything, and maybe there's the equivalent of the Fox News over there as well. But is international coverage of the Gaza conflict different from what you see in the States?

One thing I've noticed is different is that there have been other Israeli military operations and conflicts between Hamas and Israel over the last few decades — there was a really, really deadly one in 2014 — but nothing has compared to what we're seeing now. I would say the biggest difference is the scale, obviously the destruction of the infrastructure and the residential buildings. There's that. There's the death toll, the horrific toll of women and children killed and injured.

The biggest difference is that now the content coming out of Gaza is on social media. So a lot of younger people, especially, who are watching it on their apps, on their phones, are getting another side of the narrative. It's a little bit different than 2014 where when you were getting your news, you were mainly getting it from legacy media organizations.

What might be the impact of these sorts of "citizen journalists" who are on the ground in real time? What I see, for example, on TikTok, it's peer-to-peer: a young person in the States watching someone around their age in Gaza, who is saying, "Here's what we're going through." It's having an impact on young people in the States. 

I agree and it's not just peer-to-peer. It's also big media organizations in the Middle East on social media platforms that are reaching younger people in Western countries. So you have another view of the conflict reaching younger people who may not have seen it before social media was so widespread and available. You're seeing a lot more impact on public opinion in the younger generation of social media users. And you see that very, very clearly. Folks my age, for instance, are much more likely to watch news as an appointment program, sit in front of their TV. It's very different to, say, my nieces who are in their 20s who are on their phones all day and don't even own a TV. They're seeing a lot more of the raw unedited footage from a conflict zone.

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

How do you, as a journalist dealing with the intensity of a conflict like this, cut through what's misinformation or disinformation? You might have Netanyahu peddling a certain propaganda. You might have Hamas wanting to say things to help their side. What do you do as a journalist?

Well, I will say one important thing here, and this is something that of course you'd expect a journalist to say. It is a skill. You do what you did before TikTok invaded our airwaves and our phones: You check. You check that this is factually correct. You check that it's the person who's quoted who actually said this. Oftentimes you'll see a piece of video that's three weeks old presented as something that happened yesterday. You have to be careful. That takes time and it takes skill. You make mistakes, don't get me wrong. We all do. When we do, we admit that we've made them, that's very important.

I wouldn't say covering this conflict, though the scale is bigger, is different from covering Syria, for instance. I think you have to be just as precise and just as rigorous as when you do anything else. Again, I'll go back to saying that the journalists on the ground who have been feeding us some of this content, without them a lot of this work would be impossible. The big media organizations do have production teams that they used to work with before Oct. 7 who are still continuing to do the work on the ground.

Let's talk about 2024 before we wrap up here. You write about covering Donald Trump, "I had covered dictators and I had covered presidents and democracies before, but never a man with autocratic tendencies in a democracy." What does the media do about covering the GOP nominee, barring something we don't expect, and who aspires to be a dictator? He's running on retribution. He's pledged to use the Justice Department to go after Joe Biden. It's things we've never seen before. 

Listen, I do not envy my friends in U.S. political journalism. It is such a tough job because it involves constant fact-checking. Literally, that becomes almost all you do. All you do is fact-check, fact-check, fact-check. 

My type of journalism, I'm not as interested in interviewing senators and congresspeople. I'm interested in going to the places in the U.S. where there are lots of people who vote for somebody like Donald Trump. I want to figure out what's going on. I think the more we have that, the more we understand the impulses that lead people. ... Also, what is leading to such a mistrust of the mainstream, of the establishment? There is something there in America and in other parts of the world. Look at Viktor Orbán in Hungary. Look at the situation in Poland. Look at how populist politics in France are gaining ground. Marine Le Pen is at over 40% approval rating in a country like France. What's going on there? 

People mistrust establishment politicians, they view them as corrupt. They view them as bought. They view them as not working for them. So is someone like Trump or Orbán, are they the symptoms of that or are they the cause of the problem? I'm not saying I have the answer. I'm just saying that's the question I would ask myself when I cover any extreme political movement, extreme in the sense that it's on the fringes of the mainstream.

Have you ever seen a political figure like Trump in the United States where it's not just what he's saying — his supporters will repeat what he has said, and there's no ability to fact-check. It doesn't matter. You can say, "Two plus two equals four." They go, "Nope, it's five because Donald said it was five." I have no idea what I can say now. 

Trump is a particular character. He's like a character that someone has created for a film that you wouldn't have believed existed 10 years ago. But what he's saying is being said in other countries. For instance, look at Brexit in the U.K., the decision to leave the EU. It was always an emotional decision by voters. It was not based in fact. People might say, "Oh, we don't want immigrants." You could tell Brexit voters that immigrants bring more in tax money than they take out in public assistance and it wouldn't matter. So a non-rational decision, a decision not supported by the facts, cannot be then countered with facts. Correct?

This is the same thing, I think, in all the populist emotional campaign messaging that we see in other parts of the world. Fact-checking is useful because it's journalistic and it's our job, but the purpose of it is not to convince anyone not to think the way they're thinking. That's not our job. Our job as journalists is to explain what leads people to vote in emotional ways, and that's what interests me. But I do see parallels between the messaging here and what I see in other parts of the Western world and beyond, by the way. Look at countries in Asia where you have people who are whipped into a nationalist frenzy. You see it in many other places.

What are your concerns when you see Trump refusing to denounce Vladimir Putin when asked point blank about him killing journalists? After Alexei Navalny's death in prison, Trump has not criticized Putin at all, whereas Joe Biden has said he believes Navalny was murdered by Putin. What are your concerns about that going forward?

I don't think it'll be much different from the four years that Trump was in office, in a foreign policy sense. Domestically, that I don't know. But in a foreign policy sense, I think it's going to be more of the same. My question would be how will world leaders then react? Will they, à la Emmanuel Macron, try to placate him and be like buddy-buddy, or will they be, "OK, here's a world leader that we have to work against rather than try to lead him in our direction." I'm not sure that's a foregone conclusion, let's just put it that way.

Foreign leaders may look at him and say, "OK, he won, but he can only serve one term. We just have to survive a few years. We build our own little coalition."

Yeah. That's possible. In the same way the Ukraine war brought most European allies together, is it possible that if they feel some pushback by an eventual Trump administration, that will lead European partners closer together? I don't know, these are all hypotheticals. We have enough on our plate now. When we get to November, we'll have another discussion.