“My parents always told us about the Iraqi Jews, how they formed an integral part of society and then were expelled,” said Suzan Quitaz, a Kurdish journalist originally from Iraq. Like dozens of thousands of other Kurds, Quitaz’s family was expelled from their homeland and had their nationality revoked during the times of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. The Quitaz family made it to Sweden, and Suzan now resides in the UK.“The more we were told about the Jews, the more I realized that as Kurds we suffered similar things. I had always wondered why the Arab societies among which we had lived had a hard time with minorities. They used to tell us that ‘they don’t have a problem with the Jews,’ but it never quite felt that way. The Jews were ethnically cleansed from Iraq, and there is a lot of antisemitism in the Arab world.
“As for us Kurds, we were told that the problem is not with us as a people rather but because we want a state. It always struck me how for them, anyone from Somalia to Qatar is allowed to be proud of their own country, but Jews or Kurds can’t.”
Quitaz added that her mind was troubled with the question of who is behind the poisoning of the young with hatred in the media, and she was about to find out. As a journalist, Quitaz started off by joining Al-Araby, a Qatari-owned channel. “When I first went to the interview I was asked: ‘Why should I take you?’ I answered that I want to cover Israeli affairs, and his reply was that ‘there are many who cover Palestinian affairs.’ I argued that it’s true, but not many cover Israeli affairs from the Israeli side, and he agreed and hired me.”
The time at Al-Araby was challenging, Quitaz explained. “Israelis and Jews normally did not have a platform there. My colleagues looked at me as someone who is trying to promote ‘soft normalization,’ a terrible deed in their eyes. I was there for 7 years, and it was difficult. Everyone saw me as a ‘pro-Israeli’ persona non grata.”Seven years later Quitaz was ready to move on. In 2021, she was approached by the editor-in-chief of Al-Majala, a Saudi-owned magazine that is part of the Middle East Broadcasting Corporation. “In Al-Majala, for the first time, I was given the freedom to cover stories as they were. I would talk to people, victims of terror, and there was no manipulation. Their own words appeared in the article as they were.”Quitaz described the editor-in-chief of Al-Majala as a professional journalist who had correspondents throughout the Middle East, who also viewed the Abraham Accords favorably. “He was very much into positive stories, and held that even when there was criticism – that it should be balanced and fair.”
The story that changed everything
Then came Quitaz’s most impactful piece. “In May 2022 I told my editor-in-chief that I want to run a story about Arabs and Muslims in the IDF. I knew they were there, but I didn’t know how many and what they were like. For 75 years we’ve been brainwashed about the ‘occupation army’ ‘apartheid forces,’ ‘child murderers army,’ and I just wanted to know the truth.”Quitaz contacted the IDF spokesperson, and they agreed to collaborate. She ended up spending two weeks and got to know and speak to some of the soldiers, all of them Muslim Arabs, some of them Bedouin. “I was impressed because for me, until that point, it was almost like a paradox. Some of them were practicing Muslims. They prayed, they had a Quran in their hands. I asked them: ‘do you not feel any contradiction here between the Quran, the rifle, and the IDF uniform?’ And they answered me back simply: ‘What contradiction? Israel is our home. Why shouldn’t we have the right to be part of the Israeli army?’Quitaz returned to London, collected all the material, and worked on a long piece that was released in Arabic, English, and Persian. “The editor-in-chief decided to put it as a cover story, and the story instantly exploded. This was perhaps the first time – and maybe the last time – when an Arabic-speaking outlet published a story about Arab soldiers in the IDF in a positive light.”
However, soon enough the troubles started, as the story became more public, and the editor-in-chief began receiving threats. “Journalists linked to Hezbollah started tweeting and threatening. “Ali Shueib, a journalist particularly close to Hezbollah, involved the Crown Prince in the article. Soon enough I was told not to write anything about Israel, neither positive nor negative. I saw that the editor-in-chief was very stressed, and in January of 2023 I found out that he was in the process of being fired from his post; a man who has worked in Saudi media for 30 years!”Later on, Quitaz was contacted by the new management who wanted to meet her. “I was accused by my peers of being a Mossad agent, so I decided to meet them. I was told that I could stay and work for them and even cover Israel; they just wanted me to pretend that I was covering stories from home rather than being present in Israel.”
Quitaz asked the new management about the old editor-in-chief, and the latter mentioned the article about Muslim IDF soldiers. “I understood that they wanted me to be on their side, a sort of divide and conquer strategy, which would have weakened my old editor’s case. I did not agree to this and was let off from Al-Majala. In my place came a British Egyptian guy who worked at the BBC and also at Araby. We are close friends and I tell you – the first time he was in Israel he wrote me that visiting Israel was an eye opener and that everything he had heard about the country was not true.”“So, I thought to myself that fortunately, the person who switched me was also open-minded,” continued Quitaz. “He visited Israel during Ramadan and even went to pray at al-Aqsa Mosque, uploading a video with thousands of worshipers. I thought this man was going to write about this positive experience, but then he decided to write what he called the ‘Judaization’ of Jerusalem and Silwan.“I just don’t understand it. There are so many Arab journalists who fly to Israel, say that Israel is stunning, but then when it comes down to their jobs, they only continue to spew their poison and hatred.”Quitaz added that other journalists also lost their jobs. “In the end anyone in mainstream media who was somehow willing to talk about peace and prosperity was replaced by loyalists or sympathizers with Hezbollah or the Muslim Brotherhood.”
After October 7
Quitaz was one of the first Arabic-speaking journalists who visited Israel following the October 7th massacre. “I visited some of the kibbutzim, met with Arab Muslim soldiers who repelled Hamas, I even met victims – and broadcasted everything out there. I ended up receiving so much hate that my mother told me not to come visit her any time soon. I’m from a small town in Sweden where everyone knows everyone so it’s particularly hard for them. They called me a Zionist, as if it was a slur; they told me not to come to my house. My only crime was to sit with Israeli victims and grant them a platform.”And indeed, Quitaz, who was speaking to The Jerusalem Post from Sweden, didn’t update any of her friends that she had come to visit her family. “As a journalist, I don’t feel safe in Europe. People called me a liar, claimed that Hamas is not capable of these atrocities. I interact daily with children of immigrants who fled the terrors of Saddam Hussein, Assad, and Gaddafi. I have never heard any of them speak out about the horrors that the real tyrants inflicted on their families, but suddenly everyone is Gazan,” she added angrily.Quitaz’s last work for a major Arabic outlet was in Al-Jazeera – a mouthpiece of the Qatari government – where she produced a video about Yair Stern in the summer of 2023. “Two weeks after October 7th I was blocked by one of the editors there. They started spreading more poison against me and writing against me. Look at my social media: never have I spoken about specific journalists, even when I had criticism of the media. I, on the other hand, always get personal comments.”“There is no such thing as the Palestinian cause,” continued Quitaz, “other than business and advertising. I’ve worked for so many channels. If you have a shirt reading ‘from the river to the sea’ you’ll be accepted, even if you don’t have any other skills. I’ve worked 10 years in Middle East media, and it is just so toxic. Of course, I’m not saying that all of them are like that, but most of them are, especially those who work in the Qatari media.”Quitaz argued that significant percentages of those working in editing rooms are of Palestinian origin, a fact which automatically tilts the balance toward an anti-Israel stance. “Sure, there are some voices that want peace and support the Abraham Accords, but they are afraid to speak up. I, myself am not even Arab and I still get a lot of hate and lost job after job. So, imagine what would happen to a journalist who is Arab and Muslim. Would you be willing to risk your job and life to merely talk about peace?” she asked rhetorically.
‘The problem is spreading to the West’
According to Quitaz, these phenomena are now spreading to Western media as well. “I applied for a freelance job at BBC but was rejected again and again despite my experience. A friend who works there told me he heard them admit that they just don’t want ‘Zionist journalists’ in their editing room. At Sky News, they were also looking for someone with ‘solid and documented knowledge on Middle East affairs.’ I applied and never got a response.”“There are those who call them pro-Palestine, but they are actually pro-Hamas. If they were really pro-Palestine, the first thing they would do is condemn Hamas. I walked around some of the protests and saw almost no people from the Gulf, and more significantly, very few from the Syrian diaspora. I have close relations with Syrians, and I asked why they seldom go to these demonstrations. They told me they don’t want to be part of this hypocrisy, as nobody came out for them while they were going through real genocide, starvation, and torture by the Assad regime.”Another issue with Western media, according to Quitaz, is that it seldom represents voices of Gazans who disavow Hamas. “Some channels in the Gulf show authentic footage of people from Gaza saying ‘enough is enough, Hamas are the ones who brought this war.’ You never see this kind of footage on Western media. My question is who is behind this? Why don’t we see this footage? Al-Jazeera backs the Muslim Brotherhood, so it makes sense they would hide these videos. But why Sky News and the BBC? They are just copying and pasting from Al-Jazeera.”Quitaz now works as a Middle Eastern affairs researcher at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, where she interviewed IDF officials and minority leaders in Iran who are fighting the oppression of the Islamic Republic. She still dreams of continuing her work as a journalist in parallel, “although, frankly it is almost impossible – I have burned all the bridges,” she added ironically. “People just don’t want to hear what I have to offer. If I had adopted the Muslim Brotherhood or the ‘woke’ narrative I would have been in a much better situation. But today it is difficult for me to find a job in the field.”“I don’t want to brag,” Quitaz commented modestly, “but I did produce three films for Al Jazeera, and 14 for Al-Araby, worked 10 years as a journalist. People just don’t want to hear that Israel is not apartheid and that Israel does not kill children on purpose. People are only interested in consuming poison.”According to Quitaz, the same is true for the rise of antisemitism and threats to Jewish life across Europe. “In London, the Jewish community and its allies fear for their lives. This is unacceptable, but no one wants to hear about it. I myself sometimes fear that people I work with in advertising ‘know who I am.’ But then again, what does that even mean? I’m not a criminal. This is just so absurd and illogical.“My uncle Sami was a journalist in Iraq, and in 1983 he was executed under [former Iraqi president] Saddam Hussein’s rule. Another one of my uncles also suffered a similar fate. Both of them feared for their life, but they stood up for what they believed and were executed for this reason. So have I lost a lot, but at least I know that I didn’t betray my values. Unfortunately, we live in a world where it all just doesn’t count, and it’s very sad.”