“It is not easy for me to change reality, but at least I was able to convey that voice to the world.” With this phrase, Abu Aqila summed up her journalistic experience, which she continued without interruption for 25 years. She is Sherine Nasri Abu Aqleh, the journalist who painted national events in a style that she invented herself. She presented it with her voice mixed with tender hoarseness, her simple language, and her calm features, so that every piece of press she produced comes out as a story that leaves a space in the consciousness of those who watch it.
It was not surprising that the daughter of Jerusalem had all the tears that were shed at her passing. She will not wake up today from her shroud in response to the screams of her colleagues who chanted: “Wake up… wake up.”
The 51-year-old is the daughter of all Palestinian homes. She entered it when she was in her mid-twenties. She is the daughter of the street who did not grow up in the eyes of the generation of the intifada, the daughter of the camps that thousands cried yesterday, the resistance carried her on their shoulders, because they felt for a long time that she was their back on the screen, the old women shouted for her: “From the embryo of the father, Sherine is a lit candle” because she chose the camp as her home When strangers come to break in.
The daughter of the village of Beit Hanina, who was born and raised in Jerusalem, from a family that hails from the city of Bethlehem (south of the occupied West Bank), she finished her secondary education at the “School of the Rosary Nuns.” Since 1991, she responded to her passion by switching from studying architecture at the University of Science and Technology in Jordan, to majoring in the Department of Journalism and Media at Yarmouk University of Jordan as well. After her graduation, she returned to the occupied territories, to take up work with several parties, starting with the “Relief Agency”, then “Voice of Palestine”, and from there to “Amman TV”, then “Monte Carlo Radio”, before she became the first correspondent of “Al-Jazeera” in 1997. “Until her martyrdom yesterday. “Shireen follows every tank, and catches every shot,” says her colleagues, who could not complete any of their phrases. She dedicated her life to the profession that she loved. A profession that was not for her a source of livelihood, as much as it was a national and humanitarian role, and a life mission.
In the Al Jazeera staff, they used to call her the “first reporter,” not only because of her presence, but also because she created a journalistic style that precedes the video production. Her colleagues point out that Shireen was looking for the most difficult ways to produce her television material. She would not send her team to the field, and then go in the last moments of work to record the “conclusion stand”, but rather was camping at the place where an event was expected to take place. She sits among the people she said she chose to work as a journalist to be “close” to them. For hours, on the thresholds of Jerusalem, or walking near the wall, with “the human being” in the face of tear gas, and in front of the tanks whose crews deliberately harass them, on the accusation of “photographing security areas,” according to what she said in one of the interviews, and in the direction to which the bullets are heading The guns… From there, she monitors the story from the beginning, listens to the talk of the heroes of her report, tries to delve into their innermost thoughts… From those concerns, fears and wishes, she writes the text of her report.
She hangs for hours on the thresholds of Jerusalem, or walks in a march near the wall with “the human” in the face of tear gas
Sherine’s prolific professional experience brought her to the fore in the media scene, not only in Al Jazeera, but in the entire Palestinian journalistic community. From the camps and coverage of the Israeli invasion of the West Bank and the siege of President Abu Ammar, the “Palestine Star” moved to a number of Arab capitals, from Egypt and Sudan, to the United Nations and the United States to transmit the image. A tumultuous life that was chosen by the daughter of Beit Hanina, despite her captivating calm. She lived as she liked to live, a purely Palestinian woman, spending her life in Jerusalem… and being martyred in Jenin.
* The farewell ceremony for the martyr will be held tomorrow, Friday, in the “Roman Catholic Church” in Jerusalem, before she will be buried in the “Zion Cemetery.”