Without ever meeting Jennine Khalik, one only has to visit her Twitter account and read her bio, boldly warning visitors: don’t take it personally. Pinned at the top of her page is a photo of her father wearing a Palestinian flag tracksuit that has accumulated 21,000 likes; with a following of 27,000 users, such a reaction does not seem surprising. I would then recommend spending another ten minutes scrolling through her feed and read as each tweet or retweet unravels the various parts that make up one of Twitter’s favorite Palestinian activists who rarely if ever, holds back.
“I was born and raised in Australia, on Aboriginal land. I’m also the daughter of two refugees: my father was born in Nahr El-Bared and my mother was born, stateless, in Abu Dhabi.”
Hailing from Akka and Haifa in Al-Jalil from both her paternal and maternal sides, Jennine is exceptionally well-versed on the history of her ancestors for somebody that grew up in the suburbs of Western Sydney, a working-class area largely populated by immigrants and refugees.
“My political consciousness came to life when I was 14 or 15 but up until I was 11, I didn’t know I was Palestinian […] I considered myself this generic Arab,” Jennine mentioned. “My parents were always working and they just wanted to build a good life for us; in retrospect, I think they were just trying to protect us.” she added.
It was not until high school, when a teacher noted Jennine’s feistiness, that Jennine began to embrace her inclination towards issues of social justice and human rights. She jokes as she recalls an earlier memory from childhood when she watched anthills with a fellow Palestinian classmate, both saddened by the bull ants aggressively overtaking the black ants’ hill and destroying hours of their hard work. As she navigated the history of her land and her people, she was left devastated at the imagery she came across on the news or in history pages.
“Everything was taken from my grandparents and my family. When they went to Lebanon, they thought it was temporary – they didn’t expect to die there.”
Naturally, Jennine found herself pursuing journalism and law at university; she openly admits that she dropped out of the latter due to personal reasons and reflects on it as human to change one’s mind. Instead, she used her time to write for the local newspaper, which she was later hired as a newsroom journalist until landing at a national newspaper, then later as an investigative reporter in Canberra––“Australia’s DC but far less glamorous.” However, she currently works as a UX writer and content creation specialist, freelancing as a writer now that she’s taken a step back from Australian media.
“Being the daughter of refugees […] is an intrinsically political identity. You say you’re Palestinian and somebody has an opinion on it. Out in the real world, in my particular workplace in newsrooms, […] I realized how unwanted a Palestinian is.”
Some of the abuse and harassment Jennine faced, often at hands of her co-workers or employers, included having a senior editor angrily claim that Palestine does not exist. Silence from her colleagues also brought her to tears, believing that the anti-Arab racism she experienced was an internalized feature of Australia’s homogeneous media industry.
Though she acknowledges her position as a Palestinian in both Australia and the world at large, Jennine pays homage to her privilege as the daughter of migrant settlers in Australia. She speaks of the reality and history of a colonial nation-state that has not paid any reparations to its First Nations people nor has it mitigated or rejected the discrimination that individuals in these respective communities face in daily life.
One only needs to google ‘Cronulla Riots 2006’ or ‘Aboriginal deaths in custody to see through the larrikin veneer.
Jennine additionally recalls the multiple times she had been the target of Zionist and Israeli lobby groups during her time in the national media. At just 22, complaints were filed against her Twitter, which she views as a badge of honor for daring to retweet events occurring in Gaza. She was then banned from using her Twitter for 7 months as a result by her sympathetic employers that capitulated underneath the pressure of the lobby. Articles posted by fringe websites also declared Jennine as an advocate for the destruction of Israel for her persistence of a Palestinian’s right to return, which, she notes, is enshrined into international law.
“I want to be able to speak my truth, as do many Palestinians.”
Jennine’s final straw came when 21-year-old Aiia Maasarwe was heinously killed in Melbourne during her university exchange, which prompted widespread outrage and grief. Initially, Aiia was identified by media channels as an Israeli citizen, which Jennine says deliberately erased the victim’s Palestinian identity. Moreover, her interviews with the Maasarwe family were met with criticism at her workplace for overstepping her boundaries. Though Jennine saw a shift in her newsroom, such as a memo to journalists conceding that “Palestinian Citizens of Israel” could be used, not just the generic Palestinian-Israeli classification or the simplistic Israeli citizen identifier.
Nonetheless, Twitter, the world’s great democratizer, provided Jennine with space for which her thoughts and opinions could occupy.
“You get to put things out there: it might gain traction, it might not. But it was therapeutic for me, as a running diary to jot down my thoughts.”
Oftentimes, two different types of messages show up in her DMs. Firstly, there are the grateful users who thank her for sharing information about what is happening to Palestinians and also educating the greater public about the conflict. During her visit to Palestine, relatives and friends alike encouraged her to keep doing so when asked what more could be done. Twitter became Jennine’s medium and tool to combat the imminent helplessness most diaspora Palestinians have had to confront at an early age.
“Twitter, of course, is not a substitute for reading a book but it has introduced me to others who have opened my eyes. Their own experiences and knowledge have deepened and strengthened my own beliefs.”
Jennine too is in awe that she has amassed a following of 27,000 users – “just picturing 27,000 people in a room is surreal.” Without the pressure of public scrutiny that accompanies a career in journalism, wherein the powerful can be held accountable whilst also able to expunge themselves of their indictments, she found that she could be more of herself when she let go of the bright-eyed image she had envisioned for a life dedicated to truth and justice.
Juxtaposed to the silencing she’d experienced in Australia’s newsrooms, her public platform allowed her back into the very system that relentlessly tried to shut her out. In this same space, Jennine has found friends she speaks to almost every day without having ever met them in person.
As with all publicity, Jennine holds a sense of responsibility that manifests itself through her humor.
“A friend told me the other day that I have a really good strategy towards my Twitter, but it’s just me being myself. I try to be authentic; I don’t trust people who take themselves too seriously.”
Laughing during difficult times continues to be Jennine’s coping mechanism, which also engages her followers, who are most responsive to her light-heartedness. Despite her good intentions, however, she can’t seem to escape the multitude of reports sent to her mailbox for supposedly violating Twitter’s guidelines. But being human is how she processes the world around her and thus she entices others to do the same through her charisma and confidence, brushing everything off in her self-assuredness.
“I always had to stand up for myself because I knew what I wanted. It shaped the way I approached a lot of things […] and at the end of the day, I continue to be unapologetic because I’m on the right side of history.”
Palestine for Jennine did not begin or end with the simple fact of her identity and her heritage. She embraced the reality of her family living back in one of Lebanon’s most populated refugee camps and actively explored the history of her people through available literature and analysis. She’s widened the scope of her pursuit for liberation and self-determination to inform her value system as a whole, opting for the underdogs and advocating for a world that acknowledges and rectifies the wrong done unto the native and Indigenous communities of the world.
Jennine now takes up space––digital or otherwise––that she believes she rightfully deserves. When walking into a room, she wears her political and social beliefs on her sleeve, unafraid of rejection because that would simply suggest she’s not in an environment that allows her to flourish.
Some universal experiences she shares with diaspora Palestinians is the loaded weight of her identity, which, more often than not, others feel as though they must hide or erase to comfortably assimilate into their host communities. Living in the West as a “third culture kid”, whilst trying to reconcile the conflicting values between one’s home, culture, and the adopted environment is strenuous. Compounding such a strain on one’s development with the alienation of those who are the first to experience such a floating and uncertain sense of self is one of the greatest challenges facing the Arab diaspora: the pressure of representation.
“It’s one thing to have one foot in each world and having to navigate your way through that, but there’s the added weight of being a Palestinian […] I always have to be engaging, I always have to be accessible, I always have to be on.”
As many in the Black community noted during the demonstrations held over the summer of 2020, there is the pleasure of educating others to raise public awareness about certain issues that face marginalized communities and there is the expectation to educate people with the access and resources to inform themselves. In a Medium article Jennine wrote in 2015, The Right to Return Home, to Live at Home, to Die at Home, she reflects on her grandfather’s passing in Nahr Al-Bared without having ever gone back to his homeland since his expulsion. She, like other Palestinians around the world, knows all too well that the public’s understanding of the ongoing conflict in their homeland rests on her ability to articulate personal traumas and pain.
“It’s hard to talk about and to keep retelling these stories of injustice, but it’s the least that I can do.”
Resilience is the weapon in Jennine’s armor that she arms herself with daily. She says she must “[look] back to look forward” when faced with baseless criticism towards her opinions and the institutional impediments that silence her. In the same breath, she mentions that the fighters of Algerian independence, her ancestors who have survived the onslaught of the Israeli regime, and, jokingly, public figures like Bella Hadid save her from those inevitable dark moments, reminding her that the right side of history will prevail despite the uphill battle required to get there.
In the final moments of the call, Jennine abandons her politics and attributes her strength to the relationships she has, familial or friendly. The last hour has been a back-and-forth reminiscent of an underfunded podcast but packed with the clichés and knowing nods that would amass a substantial following at the very least. Just as her Twitter account charms the begrudging user, Jennine’s warmth invites listeners of all persuasions to hear her deep-seated conviction that this does not have to be the fate of Palestinians. Her will can convince non-believers that there is a way in the same manner that the memes teeming her Twitter page have the power to convert the stubborn into the soft with merely a giggle.
“I hold on to Palestine because there’s something to hold on to. It’s my duty, without it being imposed on me. Not everybody can be an advocate in a public way, but it’s important [for me] to lean into that if you have the platform to do so. I want my parents to return, I want my dad to return and I want that for myself.”