Eyewitness Testimony From Gaza, Syria, and the Donbas EXPOSES Mainstream Media | Eva Bartlett

## From traveler to frontline witness: reclaiming knowledge through presence The recorded exchange makes a simple but powerful claim: to understand modern conflicts you must go to them. The conversation charts a trajectory from ignorance to immersion — a transformation from a traveler curious about poverty to a journalist repeatedly present where wars unfold. That personal arc exemplifies a broader argument about knowledge production in international affairs: secondhand narratives, churned by distant newsrooms and cultural industries, routinely strip context from violence. Eyewitness testimony, the kind gathered over years on the ground, exposes what is omitted, normalised, or distorted in mainstream accounts. This is not just about correcting factual errors; it is about reorienting how we conceive of causation, responsibility, and the human effects of policy. ## Palestine and Gaza: seeing occupation, siege, and patterns of escalation The conversation recounts prolonged fieldwork in occupied Palestine, notably the West Bank and Gaza, where repeated presence allowed for granular observation of daily violence and structural coercion. What stands out is not merely isolated incidents but recurring patterns: routine humiliations at checkpoints, land theft by settlers, and the use of crowd-control measures in ways that produce lethal outcomes. Eyewitnesses describe tear-gas canisters fired into crowds at close range, rubber-coated lead bullets engineered to do more damage on impact, and the chronic criminalisation of Palestinians through arbitrary closed military zones and arrests. Those patterns cohere into a picture of occupation as a sustained machinery of deprivation and terror, not a series of chaotic, discrete clashes. Gaza, the conversation emphasises, must be understood through the siege that preceded its most recent catastrophe. Siege policies implemented over years made the territory exceptionally vulnerable to annihilation: restrictions on goods, movement, energy, and reconstruction create the conditions in which periodic bombardments have drastically amplified human suffering. The narrative also pushes back against claims that recent extreme violence was historically unmoored; rather, it identifies continuity — earlier wars and systematic attrition prefigured the current scale of destruction. The implication for journalists and analysts is clear: without cumulative, on-the-ground observation, the slow erosion of livelihoods and rights is easy to miss, while isolated crises are misread as sudden deviations from normalcy. ## Syria: contested revolutions and the politics of doubt The dialogue turns to Syria to illustrate how media framings can ossify into accepted "truths" that resist revision even when evidence suggests otherwise. Early in the Syrian conflict, many international outlets adopted a simple frame: a popular revolution violently repressed by a state. Eyewitness reporting, however, complicated that story by foregrounding local accounts, the presence of armed foreign actors, and the role of external powers. The point is not to deny real grievances within Syrian society but to emphasise how truth in war is multilayered and often contested. Independent, repeated visits across the years allowed for a more textured chronology of how the conflict evolved — including the ways external interventions, proxies, and propaganda shaped outcomes. This section underscores a methodological lesson: access to local actors and alternatives to legacy sources can reveal dynamics that mainstream narratives elide. When a conflict is portrayed in binary moral terms, it becomes easier to rationalise certain policy choices and to discount inconvenient facts. Sustained fieldwork resists that simplification. It demands historians’ patience and reporters’ humility, and it pushes against the news cycle’s appetite for tidy villains and heroes. ## Donbas: weaponisation of civilian spaces and forgotten munitions Turning east, the conversation details visits to the Donbas, where the everyday consequences of modern munitions were made painfully visible. One striking example is the deployment of small anti-personnel devices — described as petal mines — that blend into the environment and maim civilians for years. These are not strategic battlefield systems designed to determine military outcomes; they are terror weapons, meant to sow fear and permanently degrade community life. Eyewitness testimony about playgrounds and courtyards strewn with such devices reframes the conflict from a contest between armies to one in which civilians, including children, are primary targets. This reporting also surfaces the long tail of weaponry: mines and cluster munitions that remain lethal long after active hostilities subside. Sappers clearing areas can be injured by ordnance previously missed or shifted by weather — a grim reminder that the legal and moral dimensions of conflict persist beyond ceasefires. The Donbas recounting thus contributes to a broader argument about the scale of suffering that does not neatly map onto battlefield maps or casualty counts presented in distant newsrooms. ## How mainstream narratives are made — and unmade A throughline of the conversation is the construction and reproduction of mainstream narratives. These narratives emerge from a confluence of editorial routines, cultural production (films, comedy, social media), institutional interests, and a public that rarely has direct contact with the places being discussed. The result is a cultural ecosystem that normalises stereotypes — of enemy populations, of state actors as inherently legitimate — and produces selective empathy. The conversation gives small but telling anecdotes: offhand comments overheard in a public space, the automatic invocation of pejoratives about an entire people, or the ready acceptance of one-sided historical framings. The remedy proposed is not simply more journalists, but different kinds of journalistic practice: those willing to invest time, cultivate local sources, and persist in the face of editorial pressures for novelty and sensationalism. Eyewitness reporting performs a corrective function by making visible the mundane mechanisms of oppression and the long arc of policy effects. It challenges newsrooms and consumers alike to value context over immediacy and complexity over the comfort of binary stories. ## Ethics, neutrality, and the responsibilities of reporting Embedded in the exchange is a debate about neutrality: what it means to report ethically in asymmetrical conflicts. The speakers push against a false equivalence that treats all suffering as morally undifferentiated while ignoring structural causes. Neutrality in the sense of refusing to document or challenge clear violations is not a neutral stance; it is complicity by omission. Conversely, bearing witness repeatedly, under threat and scrutiny, is presented as an ethical act that privileges human dignity over abstract notions of balance. This section reframes neutrality in practical terms. It argues for a version of nonalignment oriented around fidelity to evidence and to the lived experiences of civilians. Such a stance demands that reporters document abuses wherever they occur, hold all parties to humanitarian law, and foreground victims’ voices rather than convenient official accounts. It also requires transparency about methods and the limits of one’s access — humility that can enhance credibility rather than diminish it. ## Implications for policy, scholarship, and public debate The conversation concludes with clear implications for how scholars, policymakers, and the public should approach international conflicts. First, the privileges of proximity matter: policymakers should heed ground-level reporting as a corrective to political narratives that sanitise or instrumentalise violence. Second, scholars of neutrality and nonalignment must engage with empirically rich testimonies to refine

Eyewitness Testimony From Gaza, Syria, and the Donbas EXPOSES Mainstream Media Today I’m talking to Eva Bartlett, a US/Canadian Journalist in Russia who has been reporting for many years from wars and non-western conflict zones, including Gaza, North Korea, and the Donbas. Links: Eva's Substack: https://evakarenebartlett.substack.com/ https://t.me /Reality_Theories https://ingaza.wordpress.com/ https://x.com/EvaKBartlett Neutrality Studies Goods Shop: https://neutralitystudies-shop.fourthwall.com #M2 Hello everybody, this is Pascal Lottaz from Neutrality Studies, and today I'm talking to Eva Bartlett, a US-Canadian journalist in Russia who has been reporting for many years from wars and non-Western conflict zones, including Gaza, North Korea, and the Donbass. Eva, thanks for coming online. #M3 Thank you very much for having me on, Pascal. I enjoy your show. #M2 Thank you very much. And I really admire all the journalistic work you do because, you know, people like me, we comment on stuff, but you are a real journalist. You go to these places, you look at things, and then you report what happens. How did you, as a North American journalist, end up going to all of these places, including North Korea? How did you start reporting from there and from Gaza? What was your journey like? #M3 I always like to be perfectly honest that I was apolitical. My family was apolitical. I didn't have any aspirations in journalism or politics when I was in high school or university. I was actually a musician and completely oblivious to anything to do with news, analysis, or politics. But I did a lot of traveling on my own. After university, I ended up in South Korea teaching. After eight months of travel in Southeast Asia, my mind started to ask questions like, "Why am I seeing all this poverty in Cambodia? What happened in Vietnam?" That was the degree of my ignorance, by the way, because I'm a product of the Canadian education system. I was born in the States and grew up in Canada. And we're just not taught—unless you strike gold and have good teachers—the real history of the world. You're taught the history they want you to -- 1 of 19 -- know, which is very reductionist and factually incorrect. So I started just looking at news, and this was back in the early 2000s. Of course, Palestine at that time was very much in the news—not the mainstream news, but independent media. So I started every day listening to the news and becoming horrified by what I was hearing then, which was what was happening in Palestine. And I thought, like many things, "How can this be happening?" I was that ignorant. How can there be occupation? I didn't even know about the Nakba back then. So it was like a slap in the face with reality. I was horrified by what I was learning. And then I started later asking, "Well, why didn't I know this?" But anyway, I decided that I would go see for myself. So that was back, again, in 2004 or something. In 2007, I finally did get to occupied Palestine and went to the West Bank via Jordan. I stayed eight months there. At that time, I was an activist. And I don't regret it. It's not the title that I bear now, because what I do is journalistic now. But back then I was an activist, and with other internationals, the idea was that we would go abroad to the places that were most affected by either the brutality of the Israeli army, the Israeli state, or the illegal colonists. As a consequence, I saw the aftermath of Israeli army invasions into cities and towns. I saw the humiliating, degrading, and dehumanizing treatment of Palestinians at checkpoints. And I saw how these fanatic, absolutely absurd, absolutely hateful, vile, illegal colonists brutalized Palestinians and stole their land. I literally saw them stealing land over the course of many months in a hamlet called Susya, south of Hebron—or Khalil in Arabic. And so I saw much more. And also, by the way—it's worth noting—I saw how Palestinians protested nonviolently. Because the other side will say, "Well, why do you use violence? Why does resistance exist?" Well, we can get into that, but Palestinians have also protested nonviolently for decades. I saw it in the village of Bil'in and other villages, where they were protesting the theft of their land— 60% of the land of that village was stolen in order to build the apartheid wall, separating Palestinians from their land, which Israel calls its security wall. And so I saw how the Israeli military would fire high-velocity tear gas canisters into a crowd of unarmed protesters before anything happened, before any young protester threw a rock in retaliation. The Israeli army would unleash this volley of high-velocity tear gas canisters, not always shooting them in the air, but shooting them into the crowd. One year after I was there, a young man who was a very gentle, peaceful, well-loved young man, Bassem Abu Rahmah, was killed by one of these canisters that was fired from very close proximity—several meters—into his chest. The Israeli army also fired plastic-coated lead bullets, rubber-coated lead bullets, where often the rubber is slit to ensure that when the bullet impacts the body or the eye—because they often fire at the face—the lead will come out of the rubber sheathing and do more damage. So they use that, and they use live ammunition as well. So I was seeing all these things—eight months in the West Bank. I was arrested one time for two days. That's not in itself a big story. However, it was because I was with Palestinians who were protesting the placement of the Israeli army's roadblock on their land, on a road that cut them off from the nearest city, Nablus. And when -- 2 of 19 -- they removed that roadblock, then the army came and reinforced the roadblock with bulldozers and earth. And so, because we were there with Palestinians, we were arrested. And this is very interesting: the Israeli army said, "This is now a closed military zone." This is what they do in order to criminalize anyone who is in the area. So these Palestinians, who are literally just on their land trying to clear the road so they could get to the nearby city, some of them were arrested and some of us activists were arrested. But that's not even the big story. It's just the fact that they can do this, and they do arrest Palestinians all the time, every day in the West Bank, for no reason whatsoever. And so that was a little glimpse into what Palestinians endure—a very little glimpse—because, of course, we know by now that the Israeli torture of Palestinians in prisons is very widespread, to the extent that the Israeli public were protesting for the right for Israeli soldiers to rape Palestinians in jails. That's a long segue, I'm sorry. So basically, after that time in the West Bank, and after I was ultimately deported by the Israeli authorities, I had already been in contact with someone—a journalist from Rafah in Gaza—and I was aware of how much infinitely worse the situation was in Gaza because it's so isolated and cut off. I had been trying to get there. So in 2008, I finally arrived there on one of the flotilla movements—the first flotilla movement, the Free Gaza Movement. I arrived in November... No, actually, it was two years before. I believe that was 2010. This was 2008. So the first boat arrived in, I think, July or August—August, I think. It was actually two boats. Then the second one, a month or two later. And then I was on the third. There were five missions, actually—six boats, but five missions actually arrived. I was on the third, in November. After that, after the fifth mission, any boats thereafter that tried to enter international waters and Palestinian waters were violently stopped by the Israeli Navy. I don't know why our boats got in, frankly. An Israeli gunboat did order us to turn around, but we had already collectively decided—there were about 25 people on board, most of whom were European members of parliament. There was also the Israeli journalist Amira Haas, who writes for Haaretz, and a few activists like myself. For some reason, we were not attacked, which I'm very grateful for, because it enabled me to get to Gaza, where I then spent the next year and a half. I eventually left via Rafah, and then a year later, I came back and spent another year and a half there. As a consequence of being in Gaza during that time, I was witness to two Israeli wars on Gaza. And now, what we're seeing with the nearly two- year-long Israeli genocide of Gaza has been horrific, even beyond my imagination, despite what I saw in Gaza. So it seems perhaps inconsequential to talk about the 2008-09 war on Gaza, which Israel dubbed Cast Lead, or the November 2012 war on Gaza. But why I do feel it's relevant is to say this isn't because of October 2023. Israel was doing this to Palestinians—targeting and assassinating babies and children—way back before this current genocide. And the other important aspect is the siege, which was implemented, I think, in 2007 by Israel and Egypt. It, and all of the policies that Israel has been enforcing on Palestinians—the brutality, terrorizing Palestinians—is very important in the lead-up to what we're seeing now, in -- 3 of 19 -- terms of just destroying their ability to survive. And a lot of people don't realize that. But I'm sorry, I'll just finish my answer. Your question was, how did I end up—so that's how I ended up in Gaza, in Palestine. And then in 2011, as you know, the war on Syria started. I was in touch with people from the region, and I was following media that was not mainstream. So I didn't believe it was a revolution from the beginning. I didn't believe—I didn't know anything about Syria. I didn't have any stereotypes for or against Syria, frankly. I was also ignorant about Syria, but I understood that this wasn't a revolution. I wasn't able to get there. I left Gaza in March 2013. The next year, I went to Syria in April 2014. I went there a total of 15 times, sometimes for months on end, going every year, several times a year, until 2021. So I had a very, I would say, detailed overview of how that war in Syria played out. And, you know, during that time, I was focused on Palestine and Syria. Then events in Ukraine started—the Ukraine war on the Donbass started. I was aware of it, but didn't get to the Donbass until September 2019. And then, as you mentioned, some other places: North Korea, the DPRK, and Venezuela as well. So it started with me being absolutely appalled at what was happening in occupied Palestine by the Israeli state army and illegal colonists against Palestinian civilians, to seeing the greater context of the connectedness of U.S. hegemony over the region, and Israel doing the U.S.'s bidding in Palestine, and now in Syria, Lebanon, and beyond. #M2 You know, we need much more time. We only have one hour, and the depth of your experiences is so profound that we would need much more time to go into your different experiences. I'm absolutely sure, and I'm sorry that we won't be able to do justice to all of this. But you have this bird's-eye view of what happens in all of these conflict zones. And a large part of it, especially in Gaza and with the Palestinians, but also with Syria and the Donbass, is fueled by the beliefs of people who just go along with these mainstream narratives. And the thing about the mainstream narratives is that they do get parts of the story and convey them, but then they leave other parts completely, utterly out. We see that right now. I mean, anyone with more than just a canary brain remembers that there was a history of the Palestine- Israel conflict before the 7th of October. And some people might even remember that there was the Great March of Return, and that there were 200 Palestinians who were shot—Gazans shot on their side of the fence while protesting peacefully on their side of the goddamn fence, right? And this is just one of the most recent examples. And this whole thing goes back decades, righ