On the front line

Kerry-Anne Mendoza from St Anne’s tells Chris Brown about how she swapped the corporate world to become an independent reporter amid the horror of Gaza this summer 

The front room is quiet and bathed in sunshine as I take my seat. The cat is sleeping peacefully by the window and barely stirs as coffee and biscuits are served. On the shelves are a selection of the everyday – novels, guides to improving your professional development and the like. 

Next to me though, a bulletproof vest and tin helmet with the words ‘Press’ emblazoned on them, are placed carefully.

For in this serene corner of St Anne’s, Kerry-Anne Mendoza is coming to terms with her experiences in Gaza – reporting from the front line as the Israeli military bombarded the tiny Palestinian enclave during the summer. 

She had visited once before, in 2002, and was horrified by what she saw, but had come back to the UK disillusioned with what she could do to change anything. She joined the corporate world, becoming a project manager for some of the country’s biggest banking groups, but the Occupy movement in 2011 sparked a revolution in her life – that her true calling was to fight for justice by telling the stories of the world around us.

Acute sense of shame

“The Palestinians I met kept asking why the world allowed this violence to happen. Why don’t they see us as people? Why do they just see us as terrorists,” she said as she began to reflect on witnessing the summer onslaught. 

“I felt such an acute sense of shame. We have to stop our government backing this and being on the wrong side of history. How can we let this happen? Our grandkids will ask us these questions.

“This is part of what drives me. At a minimum, even if we won’t win, we have to show resistance. Even if you are the only voice in a room, for goodness sake you must speak out.”

Kerry-Anne used crowdfunding to pay for her journey to Gaza in August, at the height of the Israeli operation to “root out terrorists”. Seven weeks of Israeli bombardment, Palestinian rocket attacks, and ground fighting killed more than 2,200 people, the vast majority of them Gazans – the vast majority, civilians. 

On her website, scriptonitedaily.com, she posted daily reports over three weeks – completely independent of any of the traditional media outlets – and during the evenings broadcast a live video commentary from her hotel room, interrupted more than once by the sounds of bombs exploding nearby, causing her seven-storey hotel to sway.

Heartbreaking stories

“I thought I was going to a war zone but actually I went to witness a genocide, that is the biggest experience I have been left with. It is described as conflict, and you take on that language. But even I was shocked beyond words by the level of death and destruction on the ground, and the imbalance between the two sides.

“The stories were everywhere. I would be in the street and people were living in makeshift tents made on the rubble of their homes. Some people were so crushed that they couldn’t speak, clearly in shell shock with vacant expressions. At other times people would flag our car down to try to show us what had happened to them.

“The stories were just heartbreaking, such as the father who had been forced to carry the body of his young, decapitated daughter for miles through the night to a shelter.”

A ceasefire is holding, for now, but no one there expects it to last, she says. The violence is only ever on hold. “The only difference for Gazans is where the bombs drop.”

Bristol is of course a world away from the horror of the Middle East, but the fight for justice was being waged here in this city by her own family.

Naked hostility

Kerry-Anne’s grandfather came to Bristol in the 1950s, one of the first wave of Caribbean immigrants to the city. He was faced with the absurd racism of the time, as was his wife – a white woman who was disowned by her family when the relationship was revealed.

But in the face of this “naked hostility” he helped to integrate newcomers into the community and into work, and met with then prime minister Harold Wilson to explain what life was like for those who had been invited to make their home in Britain. He also helped to set up the now vanished Bamboo Club in Easton, which was the only place at the time where black and white could meet and socialise.

Richard Farrell is one of the unsung heroes of the era, but it wasn’t until his death in the 1990s, as she was preparing to go to university, that Kerry-Anne had any inkling of the campaigning work he had done. 

“We never had a conversation about this. Then, at his funeral, hundreds of people turned up to pay their respects and told the stories of his work. I had always been drawn to politics and social justice, but no one was political in my family and I thought I was the apple that fell far from the tree. His funeral though helped me feel a deeper connection.”

Her first visit to Gaza came in 2002 during a “glorified school trip” with a group from Sussex University. Some school trip… at the end of the trip she decided to become a human shield during another Israeli offensive, but came back to the UK unable to truly acclimatise to ‘normal life’. She took jobs with banks and started up her own business as a project manager, but the Occupy movement in London changed all that.

‘A real circle of love’

“You didn’t need to get permission to try to make a difference there,” she explains. “It made me feel I couldn’t go back to the corporate life, I needed to campaign and provide a light on the injustice all around us.”

It will take time to deal with the scenes she has witnessed during the summer, but Bristol provides more than just a safe-haven for her. 

“You see things you cannot believe, you experience a level of trauma you cannot imagine and you have to deal with that,” she says.

“You come back broken, that’s the truth, you don’t come back as the same person, but that doesn’t mean you are falling apart. It just means it takes time to rehumanise and that parts of you are a little tarnished.

“My family and most of my friends are here, they are a real circle of love around me. They welcome me with open arms. My microlife is as important as my campaigning life – being a good wife, creating a marriage that is happy and has integrity. That is just as significant a commitment.

Bristol doesn’t just accept what it is served

“Bristol is a great place, though I didn’t really appreciate it until I came back after university. I do find this city is a place where in every community there is an intrinsic compassion running through. It’s very multicultural and gives people an understanding that people who look different to them are not that different.”

Is Bristol a place that can inspire a fighter for social justice? “It is good here. People will get out of bed to say ‘no’, we won’t accept what is served up to us.”

And the future? “I have met with [Bristol East MP] Kerry McCarthy and she is going to help organise a visit to Parliament to talk about my experience to MPs there. But mainly, I am working on my documentary which I want to take on tour around the UK and, hopefully, to Israel and Gaza.” The fight goes on…

Pictures by Jon Craig and, from Gaza, Kerry-Anne Mendoza