Real Lives
Rula Jebreal left a Jerusalem orphanage and anchored Italy's evening news
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
In 2000 an Italian national broadcaster put a Palestinian woman behind the desk to read the evening news. It had never happened before — no foreign woman had anchored a national newscast in Italy.
Rula Jebreal had arrived in the country seven years earlier on a scholarship, to study physiotherapy.
Dar El-Tifel#
She was born in Haifa on 24 April 1973 and grew up in Jerusalem. Her father, Othman Jebreal, was born in Nigeria and worked as a Sufi imam and a groundskeeper at al-Aqsa.
Her mother, Zakia, died in 1978, when Rula was five. Her father placed her and her sister Rania in the Dar El-Tifel orphanage in Jerusalem, and they were raised there until 1991.
Dar El-Tifel is not an incidental detail. It was founded by Hind Husseini, who took in fifty-five children orphaned at Deir Yassin in 1948 and built an institution around them. Jebreal has described Husseini as her teacher and her mother, and credits her with saving her life.
Everything Jebreal has written since circles back to that house.
Bologna, twice#
In 1993 she won a scholarship from the Italian government and went to the University of Bologna, where she took a degree in physiotherapy.
She worked as a physiotherapist. Then she went back to the same university and took a master's in journalism and political science — a second start, made in a third language, at her own expense of time.
Italian television#
She began appearing on Italian television and, in 2000, became the first foreign anchorwoman to present the evening news on national television there.
She won a Media Watch award for her coverage of the Iraq war. At thirty-three she took the Ischia International Journalism Award as journalist of the year — at the time the most prestigious such prize in European journalism.
She went on to co-present AnnoZero with Michele Santoro, one of the most-watched and most-argued-about programmes on Italian television.
She now analyses foreign policy for MSNBC in the United States, and writes for a range of American and European outlets.
Miral#
In 2003 she published her first novel, Miral, drawn directly from Dar El-Tifel and from Hind Husseini's life. It became an international bestseller and one of three books she has written.
Julian Schnabel filmed it in 2010 from Jebreal's own screenplay, with Hiam Abbass as Husseini and a cast including Freida Pinto, Vanessa Redgrave, Willem Dafoe and Yasmine Al Massri.
The film's importance is easy to state: it put a Palestinian girls' orphanage at the centre of an English-language feature, with Palestinian women as the subject rather than the backdrop. Very few films have done that before or since.
The shape of it#
Jebreal's career reads as a series of rooms she was not expected to be in — an Italian anchor desk, a European journalism prize, a Hollywood screenplay credit, an American network's foreign policy panel.
She got into each of them by retraining, which is the least glamorous method available and the only one that was open to her.
The woman who reads the news in Rome and the girl in the Jerusalem orphanage are the same person, and she has never let an audience forget it.
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