Dima Khatib

Dima Khatib is a Palestinian-Syrian journalist, poet and media executive whose international career has spanned more than three decades. A gifted linguist who moved from translation into journalism, she became the first woman to lead an overseas bureau and later the first female executive channel director within her media network.

Born in Damascus to a Palestinian refugee father and a Syrian mother, she grew up in a city where Muslims, Christians and Jews lived together with an ease that taught her tolerance and respect for diversity from an early age.

She became an award-winning journalist and mastered seven languages, writing articles and blogs in four of them. Her published poetry collection, ‘Love Refugee’, drew on personal and professional experience. She also credits motherhood with preserving a connection to her femininity through long years of demanding fieldwork in a predominantly male environment.

She and her two siblings grew up in a warm family home between two grandmothers. Her Palestinian grandmother, Khadija, preserved images and stories of the lost homeland and embodied strength after forced exile; she gave birth near the Palestinian-Lebanese border on the day of the Nakba. Her Syrian grandmother represented tenderness, affection and an equally formative sense of femininity.

Literature, politics and culture surrounded the family. Her mother, Mona Lababidi, pursued postgraduate study after marriage and became a university lecturer in financial mathematics. Her self-made father earned a doctorate from the University of Cambridge after a difficult experience of displacement and exile. He also ensured that his five sisters studied at Damascus University, worked closely with the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and served as a cultural and political adviser within the Palestine Liberation Organization during the 1960s and 1970s. In Syria, he held prominent posts in culture and literature and became a recognised authority on education, literary criticism and comparative literature. He valued knowledge over wealth, gave his daughter Arabic and international literature to read and summarise, taught her Arabic poetry and spoke to her at home in Classical Arabic. She learned French at primary school and English from him during adolescence. From the age of eight to sixteen, she studied piano at the Arab Institute of Music in Damascus, completing preparatory studies in Western music and developing an enduring love of Chopin and Tchaikovsky.

Towards the end of secondary school, a sabbatical year took the family to Indiana University in the United States. The experience loosened the shyness and introversion that had marked her childhood, improved her English and increased her confidence when she discovered that fluency in three languages could allow her to outperform native English speakers in class.

She then made the difficult decision to leave music and build on her strongest aptitude: languages. The Faculty of Translation and Interpretation at the University of Geneva admitted her to its renowned programme. By graduation, she had learned Spanish, Italian and German, studied basic Greek and worked for a period as a translator at the World Health Organization in Geneva.

Translation offered a comfortable income and the prospect of a stable life, yet she felt that carrying other people’s words created too little tangible impact. She therefore left the United Nations environment for journalism, where she could express ideas of her own. The transition had begun during university through part-time work at Swiss Radio International in Bern.

In 1996, she moved to Qatar after her father joined Qatar University as a professor. She first worked at Al-Raya and at Qatar Radio in French and was often the only woman at local press conferences. At the end of 1997, a year after its launch, she joined Al Jazeera as a newsroom trainee and then a broadcast journalist. She soon became a live-news producer and, during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, was the only woman among four producers responsible for twenty-four hours of live coverage.

Field reporting remained her goal. Under the leadership of Muhammad Jassim Al-Ali, Al Jazeera asked her to establish a bureau in Beijing. She began learning Chinese and reported widely from China, particularly enjoying longer pieces for the programme ‘Al Jazeera Correspondents’. She later settled in Hong Kong as the network’s first roving correspondent, covering Laos, Vietnam, Taiwan, Thailand and China. In 2005, she moved to Venezuela to establish Al Jazeera’s regional office in Latin America and began learning Portuguese in preparation for work in Brazil.

Her reporting eventually covered South and Central America, including Colombia, Venezuela, Chile, Argentina, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Mexico, Brazil, Uruguay, Nicaragua, Cuba and the Caribbean. She examined the rise of left-wing anti-imperialist leaders who supported causes of the Global South, especially Palestine, and gained access that produced exclusive interviews with Hugo Chávez, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Evo Morales. By presenting the history, diversity and revolutionary experience of Latin America directly to Arab audiences, the coverage offered a southern perspective rather than one mediated through the colonial assumptions of traditional Western news organisations.

When the Arab revolutions began, she was based in Venezuela and turned to Twitter to express views that required a more immediate form. A large, highly engaged following quickly made her a prominent voice and opened the way from traditional into digital journalism.

In 2015, she became Managing Director of AJ+, whose digital channels served young audiences in English, Arabic, Spanish and French. Under her leadership, the operation grew significantly, won prominent awards and entered major markets in the United States, the Arab region and French- and Spanish-speaking countries.

Because she had not studied journalism formally, she learned rapidly and kept pace with a changing Arab media environment. Classical Arabic and several other languages supported work across continents, but managing diverse young teams also required the cultural understanding gained through travel and a plural upbringing. That ability to connect with different backgrounds helped innovative products succeed in distinct markets. Her career also exposed her directly to misogyny, constraints on expression and press freedom, and cyberbullying.