04
Sep
Crossing The Line: An Israeli Reports From Palestinian Territory
As I feared–and wrote in my column–the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has overshadowed virtually every other issue at the World Conference on Racism. It would be a shame if the conclusion drawn is that all Israelis take a pro-government stand or, for that matter, that all Arabs support the most extreme tactics like suicide bombing. One of the best western journalists covering that conflict is Robert Fisk of the Independent in London. Today, he profiled an Israeli journalist who has had the guts and the sensitivity to write passionately and honestly from behind what is supposed to be her “enemy’s” line.
Here’s a taste of his dispatch.
Whenever Amira Hass tries to explain her vocation as a journalist, she recalls a seminal moment in her mother’s life. Hannah Hass was being marched from a cattle train to the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen on a summer’s day in 1944. “She and the other women had been 10 days in the train from Yugoslavia. They were sick and some were dying. Then my mother saw these German women looking at the prisoners, just looking. This image became very formative in my upbringing, this despicable ‘looking from the side’. It’s as if I was there and saw it myself.” Amira Hass stares at you through wire-framed glasses as she speaks, anxious to make sure you have understood the importance of the Jewish Holocaust in her life.
In her evocative book Drinking the Sea at Gaza, Hass eloquently explains why she, an Israeli journalist, went to live in Yasser Arafat’s tiny, garbage-strewn statelet. “In the end,” she wrote, “my desire to live in Gaza stemmed neither from adventurism nor from insanity, but from that dread of being a bystander, from my need to understand, down to the last detail, a world that is, to the best of my political and historical comprehension, a profoundly Israeli creation. To me, Gaza embodies the entire saga of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; it represents the central contradiction of the state of Israel - democracy for some, dispossession for others; it is our exposed nerve.”
Read more by cLicking below
