Date: Sun, 26 Aug 2001 23:52:59 +0200
From: vroummmm <vroummmm-AT-nirvanet.net>
Subject: I like this article


I like this article, it moves me to read it. Do you know by chance other 
narratives of woman who does a trip to hell and comes back happy to have this 
behind her, and she can tell her new vision of life towards everybody?

Fili Houtman/./
>===== Original Message From genet son of genet <radiogenet-AT-hotmail.com> ====>Amira Hass: Life under Israeli occupation - by an Israeli
>
> >
> > Jewish journalist Amira Hass doesn't merely report on the experiences of
>Palestinians on the West Bank - she shares their lives. Robert Fisk meets a
>determined and unflinching witness to oppression
> >
> > Robert Fisk
> >
> > 26 August 2001
> >
> > 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."
> >
> > Now living in the West Bank town of Ramallah - with the Palestinians whom
>many
>of her people regard as "terrorists", listening to the Palestinian curses
>heaped
>upon "the Jews" for their confiscations and dispossessions and murder squads
>and
>settlements - Amira Hass is among the bravest of reporters, her daily column
>in
>Ha'aretz ablaze with indignation at the way her own country, Israel, is
>mistreating and killing the Palestinians. Only when you meet her, however,
>do
>you realise the intensity - the passion - of her work. "There is a
>misconception
>that journalists can be objective," she tells me, the same sharp glance to
>ensure my comprehension. "Palestinians tell me I'm objective. I think this
>is
>important because I'm an Israeli. But being fair and being objective are not
>the
>same thing. What journalism is really about - it's to monitor power and the
>centres of power."
> >
> > Each day, Amira Hass writes an essay about despair, a chronological
>narrative
>she maintains when talking about her own life and about her parents: her
>mother,
>a Sarajevo Jew who joined Tito's partisans and was forced to surrender to
>the
>Nazis when they threatened to kill every woman in the Montenegrin town of
>Cetinje; her father Avraham who spent four years in the Transnistria ghetto,
>escaping a plague of typhus only to lose his toes to frostbite.
> >
> > The story of the secular Jews Hannah and Avraham is essential to an
>understanding of Amira. "My parents came here to Israel naively. They were
>offered a house in Jerusalem. But they refused it. They said: 'We cannot
>take
>the house of other refugees.' They meant Palestinians. So you see, it's not
>such
>a big deal that I write what I do - it's not a big deal that I live among
>Palestinians." Hass became a journalist by default. She had survived on odd
>jobs
>- she once worked as a cleaner - and travelled to Holland. "I sensed there
>the
>absence of Jewish existence. And this told me many things, especially about
>my
>attitude to Israel, how not to be a Zionist. This is my place, Israel, the
>language, the people, the culture, the colours..."
> >
> > Hass dropped out of the Hebrew University where she was researching the
>history of the Nazis and the attitude of the European left to the Holocaust.
>"I
>was stuck. The first intifada broke out and I didn't want to sit in academia
>while all this was happening. I used wasta - you know that Arabic word? - to
>get
>a copy-editing job on the Ha'aretz news desk in '89." Wasta means "pull" or
>"influence". Ha'aretz is a liberal, free-thinking paper, the nearest Israel
>has
>to The Independent. When the Romanian revolution broke out, Hass pleaded to
>be
>sent to cover the story - she had many contacts from a visit to Bucharest in
>1977 - and much to her surprise, Ha'aretz agreed, even though she'd been
>with
>the paper only three months.
> >
> > "When I'd gone to Romania before, I felt I had this philosophical
>responsibility to taste life under this socialist regime," she says. "It was
>a
>thousand times worse than I imagined. There was this terrible pressure -
>life
>under Israeli occupation is not as bad as life in Ceausescu's Romania. It
>was
>unbelievable suffocation. So I covered the revolution for two weeks and then
>went back to the paper. Ha'aretz didn't know if I could write - I knew I
>could.
>But I also knew never to look for what all the other journalists are looking
>for."
> >
> > In 1990, with her parents' support, she joined a group called Workers'
>Hotline, which assisted Palestinians who were cheated by their Israeli
>employers. "During the Gulf War, I reached Gaza under curfew - I'd gone to
>give
>Palestinians their cheques from Israeli employers. That's when my romance
>with
>Gaza started. No Israeli journalist knew or covered Gaza. My editor was very
>sympathetic. When in 1993 the 'peace process' broke out" - Hass requests the
>inverted commas round the phrase - "Ha'aretz suggested I cover Gaza. One of
>the
>editors said: 'We don't want you to live in Gaza.' And I knew at once that I
>wanted to live there."
> >
> > From the start, Hass recalls, there was "something very warm about the
>Palestinian attitude - there was a lot of humour in these harsh conditions."
>When I suggest that this might be something she had recognised in Jews, Hass
>immediately agrees. "Of course. I'm an east European Jew and the life of the
>shtetl is inbuilt in me. And I guess I found in Gaza a shtetl. I remember
>finding refugees from Jabalya camp, sitting on a beach. I asked them what
>they
>were doing. And one said he was 'waiting to be 40 years old' - so he'd be
>old
>enough to get a permit to work in Israel. This was a very Jewish joke."
> >
> > But Hass found no humour in the Israeli policy of "closure", of besieging
>Palestinian towns and throttling their economy and people. "I spotted as
>early
>as 1991 that the policy of 'closure' was a very clever step by the Israeli
>occupation system, a kind of pre-emptive strike," she says. "The way it
>debilitates any kind of Palestinian action and reaction is amazing.
>'Closure'
>was also a goal: a demographic separation which means that Jews have the
>right
>to move about the space of Mandatory Palestine. The 'closure' policy brought
>this to a real perfection."
> >
> > Hass found herself fascinated with the difference between Palestinian
>image
>and reality. "Their towns were being portrayed in the Israeli press as a
>'nest
>of hornets'. But I really wanted to taste what it means to live under
>occupation
>- what it is like to live under curfew, to live in fear of a soldier. I
>wanted
>to know what it was like to be an Israeli under Israeli occupation." She has
>used that word "taste" again, just as she did about Romania under
>dictatorship.
>She says she was still thinking about her mother's trip to Belsen. "It was
>this
>idea of not intervening, not changing anything. And luckily, this combined
>in me
>with journalism." Hass is possessed of the idea that change can come only
>through social movements and their interaction with the press - an odd
>notion
>that seems a little illogical.
> >
> > But there is nothing vague about her vocation. "Israel is obviously the
>centre
>of power which dictates Palestinian life," she says. "As an Israeli, my task
>as
>a journalist is to monitor power. I'm called 'a correspondent on Palestinian
>affairs', but it's more true to say that I'm an expert in Israeli
>occupation."
>Israeli reaction, she says, is very violent towards her. "I get messages
>saying
>I must have been a kapo [a Jewish camp overseer for the Nazis] in my first
>incarnation. Then I'll get an e-mail saying: 'Bravo, you have written a
>great
>article - Heil Hitler!' Someone told me they hoped I suffered breast cancer.
>'Until we expel all Palestinians, there will be no peace,' some of them say.
>I
>can't reply to them - there are thousands of these messages."
> >
> > But many Israelis tell Amira Hass to keep writing. "People misled
>themselves
>into believing that Oslo was a peace process - so they became very angry
>with
>the Palestinians. Part of their anger is directed at me. Israelis do not go
>to
>the occupied territories. They do not see with their own eyes. They don't
>see a
>Palestinian village with a settler on its land and a village that has no
>water
>and needs government permission even to plant a tree, let alone build a new
>school. People don't understand how the dispersal of Jewish settlements
>dictates
>Israeli control over Palestinian territory."
> >
> > As her mother lay dying this spring, Amira feared that she would be
>trapped by
>the Israeli siege of Ramallah - where she now lives - and spent hours
>commuting
>the few miles to Jerusalem. Now she is alone. The woman who taught her to
>despise those who were "looking from the side" died two months ago.
> >
> > Also from the Middle East section
> >
> > Five die in attack on Israeli outpost
> > Father of Saudi car-bomb victim rejects suspects' TV confessions
> > Palestinians turn militant as their children die
> > Israeli court accuses its soldiers of stoning and humiliating civilians
> > Palestinian activist survives Israeli helicopters strike
> >
> >
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>26 August 2001 00:45 GMT+1
>Home > News  > World  > Middle East
>
>Amira Hass: Life under Israeli occupation - by
>an Israeli
>
>Jewish journalist Amira Hass doesn't merely report on the
>experiences of Palestinians on the West Bank - she shares their
>lives. Robert Fisk meets a determined and unflinching witness
>to oppression
>
>Robert Fisk
>
>26 August 2001
>
>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."
>
>Now living in the West Bank town of Ramallah - with the Palestinians whom
>many of her people regard as
>"terrorists", listening to the Palestinian curses heaped upon "the Jews" for
>their confiscations and
>dispossessions and murder squads and settlements - Amira Hass is among the
>bravest of reporters, her
>daily column in Ha'aretz ablaze with indignation at the way her own country,
>Israel, is mistreating and killing
>the Palestinians. Only when you meet her, however, do you realise the
>intensity - the passion - of her
>work. "There is a misconception that journalists can be objective," she
>tells me, the same sharp glance to
>ensure my comprehension. "Palestinians tell me I'm objective. I think this
>is important because I'm an
>Israeli. But being fair and being objective are not the same thing. What
>journalism is really about - it's to
>monitor power and the centres of power."
>
>Each day, Amira Hass writes an essay about despair, a chronological
>narrative she maintains when talking
>about her own life and about her parents: her mother, a Sarajevo Jew who
>joined Tito's partisans and was
>forced to surrender to the Nazis when they threatened to kill every woman in
>the Montenegrin town of
>Cetinje; her father Avraham who spent four years in the Transnistria ghetto,
>escaping a plague of typhus
>only to lose his toes to frostbite.
>
>The story of the secular Jews Hannah and Avraham is essential to an
>understanding of Amira. "My parents
>came here to Israel naively. They were offered a house in Jerusalem. But
>they refused it. They said: 'We
>cannot take the house of other refugees.' They meant Palestinians. So you
>see, it's not such a big deal that I
>write what I do - it's not a big deal that I live among Palestinians." Hass
>became a journalist by default.
>She had survived on odd jobs - she once worked as a cleaner - and travelled
>to Holland. "I sensed there
>the absence of Jewish existence. And this told me many things, especially
>about my attitude to Israel, how
>not to be a Zionist. This is my place, Israel, the language, the people, the
>culture, the colours..."
>
>Hass dropped out of the Hebrew University where she was researching the
>history of the Nazis and the
>attitude of the European left to the Holocaust. "I was stuck. The first
>intifada broke out and I didn't want to
>sit in academia while all this was happening. I used wasta - you know that
>Arabic word? - to get a
>copy-editing job on the Ha'aretz news desk in '89." Wasta means "pull" or
>"influence". Ha'aretz is a liberal,
>free-thinking paper, the nearest Israel has to The Independent. When the
>Romanian revolution broke out,
>Hass pleaded to be sent to cover the story - she had many contacts from a
>visit to Bucharest in 1977 -
>and much to her surprise, Ha'aretz agreed, even though she'd been with the
>paper only three months.
>
>"When I'd gone to Romania before, I felt I had this philosophical
>responsibility to taste life under this
>socialist regime," she says. "It was a thousand times worse than I imagined.
>There was this terrible pressure
>- life under Israeli occupation is not as bad as life in Ceausescu's
>Romania. It was unbelievable suffocation.
>So I covered the revolution for two weeks and then went back to the paper.
>Ha'aretz didn't know if I
>could write - I knew I could. But I also knew never to look for what all the
>other journalists are looking
>for."
>
>In 1990, with her parents' support, she joined a group called Workers'
>Hotline, which assisted Palestinians
>who were cheated by their Israeli employers. "During the Gulf War, I reached
>Gaza under curfew - I'd
>gone to give Palestinians their cheques from Israeli employers. That's when
>my romance with Gaza started.
>No Israeli journalist knew or covered Gaza. My editor was very sympathetic.
>When in 1993 the 'peace
>process' broke out" - Hass requests the inverted commas round the phrase -
>"Ha'aretz suggested I cover
>Gaza. One of the editors said: 'We don't want you to live in Gaza.' And I
>knew at once that I wanted to
>live there."
>
>>From the start, Hass recalls, there was "something very warm about the
>Palestinian attitude - there was a
>lot of humour in these harsh conditions." When I suggest that this might be
>something she had recognised in
>Jews, Hass immediately agrees. "Of course. I'm an east European Jew and the
>life of the shtetl is inbuilt in
>me. And I guess I found in Gaza a shtetl. I remember finding refugees from
>Jabalya camp, sitting on a
>beach. I asked them what they were doing. And one said he was 'waiting to be
>40 years old' - so he'd be
>old enough to get a permit to work in Israel. This was a very Jewish joke."
>
>But Hass found no humour in the Israeli policy of "closure", of besieging
>Palestinian towns and throttling
>their economy and people. "I spotted as early as 1991 that the policy of
>'closure' was a very clever step by
>the Israeli occupation system, a kind of pre-emptive strike," she says. "The
>way it debilitates any kind of
>Palestinian action and reaction is amazing. 'Closure' was also a goal: a
>demographic separation which
>means that Jews have the right to move about the space of Mandatory
>Palestine. The 'closure' policy
>brought this to a real perfection."
>
>Hass found herself fascinated with the difference between Palestinian image
>and reality. "Their towns were
>being portrayed in the Israeli press as a 'nest of hornets'. But I really
>wanted to taste what it means to live
>under occupation - what it is like to live under curfew, to live in fear of
>a soldier. I wanted to know what it
>was like to be an Israeli under Israeli occupation." She has used that word
>"taste" again, just as she did
>about Romania under dictatorship. She says she was still thinking about her
>mother's trip to Belsen. "It was
>this idea of not intervening, not changing anything. And luckily, this
>combined in me with journalism." Hass
>is possessed of the idea that change can come only through social movements
>and their interaction with the
>press - an odd notion that seems a little illogical.
>
>But there is nothing vague about her vocation. "Israel is obviously the
>centre of power which dictates
>Palestinian life," she says. "As an Israeli, my task as a journalist is to
>monitor power. I'm called 'a
>correspondent on Palestinian affairs', but it's more true to say that I'm an
>expert in Israeli occupation."
>Israeli reaction, she says, is very violent towards her. "I get messages
>saying I must have been a kapo [a
>Jewish camp overseer for the Nazis] in my first incarnation. Then I'll get
>an e-mail saying: 'Bravo, you have
>written a great article - Heil Hitler!' Someone told me they hoped I
>suffered breast cancer. 'Until we expel
>all Palestinians, there will be no peace,' some of them say. I can't reply
>to them - there are thousands of
>these messages."
>
>But many Israelis tell Amira Hass to keep writing. "People misled themselves
>into believing that Oslo was a
>peace process - so they became very angry with the Palestinians. Part of
>their anger is directed at me.
>Israelis do not go to the occupied territories. They do not see with their
>own eyes. They don't see a
>Palestinian village with a settler on its land and a village that has no
>water and needs government
>permission even to plant a tree, let alone build a new school. People don't
>understand how the dispersal of
>Jewish settlements dictates Israeli control over Palestinian territory."
>
>As her mother lay dying this spring, Amira feared that she would be trapped
>by the Israeli siege of
>Ramallah - where she now lives - and spent hours commuting the few miles to
>Jerusalem. Now she is
>alone. The woman who taught her to despise those who were "looking from the
>side" died two months
>ago.
>
>
>
>
>_________________________________________________________________
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