"Twenty years later, the Israeli victory is nearly complete: The well-planned armed robbery of Palestinian land goes on daily unhindered. The model that Israel created in Gaza is being copied in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and translated into something akin to “Pales of Settlement” which, as long as they don’t show signs of fury and rebellion, are of no interest to the Jews in Israel, the supreme ruler." Amira Hass
Author Bio: Amira Hass is the Haaretz correspondent for the Occupied Territories. Born in Jerusalem in 1956, Hass joined Haaretz in 1989, and has been in her current position since 1993. As the correspondent for the territories, she spent three years living in Gaza, which served of the basis for her widely acclaimed book, "Drinking the Sea at Gaza." She has lived in the West Bank city of Ramallah since 1997.
————–
Yet further evidence of the actual paucity of my knowledge of Israel is the sad truth that I had never heard of Amira Hass until I noticed this article in Haaretz today. The daughter of two survivors of the Shoa, one Sephardi and the other Ashkenazi, she has clearly devoted her life to truth telling in the matter of systemic Israeli abuse of the Palestinian people. She has lived for long periods in Gaza and Ramallah. My. My. I am impressed. pl
In 2014 she was to attend a conference, but was quietly asked to leave Ramallah’s Birzeit University that enforces an institutional law banning Israeli Jews from its campus, they asked Amira Hass to leave. ….One of the university lecturers explained to Hass that “it is important for students to have a safe space where (Jewish) Israelis are not entitled to enter.”
“If I had known about the existence of such a law, I wouldn’t have come to the conference,” she wrote, adding, however, that she “did not take it personally” that she was asked to leave for being an Israeli Jew.
“I understand the emotional need of Palestinians to create a safe space that is off-limits to citizens of the state that denies them their rights and has been robbing them of their land,” Hass declared.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/haaretz-writer-booted-from-palestinian-school-because-shes-israeli/
Our local university’s library is named after James Michener, who is the author of the the historical novel about the ship, The Exodus, and its relocation of Holocaust survivors to Palestine.
I was fourteen when I first saw the gut-wrenching documentary of the Holocaust after Hitler’s attempt to eliminate all Jews.
At that age and time, I saw the resettlement of Jews into Palestine as a good thing because of Hitler’s attempt to eradicate Jews from Germany, and maybe the world if he had won.
I am now, of course, quite conflicted about the issue in regard to Palestine. My own ethnic group escaped Russia as their farms were being confiscated by the Bolsheviks and used in the Bolsheviks’ failed experiments of factory and communal farming.
Our families don’t now long to return there. Russia had been “Mother Russia.” America came to be “The Good Stepmother.”
I’ve come to the conclusion that since many of the Jewish people had lived for years elsewhere for a long time, it is not necessarily their right to move back and upset things as they are in Palestine now.
Christianity has now generally given up its old prejudices about the Jewish people’s guilt for Christ’s crucifixion. We embrace the Old Testament as well as the New Testament and so feel a closeness in some regard to the Jewish people. But that does not mean we should always support them in this effort to reshape Palestine to their liking.
As a literature major I understood that “the wandering Jew” theme in Western literature came about because for a long time Christians blamed the Jews for Christ’s crucifixion.
Times and myths and beliefs have a way of evolving. The people of Israel need to accept the new era and find a way to live peacefully with the Palestinians.
I had the pleasure of meeting Amira in Jerusalem. She is truly most the most courageous of the Israeli journalists sympathetic to the Palestinians. In fact, she lived in the occupied territories at one point. Perhaps she still does.
The author of Exodus, one which the famous film was based, was Leon Uris.
J
A while back there was a young reporter of Iranian extraction posted in Jerusalem from the United States.
Looking for a place to live, she found an apartment to share with two other young American women.
One of those American women, studying to be a Rabbi, stated that she did not feel comfortable with a Muslim in this place.
The Horses of Religious War have fled the barn, it will be decades before those flames could be put out.
jane Gaffney
It says in the article that she lives in Ramallah and has done so for a long time.
For more than a decade, the IDF has deemed it illegal for Israel Jews to be in the occupied West Bank.
“It’s illegal; the IDF prohibits Israeli Jews from entering Palestinian cities in the West Bank.”
Ramallah is in West Bank.
Birzeit is in Ramallah.
https://www.jpost.com/magazine/an-israeli-living-in-ramallah-453698
https://www.haaretz.com/1.5150353
-30-
Jim
It seems that they are afraid to arrest her.
With respect, Diana Croissant, Exodus, “the film and novel by Leon Uris on which it was based,” is fiction calculated to appeal to emotion, particularly the emotions of a 14 year old.
Over the years, Hollywood has produced Booster shots to keep those impressions alive and active; a kind of vaccine that wards off infections that might lead you or others to view present behavior of Israeli zionists toward Palestine and wonder whether the leopard might have had those nasty spots all along.
Have you challenged the narrative based on the images implanted in a 14 year old? Do you still think that “Hitler attempted to eliminate the Jews?”
My son’s mother always joked that whenever the US govt. pressured the Israelis to take their knee off the Palestinian neck, all the networks would show “Exodus” again.
On another note, it’s ironic that Israel has carte blanche from the United States to pursue the creation of “Bantustans” in occupied territory. While South Africa tried that (and would have succeeded) but they failed due to international pressure and I think we know that “International pressure” comes from the United States first and foremost. Not OK for white South Africans to have an apartheid state. but quite OK for Israeli Jews to do it to Arabs. Now South Africa will soon be “Weiss Menschenrein”. What a strange world we live in where it’s only contradictory if you think it is.
A. Pols
Or “Schindler’s List.”
As a reader of Amira Hess’s articles (and of the responses to it) in Hebrew in Haaretz, I can tell you that she is unambiguously a woman of the Left – indeed, of the far Left.
Does this knowledge, i.e. the fact that she is to be classed politically with the “Marxist scum” you inveigh against, alter or qualify your view of her courage and truth-telling, Col. Lang ?
DMR
Not a bit. she is your problem, not ours.
All caps BABAK MAKKINEJAD,
That’s a lovely story. Had you bothered to check, an American Jewish female studying to become a rabi in Jerusalem, is code for ultra liberal. You also shouldn’t have personalized the reporter by making her of Iranian origin. Also, when you talk about religious wars, you probably mean Sunni vs. Shia, right?
Now, I’m sure you will join me and call for a free Kurdistan, Baluchistan and a slew of other minorities that are under the thumb of imperialist Iran
The Jewish victory is still not quit total. If they do get to annex the area along the Jordan river. The Palestinians will have no access to any water not under Jewish control.
The Israeli settlements are built on top of the West Bank groundwater resources and as we can see in this article they can control all water flowing down to the Palestinian cities. Turn Palestine into a desert and force the Palestinians to leave or die of thirst. We are seen an similar policy in Gaza.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/west-bank-israel-water/2020/09/24/a607c854-f2d3-11ea-8025-5d3489768ac8_story.html
The creeping genocide of the Palestinian people is not a left – right issue.
Colonel Lang:
1. nb: I’m not Israeli.
2. In what way is Amira Hass a “problem”, for Israelis ?
3. By definition all “commies” are obtuse fanatics, contemptibly detached from reality. Or so I thought? Yet you admire her.
Please explain.
dmr “nb?” You haven’t learned that I will not accept a schoolmaster’s attitude from correspondents? You will not be here long. Yes, I see you are Canadian. What a surprise! Are you also an Israeli citizen? From long experience of them, I know that most Israelis detest and despise Palestinians. They do everything they can to avoid associating with them. The number of Israeli Jews who have any capability in Arabic is miniscule. That includes the people in the IDF and police who are engaged with Palestinian affairs. Haaretz is to be praised for employing someone who is so pro-Palestinian. I am opposed to toleration of Communists and their supporters (like you) who are a danger to the world and to my country. She is not that and her other characteristics in the context of Palestine make her admirable for me.
A fair reply, Colonel Lang. You have my respect though politically speaking the like of you and I are irreconcilably opposed. I will say however, across the gulf that separates us, that you are dead right about the near-universal ignorance of Arabic amongst Israel’s security apparatus not to mention the populace at large. It is contemptible (if understandable given that Israel has become an armed ghetto), and speaks volumes. And since you read Haaretz in English, you’ll surely be in agreement with me about the quality of its reporting. I rate it one of the best newspapers anywhere, on a par with the Guardian and Der Spiegel.
b.t.w. I am not (thank God) an Israeli citizen and never have been one.
Cofer:
I cannot join your call for a free Kurdistan, Baluchistan and a slew of other minorities….
Kurds & Baluchis will starve to death outside of Iran.
Are you going to pay for their up-keep? I think not.
As for imperialism, that is entirely a Western conception.
You see, the Great King, a Zoroastrian, created the Universal Empire – based on Morality & Religion, and Justice for All; which inspired all the subsequent imperialists of the “future” who used the Great King’s structures to extract booty from the subjected people.
All caps BABAK MAKKINEJAD, “Kurds & will starve to death outside of Iran.”
Brilliant, using your ‘logic’ Israel is feeding Palestinians, oh wait, better yet, the Palestinians claim the land of Israel because they would like to feed the Jewish inhabitants.
I can see clearly now.
As they say in the language of thw people that conquered you, “Fantasyah”
Cofer
Life is tough, get used to it.
I have just begun reading the Amira Haas book, “Drinking the Sea at Gaza.” It is a masterpiece, with equal qualities of meticulous insights and grand humanity.
There is no shortage of documentation as well as literary works about the expulsion of Arabs from their villages, include one by novelist S. Yizhar, Khirbet Khizeh, written in 1949 about a platoon doing just that. A more gruesome tale of the conquest is the fictional recounting of an incident in the Negev, written by novelist Adiana Shibli entitled Minor Detail. For a comprehensive view of the whole operation, there is Ilan Pappe’s Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, which goes into the politics as well as actions involved, with Ben Gurion’s project front and center.
A 2017 Israeli law declares all of historic Palestine to be their Jewish state, to include the disenfranchisement of Arabs, whether in the Occupied Territories or within the Green Line. Aggressive actions taken against the Bedouins, stripping them of their lands despite the fact that they serve in the Army is one of the most dramatic. Their crops were burnt by the IDF just before the annual harvest. It is a tragic situation.