by Robert Fisk
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Girl and the Child and Love
Blood and destruction shall be so in use,
And dreadful objects so familiar,
That mothers shall but smile when they behold
Their infants quarter’d with the hands of war,
All pity chok’d with custom of fell deeds.
—Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, III, i, 265–72
WHENEVER AMIRA HASS TRIES to explain her vocation as an Israeli journalist— as a journalist of any nationality—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 ten days in the train from Yugoslavia. They were sick and some were dying by the road. 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 me through wire-framed glasses as she speaks, to see if I have understood 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 Yassir Arafat’s 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.
It is the summer of 2001. Amira Hass is sitting on the windowsill of my colleague Phil Reeves’s home in Jerusalem and behind her the burnished dome of the Al-Aqsa mosque glitters in the sunlight. Yet she lives not in Jerusalem but in 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—which makes her among the bravest of reporters. Her daily column in Ha’aretz blazes with indignation at the way her own country, Israel, is mistreating and killing the Palestinians. Only when I meet her, however, do I 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.”
If only, I kept thinking, the American journalists who report in so craven a fashion from the Middle East—so fearful of Israeli criticism that they turn Israeli murder into “targeted attacks” and illegal settlements into “Jewish neighborhoods”—could listen to Amira Hass. She writes each day an essay about despair, a chronological narrative that she does not abandon when talking about her own life. She begins at the beginning, her mother a Sarajevo Jew who joined Tito’s partisans, who was forced to surrender to the Nazis when they threatened to kill every woman in the Montenegrin town of Cetinje, her father Avraham spending four years in the Transnistria ghetto in the Ukraine, escaping a plague of typhus that killed up to 50 per cent of the Jews, only to lose his toes to frostbite.
“When he came to Israel as a communist activist after the war, he was involved in lots of strikes and demonstrations. In the early Fifties, the Israeli police arrested him and he was brought before a judge who demanded to know why he’d refused to give his fingerprints. My father put his feet without toes on the desk of His Honour the Judge and said: ‘I have already given my fingerprints.’ ” Avraham, Amira Hass says, combined a strong Jewish and secular identity; he was a socialist but never a Zionist.
The story of Hannah and Avraham is essential to an understanding of Amira. They fought for their right to be equal in the Jewish diaspora and had wanted to stay in the lands of Europe which had turned into mass graves. “Many of these people returned to their countries after the war—and the inhabitants there accepted the ordeal of the Jews far too easily. My mother went back to Belgrade as part of [Milovan] Djilas’s [communist] group. It was a new regime in Yugoslavia. But when she went to register as a citizen of Belgrade, the woman clerk said: ‘But you emigrated.’ You see, the Germans had deported her and they always officially recorded that their deportees had ‘emigrated.’ The clerk took the Germans at their word.” It was a common experience. Amid total destruction—in which entire families had been extinguished by the Nazis—the vacuum created by the Jewish Holocaust was too much to bear.
“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 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 Nazism and the attitude of the European left to the Jewish 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 newsdesk 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 only been three months with the paper.
“When I’d gone to Romania before, I felt I had this philosophical responsibility to taste life under this socialist regime. It was a thousand times worse than I imagined. There was this terrible pressure—life under Israeli occupation is not as bad as life under 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’ Hot-line,” 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 and self-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 Jabaliya camp, sitting on a beach, looking at the waves. I asked them what they were doing. And one said he was ‘waiting to be forty 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 Isr
aeli occupation system, a kind of pre-emptive strike. 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 only come 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. 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 death-camp overseer for the Nazis] in my first incarnation. Then I’ll get an email saying: ‘Bravo, you have written a great article—Heil Hitler!’ Someone told me they hoped I had 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 in the spring of 2001, Amira Hass was fearful that she would be trapped by the Israeli siege of Ramallah—where she still lives—and spent hours commuting the few miles to Jerusalem to be with her. Now she is alone. The woman who taught her to despise those who were “looking from the side” died just two months before we met. Yet for journalists who try to tell the truth about the world’s last colonial war, Hass remains an inspiration. She lectures in America, turns up on countless radio talk shows and interviews, her inexhaustible reporting ever more astute and passionate. How typical that it should be a Jewish woman who writes more eloquently than any other reporter about the Palestinians. How admirable that it should be a Jewish woman, an older but equally committed New York Jew, who can fight for justice for the Lebanese civilians whose lives were destroyed in Israel’s “Grapes of Wrath” bombardment of southern Lebanon in 1996, whose own research work into the Qana massacre should be far superior to anything written by an Arab author.
When Eva Stern’s grandfather Aaron Hersh climbed off the transport at Auschwitz extermination camp in 1944, along with her mother Hannah and two aunts from their ultra-orthodox Jewish family, he was still holding his prayer shawl. “A Polish prisoner warned him he’d die if he didn’t hand it over, but he refused,” Eva Stern says. “Then a German officer ordered my grandfather to give the shawl to him while he was waiting in line for selection for the gas chambers. He again refused. So he shot my grandfather in the head. That’s how he died.”
In the warmth of a Manhattan hotel lobby, Stern speaks quickly, in an almost subdued voice, recalling the terrible story which her mother told her of the family’s journey from Czechoslovakia to Auschwitz. “She was only seventeen and tried to save one of her sister’s children by holding it in her arms. But another prisoner snatched it away and gave it back to her sister—because they would all die if Mengele saw both women with a child. So her sister and her children were all selected to die. And my mother lived. At least seventy members of her family were murdered. She was taken to Ravensbruck concentration camp and was eventually liberated by the Red Army. The incident with the child had the greatest impact on her. I can honestly say that my mother hasn’t slept for fifty years.” But it is the death of her grandfather Aaron Hersh—a Talmudic scholar by the age of twenty who was shot after refusing to surrender his tallit—that has marked Eva Stern’s life.
With anger painfully suppressed, she opens a thick file on the seat beside her. Entitled Israel’s Operation “Grapes of Wrath” and the Qana Massacre, it is her own work, a compilation of news reports and photographs of Israel’s 1996 bombardment in which more than 170 civilians were killed, 106 of them at Qana, 55 of them children. Stern flicks her finger in fury at one of the pictures; it shows Israeli soldiers standing in front of their battle tanks on the Lebanese border. The caption reads: “Israeli soldiers briefly halt their shelling to commemorate Holocaust Day.” And Stern looks at me so that I can see the extent of her fury.
“What would my grandfather say of this?” she asks. “What were those Israelis thinking as they were putting on their prayer shawls? Were they praying: ‘Father who art in heaven, help me to kill as many Arabushim as possible’? Do they now have a right to kill without any guilt?” Arabushim—a racist term for Arabs in the Hebrew language—was later used in an Israeli newspaper interview by one of the artillerymen who fired into the UN base at Qana. Stern has included an English translation of the interview from Kol Ha’ir in her file, a set of documents that she has sent to the UN, to the Lebanese delegation to the UN, and to the most prominent American journalists in New York. She hoped to persuade the latter to mark the first anniversary of the Qana massacre. Her sense of outrage is as brave as it is lonely; although many American Jews are troubled by the behaviour of Israel’s right-wing government and the bloody adventures in which Israel has been involved in Lebanon and in “Palestine,” most do not take kindly to Stern’s concern for the truth to be told. But she is unremitting:
My feelings started slowly. I always had a problem with unquestioned obedience to authority—that’s why I always got into trouble in class. And when I thought about the atrocities committed by the Israelis, I felt that as an American taxpayer and an American Jew, I had an obligation to speak out. If ordinary Germans living under total oppression can be held responsible for the crimes committed by the Nazis—because they did not speak out—how much more responsible are we who live in a country where we have the freedom to speak out? If ordinary Germans were guilty for not speaking out, then surely we are also guilty in remaining silent about Qana. Because we don’t live in fear of death squads. What I am doing is not courageous—it is the decent thing to do. If enough decent Germans had spoken out at the time, perhaps the Holocaust would not have happened. I’m not saying that the level of atrocities committed by the Israelis is on the same scale or in any way comparable to those of the Nazis. Of course not. But I know that I have paid as a taxpayer for the shells that rained down on Qana. And therefore if I’m silent, I’m no better than those Germans. Israel claims to be the representative of the Jewish people. It’s important for people to know that they clearly do not speak for world Jewry. They clearly do not speak for me. So I have a duty to speak out.
A secretary in a Manhattan corporate law firm—she was educated in an ultra-orthodox Brooklyn girls’ school—Eva Stern was encouraged in her campaign by Noam Chomsky, that most irascible and brilliant of America’s philosophers and linguists, and by the work of former Warsaw Ghetto survivor Israel Shahak, whose history of Israel she quotes by heart. “He wrote that ‘any support of human rights in general by a Jew which does not include the support
of human rights of non-Jews whose rights are being violated by the “Jewish state” is as deceitful as the support of human rights by a Stalinist.’ That really influenced me.”
Stern’s father, Chaim, was a Hungarian Jew who also survived the concentration camps. “My mother was his cousin and he married her in 1949. I was born seven years later. My parents are still alive and know my feelings about Israeli atrocities. They are sort of ambivalent about it. They believe I’m right in condemning it. But because of what they went through, they believe all the world is anti-Semitic. So when there’s a terrorist attack against the Israelis, they are unable to see it in the context of the Arab–Israeli dispute. I strongly condemn any terrorist attack. But my parents see it in terms of ‘the Arabs are anti-Semitic and that’s why there’s a terrorist attack.’ I refuse to condemn my parents for these feelings. They see all Germans, for example, as Nazis—because in their experience, they only met Nazis. And for most Palestinians, the only Jews they know of are the oppressors. The Palestinians in the refugee camps . . . probably never met a decent, moral Jew.”
But Eva Stern’s attempt to persuade American journalists to mark the anniversary of the Qana slaughter met with little more than indifference. Not a single major mainstream American newspaper carried a paragraph—not even a brief news report—on the UN-attended ceremony held in Lebanon to mark the first anniversary of the bloodbath. Unlike Eva Stern, American journalists remained silent. So did her bosses. The house magazine of her Manhattan corporate law firm encourages employees to write about their interests and out-of-hours work. Stern wrote a passionate account of her inquiries into Qana—and into the 1982 massacre of Palestinians at Sabra and Chatila. An official of the firm later declined to publish her article—on the grounds that it was “sensitive” and “might be misunderstood.”
Not long after I met Eva Stern, a letter arrived in my mail in Beirut from Nezar Hindawi. Remember the name? Hindawi was the Palestinian who on 17 April 1986 gave his unsuspecting and pregnant Irish girlfriend Anne-Marie Murphy a bomb to take on board an El Al jet at London Heathrow Airport. The 1.5 kilograms of Semtex would have destroyed the aircraft, killing all on board, including the young chambermaid who fondly believed that Hindawi would be arriving in Israel a few days later to marry her. After seeking the protection of Syrian security men in London, he decided to give himself up. At the Old Bailey six months later, he was given forty-five years in prison, the longest sentence in British criminal history.