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Robert Fisk and Israeli journalist Amira Hass walk alongside a section of ‘The Wall’ at the West Bank (Nelofer Pazira) ( )<\/em>
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Show me something that will shock me, I told Amira Hass. So Israel\u2019s only journalist in the Palestinian West Bank \u2013 or Palestine, if you still believe in so unorthodox a word \u2013 took me down a road outside Ramallah that I remember as a highway which led to Jerusalem. But now, just over a hill, it deteriorates into a half tarmac road, a set of closed, rusting shop doors, and garbage. The same old summer smell of raw sewage creeps up the road. It lies, green and gentle, in a pool at the bottom of the wall.Or The Wall. Or, for more cautious scribes, the \u201cSecurity Wall\u201d. Or, for more squeamish souls, the \u201cSecurity Barrier\u201d. Or for even more slovenly pens, just the \u201cBarrier\u201d. Or, if you\u2019re really worried about the political implications, the \u201cFence\u201d.\u00a0The Fence \u2013 like the friendly wooden posts and crossbeams you might find along the edge of a field. Or \u2013 if you really want to frighten the TV editors and anger the Israelis \u2013 the \u201cSegregation Wall\u201d\u00a0or even the \u201cApartheid Wall\u201d. Why, soon we will be talking about the Palestinian \u201cBantustans\u201d that lie cut off by The Wall and the Israelis-only roads, and the vast empire of Jewish settlements\u00a0on Arab lands.Trust Amira to start the ball rolling. The phrase \u201cPalestinian Bantustan\u201d litters her angry digression as she takes me around the Palestinian enclaves of the West Bank and, after an hour or two, the Wall:\u00a0towering 26 feet above us, stern, monstrous in its determination, curling and snaking between apartment blocks, and skulking in wadis and twisting back on itself until you have two walls one after the other, a double wall but the same wall such are the Alpine twists of this creature. You\u00a0shake your head for a moment when \u2013 suddenly, through some miscalculation, surely \u2013 there is no wall at all but a shopping street or a bare hillside of scrub and rock. And then the massive colonial project of Israel\u2019s settlements, all green trees and red-roofed houses and neat roads and, yes, more walls and barbed wire fences and yet bigger walls. And then the beast itself.\u00a0The Wall.But the section of The Wall to which Amira Hass takes me \u2013 tourist guide and analyst of Israeli society, she admits, do not go together \u2013 is a truly miserable place. Not as epic as Dante. Maybe a war correspondent could better describe the place. It\u2019s the old road from Ramallah to Jerusalem, lined with lost wealth and forgotten hopes and once-loved homes which now end, of course, at The Wall. \u201cNow if this is not shocking, I don\u2019t know what shocking\u00a0is,\u201d Amira says. \u201cIt\u2019s a destruction of people\u2019s life \u2013 it\u2019s the end of the world. See here? We go straight to Jerusalem. Not now. This was a busy road and you can see here how people invested in homes with a little bit of grace, the strength of the houses, the stone. Look at the Hebrew signs \u2013 because these Palestinians used to have so many Israeli customers. Even the name \u2018carpenter\u2019\u00a0is in Hebrew.\u201dBut almost all the shops are closed, the houses shuttered, weeds and dry sticks along the broken kerb. The graffiti are pitiful, the sun merciless, the sky so caked with heat that the grey of the wall sometimes merges into the grey stone of the sky. \u201cIt is pathetic,\u201d Amira Hass says, without emotion. \u201cThis place \u2013 I\u2019ve always been showing it to people; always, you know, probably a hundred times already, and it never stops shocking me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
srael razes West Bank homes of Palestinian attackers<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The sewage, once you get used to it, is somehow appropriate. It\u2019s like a place where imagination has dried up, leaving only a grim little pool behind, the green all the brighter because The Wall is acquiring the patina of age.The silence is not oppressive \u2013 as it might be in a novel \u2013 but it demands an answer. What does The Wall say to us, I ask Amira? \u201cI think what it tells me\u2026\u201d she begins. \u201cBecause it realises it cannot drive the Palestinians away, it has to hide them. It has to conceal them from our eyes. Some might go out to work over there for Jews. And this is seen as doing them\u00a0a favour. Israelis do not enter, because for Israelis, we don\u2019t need these areas \u2013 we don\u2019t need it \u2013 this is garbage \u2013 this is sewage. The Wall is about how strong is the need to be pure \u2013 and how many people participated in this act of violence? They say it\u2019s because of the suicide attacks, but the legal and bureaucratic infrastructure for this separation existed before The Wall. So The Wall is a kind of graphic or plastic or tangible expression of laws of separation that existed before.\u201dAnd this is an Israeli who is speaking to me, the tough, unremitting daughter of a Bosnian Partisan mother who had to give herself up to the Gestapo and a Jewish Romanian Holocaust survivor, and whose socialism, I think, has given her a hard, Marxist courage.She might not agree, but I think of her as a child of the Second World War, even though she was born 11 years after Hitler\u2019s death. She guesses she has only between 100 and 500\u00a0Israeli readers left;\u00a0thank God, say many of us, that her newspaper, Haaretz<\/em>, still exists.Amira\u2019s mother, on her way from the train station to Bergen-Belsen in 1944, was struck by the German housewives who came to look at the trail of distraught prisoners, of how the German women \u201cwatched from the side\u201d.\u00a0Amira Hass, I suspect, will never watch from the side. She has grown used to the hate and abuse from her own people. But she is a realist.\u201cLook, we cannot ignore that for a certain period, [The Wall] did serve the immediate role of security,\u201d she says. And she is right. The Palestinian campaign of suicide bombing was cut short. But The Wall was also a machine for expansion; it crept forward onto Arab land which was no more a part of the state of Israel than the vast colonies now holding around 400,000 Jews across the West Bank. Not yet, at any rate.Amira wears round spectacles which make her look a bit like one of those dentists we have all met who study with sorrow and cynicism and a certain depression the terrible state of our teeth. She writes like that. She has just finished a long article for Haaretz<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 it will be published two days later, a ferocious dissection of the 1993 Oslo agreement which comes close to proving that the Israelis never intended the \u201cpeace\u201d\u00a0agreement to provide the Palestinians with statehood.\u00a0\u201cThe reality of the Palestinian Bantustans, reservations or enclaves,\u201d she writes on the gloomy 25th anniversary of the Oslo agreement, \u201cis a fact on the ground\u2026nowhere was it stated that the goal was the establishment of a Palestinian state in the territory occupied in 1967, contrary to what the Palestinians, many people in the Israeli peace camp at that time and the European countries had concluded.\u201d In Haaretz<\/em>, Amira says, \u201cthe problem is the copy editors \u2013 I call them the kids \u2013 change every couple of years and each time they ask me: \u2018How do you know Oslo was not about peace?\u2019\u2026Now the paper is proud because they have someone who got it right. Twenty years ago they thought I was a lunatic.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n The Hass tour continues around what she refers to as \u201cthe five-star prison\u201d. We pause above the city of Ramallah, temporary pseudo-capital of the Palestinian state-that-isn\u2019t. She imagines \u2013 she often does this \u2013 an alien arriving in the West Bank from outer space. The alien, she says, would notice that Palestinian homes have black water tanks on the roof \u2013 because their water comes in quotas from the Palestinian Authority \u2013 while the Jewish settlements have a mains supply. \u201cThey don\u2019t need to worry.\u201d The hilltop settlements \u2013 \u201cso lush, so tempting, it has very good air\u201d \u2013 have red, sloping, European style roofs. Now the richer Palestinian families are imitating the red roofs of their occupiers.\u00a0Amira Hass\u2019s alien appears again. \u201cIt sees a sprawling city [Ramallah], fancy buildings\u2026you have cinemas here and shops and businesses. Look at the cars along there. Our out-of-space alien, he\u2019d say: \u2018What\u2019s the problem? Why are you complaining about the occupation?\u2019 So the problem is that you have an illusion that you are not under occupation in this narrow space, in a caged place, in this five-star prison\u2026The contours, the borders, are very clear. But people within the borders have got used to some kind of normalcy that is very hard for them to give up now.\u201cBasically, they know that if they engage in another wave of resistance, they might lose even this \u2013 even the little that they have, this normalcy\u2026One of the best proofs to me that there is some kind of normalcy is the Palestinians who are Israeli citizens who come every weekend to this Palestinian Bantustan to escape Israeli racism and the arrogance they face on a daily basis inside Israel \u2013 and they come here to escape it, to be in an all-Palestinian ambience.\u201dThe analysis is harsh and not without historical distance. \u201cThe Palestinians know this is not independence. But right now they make the calculation that this is not worthwhile. During the last two or three years, when some young men were engaged in stabbing attacks and there were some students who went to the checkpoints here to clash with the Israeli\u00a0army, people felt for them emotionally. But you didn\u2019t see the masses coming out to confront the army. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Now, it\u2019s not fear, it\u2019s not the Palestinian police who have stopped them. Right now, with the Palestinians split between Hamas and Fatah, Palestinians at the bottom of their political \u2018savviness\u2019, and with America \u2013 Trump \u2013 all of this, there is no reason to sacrifice yourself for nothing.\u201d\u00a0Journalist Amira Hass suspects she has \u2018between 100 and 500\u2019 Israeli readers remaining (Nelofer Pazira)She drives on, past a military base where she points out the words \u2013 in English \u2013 spray-painted on a wall. \u201cJews did 9\/11.\u201d\u00a0With such words, could the Palestinians incriminate their society more utterly in the eyes of the West? But there are other graffiti. In a tiny Palestinian village perhaps two hundred metres from the Jewish settlement of Beit El \u2013 cameras pointing outwards along its fence \u2014 she points to the words spray-painted onto the wall of a Palestinian home after settlers raided the village. \u201cJudea and Samaria,\u201d\u00a0it says in Hebrew, referring to the West Bank. \u201cBlood will be shed.\u201d Aisha Fara shows us the roof of her home, where her solar glass has been shattered by tiny stones \u2013 fired from a slingshot by religious students, she says, just three days earlier \u2013 and despite her 74 years, she doesn\u2019t mince her words. I work out silently that she was born in the original mandate Palestine in 1944, the same year Amira Hass\u2019s mother was sent to Bergen-Belsen.\u201cThe thieves came before sunset,\u201d Fara\u00a0says of the stone-throwers. \u201cThey burned our trees three times. But thieves do not remain forever. And the people scattered all over will return to their homes, God willing\u2026 You ask me who they [the settlers] are? You sent them. You have it all in your cameras\u2026 I want the American pigs to hear \u2013 we are not Red Indians!\u201d Amira listens carefully. \u201cFor her, history is like a long, long, long chain of expulsion,\u201d she says of Aisha Fara. \u201cThese are things you stop writing about. Normalcy again.\u201dThis, I think, has affected Amira Hass, the way in which a newspaper story falls away once it is has become a daily event. Stone-throwing, burning, another colonisation. And the privileges of being an Israeli citizen are ever present. \u201cIn a way, when we were bombed, it was easier because I was with everyone. This is something I can feel \u2013 the fear of bombs, of course, I share it. But closure, for example, this is something I cannot understand. I cannot really grasp it. For me a wall is just something ugly on the way to Jerusalem. But for Palestinians, it is the end of the world. When I go to Jerusalem, I cannot tell my neighbours that I go there \u2013 I\u2019m shy. I\u2019m embarrassed\u2026because for them, Jerusalem is like the moon.\u201dSo will she live all the rest of her life among the Palestinians of the West Bank, the only Israeli reporter on the sharp end of the story? \u201cI never thought I\u2019d live in El-Bireh, but it\u2019s now the town I\u2019ve lived in longer than any other place,\u201d she replies. \u201cI never planned it \u2013 but that\u2019s what happened. And I know that if something happens \u2013 if I have to leave, either because I stop working or the Israelis tell me to go or the Palestinians tell me to go, whatever, I will never be able to go back and live in a purely Jewish neighbourhood. I\u2019ll have to go to Acre or Haifa\u2026 In Haifa, you have Palestinians.\u201dAs I turn to go back to Jerusalem, to the \u201cmoon\u201d, I thank Amira Hass for her lecture tour, academic as well as journalistic and \u2014 in the eyes of her Israeli non-readers \u2013 a commentary as appalling as the hate-mail they have sent her. \u201cI have a tendency to say to people what they don\u2019t want to hear,\u201d she says. She sounds like a journalist to me. And I understand at once that she will never watch from the side .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is the old road from Ramallah to Jerusalem, lined with lost wealth and forgotten hopes and once-loved homes. They all now end, of course, at The Wall Robert Fisk in Bir Naballa, West Bank | @indyvoices | Thursday 20 September 2018 14:45 | Robert Fisk and Israeli journalist Amira Hass walk alongside a section …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jahalin.org\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4705"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jahalin.org\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jahalin.org\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jahalin.org\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jahalin.org\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4705"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.jahalin.org\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4705\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4707,"href":"https:\/\/www.jahalin.org\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4705\/revisions\/4707"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jahalin.org\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4705"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jahalin.org\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4705"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jahalin.org\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4705"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}