An extract from Drinking the Sea at Gaza : Days and Nights in a Land under Siege, by Amira Hass appears in Tell Me No Lies : Investigative Journalism and its Triumphs, edited by John Pilger. Amira Hass is an Israeli correspondent regarded as the most courageous reporter of occupied Palestine. The injustices she reports in Gaza in the 1990s literally take your breath away.
Why should I be so concerned? Why cannot I be like most of Hass's Israeli readers, among the best of them, who read one of her items, have their breath taken away, but then put the knowledge aside and get on with their lives? Of course we do get on with our lives, we have to, but surely the putting aside is a consciously wilful action. We are choosing not to have a response. We are choosing to be an unresponsive bystander. This is the role the New Zealand media plays in relation to Gaza.
Amira learned from her mother the evil of the unresponsive bystander when being transferred from cattle truck to concentration camp German women stood on the side just looking. (Her father and mother survived, went to Israel where they refused to accept a house offered them which had been taken from Palestinians).
I am afflicted with an inner compulsion to react to injustice, to bullies. It is involuntary and I cannot put it aside. I do not know why injustice in the Middle East affects me more than in other parts of the world. I fully realise that the victim in this life may be the bully in the next. So why can I not say to myself: why worry? I wish I could. I dare say all those magnificent investigative journalists wish they could. All those people involved with human rights.
Amira Hass, choosing to live among the Palestinians, details the military and bureacratic inhumanity and torment they are subjected to. They are unable to live normally. Suffice to say that in the 10 - 15 years since it has become abundantly clear that Israel intends giving the Palestinians nothing and the only reason it insists upon a moderate Palestinian leader is because he will be amenable to management and the perpetuation of occupation and oppression.
The life of Gazans states Hass is synonymous with mass internment and suffocating constriction. One Gazan joke is that you can get an exit permit if you are about to die. Another joke is that only the roll call is missing. (The point of this latter not seen or appreciated by many Jewish Israelis). Another piece of humour: It's a good thing the roads are in such bad shape - it takes a whole hour to get from one end of the Strip to the other and you don't notice how small it is. If you drive really slowly, say fifteen miles an hour, you can pretend that you're actually going a very long way".
Here I am standing on the sideline wondering what on earth can the Gazans do to have some notice taken of them. They are concentrated into a sealed camp and that mythical international community does not give a damn. What if they adopted a measure of mass demonstration by secretly making or having made a concentration camp uniform? And everyone, literally everyone, began walking about their daily business in these camp clothes?
In what way would Israel go ballistic? Would it mow everyone down with machine guns? Would it put everyone into prison? Would it drive them into the sea? Would it turn the level of deprivation from malnutrition to mass starvation? Would we see the Israeli army back in Gaza full-time administering every neighbourhood and instituting a morning roll call?
Would we international bystanders find ourselves looking into the Gaza camp at skeletons in camp uniforms, some crawling, some dying, some dead? The question has to be asked: does Israel actually know to what depth of fascism it is prepared to sink? Would it even see the irony?
Or would the real international community get the point and refuse to cooperate with the United States, which would of course be blaming the victims for their outrageous bad taste.
