Amira Hass on Gaza
Jan. 1, 2024
I wasn’t planning on sending out news updates while the fighting in Gaza was at a high pitch and is in the headlines of the major North American media outlets. Most people can only absorb a certain amount of news. I was also distraught by my niece’s abduction as a hostage in Gaza (she was released on November 29) and the death of her husband. By now, there has been so much human suffering of both Israelis and Palestinians that it’s a struggle to keep space in our hearts and souls to acknowledge the stories of every individual and family that we can know about as well as the many whose names we may never learn.
Amira Hass has been bravely doing that with her articles in Haaretz. For example, “Israel's Bombs Are Wiping Out Entire Palestinian Families in Gaza.”
Perhaps Amira’s article (publication information below), reporting on responses to those articles, will be a wakeup call to the American Jewish rabbis, intellectuals, and institutional leaders who have been reluctant to forthrightly criticize Israel’s current assault on the Gaza Strip. The majority of them, even self-designated liberals and progressives, have been saying that “good Jews” should accept, even if regretfully, that massive deaths and the destruction of Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip are required to secure a Jewish state in Israel/Palestine. Right-wingers want us, as Amira Hass’s reader does, to revel in it.
In 2021 Natan Sharansky and Gil Troy coined the term “un-Jews” for those who refuse this corrupt logic. They and other Israeli right-wingers and their North American acolytes have doubled down on this since October 7.
Distinguished Fellow in Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College and rabbi Shaul Magid, summarizing the argument of his new book, The Necessity of Exile, writes:
Are we to say that those progressive [anti-Zionist] Jews don’t care about the Jewish people as much as Zionists do? Are we to say that Judith Butler, Daniel Boyarin, Peter Beinart, and Noam Chomsky – and I, for that matter – are not deeply invested in the Jewish people? I don’t think so. Inquisitory tactics rarely bear fruit. They show weakness, not strength.
The Palestinian woman quoted in Amira Hass’s article below expressed a sensibility that may serve as a model for progressive Jews:
She read the New York Times investigation into the rape and brutality against women by Hamas gunmen and their adjuncts on October 7. "Tell me it's not true," she asked me, rhetorically, and continued: "I never dreamed there would be among us, the Palestinians, people and organizations for whom rape is part of the struggle. Where does this barbarism come from," she asked. "From the anti-depressants to which many young people have become addicted? From being imprisoned in a narrow territory and being cut off from the world? From fiery sermons? From porn sites? From the protruding rifles? From the approaching death? From all of it together?”...
She expressed her revulsion at the violence against civilians on October 7, when she still hoped that the reports of rape were untrue. From the barrage of invective that was hurled at her she, like other Palestinians, came to understand that public discussion of the heavy price the Hamas attack is exacting from the Palestinians themselves and of the limits to the struggle for liberation from Israeli oppression must be postponed. Right now, the Gaza Strip and its inhabitants are being shredded, and what's most important is to stop the fighting immediately.
Haaretz
Jan. 1, 2024
'I Enjoy Your Gaza Articles. The Suffering and Pain of This Rotten People Is My Fuel'
Killing, ruin, agony: To most Israelis, a suitable punishment
Palestinians displaced by the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip sit in their makeshift tent camp in the Muwasi area on December 31, 2023. Credit: Fatima Shbair /AP
Why should readers of Haaretz (and "Gilis" is not alone) be forbidden to say what Arabaffairs analysts are allowed to say on a live television broadcast? A Palestinian posting a similar comment, or one even less bloodthirsty, would certainly be arrested and tried for incitement, if not for calling for genocide. If a European, American or South African citizen were to write like that about Israelis, the diligent hunters of Jew haters would add his comment to their graphs showing an increase in antisemitism, and then be interviewed about it on every news program.
The facts are laid one next to another, like the bodies wrapped in sheets of white plastic that we don't see in our living rooms. Horizontally. Not one on top of the other, not one instead of the other. Hamas attacked, abducted and killed soldiers; it humiliated an army that considered itself invincible; it raped; it murdered and abducted unarmed civilians, including babies.
Thousands of families will bear their suffering forever. Armed Hamas men are now fighting on the soil of the Strip against Israeli soldiers, and occasionally firing rockets into Israel. Both armies are incurring losses. The Israel Defense Forces has already slain about 8,000 babies and children and more than 5,100 women, out of a total of about 21,000 Palestinian fatalities that have been recorded.
The number of elderly people slain by the IDF and the number of bodies that are still under the rubble are not yet known. Hundreds of thousands of families will bear their suffering forever, with more to come from the pilots and the operators of combat drones and bulldozers. In the Hebrew of President Isaac Herzog, this is "the war of the family of nations, of all those who seek justice, peace and liberty."
Most Israelis are saying: This is the appropriate punishment for the fact that one day the murderous Hamas expelled us from the Garden of Eden in which we lived. And I shall continue to say: expelled from the illusion that one can forever live in happiness and prosperity and safety and at the same time rule cruelly over an entire people and deprive it of life, freedom, space, land and hope in its own homeland.
'The suffering and pain of this rotten nation is my fuel,' one reader commented about my reports on Gaza Palestinians.