On fuel – Amira Hass in Haaretz:
‘The friend who called Friday began crying right after saying hello. 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 has seen and experienced a great deal in her 70 years: poverty and hope in the refugee camps; wars; women and children killed by Israel; children in dance and art groups; young adults who adhered to the armed struggle; siege, displacement and exile. She joined the PLO long before Hamas was established.
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.’
(…)
‘Someone I don't know personally, the son of Holocaust survivors, wrote words of encouragement to me: "You don't give a pass to us Israelis who want more than anything to deny that the Palestinians are human beings like us. .. We have become Sodom."
A displaced woman I don't know, who had lived in one of the neighborhoods in Gaza City that we have already destroyed, wrote this to me: "We're in a UN Relief and Works Agency school [in the central Gaza Strip). I need diapers and milk for my daughters: One is 18 months old and the other is 3 months. A month and a half ago, when we obeyed instructions and went south, my husband was detained [as part of the IDF mass detentions of Palestinians in the Strip]. I have not heard from him since. Now maybe we'll go to Rafah [in the southern Strip, at the border with Egypt]."
A reader calling himself Gilis commented on my article [in Haaretz Hebrew; publication of the English version is pending] about some 1,800 Palestinian families in the Gaza Strip who have lost multiple members in Israeli airstrikes: "Wow, I'm really enjoying reading your articles lately – the suffering and the pain of this rotten people is my fuel. The greater their sadness, the greater is my optimism for a better future. In their death we shall be comforted."’
Read the article here.
War, the struggle, propaganda don’t leave much room for the notion that the time that annihilation and humiliation of the enemy was the solution to most of your problems has passed.
Of course, there are citizens in Israel and most probably also in Gaza and on the West Bank who realize that the neighbor is not going to disappear, but propaganda and war and death are great desensitizers.
And probably we should not be too proud of our sensitivity. Even though it’s laudable when we start a book club in Barcelona, Seattle, Berlin or Birmingham where we read Israeli and Palestinian authors almost at the same time.
The artist Renzi Martens made an interesting movie about Congo called ‘Enjoy Poverty’.
It’s time for another movie or video installation art called ‘Enjoy Cruelty’. As a postscript to our book clubs.