Amira Hass

Candy at the checkpoint

Amira Hass — 2007-09-07T05:17:00Z

The PA leaders, who represent a ruling class that is party to the negotiations for an enclave-state, are happy to receive the candy that Israel distributes to them and still do not comprehend why their people despise them.

It's noon on Thursday and Khaled, a lawyer, noticed immediately: The older soldier checking IDs at the Za'atra checkpoing - south of Nablus - is being nice to people. The soldier looked inside the car, saw the three children, smiled and gave them candy.

Khaled's first impulse was to refuse the sweets. Later he decided to give the soldier a break and not explain that the candy and the politeness do not alter the reality: this checkpoint, at the foothill of the sprawling settlement of Tapuah, is part of the whole complex of fences along roads, obstacles in side roads and dislocation of villages from their land and often isolating Palestinians living in the northern West Bank from the south. (...)

Too many authorities

Amira Hass — 2007-08-23T07:35:00Z

Not only are some 1.5 million Gaza residents living like prisoners in the largest jail in the world, but they are also subjected to daily attacks by Israel that leave them with more dead to bury. Two children were killed on Tuesday, and not only those suspected of firing Qassam rockets. And if there's no shelling, there's a short-term incursion, and dozens of people are arrested and undergo a day-long campaign of humiliation. (...)

- / Ha'aretz

Two lobbies defend the oppression

Amira Hass — 2006-11-10T11:05:00Z

There could not have been a worse time to release the Human Rights Watch report on violence against women within Palestinian families and society: yesterday, November 7, at the same time the Israeli army withdrew from Beit Hanun after a six-day assault that claimed 53 lives. At least 27 of those killed were unarmed civilians, including 10 children and two Red Crescent volunteers. Of the 200 or so people injured in the operation, there were at least 50 children and 46 women. In addition to the casualties, homes were destroyed and the water, electricity and road networks damaged. (...)

- / Ha'aretz

In the name of security, but not for its sake

Amira Hass — 2006-09-21T22:11:00Z

Six Palestinian churches in the West Bank and Gaza Strip suffered damage and arson attempts in reaction to the words of Pope Benedict XVI. Palestinian spokesmen of all stripes condemned these attacks and said that the Palestinian nation - Christians and Muslims alike - is one, and is united in its struggle against the occupation. Reports on the attacks in the Palestinian media described the perpetrators as "unknown." In the Palestinian subtext, "unknown" implies "of suspicious identity," a phrase that borders on a half-concealed accusation that Israel's Shin Bet security services sent agents provocateurs. (...)

- / Ha'aretz

The slippery slope of expulsion

Amira Hass — 2006-09-07T11:30:00Z

When a Civil Administration officer at the Beit El military base extended the tourist visa of Sam Bahour, a Palestinian-American businessman from Ramallah, and wrote on it "last permit," he did not do so on his own initiative. When the officer issued what amounts to a deportation order against Bahour from the city in which his family has lived for many generations, and in which he has lived for 14 years with his wife and two daughters, he was only the messenger.

When a border official at the Allenby Bridge two weeks ago denied entry to a Palestinian-Jordanian woman arriving with her husband, a young doctor from Ramallah, he was following orders. So were the border officials who did not allow the Spanish wife of R.I. from Ramallah to return with their two-year-old daughter, and those who prevented S.A., a Ramallah-born Palestinian with Swedish citizenship, from returning to his wife, children and livelihood in Bir Zeit. The official who twice denied entry to P.Z., a Palestinian-American who has invested $300 million in the territories and is a senior director of a Palestinian investment company, was also obeying new rules dictated by the Israeli Interior Ministry. (...)

- / Ha'aretz

Their power of endurance

Amira Hass — 2006-08-09T12:48:00Z

Hezbollah's Al-Manar television station would dismiss as feminine and sentimental the view that peoples don't win wars. Like other Arab analysts, they regard attacking Israeli civilians and engaging the IDF in fierce battles as an Arab victory. But where's the victory for the 1,000 Lebanese the Israeli army has killed? Where's the victory in a million people fleeing homes that were bombed and destroyed? Are such losses worthwhile just to demonstrate that a guerrilla group can entangle a regular army and expose such an Israeli weakness?

On the other hand, the non-victory of the other side is not an Israeli victory, even if Israel triples the number of Hezbollah fighters and doubles the number of Lebanese mothers that it has killed so far. Even if the Israeli Air Force wipes out a thousand villages, it would still not bring back to life the Israelis who were killed. (...)

- / Ha'aretz

Hungry and shell-shocked

Amira Hass — 2006-04-21T08:23:27Z

GAZA - Where will the next blow land? That is the question. Not if it will come, but rather when, and on whom will it land, and what kind will it be?

Five-year-old L. believes the solution is to sleep every night in his parents' bed, and in that way to be protected from the shelling. But even there he is not able to fall asleep because he is so worried and afraid. In the kindergarten in the yard outside the house, the children speak all the time about the "booms" that fill their day. Booms from the sea and booms from the land. Day and night. Sometimes three per minute, sometimes three per hour. Sometimes simultaneously from the land and from the sea. The air quivers, a flock of birds takes off in fear, and for a minute the silence of terror reigns. Are there casualties? Who, where, how many? If the parents succeed in hiding from their children pictures of the other children who have been killed or wounded by the shells, the older children fill in the gory details from what they saw on TV or read in the papers. They strengthen each other's fears. (...)

- / Ha'aretz

The uber-wardens

Amira Hass — 2006-04-12T11:51:00Z

The Israeli uber-wardens seem to have special fondness for meddling in Palestinian family life, and not only when one of the spouses is an Israeli citizen.

Two weeks ago, on Election Day, at 8 A.M., drivers wishing to leave Tul Karm from the eastern exit (toward Anabta) discovered that their permits were invalid. A soldier at the checkpoint, who prevented the passage of the drivers, apologized: Today, leaving the city by car is permitted only to residents of the three neighboring villages - Shufa, Safrin and Beit Lid, he explained to Machsom Watch activists. "And in general, this is not a checkpoint (through which the permits are meant to allow passage - A.H.), but a barricade. And here there are no permits; here there are procedures."

Palestinians living under the Israeli occupation are imprisoned in a thicket of physical, corporeal barriers of all types and sizes (checkpoints, roadblocks, blockades, fences, walls, steel gates, roads prohibited to traffic, dirt embankments, concrete cubes) and by a frequently updated assortment of bans and limitations. There are permanent bans, to which various periodic bans are supplemented, such as the aforementioned ban on travel to Anabta. Even without recurrent nighttime raids by the army to arrest wanted men, even without the shelling that fails to stop the firing of Qassam rockets, life is completely disrupted.

The disruption of life and the bans are not reported as "news," because they are the routine. And this routine erodes any hope for a humane future. (...)

- / Ha'aretz

Convergence to a border of convenience

Amira Hass — 2006-04-05T23:45:00Z

For the "convergence" plan to be presented to the Western world as a giant concession worthy of praise, the dimensions of Jewish support for the "vision of the Greater Land of Israel" must be inflated. But if the Greater Land of Israel really were the top priority for the Jewish citizenry of Israel, then there wouldn't be fewer than 10,000 settlers in the Jordan Valley. Tens of thousands would be rushing to expand Ma'aleh Ephraim and the farming settlements, so the lights of the eastern sector of the Greater Land would shine and twinkle like the lights of the western sector of the Jordanian kingdom. (...)

- / Ha'aretz

Intertwined debates on two sides

Amira Hass — 2006-03-29T15:46:27Z

There is logic behind the coincidence that involved the establishment of the Palestinian cabinet just a few days before the elections were held in Israel. No matter how much both sides declare that there are not, and will not, be talks between them - the two peoples, occupier and occupied, are intertwined. At the temporal juncture created by the elections in Israel and the creation of the Palestinian cabinet, the two internal debates within the two societies are themselves meeting and "speaking."

The internal debate regarding the composition of a cabinet headed by Hamas prompted an open clash between two types of legitimacy to rule. It was Hamas, which Israel and the United States define as a terror organization, that relies on legitimacy of the liberal-democratic kind. Most of the citizenry voted for it and it was allowed, it believed, to determine policies on the basis of that electoral achievement, while rejecting the demand to pay any attention to previous decisions made in the PLO regarding negotiations with Israel (which are what brought about the establishment of the Palestinian Authority). (...)

- / Ha'aretz

Strangled in Gaza

Amira Hass — 2006-03-22T21:24:54Z

In the coming elections, Israelis will be voting not only for themselves, but also for the 3.5 million occupied Palestinians - and along the way will affect the lives of Egypt's citizens, as well.

In the elections, Israelis will not be voting just for themselves. Not only will they choose parties that affect their own lives for four years, but also those of 3.5 million occupied Palestinians - as they have done for 39 years now. The winners in Israel will form a government that will determine the most minute details of every Palestinian's life.

This is the essence of occupation. One people casts its votes and thereby authorizes its democratic government to be a dictator in a place that it rules by military hegemony. In that place there lives a separate nation that is entirely excluded from any rights in this democratic game. (...)

- / Ha'aretz

Playing two different games

Amira Hass — 2006-03-15T12:14:00Z

The Palestinians are busy forming a government. It is too early to say how the events in Jericho will affect its composition, but what in the past was an internal game of musical chairs among Fatah and its satellites - a competition over personal prestige and a power play by Yasser Arafat - now appears to be a discussion between different political movements and principles.

Hamas has already submitted its proposed guidelines for a coalition government. The guidelines are a mixture of the declarations and slogans of a national liberation movement and the vague promises of a future government. This mix does not bode well for the Palestinian people. Even the vagueness in the guidelines, as Mahmoud Abbas has reportedly complained, is that of an "ordinary" government - things along the lines of "we will work to eradicate poverty," a standard pledge among Israeli governments.

The guidelines give considerable space to the right of return, as well as to the standard declaration that resistance in all its forms is a right - even though, at the same time, they stress that resistance is a means, not an end. The guidelines also include a promise that Palestinian Authority institutions will be established based on the principles of democracy, justice, individual rights and freedoms, and so forth. (...)

- / Ha'aretz

Saadat's wife: At least he's alive

Amira Hass — 2006-03-15T12:13:00Z

At 10 A.M. yesterday, Mohammed J., a resident of Jericho, heard shots. He thought they had to do with a local feud, but friends told him that Israeli military vehicles had been besieging the town's central prison for half an hour. They had no doubt: the target was Ahmed Saadat and his friends.

In other areas of the normally sleepy town, people gathered to protest. Mohammed J. could not have known at that point that an hour before, the British and American prison guards told their Palestinian counterparts they were leaving for a while. They got into their cars and left, was what some Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) prisoners managed to tell their families by cell phone. (...)

- / Ha'aretz

Fear of the doctoral student in math

Amira Hass — 2006-03-08T11:50:00Z

The state claims that it is not obligated to permit Palestinians from the territories into Israel.

The "classified information" was once again at work, in the High Court of Justice hearing Monday on the petition by Jihad Al-Shwaikh to receive an entry permit to Israel. He was accepted as a doctoral student in math education at the University of Haifa; his advisor is Professor Anna Sfard. Al-Shwaikh was born in 1967 in the Shati refugee camp in Gaza, and has lived in Ramallah since 1990. He took one course on-line, advised by Sfard, because he did not receive an entry permit. (...)

- / Ha'aretz

A cruel equation

Amira Hass — 2006-03-06T10:17:47Z

"Now everything depends on your will and your decision. If you want to study for a doctorate in Haifa .... that's where you will study, under my guidance," Anna Sfard, a professor of mathematics education, told a student who had just completed his master's degree in her field, with high honors. That was less than a year ago, at the end of a professional discussion between the two.

Mathematics education is a relatively new and rapidly developing field, explains Sfard, a professor in the department of education at the University of Haifa. She claims that paradoxically, just at the time when the need for scientific and mathematical tools has increased, a general decline in student achievements in these areas has begun, all over the world. The goal is to ensure that mathematics studies will equip students with suitable tools for dealing with a technologically oriented world.

The student of mathematics education, Jihad al-Shwaikh, observed his interlocutor from behind elliptical glasses, and remained silent. He didn't react to her immediately, as one would expect from someone who has just been told that in addition to his high grades, he clearly has abilities, ideas and love of the field of education and teaching, which qualify him to continue his studies. Sfard seemed surprised by his silence. (...)

- / Ha'aretz