’We die anyway, so let it be in front of the cameras’: Conversations with Gazans - Israel News - Haaretz.com
My friends in Gaza are outraged by Israel’s claim that Hamas rules everything. ’You people always looked down at us, so it’s hard for you to understand that no one demonstrates in anyone else’s name’
Amira Hass May 20, 2018
▻https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-we-die-anyway-so-let-it-be-in-front-of-the-camera-talking-to-gazan
“Our ability, the Palestinians, to be killed is greater than your ability, the Israelis, to kill,” a resident of the Deheisheh refugee camp near Bethlehem told me at the beginning of the second intifada. Ever an optimist, he meant that because of this difference, in the end the two sides would reach a fair agreement.
On Tuesday this week, alongside the border fence and across from Beit Hanun in the northern Gaza Strip, his mistake once again became clear. There’s a limit to the Palestinians’ ability to be killed. In the morning after the Monday of bloodshed, the protesters took a break. Sixty fresh mourning tents and hundreds of newly wounded justified the lull they asked for. The next day, Nakba Day, which was supposed to be the peak, was actually the day they gave up on the symbolic mass March of Return to the border fence.
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Between the sunflower and potato fields of the kibbutzim, I was jealous of my colleagues who were forwarding the statements by the army and Israeli politicians with such great self-persuasion. According to Israeli spokespeople, both military and civilian, the respite along the border fence is unequivocal proof that Hamas’ leaders control everything, and everyone is under their authority; they’re the ones who sent the people to their deaths a day earlier, they’re the ones who prevented that scenario the next day. So simple.
According to those reports, Egypt handed down instructions to stop the process – after receiving an Israeli request – and Hamas obeyed. Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was humiliated, and it worked. All this is received in Israel as established facts, investigative journalism and another Israeli victory. There’s no need to be in Gaza to know, and it doesn’t matter that the army forbids Israeli journalists to enter the Strip.
All our bionic powers do the work: balloons for taking photographs, drones, eavesdropping, collaborators, an off-the-record statement by a senior Fatah official in Ramallah. All this appears to provide what we interpret as the gospel truth. In comparison, an abundance of details, explanations, assumptions, denials, hesitations and contradictions that we receive from the Palestinian side are considered failed journalism that doesn’t provide a bottom line.
Near the sprinklers blithely spraying water in the Israeli fields, I wondered: If you knew that Hamas planned to cynically send people to their deaths so as to once again gain attention and portray Israel as evil, why do you do what they wanted? Why do you, who didn’t use nonlethal means, obey Hamas too?
There’s an interior fence, a security fence, and a berm that was built with earth removed from the digging of Israel’s new underground barrier. And there’s a security road and then another one. And then the fields. Around it all are lookout posts and above are surveillance balloons and drones. And all you could do was prove Israel’s ability to kill and maim?
