I absolutely love everything that this woman writes. She is so smart and she
includes all the subtleties. The phrase means, "Don't Return to Israel as your
home", I think.
Miriam
say: Don't make aliyah.
http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.692928
Amira Hass |
How the Palestinians see Israelis: Israeli soldiers clashing with
Palestinians.Credit: AFP
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In a Palestinian village, the smell of fire and fear remains
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Otherwise Occupied: The Shin Bet provides coffee as well as torture
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Does the Israeli army plant knives on Palestinians?
“I should warn you. Amira Hass is a Zionist,” a pro-Palestinian activist in
South Africa wrote about me two months ago. When she left the room, her fuming
eyes already conveyed that what I had said in my conversation with her and her
colleagues had gone beyond the party line. For example, I didn’t come out in
favor of the magic, one-state solution and didn’t define the wars against Gaza
as genocide.
I also told that same audience that it is not enough to analyze the colonial
roots of Israel. The historical context must also include the Nazi industry of
murder and the fact that most countries refused to take in large numbers of
Jewish refugees.
The thing that apparently angered them most was that I dared claim that the use
of weapons does not advance the Palestinians’ cause today. It was not because
of my Israeli identity that I was critical of the worship of the armed struggle
and wars, I clarified, but rather out of a feminist and socialist worldview. I
disparaged the lethal male mimicry (whether among soldiers or between
Palestinians and soldiers) of competing over “whose is bigger.” The Israelis’
is bigger. Their capacity for destructive revenge is bigger so other means need
to be found in the struggle. After all, there is also revolutionary
responsibility for preventing more devastation and destruction, and not just
understanding the human need of the oppressed for revenge.
I tell every audience also what it doesn’t want to hear. I tell Zionists how
surprising it is that Palestinian acts of violence are so few compared to the
systematic and humiliating violence that Israelis authorities employ against
them. At a pro-Palestinian conference in the Netherlands about two years ago, I
said that the Jewish linkage to the Holy Land cannot be ignored, which also
prompted fuming eyes, as if I had never written against the dispossession and
expulsion of Palestinians.
In meetings with socialist Zionist youth in South Africa I told them they
should not immigrate to Israel. As the other Whites, they still benefited from
past privilege of criminal proportions in South Africa, so they should stay in
their country and fight to genuinely curb the crimes of apartheid. Fully
consciously exploiting additional privilege and moving to Israel would be
choosing to participate in another crime.
I said something similar on a panel that I moderated at the HaaretzQ conference
in New York last week that dealt with struggles for equality. The audience
comprised mostly liberal Zionists. The newspaper’s representatives made it
clear that Haaretz is a Zionist publication, that its opposition to the
occupation stems from Zionist principles. I found it appropriate to distinguish
myself from this stance.
Zionism preaches in favor of the immigration of Diaspora Jews to Israel. Every
liberal Zionist Jew living well in the Diaspora needed to know that even
without “making aliyah,” Israel was granting them rights denied to Palestinians
who were born in the country or whose parents were. Diaspora Jews have the
right to visit Israel, to acquire Israeli citizenship, to live and work on
either side of Israel’s pre-1967 border with the West Bank, to marry an
Israeli, travel between Israel and the United States and not lose their rights
in either country.
Everything Israel provides Diaspora Jews, it denies the Palestinians. Most of
the Palestinians who live abroad are not even entitled to visit the land of
their mothers and grandmothers (their real ones; not imaginary ones from
thousands of years ago). Those who are allowed to visit are subject to
restrictions: Some can’t leave the West Bank, others are not allowed to enter
the West Bank, most are barred from going to Gaza.
Israel is not only barring them from returning to their country. It is also
preventing them from settling down in the enclaves of the West Bank.
Palestinians who have fled or are trying to flee the nightmare of the Syrian
slaughterhouse can’t even dream about the most rational of options: taking
refuge in their country of origin.
As a rule, Israel bars Palestinians in the Gaza Strip from traveling abroad, to
Israel or to the West Bank. It bars them from living in the West Bank and bars
West Bank Palestinians from living in about 60 percent of West Bank territory.
Jews from Brooklyn or Tel Aviv can settle tomorrow in the Jewish settlement of
Ofra. Residents of the Palestinian village of Silwad, whose land was stolen for
Ofra, are not entitled to settle in Jaffa or to establish a community on the
outskirts of Jerusalem. Palestinian citizens of Israel lose their social rights
if they dare live in the West Bank.
People born in Jerusalem are expelled from the country and lose their residency
status if they dare marry and work in the U.S. By the way, Israel also
prohibits them from living in Kafr Qasem inside Israel, or in Be’er Sheva. They
are only allowed to live in the ghettos that we created for them in the united
city.
Israel uses Jewish immigration to excuse and deepen the dispossession.
Immigrants to Israel become conscious collaborators with the increasingly
extreme apartheid policy. Apartheid is considered a crime. We who were born in
this country are collaborators against our will. All that remains for us is to
use our privileges to fight the regime of privileges and, as much as possible,
reduce the level of our collaboration with the dispossession. This course of
action is not unique to us. Israel is not the only evil regime in the world
creating rights for some groups and depriving others of them. But Israel, by
default, is our home.
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Amira Hass
Haaretz Correspondent
