May 5, 2002

WHAT should one do when death is dancing in the street, mercilessly stamping out innocent living human beings under its cruel feet, burning them alive, leaving their bodies to rot for days on end, the whole act carefully planned and presided over by a Milosevic or an Ariel Sharon or a Narendra Modi? Of course, I am not talking about those who are directly involved in the act as murderers and victims. I am referring to those belonging to the mysterious group of human beings called the silent majority. Is it, by definition, supposed to remain silent and, by doing so, support the killers?

“When the ‘Silent majority’ backs a violent minority” is the title of an article by Sumanta Banerjee, published in the March 30, 2002 issue of the Economic and Political Weekly, Mumbai. Writing in the context of the recent — and still continuing — riots in Gujarat, Banerjee makes a very pertinent point: “However much liberal and Left political and social scientists may try to explain every communal riot as a conspiracy by a bunch of politicians in league with religious fundamentalists, we cannot deny the fact that such riots take place on a soil fertile with religious prejudices and hatred. Administrative interventions like prompt police action can indeed prevent riots, but can never eradicate the canker of religious communalism that has remained embedded, and is fast spreading, among the ‘silent majority’.”

This revealing article makes two very straightforward points. One, that the silence of this ‘silent majority’ often amounts to acquiescence in communal riots, and can also provide a social sanction for their outbreak and continuation for days together.

And, what is more disturbing, that “from the role of passive assenters during communal riots in the 1960-70 period, a large number of the ‘silent majority’, both Hindus and Muslims, have graduated to the role of active participants in such riots during the last two decades. The recent holocaust in Gujarat shows that they are no longer silent. In their post-Godhra retaliation, the RSS-BJP-VHP axis succeeded in mobilizing thousands from among these silent Hindu majority. As exposed by the media, Hindu rioters and killers came from educated and upper class families — moving around in cars and with cellphones, while looting Muslim shops and burning Muslim families.”

A haunting and disturbing image of a bystander is invoked by the courageous Israeli journalist and writer Amira Hass when she describes an experience from her mother’s life. Hannah Hass was being marched from a cattle train to the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen on a summer’s day in 1944. “She and the other women had been 10 days in the train from Yugoslavia. They were sick and some were dying. Then my mother saw these German women looking at the prisoners, just looking. This image became very formative in my upbringing, this despicable ‘looking from the side’. It’s as if I was there and saw it myself.”

As an Israeli journalist, she went to live in what Robert Fisk, in his article on Amira Hass in The Independent on August 26, 2001, calls “Yasser Arafat’s tiny, garbage-strewn statelet”. Explaining her decision, Hass says, “In the end, my desire to live in Gaza stemmed neither from adventurism nor from insanity, but from that dread of being a bystander, from my need to understand, down to the last detail, a world that is, to the best of my political and historical comprehension, a profoundly Israeli creation. To me, Gaza embodies the entire saga of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; it represents the central contradiction of the state of Israel — democracy for some, dispossession for others; it is our exposed nerve.”

Fisk, himself an embodiment of courage in our cruel, unjust world, is a great admirer of Amira Hass. He says, “now living in the West Bank town of Ramallah — with the Palestinians whom many of her people regard as ‘terrorists’, listening to the Palestinian curses heaped upon ‘the Jews’ for their confiscations and dispossessions and murder squads and settlements — Amira Hass is among the bravest of reporters, her daily column in Ha’aretz ablaze with indignation at the way her own country, Israel, is mistreating and killing the Palestinians. Only when you meet her, however, do you realize the intensity — the passion — of her work.”

She makes a clear distinction between objective and fair reporting. “There is a misconception that journalists can be objective. Palestinians tell me I’m objective. I think this is important because I’m an Israeli. But being fair and being objective are not the same thing. What journalism is really about — it’s to monitor power and the centres of power.”

Hass found herself fascinated with the difference between Palestinian image and reality. “Their towns were being portrayed in the Israeli press as a ‘nest of hornets’. But I really wanted to taste what it means to live under occupation — what it is like to live under curfew, to live in fear of a soldier. I wanted to know what it was like to be an Israeli under Israeli occupation.”

“Israel,” she says, “is obviously the centre of power which dictates Palestinian life... As an Israeli, my task as a journalist is to monitor power. I’m called ‘a correspondent on Palestinian affairs’, but it’s more true to say that I’m an expert in Israeli occupation.” Israeli reaction, she maintains, is very violent towards her. “I get messages saying I must have been a kapo [a Jewish camp overseer for the Nazis] in my first incarnation. Then I’ll get an e-mail saying: ‘Bravo, you have written a great article — Heil Hitler!’ Someone told me they hoped I suffered breast cancer. ‘Until we expel all Palestinians, there will be no peace,’ some of them say. I can’t reply to them — there are thousands of these messages.”

But many Israelis tell Amira Hass to keep writing. “People misled themselves into believing that Oslo was a peace process — so they became very angry with the Palestinians. Part of their anger is directed at me. Israelis do not go to the occupied territories. They do not see with their own eyes. They don’t see a Palestinian village with a settler on its land and a village that has no water and needs government permission even to plant a tree, let alone build a new school. People don’t understand how the dispersal of Jewish settlements dictates Israeli control over Palestinian territory.”

An interesting website called “Occupational Hazard” (http://www.occupationalhazard.org/occupation/) contains a collection of articles on the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, taken from publications such as Ha’aretz, Palestine Report (www.palestinereport.org) and Gush Shalom, and other action groups like — www.rapprochement.org and Coalition of Women for a Just Peace. The site features a number of pieces written by Amira Hass as a correspondent documenting occupation.

When interviewed on the Israeli cable TV3 on the half-hour programme “ShishiShabat” on June 2, 2000, Hass was introduced by Michal Gazit with these words: “Seven years of living in Gaza and Ramallah gave birth to hundreds of articles that document from the inside the weariness of the Palestinian people. [She] has been awarded the prize as one of the fifty heroes of the freedom of the press for the second half of the twentieth century as they were chosen by the Institute for International Journalism. Her detractors, who swear to see in her someone crazy in the extreme case and a hopeless naive in the best case, agree that she gives a unique quality to the overused term ‘self-righteous’.” Hass’ simple reply to the suggestion was: “I am not self-righteous... I think that more than anything I document the Israeli occupation. That is in fact my main job.”

When asked how she considered herself an objective reporter when she identified much more with the Palestinian interest, she said that it was “very much an Israeli interest that we rid ourselves of the disease called colonialism... If there won’t be an understanding here that two people live in this country and we have to reach a solution that is a fair solution, then I can only repeat a question that Palestinians who cannot understand the Israeli mentality at times direct at me, ‘Tell me Amira, don’t the Israelis think about their grandchildren?’”

For Hass, trying to understand and articulate the situation of the oppressed is to try and understand the mentality of the oppressor. “The problem,” she says, “is not in the oppressed, it is in the oppressor. Oppressors exist, and to find oppressors is not a problem. Journalism is supposed to deal with the oppressors, and to deal with centres of power and take care of the centres of power.”

She is very clear about who she is addressing. “My audience is Israeli. It is the most comfortable to write about the protests and the burning flags. But I say no, think. You are the centre of power. In front of the Palestinians, Israel is the centre of power.” She has been trying to make her readers understand that a pure Jewish rule that dictates to Palestinians their way of life just like the whites dictated to the blacks in South Africa, simply cannot work. “It has to be understood that there are two principles: there are two peoples in this country and the principle of equality. What kind of independence is it that when I go out of my house in Ramallah, every two minutes there is an Israeli soldier. Can a Palestinian call that independence? That is a joke... Can we make a Palestinian state that is Cantons and Bantustans. Is that possible? South Africa proved that it is possible for a certain period of time and then the whole thing blows up. And it is thought that here it won’t explode? Why won’t it explode?”

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