Tel Aviv: The prominent Israeli journalist, Amira Hass, has been subjected to a “wave of hate mail” and calls for prosecution for incitement to violence since writing an article defending the throwing of stones by Palestinian youths at Israeli soldiers.
Hass, who has lived in and reported on the occupied Palestinian territories for 20 years, argued that “throwing stones is the birthright and duty of anyone subject to foreign rule”, and suggested that Palestinian schools should offer “basic classes in resistance”.
The opinion piece, published in the liberal Israeli daily Haaretz, for whom Hass works, drew outraged reaction on the internet and from media commentators. The Yesha Council, which represents settlers, and the Legal Forum for the Land of Israel filed complaints with the police and the Israeli attorney-general, and demanded that Hass be investigated for incitement to violence and terrorism.
Hass argued that stone-throwing was “an action as well as a metaphor of resistance”. She wrote: “Steadfastness (sumud) and resistance against the physical, and even more so the systemic, institutionalised violence is the core sentence in the inner syntax of Palestinians in this land. This is reflected every day, every hour, every moment, without pause... The levels of distress, suffocation, bitterness, anxiety and wrath are continually on the rise, as is the astonishment at Israelis’ blindness in believing their violence can remain in control forever.”
Throwing stones was “born of boredom, excessive hormones, mimicry, boastfulness and competition. But in the inner syntax of the relationship between the occupier and the occupied, stone-throwing is the adjective attached to the subject of ‘We’ve had enough of you, occupiers’.”
Schools, she suggested, should teach Palestinian children various forms of resistance, plus its rules and limitations - for example, “the distinction between civilian and those who carry arms, between children and those in uniform, as well as the failures and narrowness of using weapons”.
Hass’s article appeared during several days of clashes in the West Bank following the death of a Palestinian prisoner whose cancer, according to Palestinian leaders, was diagnosed late and treated only with painkillers; and the shooting dead of two Palestinian teenagers by Israeli soldiers after they allegedly threw firebombs at a checkpoint. It was published the day after a military court convicted a Palestinian man of the murder of Asher Palmer and his baby son, Jonathan, whose car crashed after being struck with a stone in 2011. Another Israeli child, three-year-old Adele Bitton, was critically injured in a similar incident last month (MAR).
Images of stone-throwing Palestinian youths, often with their faces concealed by chequered keffiyehs and sometimes using slingshots, have become symbolic of the resistance to Israel’s 46-year occupation. Their actions are routinely met with teargas, stun grenades and rubber bullets fired by the Israeli military.
A comment piece in the newspaper Ma’ariv said Hass’s “statements are the outpouring of a suppurating abscess of self-hatred, couched in hypocritical moral acrobatics. Her eyes are blind to Jewish suffering and are open only to her friends from Hamas, the champions of human rights.”
Hass said her critics had either not read or had not understood her article. “I’m surprised that they don’t read the whole text - and then I’m surprised at myself for being surprised,” she said.
Hass, the daughter of two Holocaust survivors, has been vilified for living among Palestinians and chronicling their lives under occupation. “I feel privileged to know two societies, but sometimes I feel it’s futile. I’ve been writing about the occupation for 20 years, and it only gets worse.”
Guardian News
