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In the late 1980s Israeli historian Benny Morris published The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949. The book, which opens with a map of the hundreds of Arab villages whose residents fled or were forced to leave during what Palestinians call the Nakba or Catastrophe, would upend the way Israelis thought about the founding of their state. Today on the 61st anniversary of the Nakba, Israel seems far less inclined to examine its role in the devastation of Palestinian lives.
Morris has moved from dove to hawk, arguing recently in the NYT that Israel may have to launch a nuclear strike against Iran because of Iran’s support of Palestinian groups, and the Israeli paper Ha’aretz reports today that its award-winning correspondent, Amira Hass, has been arrested after exiting the Gaza Strip where she had been living and reporting for the past few months.
Hass was apparently accused of violating a law that forbids Israelis from living in an enemy state. The law was passed in 2006 after the abduction of IDF soldier Gilad Shalit.
Gaza has been under a blockade for over two years, its residents starved and living in destitution. Just before Obama entered office Israel launched an air and land invasion killing more than 1,400 Palestinians, mostly civilians. Israel has made it difficult if not impossible for reporters to enter the region. Hass was the first Israeli journalist to enter Gaza in more than two years. Like the Russians in Chechnya and the Americans in Vietnam they’ve learned their lesson. Show images of war and your citizens may not rally around the flag.
It took forty years before Israel’s historians were able to look back and acknowledge what happened during the Nakba. With the silencing of reporters like Hass how many more years will it take before Israeli society – and the rest of us – come to terms with the latest chapter of catastrophe in Gaza?
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