My reply to respected photographer Pedro Meyer, after he wrote: "So if you have Hamas, being not only cruel, but perverse as well, in using their kids and innocent people to advance their agenda, well then I say, SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES!"
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I'm in Gaza. I was going to politely explain what's the situation here regarding the media and Hamas, so that you people could understand what are the real possibilities and the considerations of doing journalism in these conditions. This discussion emanates from a new twist in the information war, as all of a sudden, many people in different parts of the cyberworld started to denounce that we reporters here are a) biased or b) threatened with death by Hamas and so, unable to speak the truth. This is a planned propaganda campaign directed to create the perception that reports from Gaza aren't credible and in this way, deactivate the power of the images of civilian suffering that are damaging Israel's efforts.
I was also going to explain to you the explicit role of Israeli pre-censorship (did you know that, in order to be able to get the government's press accreditation, we have to sign a paper agreeing to accept what they call pre-censorship? There is a specific military department for this, and they don't hide it, it's on their webpage, you have to download it, print it and sign it before you get to their office in Jerusalem) and it's implicit one, as well as the harsh measures this system takes against rebellious journalists.
So, I was hoping to put some facts on the table for you to be informed when judging. But before, I wanted to get acquainted with your debate by reading all of your comments. Until I read this:
" So if you have Hamas, being not only cruel, but perverse as well, in using their kids and innocent people to advance their agenda, well then I say, SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES!"
That was Pedro Meyer. A man I've admired and followed as an artist --must admit I never looked into his political opinions but then I didn't know he was outspoken on that.
In a man like him, you admire his human sensibility, expressed in art.
And thus I'm still shocked and appalled by such a statement. He can believe that the state of Israel needs security and still understand and feel for people suffering unnecessary pain. He's never been here to see it, but it is our role to put it out there for you to know. He doesn't want to and has chosen to dismiss our work as propaganda. As if the children weren't dying, as if the Israeli's weren't bombing schools, and as if pregnant women weren't being killed.
Just before that, he stated: Hamas has "imposed their will upon their civilian population". I agree with him. Yet, how can you not feel empathy for those who suffer under Hamas and then are horribly blown to pieces by Israel. In the 2006 elections, Hamas won 44% of the vote. A plurality. That means that 56% of the people didn`t vote Hamas. And that's a figure 8 years old. How many times have the Israelis changed their political preferences since then?
But even if you somehow thought that most Palestinians support Hamas, how does that justify attacks on civilian houses? Because the son is a Hamas member, you will blow up everybody in the familiy? That's agains the Geneva conventions, an international understanding only reached after Europe spent 200 years destroying itself and the bleeding countries realised the next time would be the last one, and that barbarism could not be accepted any longer.
As the memories of the world wars fade, people are forgetting those very hardly achieved learnings. The Israeli army is barbaric as are the Israeli policies. Hamas is barbaric too, horribly. But there's someone here whose barbarism is a lot mightier and causing a lot more pain.
You don't want to accept what your eyes see. You are debating pictures of fighters when people are being reduced to ashes. I just went to this man's house, a man targeted because he was respected in his community and Israel wants to take out all leaders. But he wasn't Hamas, he was an old, retired PLO member, and if you do memory, the PLO are the good Palestinians, according to Bibi, right? I went to his house and I saw his children removing bits of his flesh from the walls. A drone, operated by some 19 year old guy away in Israel, smashed him with a rocket.
This is bigger than Israel and Gaza. This is about what the humankind has learned about its own tendency to madness and how it needs to control it. This is about people losing their own sense of humanity and thinking that someone else deserves to die, and die horribly. This is about people desensitising themselves and trying to find justifications for that. This is about ringing the alarm about this trend and putting our good hearts before our political, national, ethnic or religious affiliations. If the people here, involved in the heat of the fighting, can't keep their minds cool, we outsiders have the responsibility to stay calm and help them to go back to humanity.
I know Israel quite well. I have seen Jews putting themselves at risk, and even sacrificing themselves, to protect Palestinians. Some of them are dear friends of mine. With them, we've thought a lot about the achievements of Israel and it's failures. A society that is so full of hate, where Sharon, the killer of Sabra and Chatila, used to be considered the far right, but then he was outflanked by Netanyahu, who himself was outflanked by Lieberman, who himself has now been outflanked by Bennett (everytime moving further right to Fascism), is not what Theodor Herzl dreamed, not even what Ben Gurion or Golda Meir (themselves statespeople who took very tough decisions) dreamed, but far from that. It is a society that has the seed of self-destruction as a result of its ethnocentrism and it's choice for violence. A society formed by the Israeli army, which shapes the minds of every Israeli man (3 years) and woman (2 years) during the military service. I've witnessed it. Shovrim Shtika, an association of army veterans, has explained how this works.
People are publishing in mainstream newspapers articles with titles like "when genocide is permissible", calling to wipe out all Palestinians. I wouldn't like my children to grow up there. Many people don't. So they're leaving. In numbers so big that, as opposed to aliyah ("ascent", Jewish immigration to Israel), they've coined the term yeridah ("descent") for those who can't stand this anymore. Which in turns helps to keep this society's erosion as it's most sensitive people leave.
These are dark times. Since 9/11, we seem to be going down. We're risking going back to times where everything is accepted. Where the madness of my enemy is the justification for my madness, his brutality for my brutality. Times where we stop seeing each others as humans and start calling others cokroaches, as the hutus did with the tutsis in 1994. We risk de-learning, involution to stages when we could write in a public forum "well then I say, SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES!"
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