Reporting from Ramallah : An Israeli Journalist in an Occupied Land

The writings of an Israeli journalist who has chosen to live in a Palestinian town in order to provide a firsthand description of what daily life is like for the population.

The only Israelis this generation of Palestinians know are soldiers and settlers. For them, Israel is no more than a subsidiary of an army that knows no limits and settlements that know no borders. Recipient of the UNESCO Guillermo Camo World Press Freedom Prize in 2003, Amira Hass is the only Jewish Israeli correspondent on Palestinian affairs to live among the people about whom she reports. The child of Holocaust survivors, Hass prefers the title "expert in Israeli occupation," and, as such, is relentless in her quest for both truth and justice.

Hass, a Jewish Israeli journalist for the newspaper Ha'aretz, has chosen to live on the West Bank-and her intimate knowledge of the plight of the Palestinians illuminates this book. Culled from her dispatches during the past five years, these pieces offer a three-dimensional portrait of the daily experiences of the Palestinians under Israeli occupation. The early pieces, written while serious peace talks were being conducted in the late '90s, shows the roots of the current violence: most notably, Palestinians' frustration that the Oslo peace accords hadn't produced many tangible results. As Hass presciently wrote: "The distance from here to private and collective acts of despair is not great." As the book wends its way through the outbreak of violence in September 2000, that despair is increasingly on display. Her pieces illustrate how Palestinian frustration-over detentions, house demolitions, a life so riddled with restrictions that "hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are criminals or potential criminals"-erupted into suicide bombings and other forms of terrorism. But what distinguishes this book is its emphasis on the personal-and how the conflict has created a logic that has driven both sides to violence. In an in-depth interview, an Israeli sharpshooter discusses the rules of when to open fire ("Every day, the regulations... change"). Members of Palestinian society discuss the difficulty of keeping children healthy and educated under the pressures of violence and occupation. Members of Palestinian terrorist groups discuss what drove them to their acts and the internal rivalries among competing factions. Anyone who wants an in-depth, humanizing portrait of the Palestinians should look no further.
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This book is particularly timely given the current peacemaking efforts in the Palestinian territories. And with her experience as an Israeli journalist actually living in Ramallah, Hass brings particular insights into the social and political issues involved in the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians. In this collection of her news accounts from 1997 through 2002, Hass writes eloquently of the "violence of plenty," the hearty resentment and animosity between the haves and have-nots underlying much of the tension in the region. "Plenty draws the line between the worthy and the unworthy," she writes, noting the inequities in the administration of everything from land for farming and development to road construction and utilities. Hass provides a firsthand description of the day-to-day lives of the Palestinians under Israeli military occupation, the hypocrisy of administrative bodies that bend the law to the advantage of Israeli settlers, and the escalation of violence on both sides as Palestinians and Israelis lay claim to the territory. Readers interested in understanding this conflict will appreciate Hass' honesty and insight. Vanessa Bush
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