March 7th, '03
On Being Surrounded

Hard times in my little country. Yesterday we buried the 15 victims of Wednesday's horrific bus bombing in Haifa. Unlike what you may have read in the news, this was not the first suicide attack Israel had suffered in two months. It was the first successful suicide attack in two months. From the reports we've been getting here - carefully worded to avoid sowing panic - there have been attempted almost attacks every day.

There was a very sad report in today's Jerusalem Post. Turns out that two of the victims, New Hampshire-born Abigail Litle, 14, and Yuval Mendelevitch, 13, had participated in the Givat Haviva Jewish-Arab Center for Peace's Children Teaching Children program, at which they discussed pluralism, tolerance, and coexistence with Arabs their age. You can read about it here.

And the day after the attack, the international press played up Israel's incursion into Gaza. This was definately newsworthy, but not as a "reponse" to the Haifa bombing. The fact is, there have been mortars fired from Gaza into the city of Sderot on a regular basis. What other country would tolerate its population centers being bombed without launching some kind of response?

Then of course, there's the "big" war. Depending on who's talking, the war against Iraq is either starting this week or being pushed off until April. Either way, it's not going to be pretty.

This is enough to make one feel "surrounded", but for me, the real kicker came last night. I was coming home from a performance in the north when I heard on the radio that Amira Haas, the Haaretz reporter who has become famous by living in Ramallah and writing witheringly anti-Israel accounts about life in the territories, has been awarded a $25,000 journalism award by UNESCO.

Amira Haas is so identified with the Palestinian cause that she is one of the only Israeli journalists who can travel freely in the West Bank and Gaza (Before he was arrested by Israel, Marwan Barghouti, leader of the PA's Tanzim militia, warned outright that any Israeli journalist who entered PA areas would be killed). To put Haas' journalistic credentials in perspective, take a look at the following, from an article from the media watch website, Honest Reporting:

In June 2001, the Jerusalem District Court ordered Ha'aretz and Amira Hass to pay 250,000 shekels (about $80,000) for slandering the Jewish community of Hebron. In January, Haas had reported on an incident in which Israeli Border Police killed a wanted Palestinian terrorist, Shabber Hassouna al-Husseini. Hass reported that Jews from Hebron kicked, spit on and danced around the dead body... Following an investigation, the Israeli Army determined that the accusations were false. Judge Rachel Shalev-Gartel [ruled] that Haas' report -- disproven by several televised accounts of the incident -- damaged the community's reputation.

Like I said, hard times.

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