{"id":108678,"date":"2014-09-01T14:20:08","date_gmt":"2014-09-01T12:20:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.anjameulenbelt.nl\/weblog\/?p=108678"},"modified":"2014-09-06T00:16:09","modified_gmt":"2014-09-05T22:16:09","slug":"gaza-missen-door-amira-hass","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.anjameulenbelt.nl\/weblog\/2014\/09\/01\/gaza-missen-door-amira-hass\/","title":{"rendered":"Gaza missen, door Amira Hass"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"
\n(Amira Hass, een paar jaar geleden<\/em>)<\/p>\n

De nachtmerrie is opgeschort, schrijft Amira Hass. Zij is een van de twee joods-Israelische journalisten die regelmatig de Palestijnen bezochten (de andere is Gideon Levy) ze heeft zelfs in Gaza gewoond, toen het nog kon. Nu mag ze als Israeli Gaza niet meer in. In een voor mij heel erg herkenbaar stuk schrijft ze hoe ze haar mensen daar gemist heeft in de afgelopen weken. Het is idioot onrechtvaardig dat zij Gaza niet in mag en ik wel. Een van de zo vele idiote onrechtvaardigheden waar Isra\u00ebl in grossiert. Hier schrijft ze over haar eigen persoonlijke gevoelens – dat doet ze zelden al spat de verontwaardiging en woede van al haar stukken af.
\n<\/p>\n

Missing my friends in Gaza<\/strong>
\nAfter seven weeks of hell, my heart goes out to the children an hour\u2019s drive away whom Israel does not let me watch grow up.
\nBy Amira Hass, Haaretz, Sep. 1, 2014<\/p>\n

The nightmare is in abeyance. No more waking up with a heaviness amid Ramallah\u2019s morning sounds \u2014 the sesame-bagel seller hawking his wares, policemen in the distance finishing their training by singing the national anthem, the engine of a cement-mixer owned by the Tarifi Ready Mix Concrete Company groaning outside the window.<\/p>\n

No more waking up in fear that overnight some of my friends or their relatives and acquaintances were hurt in Gaza. No more discovering that someone’s home was bombed or damaged, or that the people had to leave in a rush after a phone call from the Israel Defense Forces informing them that the neighboring building was about to be blown up.<\/p>\n

No more feverish searching on news websites for the names of neighborhoods that had just been bombed \u2014 to know whether I should dread now, for a couple of hours, that the worst has happened to my loved ones. And all this occurs in a time and place where the unimaginably horrific happens to everyone all the time.<\/p>\n

No need to wait impatiently for the suitable late morning to start my daily round of phone calls \u2014 a kind of macabre inventory: who\u2019s alive, how many whole families have been bombed in their homes overnight.<\/p>\n

Fear permeates the courteous sentences that Gazans say despite the bombings: \u201cSo how are you? How is your health? Inshallah, God willing, all is well with you.\u201d These voices reveal apathy.<\/p>\n

Now I can write about the heaviness, the burden, that accompanied me for seven weeks, day after day, moment after moment, without falling into the trap of narcissism.<\/p>\n

My heart may go out once more to the children, an hour\u2019s drive away, whom Israel does not allow me to watch grow up. My heart goes out to them without fear gnawing at every thought.<\/p>\n

My heart goes out to Tayyeb, who \u201cran away\u201d (it was his mother Fatima who chose that verb, with typical self-irony) to his grandmother\u2019s house in the Al-Shati refugee camp when the bombings resumed. There were many children there his age to play with so he could take his mind off the floors and walls, which shook wildly with every exploding bomb.<\/p>\n

My heart goes out to Sireen, who plays the oud and can now take her instrument outside into the street. During the war, she was advised not to take it outside because the Jewish state\u2019s drones might mistake it for a Qassam rocket or something and fire a deadly missile at it \u2014 and her.<\/p>\n

My heart goes out to Yousef, who never answered the phone, and to Yara, so full of mischief, who always answered: \u201cEverything is as usual. How about you?\u201d<\/p>\n

It goes out to Carmel, who of all her sisters allowed her fear to show, and who always clung to her father wherever he went in the apartment, its windows shattered.<\/p>\n

It goes out to Amal Samouni, whom I was afraid to call so as not to hear how she was reliving the terror of 2009. (Israeli troops killed her father in their home, right in front of her. Later, on soldiers\u2019 orders, she moved to an adjacent building with 100 of her relatives. A drone hit that building with missiles on the order of Givati Brigade commander Ilan Malka, killing 21 children, elderly people, women, men and teens. Amal was seriously wounded.)<\/p>\n

Loved ones over there<\/strong><\/p>\n

The nightmare is in abeyance, and my yearning feels almost normal again \u2014 not like the cement-mixer in the belly and the head, which crushes every familiar word in the dictionary. It\u2019s yearning in the sense of affection, love, esteem, closeness \u2014 everything I learned and am learning from the objects of my longing.<\/p>\n

I miss Bassam\u2019s mane of salt-and-pepper hair \u2014 Bassam, who taught me how to drive against the traffic. (\u201cIf the world is upside down, why not drive the wrong way?\u201d)<\/p>\n

I miss the scoldings his mother served with lunch. (\u201cWhat\u2019s this \u2014 have you Jews lost your minds?\u201d She and her husband, both about 75, have heart trouble and difficulty walking. They went on a pilgrimage to Mecca at the start of the war and insisted on returning to the refugee camp when the bombings were going on full force.)<\/p>\n

I miss Fawrat, with her dimples, who describes the fear in a practical tone, as if it were the dough she taught me to knead ages and ages ago. That was when house demolitions by bulldozer, not bombing, were part of our vocabulary.<\/p>\n

I miss Abu Wissam, a redhead among many other redheads in Beit Lahia, and his jokes about their Crusader ancestors.<\/p>\n

I miss Gazan-style humor (\u201cWe demand immediate resumption of the World Cup broadcasts\u201d; \u201cWe\u2019re celebrating victory \u2014 what did you think?\u201d; \u201cAnother victory like this and there won\u2019t be any more Gaza\u201d; \u201c[Kibbutz] Bror Hayil is rooting for the Brazilian team? We\u2019re rooting for Argentina\u201d \u2014 the words of refugees from the village of Bureir, on whose land the kibbutz, with its many immigrants from Brazil, is situated.)<\/p>\n

I miss Kauthar, whose every sentence is razor-sharp and every description so clear it\u2019s as if her audience were experiencing the story she\u2019s telling.<\/p>\n

I miss Nihad, the logical one, whose explanations of sermons or verses from the Koran are so clear that even a sworn atheist understands them. And I miss Subhiyah, whose quiet way of explaining things does not conceal her warmth. Flattery and fakery disgust her, and she never stops protesting injustice.<\/p>\n

I miss Fakher, always teaching, even when he\u2019s merely saying he just made coffee.<\/p>\n

I miss Abd el-Hakim, who did not answer the telephone the entire seven weeks and to whom I owe my first lessons (from 1991) on the economy of the occupation.<\/p>\n

I miss Iyad, whose cynicism is the most endearing I have ever encountered.<\/p>\n

I miss Majdi, the cunning Majdi, like all Majdalawis \u2014 those from Majdal, or Ashkelon \u2014 who are known for their craftiness even if they were born in refugee camps.<\/p>\n

And I miss Mustafa, who back in 1993 told me as we were leaving the Civil Administration building in Rafah, with its Israeli officers strutting among the natives as if they owned the world: \u201cDon\u2019t believe that you\u2019re really seeing us. We\u2019re just a picture.\u201d<\/p>\n

His sentence is so precise in its inaccuracy. After all, each of you is a world unto him- or herself. Your humanity continues to guide me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Amira Hass, een paar jaar geleden) De nachtmerrie is opgeschort, schrijft Amira Hass. Zij is een van de twee joods-Israelische journalisten die regelmatig de Palestijnen bezochten (de andere is Gideon Levy) ze heeft zelfs in Gaza gewoond, toen het nog … Lees verder →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false},"categories":[2,14],"tags":[194],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anjameulenbelt.nl\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108678"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anjameulenbelt.nl\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anjameulenbelt.nl\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anjameulenbelt.nl\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anjameulenbelt.nl\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108678"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.anjameulenbelt.nl\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108678\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":113632,"href":"https:\/\/www.anjameulenbelt.nl\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108678\/revisions\/113632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anjameulenbelt.nl\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anjameulenbelt.nl\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=108678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anjameulenbelt.nl\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=108678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}