Just days after Mahmoud Abbas formally launched Palestine’s bid for UN-sanctioned statehood, Saskatoon residents were given the opportunity to hear a speaker well-versed in the complexities of the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine.

Amira Hass is a journalist and an Israeli Jew whose mother was imprisoned in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp during the Holocaust. Hass has lived in Palestine since 1993, first in Gaza and then, since 1997, in the West Bank. For 20 years, Hass has reported on the daily conditions of Palestinians in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

After thanking the organizations Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East and the Fellowship for Reconciliation and Peace, Hass apologized that she could not return the warm welcome with happier content in her speech.

“In the course of 20 years of reporting about the Israeli occupation,” Hass said, “I have become quite skeptical about the ability of fair reporting… to make a change.”

One of Hass’s main goals in her speech, upon which she touched frequently, was to answer the question: “How can you translate occupation to the occupier?”

According to Hass, the majority of Israelis see the occupation as something that pays rather than as something they must pay for. This view of the conflict, which stems from the many benefits Israelis receive from the occupation — Hass cited significantly more access to water and land as well as freedom of movement and full citizenship — blinds many Israelis to the negative aspects of the occupation. Principal among these is its immoral nature, which the Israeli media, Hass says, help to obscure in their coverage.

“ ‘Restriction of movement,’ ‘occupation,’ and so on: the meaning of these words is becoming diluted until it is invisible.”

Hass also said that when the Israeli military commits violence it is referred to as “activity” or “movement,” while any armed Palestinian is classified a terrorist.

Later in the evening, Hass fielded a question about Israeli security, which is given as one of the major reasons for the occupation. The audience member mentioned suicide attacks on Israeli buses and Palestinians shooting rockets into Israeli neighbourhoods. Hass’s response was unequivocal and scathing.

“Violence is the very essence of occupation,” she said. “In general, the more inequality is in a society, the more violent it is.”

Between the early 1970s and ’91, Hass said, the Israeli government allowed Palestinians a relatively large degree of freedom of movement. They reversed this policy in 1991, before the suicide attacks began.

The Palestinian Authority, established in 1994 around the time of the Oslo Accords, has technically been in control of Palestine. This has led, according to Hass, to many both in Israel and around the world believing that the Israeli occupation of Palestine ended in 1994.

“Often, I hear from Israelis and foreigners… about the re-occupation of the West Bank, or the re-invasion of Palestine, referring to the years of the Second Intifada, and the Israeli suppression of the Second Intifada” in September 2000.

The idea that the West Bank was “re-occupied” at this time includes an implicit understanding that it had been liberated before then and that the Israeli Army had fully withdrawn. This, Hass says, “is, of course, nonsense.

“The Israeli Army never withdrew. It only re-deployed from certain cities and concentrated in military camps.”

Hass claimed that the people who seem most convinced of Palestine’s re-occupation are often “the most ardent supporters of the Oslo Accords.” To Hass, the two absolutely go hand in hand.

“The Palestinian Authority wasn’t a sovereign state. It wasn’t even meant to be under the Oslo Accords.”

The accords “gave way to a new form of occupation: they gave to the Palestinian Authority the responsibility for the well-being of the state without the authority to ensure that well-being. They turned the Palestinian Authority into a subcontractor.”

Hass explained that the Palestinian Authority has little control over utilities such as water and cannot authorize the refurbishing of infrastructure or new construction. That must all go through the Israeli government.

Hass classifies actions like this as violence of a non-physical kind, being perpetrated by the Israeli government on a daily basis. She explained that this kind of action is insidious because depriving the occupied people benefits the occupiers; thus Israelis enjoy more water and land precisely because Palestinians have less, and Israelis are unlikely to demand a cessation of the conflict because of such benefits.

After decades of conflict and occupation, an entire generation of Palestinians has grown up with no idea that some Israelis are sympathetic to their cause, Hass says.

“Many young Palestinians only know Israelis as [illegal settlers in Palestine, often violent] and soldiers. They do not have the compassion of the older generation.”

This is why it is imperative to show Israelis the dangers of occupation as soon as possible.

“The sooner this happens, the more room there will be for Israel in [a peaceful] Middle East. But already I fear this moment has passed.”

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Photo: Siv Dolmen