Amr Gharbeia's Library tagged Video →  View Popular

AMY GOODMAN: The rockets of the Palestinians?

AMIRA HASS: Look, I think that the rockets of the—this is where I differ from the human rights language. My argument with them is about indeed morality and about usefulness for the struggle for liberation. Is it useful or not? I think that the whole rocket thing is a theater, is a make—pretend for internal use, for the Palestinian internal use, to say, “Oh, we are fighting against the occupation.” It’s putting people in total misconception, because Hamas has not delivered in improving people’s life, so they go to the realm of imaginary fight and imaginary struggle for liberation, comparing themselves to Hezbollah, based on no fact, I mean, only out of lies, which doesn’t mean that I—

But the thing here that we—when we concentrate so much about the rockets, we think—we forget, we completely forget, the daily—what daily?—minute-by-minute violence that Israel is exercising against the Palestinians. When borders are closed, when all exits to Gaza and out of Gaza are closed, this is violence. This is daily violence. When children do not have pens and pencils and paper to use in schools, this is violence. Everybody is talking about food. Food is not the problem. The problem is the right of Palestinians to produce, to create, to export, to travel, and this has been violated for ten years already, before the rockets were launched from Gaza.

So this is—but the Goldstone report forced Israel to look at testimonies and evidence that was there all the time, but it was very easy to ignore, because they were saying, “Oh, it’s just all these journalists and these marginal journalists, and so far our soldiers have not told anything, so everybody believes our version.” All of a sudden, the scope of the attack against Goldstone report shows that they take it seriously.

The Second Intifada was a disaster, was a disaster for many reasons, and we don’t have the time, but the main reason is that it was a reflection of people’s anger with this discrepancy, terrible discrepancy, between open—the official language and the reality, the reality of no rights, of no—and, by the way, economically wise, it was good, it was not bad. It was not for strict economical reasons. But it was for this—you are promised liberty. You’re promised freedom. You’re promised a state. You’re promised independence. And what you get are bantustans and growing Israeli settlements and disconnecting Gaza from the West Bank. So there was an explosion. But then, for internal reasons, there was the militarization of this uprising used by Arafat in order to hush criticism against Arafat, escalated by Israeli excessive use of power, lethal power, to disperse demonstrations that were very benign, before the shooting to the air. And then Hamas used this, and others, to show that they are—for their internal Palestinian struggle, a competition over popularity. So they were competing over who can kill more Jews. So this, for me, was a very big failure. But the uprising started for genuine reasons.