Features

After Israel attacked an aid flotilla headed for the Gaza Strip in May 2010, investigative journalist John Pilger accused members of the Western media, including the trusty BBC, of “deception” in their coverage of the event. The promulgating of propaganda is a charge commonly leveled at the Israeli government, but Ron Fogel, an Israeli now living in Dunedin, disagrees that this is reflected in the media. “I’ve noticed during my years in New Zealand following the news and the media…personally I feel that it’s not well represented. I feel it tends to go towards the Palestinian side.” The general consensus among the people I spoke to was that the conflict was reported fairly by the media when taken as whole, but that taken individually certain outlets had a different priorities. A slight shift in the tone of reporting towards the Palestinian perspective was noticed in the last decade.

Whose voice and what perspective a story is told from is always a dilemma in journalism, and the dilemma only heightens in the context of the world’s thorniest, most perplexing issue; the conflict between Israel and “Palestine” or “the Occupied Palestinian Territories” (which label is used all depends on the perspective).
 
I spoke to Israelis, Palestinians and others who have a connecting tie to the area, in an attempt to determine what perspectives exist on the conflict, where they overlap and where they clash. Each person spoke to me earnestly and honestly and I found each view was enlightening in some way. It is worth noting that everyone spoken to has had the benefit of distance from which to consider the issue. A very different article could probably be written based on the perspectives of those living in the area, who have not had the desire or opportunity to leave.
 
Mai Tamimi is doing her PhD at the University of Otago. She originally comes from Hebron, a city in the West Bank. She agrees that dialogue on Israel and Palestine so easily becomes political: “is it their land, is it our land? And then you get into the history of things and get lost.” Instead she agrees to describe to me “what a Palestinian life looks like.” It isn’t an easy one for most Palestinians, 38% of whom are under the age of 15. “The most problematic thing for Palestinians living in Palestine is access. Access to places, access to resources, access to everything.” The biggest contributor to this is ‘the Wall’, the separation barrier which winds its way around and inside the Occupied Palestinian Territories. “The wall is affecting almost every aspect of life for Palestinians; access to universities, to education, to hospital. Fields, sources of income, family members are on the other side…the reality is, it’s very difficult to cope with it on a daily basis.”
 
Soon after Mai arrived in New Zealand, she and her children drove from Dunedin to Christchurch. Her son and daughter were astonished not to encounter checkpoints on the drive. “It is normal to them to be stopped once, twice, three times in the twenty minute drive between Hebron and Bethlehem, not to drive for about five hours without being stopped by soldiers.” I ask Mai whether she thinks Palestinians are treated fairly at checkpoints by the Israeli military: “I would say no. It takes a lot of time and people are treated in a very bad way. Many people must wait on the borders to cross checkpoints if they are on the way to hospitals…there are stories of pregnant women who deliver on checkpoints and the lives of the babies and mothers are threatened and they die as a consequence…There are also the checkpoints that you have to walk through. People are overcrowded and the soldiers are just sitting their laughing. Laughing at what? You are laughing at humiliating other people? But we are all human beings. We all deserve to live a proper life and, as an occupying country, there are obligations on how you treat the people you have occupied.”
 
Ron has spent time in the Occupied Palestinian Territories as a member of the Israeli Defence Force. He agrees that, “no it’s definitely not fine [there]. It’s beyond being fine, it’s horrible what’s happening there. But of course the whole core of the debate is the reasons why it’s not fine.” The state that Palestine is in must be condemned but it is too simplistic to ignore the context that has shaped Israel’s part in it.
 
Leilana Quinger, a New Zealander who spent three months in Jerusalem working with The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions describes it as “a kind of joke - it’s not really a joke - that all my Israeli friends talk about, that anything can get passed as long as they use the word ‘security’ because Israelis are really scared and with really good reason…it’s a very tiny country and it is in an area of countries that do hate [Israel] and want to annihilate it and that isn’t paranoia, that’s actually how it is. Those kind of fears that Israelis have can be played on very easily.”
 
Ron thinks that “there’s a lot of things the Israeli Government can do in order to assist the Palestinians to grow, which they don’t do”, but Ron and others pointed out to me that the economic and political issues that Palestine face are not solely the fault of Israel. “I feel that there are so many problems in Palestine as well, and with Palestinian government and society,” says Leila. “There’s huge internal conflict between Fatah and Hamas. And it’s actually starting in some areas to potentially eclipse the conflict with Israel…We shouldn’t paint a picture that if Palestine has a state it’s going to be perfect. It’s going to be a fucked up state, but they have the right to have that fucked up state for themselves.”
 
It’s not just Leila who thinks this. “A large part of the Israeli spectrum have come on board for a Palestinian state of some sort”, according to Professor Bill Harris, the head of Otago University’s politics department. Ron is among them. “No one’s going to go away, not the Palestinians, neither the Israelis. Each side has to understand that there’s another side here and another people here and that they live here and we live here and we have to share it.”
 
But it’s hard to reach this mindset with a history as rocky as this one. Israelis are proud of their country, though not all are proud of their government, and the Arab world’s insistence that it should not exist leaves Israelis understandably sensitive about and scared for their safety. For Palestinians, the amount of violence and upheaval suffered means it is hard to let go of bitterness. “I was in peace camps saying that we all can live in peace and it doesn’t matter who has the power to lead the country,” says Manal, a Palestinian who grew up in Jordan and who now lives in New York City, “but after what I witnessed in the massacre in the Jenine refugee camp in 2002 and what followed in Gaza in 2008...I know now that Israel was never interested in peace with the Palestinian people.”
 
Mourra, a Palestinian raised in a Lebanese refugee camp, says “okay, you want to talk about trading being Israel and Palestine. There is none. If you want to talk about cultural exchange between Israel and Palestine, there's none…everyone who's entered the UN conference room is debating with our land." Nevertheless he tells me to “write your article for hope.”
                                 
Everyone wants peace, but a sort of exhausted cynicism seems to descend on everyone when asked whether the conflict can ever end. Bill Harris thinks that the key is to widen the view. “I did my PhD thesis on Palestinian refugees and on the settlement process so I know it pretty well, I just got very tired of it, to be honest. I moved to dealing with Lebanon and Syria…My avenue is change in the Arab world towards Arab governments that are more viable for dealing with Israel in terms of being legitimate amongst their own populations, and therefore being able to offer from the Arab-side generous settlements. Then it would be very difficult for [the Israelis] not to come on board…The main thing you need is change in Syria. The odds at the moment are probably trending against it, but the Syrian people might surprise us. I think that’s where the hope is.”
 
Change in the Arab world would be an important step, but just the first one. Is there any hope of peace long-term? “I think it’s a very difficult problem but I think you can see a way in which you could put some sort of resolution together in pragmatic terms,” says Professor Harris. It might look something like this: a territory swap that would give Palestine the same amount of territory as before the 1967 Arab-Israeli war (although the borders would take on a different configuration), combined with a division in the control of coveted Jerusalem in a checkerboard arrangement, and a nominal return of Palestinian refugees living in Jordan and Lebanon to their original homes, which are now within Israel itself.
 
As Critic goes to print, Barack Obama has just proposed this arrangement’s first element, the restoration of the 1967 borderlines, as the basis for new peace talks.
 
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has labeled such a move as “indefensible”.
 
It’s far from over yet.