As a Jewish-Israeli journalist embedded in the long-term historical conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, Amira Hass lives between worlds.
Hass has lived and reported in Gaza for the past three decades, including the first six months of the current conflict; in her role as a reporter, she documents what she described as a genocide targeting Palestinians. She called the conflict “an ongoing Nakba,” an Arabic term which means “catastrophe” and is used to describe the loss of Palestinian lands in 1948 following the establishment of Israel.
On Monday, Oct. 28, Hass spoke to an audience of over 100 Middlebury students and faculty in Wilson Hall about her experiences in Gaza and how she has come to understand the nature of this conflict.
Emphasizing the deaths of over 41,000 Palestinians since last October because of Israel’s current assault and limitations on humanitarian aid, Hass began by speaking urgently on the increasingly bleak conditions Palestinians endure in Gaza.
“At this moment, when just meeting here and sitting here on this campus, a yet unknown number of Palestinian children in Gaza are likely to be killed or severely wounded by an Israeli bomb dropped through the air, or a shell launched by a tank, or by bullets,” she told the audience.
While Hass’s anecdotes of violence in Israel and Gaza are from the present, she came with a message to impart to listeners: that this collective agony of Palestinians and Israelis is a continuation of a historical struggle that started long before Oct. 7, 2023.
Hass grounded the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict by telling the audience to look beyond the rhetorical and historiographical constraints imposed by two terms: binarism and symmetrism. She framed these two concepts as essential to understanding the history of the conflict and moving towards peace.
According to Hass, it is insufficient to view history through binarism — viewing any one group as purely good or purely evil — because doing so serves to justify the methods of the “good side.”
Hass connected this term to her own approach to the conflict, asserting her conviction to remain outside of binarism.
“I retain my right to be non-binary,” she said, “to acknowledge and feel the pain of people, and not only to feel totally disgusted by the Israeli government’s and society’s murderous campaign against the Palestinians, but also to question the wisdom of Palestinian leaders' responses.”
She also advised listeners to consider abandoning symmetrism, the idea that ideological conflict must exist on equal terms. While both sides may have experienced harm, to approach their goals and grief in the same way does not create a substantial or effective framework for peace.
Hass further discussed the 1993 Oslo Accords and their failures, stating that the Oslo Accords were a considerable compromise of Palestinian land. She concluded that the expansion of Israeli settlements and Palestinian communities dissolving into enclaves created a direct pipeline to the current conditions of the Palestinians, whom she claimed are considered second-class citizens.
“Any Jew in the audience, in a matter of days, can have more rights in the West Bank and in the whole country than any Palestinians. Any one of you who is Jewish can become an Israeli citizen, can live wherever she or he wants to live, to get work permits, to travel freely, to marry whoever you want to marry. These are normal rights, but they are abnormal because the indigenous people don't have these rights,” Hass said.
Her criticism was not only targeted at the Israeli government, but also at political parties and armed resistance groups such as Hamas and Fatah. In reference to the Second Intifada, which occurred between 2000 and 2005, Hass argued that armed struggle failed to stop colonist powers, which she claimed led to greater suffering.
“The separation wall was built, devoured tens of thousands of agricultural land, and made people more impoverished than before, and allowed the settlements to strengthen under the critics of security,” Hass said.
Questioning the motives of armed groups such as Hamas, Hass pushed for a critical examination of their role within Palestinian resistance in light of the Oct. 7 attack.
“Why [is] the failure of the armed struggle to stop the colonialist power and its settler colonial project forgivable or overlooked by many Palestinians and supporters?” Hass asked. “Why [is] their partial or full failure given as a full justification to the October 7 attack by so many Palestinians and pro-Palestinians?”
She later expounded more on this assessment of armed resistance, emphasizing that the attack was the decision of a group of mostly men. Hass urges the audience to consider the overall destructiveness made possible by modern technology and mass weapons of destruction, and therefore the capacity of armed conflicts. To Hass, movements of armed resistance cannot think so futuristically that they disregard the lives of the people today.
Hass’s arguments on armed resistance garnered criticism from some students and faculty. In an email to The Campus, Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies Cynthia Gao, who studies 20th century Third World liberation movements, disagreed with Hass and argued that armed resistance could be seen as a political response to structural conditions.
“I do not take the loss of life lightly. I agree that armed struggle should not be romanticized, particularly by those of us who have not experienced its direct costs. But the persistence of armed struggle as an anti-colonial strategy points to the central contradiction of colonial rule,” Gao wrote.
Gao expanded on the idea of that contradiction. She stated that the technical capacity and desire of a colonial force to slaughter colonized populations should theoretically mean that they would succeed, and that resistance against this is futile — and many colonial powers hold this to be true. However, she believes this is incorrect.
“Many colonial powers have fallen, because of this hubristic belief that technological and military superiority will ensure their dominance in perpetuity,” Gao wrote.
Gao also underscored her disagreement with Hass on how to conceptualize armed resistance.
“Hass noted that before October 7th, Gazans could, without resorting to armed struggle, live some semblance of a life, albeit in a jail, in a cage. From what I know, people cannot live in cages forever, and rarely are their attempts to break free ever deemed acceptable to their jailers,” Gao wrote.
For some audience members, hearing Hass address the violence in Gaza explicitly was both refreshing and troubling, given a lack of a clear course of action to ending the conflict. One student who attended the talk described their experience of listening to Hass.
“Hearing Hass use the term genocide and firmly criticize the actions of the Israeli government [in] Gaza feels relieving to myself and I’m sure to others who have found themselves forced to step around possible rhetorical pitfalls for the ‘validity’ of their arguments,” one student who attended the talk wrote to The Campus. “Like many others in the audience, however, I found myself once again waiting for a hypothesis of productive action.”
