ANN ARBOR — Many see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as being about land, religion or just hatred.  For veteran Israeli journalist Amira Hass it is about both Israeli domination and masculinity.  The obsession with militarization, she argued in front of nearly 200 audience members here this week, is also symbolic of “male individualism.”

Hass is a columnist in the Israeli daily newspaper Ha’aretz.  She is renowned for living in the West Bank and, earlier, the Gaza Strip.  This has given her insight into the Palestinian perspective, and the ability to write with the benefit of direct experience.  For Hass, when she rights, she writes as an Israeli, and a feminist, living under Israeli occupation.

Her work has garnered well-deserved recognition, from her three major books, two of which are about Gaza, to international awards.  She received the Press Freedom Hero award from the International Press Institute in 2000, the Bruno Kreisky Human Rights Award in 2002, the UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize in 2003, and the inaugural award from the Anna Lindh Memorial Fund in 2004.

She began the talk with two similar stories. It was about the reactions Israeli parents had when their homes were robbed. They were not remorseful about the stolen jewelry and money.  It was the guns they kept there, the ones that belonged to their dead soldier sons, that they missed the most.

It was as if the gun was passed down from their sons, for them to take care of and love.

In Palestine, especially during the recent intifada, Palestinian youth rushed to photo studios to pose for martyr pictures, with guns.  Many of them expected to get killed, even though they were not engaged in gun battles.  They hoped that with these pictures, their deaths would be turned into celebrations of their resistance.

Hass pulls from these stories two different celebrations of the gun. Ultimately, she feels, these are about the process of manhood and virility.  The Israeli soldiers, who are still called “boys” in Israel, are trained to treat the gun as a woman, to care for it and cherish it.  For the Palestinians, the gun symbolizes their manhood and their heroic funeral in which they are celebrated as having died for a cause.

She was not in doubt about the power differences that could be lost in this comparison. “Under the guise of peace talks,” she observed, “Israel enhanced its colonization process.” She was keenly aware to remind the audience who the occupiers were and that they exercised an “undemocratic, totalitarian control over people.”

It is too bad so many in the West, she feels, see it as a “benign” occupation. She referred to her 2004 interview with a soldier who said his orders were “not to shoot at children below 12.”  She gave other examples to tear down this myth,

The occupation, like male domination, has become so “naturalized, it does not need justification.”

The gendered nature of these different gun cultures spoke to power balance and how this occupation both transforms masculinity and is impacted by it.

Hass reported that Israeli society is changing as well. She used to see a basis for agreement between the two peoples. But that changed. For one thing, she hears less dissent from Israeli soldiers.

She told a story about how in the summer of 2002, she approached a checkpoint.  The solider was shocked to see her there since they are reserved for Palestinians.  He said, “You are Jewish, what are you doing here?”  She told him the same thing.  He responded, “Believe me, I have no idea.”

She found such interactions refreshing and hopeful, but now, they are increasingly rare.  In fact, they tend to sound paternalistic, telling her to avoid going to the places she has lived for years. They tell her, father-like, to “take care of herself” even though many of them are 18 or 19 years old.  

Her talk last Tuesday was sponsored by the University of Michigan’s Department of Women’s Studies and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. Will Youmans is a writer for The Arab-American News.