A Bad Odor

Publisher: Haaretz
Date of publication: December 2007

“This is most definitely not a pastoral picture: Two village council heads are standing in front of the garbage dump of one of the villages, Beit Liqia, and counting, one by one, all of the environmental hazards. The village's houses are 200 meters away. There are people who burn garbage (mainly to separate metal from old cables or the iron from tires) and then black smoke forms and wafts around the windows of the crowded homes. Around the garbage dump are olive groves. Nobody harvests the olives there any more. At the garbage dump in the village of Beit Anan they burn the waste. Though it is situated relatively far from the village houses, it is also located among olive groves and alongside the narrow road. The smoke and the smell of burning plastic and organic waste accompany travelers.

It is impossible to accuse the two council heads - Hassan Mfarja of Beit Liqia and Naji Jamhur of Beit Anan - of lacking awareness of the importance of preserving the environment. They have participated in workshops and training courses, learned about advanced waste disposal sites in Japan, and know all there is to know about sorting refuse and what happens to groundwater.

They had a dream: to open an orderly dump site far from the built-up area that would serve seven villages in the area and enable more stringent environmental protection. But the Civil Administration blocked the route they paved to the site and confiscated the truck. This is Area C, they were told. And the Civil Administration is the master in Area C (which is under complete Israeli control) and in those villages, which are close to the Green Line, 95 percent or more of the lands are included in Area C.

Area C (60 percent of the West Bank, as determined in the Oslo years) is exactly the territory that Israel has its eye on in the hope of annexing a large piece of it in the context of the "permanent status agreement." Palestinian development of the territory endangers its chances of becoming Judaized. Therefore, Israel is not allowing Palestinians to build on their own lands, to expand the master plan (which explains why Beit Liqia looks like a refugee camp) or to connect villages to the water grid. Continue reading article here>>


DECONSTRUCTION:
In “A bad odor,” an opinion piece that appears in Haaretz, Amira Hass begins by informing the reader that the scene of a garbage dump is “not a pastoral picture,” and so  immediately creates a false and  absurd standard for the appearance of, of all things, a garbage dump. In the next paragraph, she goes on to quickly remove responsibility from Palestinian shoulders by hyperbolically stating that the two Palestinian councilmen involved in overseeing the dump “know all there is to know about sorting refuse and what happens to groundwater.” The Palestinian councilmen, that is, are expert environmentalists and so what goes on at the dump simply cannot be their fault.

The culprit, of course, is Israel. Hass charges that it is Israel which has unfairly created roadblocks and checkpoints that make it, not impossible, but “financial suicide” for the dumping to occur in one of the 85 authorized sites near Ramallah.

Local Palestinians, as Steve Erlanger reported for the New York Times in September of 2007 (presumably “inspiring” Hass' spate of garbage-related writing), see things differently than the radically left-wing Israeli Hass. One Palestinian garbage dump worker from the West Bank responded with a laugh when he was asked if the Palestinian Authority helps them. "No one from the authority comes to check on us; no one really cares," he said. "The Palestinian nation gets aid and help from abroad, but we never see any."

No mention of this finds its way to either Hass' editorial or article. A more glaring omission, however, leaves the reader bewildered: Hass fails to even hint that the Palestinian intifada (which began a few months before the Palestinians' garbage problems began) and waves of Palestinian death squads emanating from the West Bank may have something to do with the restructuring of roads and sites in “Area C.” Israel, in Hass' view, simply wanted to make life difficult for the Palestinians; worse, Hass charges that it's Israel's “lust for land” that has created the problem. And all this despite the fact, which Hass openly acknoweldges, that Israel's Civil Administration actually has granted Palestinians permits to build dumps on Area C land.

The most noxious odor of this story comes from the editorial itself. It should be remembered that Hass was found guilty of cooking up a libelous story in January of 2001 that falsely and maliciously accused Jewish settlers of beating and desecrating the body of a  Palestinian man. It seems that Hass has learned more subtle methods of turning news into vilification. This time, though, she is going after the whole state instead of just a group settlers.