Between the lines.

Yifat Kedar's video Between the Lines (2001) begins and ends with her subject, Amira Hass, video-recording two night scenes from her apartment window in Ramallah. Hass is an Israeli journalist who has worked for the newspaper Ha'aretz since 1989 and began covering the occupation in Gaza in 1991. In 1993 she moved to Gaza where she lived for three years and later, in 1997, she moved to Ramallah. She is the only Israeli journalist living in Ramallah, and for that matter, she is the city's only Jewish inhabitant among thousands of Christians and Moslems. The uniqueness of her siruation became apparent to her when, after living with Palestinian and German roommates for two years, she tried to move into an apartment on her own. Discovering the reluctance of Ramallah landlords to rent to her precisely because she was Jewish, Hass secured an apartment only after appealing to a Fatah senior for support. Though obviously difficult and sometimes dangerous, Hass's decision to live in Gaza and the West Bank demonstrates her commitment to exposing the conditions of the Occupation from the inside.

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The video begins as Hass records the night scene outside her Ramallah home. On this first night of the video, the scene is calm, though the electricity has gone off. Hass points out that the only lights on are those across the way in a Jewish settlement and then raises an interesting question: if an independent Palestinian state were to be created, would it still get its electricity from the Israeli electric company that currently supplies Ramallah with its power? With this question posed, we are immediately introduced to one of the many structural, religious, ethnic and practical quagmires of the current struggle between Israel and the Palestinians. The film ends with the same scene two years later. Only now her (video) recording reveals a situation outside her Ramallah home that is not so quiet. Over background noise of gunfire and mortar, Hass laments, "Midnight, I woke up from the shooting. Unbelievable. OK. I want to get some sleep..." The video ends with sounds of gunfire and crickets underscoring the ongoing, strange life that has grown out of this particular conflict.

Between these two Ramallah nights, Kedar provides us with a record of Hass's life and work, originally produced for Israeli TV. Hass was at first resistant to having the piece made about her, but after a time she agreed and Kedar was able to follow her for a period of two years beginning in 1999 and continuing through the early stages of the Intifada in 2000 and 2001. Since Hass's life work since the early '90s has been to witness and report the condition and effects of the Israeli Occupation, the video remains mostly set in the Palestinian Territories. Hass does, however, move between the Territories and Israel, where she returns for business, as well as to see friends and family. But other than Hass's connections there, Israel is presented with some distance. When Hass returns to her old neighborhood in Tel Aviv to pick up mail, we are presented with images of an urban, cosmopolitan Israel where well-dressed pedestrians shop, talk on their cell phones and meet one another at cafes, clearly demonstrating another world, one that is shielded from the Occupation. Hass's goal is to bring the other view into focus-the view from the side of the Occupation. "If we wrote about South Africa," she says, "everyone would understand." She creates this view by living in the Palestinian Territories, by having direct contact with Palestinian people and by going to places where Israelis, and indeed most journalists, will not venture.

In the El Amir refugee camp where she is sent to cover the local soccer team. Hass also sits down for tea with several Palestinian men who tell her frankly that they would accept peace if the Gaza Strip and the West Bank were declared an independent Palestinian State but with no settlements and no Israeli sovereignty. In the West Bank village of Dura El Kara, located close to Ramallah but also near the Jewish settlement of Belt El, Hass meets with local Palestinian residents. The last time Kedar tried to tape Hass in this area, the settlers opened fire on them from the hilltop, then stole their camera and destroyed the tape. "Israel wants the hill," the Palestinian locals tell Hass, "they want to build a road and this will be a disaster to the Palestinians who live here because it will pass through their fields and their homes will be demolished." Later on they amicably tease Hass: "Are you married?...No!...Let's find her someone..." What is remarkable about this scene is that it demonstrates a nuance of the conflict that might be hard for outsiders to visualize, the degree to which the conflict manifests itself on such a localized scale as the West Bank boundaries between Palestinian villages, their outskirts, indeed individual Palestinian farms, while the Jewish settlements are challenged, defended and fought over square foot by square foot.

Between the Lines is full of such porous, sometimes bewildering, often arbitrary and absurd boundaries and rules. Throughout the video, Hass continually challenges the opaque, even cryptic decisions that are made involving who owns what or who can pass where. In one scene Hass drives through a checkpoint with a Palestinian companion to drop him off at his place of business within the Palestinian Territory, but the Israeli Army-for no apparent reason-has moved the checkpoint hundreds of meters back into Palestinian Territory making it officially-for the moment anyway-Israeli territory. A soldier stops her car and asks her companion for his "crossing permit." Hass responds, "Why does he need a permit? He has a business here" Her companion continues. "My business is here, you moved into here. I didn't move into Israel. You moved in on me." Later, after Hass exposed the situation in an article for the paper, the army returns the roadblock to its original location.

In another scene that attests to this kind of absurdity, Hass and other journalists have been invited by the Israeli Army to tour the Gaza Strip. As Palestinian farmers in horse drawn wagons ride by, an Army spokesman explains that the area they visit is semi-agricultural but that the Palestinians have committed many "illegal construction violations" including planting "illegal crops." Hass immediately challenges him and says, "You say it's Palestinian private land." He responds: "Some of the land here people claim it's private but it was confiscated." What is the meaning then, Hass asks, of "illegal plantings?" She gets an evasive answer: "It means, "they planted them illegally." Later another soldier asks Hass how she sees this day from her point of view. "It's interesting because this perspective is ... supplementary ... the way he presented things, it's interesting, anthropologically speaking. Illegal crops, that's very interesting." She's then told he will explain the concept to her later, but when she presses him for an explanation he moves away to attend to something else.

In perhaps the most disturbing scene of the video, Hass travels to Hebron, a city in the West Bank where Arabs and Jews live. However on this day, the Arab market has been closed and a curfew is in effect on all the Arab residents due to tension with the settlers. Because the situation is so tense, Kedar's insurance company will not cover her film crew so Hass must tape the scene herself. She brings along a Palestinian civil rights activist who hadreceived a special permit from the Israeli Army to join her. "Hebron is under curfew," she states, "the Jews roam freely while the Palestinians are locked up in their homes."

As they walk through the empty, shuttered streets of the Arab section, an Israeli soldier stops them and asks: "Are you Israelis?" Hass retorts, "Would we be here if we weren't asked that ten times already?" The soldier laughs. Later another soldier asks her friend for his ID. It is so strange, even surreal, to see how the mechanics of identification manifest in this particular conflict. Indeed many Israelis and Palestinians look so much alike that identification can often only occur through exterior markers like license plates and identity cards. Earlier in the video Hass has her car "stone-proofed" because her Israeli license plate might mistakenly identify her to the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank as a settler and thus put her in danger. It appears that it is often these exterior markers that determine which side of the conflict you will be identified with and thus how you will be treated. Although her friend has a permit from the Army to tour Hebron, his presence outdoors is finally challenged when they come upon a group of Jewish people gathered outside. At first mistaken for an Israeli soldier, he is later taunted and told to leave when he is discovered to be Arab.

While Hass's sympathies are clearly with the Palestinian people caught within the indignity of statelessriess and occupatiori, she is as challenging to the Palestinian leadership as she is to the Israeli Army. When the Palestinian Authority calls a press conference at the headquarters of Jibril Rajoub, Hass directly challenges him by asking how he feels about what is heard "on the Palestinian street" that the call is not just for Israel to recognize an independent Palestinian state, but "the call is also to the Palestinian Authority to change the undemocratic regime of the last seven years." Rajoub responds: "Don't teach us democracy." But Hass continues to press him: "It's not us, it's your people talking about it. People on the street. There's a petition with 10,000 signatures. There was a large assembly. That's what people are talking about, not us..."

Hass is relentless in her challenge to authority, but her real uniqueness lies in her ability to literally cross from one side to the next with an uncanny ease. In May 2000 a severe clash in Ramallah portends the Intifada that wouldl erupt a few months later. Hass watches as the skirmish heats up. She is so close to the fighting on the Palestinian side that she is able to identify various National Front and Fatah factions. But Hass doesn't take cover. Instead she walks across what appears to be a battle line-crossing it as if it is a busy city street and she is annoyed at the traffic rather than the gunfire-all the while talking to a colleague on her cell phone: "I'm in Ramallah," she says, "dodging bullets" She walks to where the Israeli Army is positioned. Once there she has a reverse view of the situation. Tired and very young-looking Israeli soldiers slump against the wall of a building. "Now that I'm here with them," she says, "they don't seem bloodthirsty like it seems on the Palestinian side... You don't see them as being scary, they just want it to be over...They don't want to be here."

Hass's unique ability to wander between entrenched sides appears to be a product of who she is: she seems both without a permanent home but permanently at home in a space that lies somewhere between the Israeli and Palestinian sides. Her ability to continually relocate herself between sides has all to do with her personal history as well. "I also feel like a refugee to some extent" Hass says early in the tape. "I found that in Gaza, I identify with what I call 'permanent temporariness.' As the daughter of refugees from Eastern Europe. I can identify with that permanent temporariness." Indeed by expressing this sensibility early on, we see there is another very important presence in the video and in Hass'ss life beyond the Israeli and Palestinian conflict: her mother, Hannah, died in 2001, Kedar's video is testimony to the closeness between the two women, who understand each other in profound ways. Hannah tells us "Not only was I in a concentration camp, but my entire family was wiped out so I have no home, no family. I have a daughter. She feels like she only has me and I only have her."

The presence of Hass's mother thus points to another presence in the video, one that weighs heavily upon Hass's life and indeed the proceedings of the film: the Holocaust. "There is not a day in my life" Hass says, "that I don't think about the Holocaust." But importantly, she goes on: "The Holocaust is exploited so much to justify things, or to connect unrelated things...For many Israelis, the Holocaust is a way or an excuse that justifies everything that was done or is being done. It justifies the entire cycle of the eviction of the Palestinians. And for many Palestinians, being evicted by the Israelis justifies Holocaust denial..."

Hass's own traumatic feelings connected to the Holocaust do not lie in fear of renewed victimization-the kind of "never again" militancy that many post-Holocaust Jews subscribe to-but rather in the fear of doing nothing when confronted with suffering. This ethos was influenced in profound ways by her mother's experience and by one memory in particular in which her mother describes being transported by train from Belgrade to the death camp. As they were taken out of the carriages, a group of German women carrying baskets of food looked at them with "a sort of indifferent curiosity." Ever since, Hass says she gets "nauseous from watching others suffer without doing anything. One of my worst nightmares when I was a bit older was that I'd be in a situation in which I am the bystander."

Hass's allegiance is not to a particular group or place but to reality. And it is the reality of the Occupation that she tries to convey in her writing. "She has a lot of fantasy," her mother tells us, "For instance she once wanted to write something fictional. It's easier than saying exactly what reality is...That's harder to write.... But in the end her mother continues, "she does what reality pushes her to do."

A REVIEW BY TINA WASSERMAN

TINA WASSERMAN, Ph.D. is Chair of Visual and Critical Stusies at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston/Tufts University