Cristina Mas: "A witness explained to me that he talked to the ants that entered the isolation cell."

BarcelonaWe already knew Cristina Mas's committed journalism from her chronicles and pieces in the ARA, but in the book Palestine from within (Ara Llibres) we find much more. Not only does it contain the substance of some seventy illuminating interviews, as befits a front-line reporter with extensive knowledge of the field in Gaza and the West Bank, but it also lets her historian's side shine through. The result is a clarifying and rigorous volume that allows us to fully understand one of the most entrenched conflicts on the planet: with the perspective of time but also from the proximity of those who live it, or suffer it.

What was the spark to write the book?

— The frustration of not being able to go to Gaza to explain this historic change from there. I felt like we were failing in our responsibility, not only to the Palestinians, but in general. The book helped me find a way to tell the story beyond what the daily articles allowed. I moved to the West Bank and Israel for two months to write it, and people opened up to me because I was there. I'm very afraid that when we return to Gaza, the Palestinians won't want to talk to us anymore. That they'll tell us: "What's the point of me telling you all about my tragedy and reliving it if the world has seen it and no one has done anything?" This question tortures me, and I thought, well, I'll be a European journalist who doesn't report the news of the day, but instead wants to interview grandmothers who lived through the 1948 Nakba, or a housewife, or a painter.

What do you discover when you visit Palestine that isn't explained in the general narrative about the conflict?

— That life surpasses everything. In the end, there is a daily resistance that transforms absolutely banal and mundane acts into a permanent vindication of life and the desire to move forward.

Will Israel carry out its plan to eradicate the Palestinians?

— On the subject of Gaza, we may assume that the people of Gaza have no choice. But I believe that if two and a half million Palestinians had decided to leave and started walking toward Egypt, no one would have been able to stop them. The Egyptian authorities wouldn't have started machine-gunning them. But the Palestinians don't leave, of course, because there is a clear will to persist.

There's a genocide underway, and governments of all stripes around the world are watching it from a passive standpoint. How can this be explained?

— Perhaps the word isn't passivity, but complicity. With Israel's own economic, military, and diplomatic strength, it could not have accomplished everything that has happened in the last seventeen months. There are governments that are enablers, necessary collaborators in this genocide. This doesn't date back to the days of British colonization. The great imperial powers that have succeeded one another in the region, from the Ottoman Empire, then the British, and then the United States, have seen this place as a tremendous strategic interest. For the British, it was the trade routes from Asia to Europe, and in the case of the United States, it's directly about controlling oil. Israel has never functioned autonomously, never fully grown, or shaken off this dependence.

Why don't the Arab countries, at least them, help the Palestinians?

— Why should they do it? In the end, they are fierce dictatorial regimes that fear their own people the most. The example of the Palestinian people, abandoned by the rest of the world but capable of maintaining this collective resistance, is a dangerous example for Arab dictatorships. It's like when people wonder why the European powers left the Republic alone against Franco. Because they were much more afraid of the triumph of a revolution than of a dictatorship.

One of the peculiarities of this war is that it is particularly targeting journalists. However, there isn't a widespread rejection from the editorial boards of the major global news organizations. To what do you attribute this?

— The economic interests behind the Israeli state are very strong. And, in a way, Israel has always been clear that the battle for the narrative is key. In fact, it's a country with a propaganda department, Hasbarà. They've invested a lot of resources to achieve that international influence and have been very tenacious in spreading the xenophobic and Islamophobic discourse that dehumanizes Arabs and generates this "either them or us" narrative. For example, since we're talking about journalists, those who haven't died are always tainted by a layer of lack of credibility. As if being Palestinian means they can't be sufficiently professional, which is refuted by the coverage. And it's also hard to think of another case of a war in which there has been zero access for the international press: you always find a porous border. I think that if there had been a very clear will on the part of the mainstream media, which have a lot of resources, someone could have entered Gaza and explained this war from within as well.

In conclusion, we look the other way.

— They look the other way and omit any reference to the rules of the game. I vividly remember a few years ago when the United States bombed the Kunduz hospital in Afghanistan. It made the front page of every international media outlet because that line had been crossed. And now? We can't help but remember that all wars are dirty, but even the dirtiest are subject to an agreed-upon international law that determines the rules of the game.

They try to justify it by saying that there was a Hamas leader inside.

— But a Hamas leader who was undergoing surgery is a wounded man. And a wounded man is not a combatant. A hospital isn't bombed for any reason, but instead of finding that reason, what they do is justify the bombing because there was a Hamas member there.

Is Israel setting a new standard in the typology of contemporary warfare?

— Israel functions as a development laboratory. It is a vast military surveillance association whose testing ground is the six million employed Palestinians, upon whom it can experiment with all these technological and military advances.

Sinister advances.

— Yes, I have a hard time talking about "sophisticated" weapons, because sophistication should imply a higher level of civilization when it comes to identifying targets to bomb. And no. It only accelerates the production of identified targets. That's why in Gaza, which is a territory like Maresme, more tons of explosives have been dropped than in all of Iraq in ten years of war. It's a completely unknown dimension, and this is achieved thanks to artificial intelligence programs capable of identifying many targets.

Europe is rearming... but only to confront Putin. Should we also do so as a precaution against the Israeli surveillance and war machine?

— It's very difficult for anyone to justify that the world is a safer place after raiding Gaza. The world is much less safe after arming Netanyahu and justifying this barbarity. The world is becoming brutalized, and there's a common thread running through Ukraine, Gaza, and Trump, and we're expanding the horizon of what's possible and accepting as normal things that were previously unthinkable. We see unimaginable things, like the head of European diplomacy, Kaja Kallas, holding a press conference in Jerusalem with the Israeli foreign minister, a government indicted in the most important international courts on the planet for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

There is an arrest warrant out for Netanyahu.

— In theory, he should be arrested and brought before The Hague Tribunal for trial, but Trump is visiting the United States, and to do so, he flies over French airspace, which gives the French government the right to arrest him... but nothing happens. Well, if we start generalizing these exceptions, it's very difficult for Palestinians not to say, "If only we had blue eyes and were blond, this wouldn't be happening to us."

Does Israel have the right to defend itself?

— If Israel has the right to defend itself against the Palestinians, the Palestinians also have the right to do so, because under international law, it is a state that illegally occupies a people, and therefore, this people has the right to resist the occupation. The right to defense against the very people you are attacking is a complicated argument. We didn't imagine that the response to October 7th would have this absolutely brutal dimension, but it was assumed that it would be disproportionate. Likewise, no matter how much Israel continues to assert this right to defense, the world's most important international organizations have classified it as genocide.

If the response was predictable, what exactly was Hamas looking for?

— It's very important to say that we're not investigating October 7th because Israel is blocking it. This is one of the reasons for Netanyahu's constitutional crisis, which is why he wants to dismiss the attorney general and the head of the internal security services. Even today, the question of what failed on October 7th, in a state with enormous military and surveillance technology, has no answer. And it doesn't have one because the Israeli government is blocking it for political gain.

Anyway, what is your hypothesis?

— Hamas is carrying out a kidnapping operation, primarily targeting soldiers, but also civilians, in the kibbutzim areas closest to the Gaza border. And it is doing so at a time when the Palestinian issue was completely off the agenda, because both Trump and Biden had favored the definitive normalization of Israel's political, economic, and diplomatic relations with all its neighbors in the region. But, of course, today that balance that had been forged is impossible. Not because the Saudi regime has any sympathy for the Palestinian cause, but because it would be endorsing a reality it cannot formally accept. But the explanation that works best for me, based on all the information we have been able to gather from the investigations, is that there comes a moment when the execution of the plan spirals out of control.

In what sense?

— I've been to Gaza many times and have been able to capture that feeling of open-air imprisonment. And so, if you open ten holes in the fence... people will come out. And people will come out who in their 20 or 30 years of life have never seen anything other than that confinement. So, if they're suddenly told, "This time we're attacking and we're breaking free; we've brought down the wall!" this unleashes chaos. The initial logic, which I don't want to justify but am just recording, was to kidnap a significant number of people to force Israel into an exchange agreement, as had happened many times before. But the situation spiraled out of control.

It is hard to see how this was a profitable maneuver.

— This is something the people of Gaza must say. At some point, the people of Gaza will decide whether they should be held accountable for this decision, whether they should hold Hamas responsible for carrying out the operation, whether they should hold the Israeli reaction responsible... This is a story being written now, and the outcome will depend greatly on the final outcome.

A word missing from your book, and it's clearly no coincidence: terrorism.

— Terrorism... what does it mean? You won't find any consensus definition of terrorism. It's called "the use of terror for political ends," but anyone can do that. What Israel is doing in Gaza, massacring the population and launching evacuation leaflets, means we can also talk about state terrorism. These are concepts so politically connoted that they're useless for analyzing anything. So, since 9/11, this narrative has been imposed on us that Arabs are terrorists, a narrative that only functions as a factor of dehumanization, of alienation, of turning them into something alien, incomprehensible, irrational, brutal. Barbaric, in short.

The book is based on seventy interviews. What was the most moving testimony?

— Look, I was really struck by a witness I didn't include in the book. Maybe it's a mistake, but I couldn't find a way to fit it in. It's about a young man who was detained and imprisoned in Israel for many months, including two months in solitary confinement. It was a broom closet with no window, no ventilation, the light on 24/7, and where you have no contact with anyone. It's basically a form of torture to get the person to go crazy and confess whatever is necessary. He told me that to pass the time he would talk to the ants that came into the cell. He would save them loaves of bread, and when the ants gathered around the bread, he would eat them and talk.

The Zionist cause has traditionally had its share of failed defenders in Catalonia. In light of this Israeli response, do you detect a shift in positions?

— There has been a significant wave of solidarity, and this should also be taken into account. When they knew I was from Barcelona, many doors were opened to Palestine. They told me, "The streets of Barcelona have helped the Palestinian cause much more than all the Arab regimes combined." This was a widespread perception. And this has also had an impact on the positioning of the Spanish government, which has ended up being somewhat different from the dominant one, even though it continues to maintain arms trade with Israel.

I was referring, in any case, to the published opinion.

— For many years, Israel has fueled this propaganda, fueled by this support of defenders around the world, and Catalonia has played a significant role in this. But yes, I think many people now don't dare to vocally justify everything that's happening, although the great myths remain.

How now?

— For example, the questioning of the Hamas death toll, because the sources are Palestinian. Well, scientific studies are showing that the death toll is underestimated. Of course, it's very difficult to count the dead in a situation of total and absolute war, especially considering the media blackout.

The two-state solution is often invoked, but in the book you are skeptical.

— Everyone knows that the two-state solution won't work. We've been saying for 30 years, with the Oslo Accords, that this is going to happen, and the Palestinians have said yes to everything, but every day that passes, they find they have less land left to live on. And this is not an accident, but the nature of that state, based on the supremacy of a people who believe they have a superior right for genetic, ethnic, religious, or biblical reasons.

So what's the way out?

— There are three scenarios. The American scenario is that the Palestinians are wiped out, liquidated, killed, or driven away. And then there will be reservations similar to those of Native Americans, which you can visit as a cultural or folklore curiosity. The second scenario is the Algerian one: as a result of realizing that this colonial power will not respect the indigenous population, this project, which is the Israeli one, may collapse, as happened in Algeria with French colonization. But this generated much suffering and many deaths, because these processes are always very costly. And then there is the South African solution, which is the realization that a system based on apartheid cannot continue to function and that a way to coexist must be found by dismantling a legalized regime of oppression of some over others. And this necessarily involves dismantling the State of Israel.

It does not appear that the Jews are about to dismantle their state.

— But this doesn't mean throwing all the Jews into the sea or anything like that. It means dismantling this system of supremacy and ethnic discrimination. I believe that this last scenario, as difficult as it may seem, is also the most rational. Or at least it's what would make the most sense if what we were talking about were finding a solution. Peace in the cemeteries is also a solution, but for me, it's not the solution. final solution is not a solution.