Gaza melts down

http://www.guerrillanews.com/headlines/9252/Gaza_melts_down

a view from "inside" gaza today....


A little background here: Palestinians are the easiest people in the world to cover as a journalist. They respect the work, know journalists take risks to tell their story, and, frankly, know that stories of their suffering under Israeli oppression are good P.R. But it’s not just cynical and calculating; they’re Arabs and that stuff about Arabs’ respect for guests is very real and sincere.

Having said that, a lot of the goodwill toward the foreign journo dries up when it’s Arabs fighting each other. Suddenly, you’re not documenting a noble struggle against occupation, you’re just some foreigner.....


And from what I can tell, the new Palestinian civil war is barely being reported. Last night the top hotels that journalists use in Gaza, even the ones never used as firing positions, remain empty. Now that the Israelis have left, it seems to be a story no one is interested in.

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And I speak as someone who's been paying attention. Until things REALLY blow up, it's not news, it's simply a continued simmering. "Hamas and Fatah still at each other's throats, news at 11" will not cut it. Right now we're in a standoff mode and the standoff is continuing without resolution. That's not "new" anymore.

“You know they’d kill me for saying this, but I miss the Israelis,” one droll local journalist told me after we watched the men beat another photographer and destroy his gear. “Sure they occupied us, but there were fucking rules, man. ‘Go here and we’ll shoot you. Stand there and you’re cool.’ We could work. We could live. Now we have this shit.”