More than 1,200 dead in a savage terrorist attack, more than 240 hostages who are still being held against their will, merciless bombings on one of the most densely populated areas in the world and which have already caused more than 10,000 deaths. And a context (a why) that goes back centuries and that reaches the present day after going through traumatic chapters for both sides (the Holocaust for the Israelis, the Nakba for the Palestinians).
The main news focus is now on the Israeli attacks on Gaza and its occupation, but reporting on this new war in the region is a journalistic challenge that is difficult to match, explain the La Vanguardia envoys. Because of the impossibility of accessing the Gaza Strip, because of the weight of history and because of the intersecting and contradictory geopolitical interests that accumulate.
“It is the oldest war in the world and, no matter how hard you try and apply professional journalistic criteria, you always have the feeling that you have made a mistake, that you have left out a detail or that you have not reflected a point of view,” explains Xavier. Mas de Xaxàs, the first of the newspaper's envoys to Israel in the face of the new escalation. “No international crisis is as divisive and polarizing as this one, in a land that has been in the news since, at least, the Crusades,” adds Joaquín Luna, who took over from Mas de Xaxàs, by phone from Tel Aviv. In addition to the military blockade, entering Gaza is impossible “due to the physical and impassable border” created around it, Luna emphasizes. “You don't have the freedom of movement to cross the front and balance the point of view,” laments Mas de Xaxàs.
The experience accumulated by both in decades of international coverage, however, helps to alleviate these obstacles and in the newspaper it has been possible to read interviews with Israeli pacifists such as the singer Noa, ministers of Netanyahu's government, the mayor of Ramallah and historians and intellectuals; reports that collected the voice of the Israeli Arab population, of relatives of hostages and of communities in which Jews and Palestinians live together, to give just a few examples. Perspectives that, beyond the essential war chronicles and the tragic and incessant count of victims, help readers get closer to the complexity of the conflict.
