From: "MER" <MERL@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: A Most Courageous and Dedicated Israeli Journalist
Date: Sun, 26 Aug 2001 10:36:28 -0400
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A MOST COURAGEOUS AND DEDICATED ISRAELI JOURNALIST
MID-EAST REALITIES © - MER - www.MiddleEast.Org - Washington - 8/26:
If we had an award for Middle East Journalist of the year, the
Israeli writer Amira Hass would be very high on that list. A few
years ago, long before it became politically correct to term Israeli
policies "apartheid like", especially in Jewish and American
circles, Amira Hass was doing just that in her writing and speaking.
At that time we were fortunate to be able to broadcast one of her
talks to a small university group on MID-EAST REALITIES TELEVISION
(www.mertv.org). Only those who have themselves transversed the
increasingly dangerous Israeli-Palestinian divide can begin to
imagine the courage, the dedication, and the selflessness -- in
addition to the talent -- that is required to serve all of us so
well as does Amira Hass, usually writing in the Israeli daily
Ha'aretz.
AMIRA HASS: LIFE UNDER ISRAELI OCCUPATION - BY AN ISRAELI
Jewish journalist Amira Hass doesn't merely report on the
experiences of Palestinians on the West Bank - she shares
their lives. Robert Fisk meets a determined and unflinching
witness to oppression.
[The Independent - UK - Sunday, 26 August]:
Whenever Amira Hass tries to explain her vocation as a journalist, she
recalls a seminal moment in her mother's life. Hannah Hass was being marched
from a cattle train to the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen on a summer's
day in 1944. "She and the other women had been 10 days in the train from
Yugoslavia. They were sick and some were dying. Then my mother saw these
German women looking at the prisoners, just looking. This image became very
formative in my upbringing, this despicable 'looking from the side'. It's as
if I was there and saw it myself." Amira Hass stares at you through
wire-framed glasses as she speaks, anxious to make sure you have understood
the importance of the Jewish Holocaust in her life.
In her evocative book Drinking the Sea at Gaza, Hass eloquently explains why
she, an Israeli journalist, went to live in Yasser Arafat's tiny,
garbage-strewn statelet. "In the end," she wrote, "my desire to live in Gaza
stemmed neither from adventurism nor from insanity, but from that dread of
being a bystander, from my need to understand, down to the last detail, a
world that is, to the best of my political and historical comprehension, a
profoundly Israeli creation. To me, Gaza embodies the entire saga of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict; it represents the central contradiction of the
state of Israel ñ democracy for some, dispossession for others; it is our
exposed nerve."
Now living in the West Bank town of Ramallah ñ with the Palestinians whom
many of her people regard as "terrorists", listening to the Palestinian
curses heaped upon "the Jews" for their confiscations and dispossessions and
murder squads and settlements ñ Amira Hass is among the bravest of
reporters, her daily column in Ha'aretz ablaze with indignation at the way
her own country, Israel, is mistreating and killing the Palestinians. Only
when you meet her, however, do you realise the intensity ñ the passion ñ of
her work. "There is a misconception that journalists can be objective," she
tells me, the same sharp glance to ensure my comprehension. "Palestinians
tell me I'm objective. I think this is important because I'm an Israeli. But
being fair and being objective are not the same thing. What journalism is
really about ñ it's to monitor power and the centres of power."
Each day, Amira Hass writes an essay about despair, a chronological
narrative she maintains when talking about her own life and about her
parents: her mother, a Sarajevo Jew who joined Tito's partisans and was
forced to surrender to the Nazis when they threatened to kill every woman in
the Montenegrin town of Cetinje; her father Avraham who spent four years in
the Transnistria ghetto, escaping a plague of typhus only to lose his toes
to frostbite.
The story of the secular Jews Hannah and Avraham is essential to an
understanding of Amira. "My parents came here to Israel naively. They were
offered a house in Jerusalem. But they refused it. They said: 'We cannot
take the house of other refugees.' They meant Palestinians. So you see, it's
not such a big deal that I write what I do ñ it's not a big deal that I live
among Palestinians." Hass became a journalist by default. She had survived
on odd jobs ñ she once worked as a cleaner ñ and travelled to Holland. "I
sensed there the absence of Jewish existence. And this told me many things,
especially about my attitude to Israel, how not to be a Zionist. This is my
place, Israel, the language, the people, the culture, the colours..."
Hass dropped out of the Hebrew University where she was researching the
history of the Nazis and the attitude of the European left to the Holocaust.
"I was stuck. The first intifada broke out and I didn't want to sit in
academia while all this was happening. I used wasta ñ you know that Arabic
word? ñ to get a copy-editing job on the Ha'aretz news desk in '89." Wasta
means "pull" or "influence". Ha'aretz is a liberal, free-thinking paper, the
nearest Israel has to The Independent. When the Romanian revolution broke
out, Hass pleaded to be sent to cover the story ñ she had many contacts from
a visit to Bucharest in 1977 ñ and much to her surprise, Ha'aretz agreed,
even though she'd been with the paper only three months.
"When I'd gone to Romania before, I felt I had this philosophical
responsibility to taste life under this socialist regime," she says. "It was
a thousand times worse than I imagined. There was this terrible pressure ñ
life under Israeli occupation is not as bad as life in Ceausescu's Romania.
It was unbelievable suffocation. So I covered the revolution for two weeks
and then went back to the paper. Ha'aretz didn't know if I could write ñ I
knew I could. But I also knew never to look for what all the other
journalists are looking for."
In 1990, with her parents' support, she joined a group called Workers'
Hotline, which assisted Palestinians who were cheated by their Israeli
employers. "During the Gulf War, I reached Gaza under curfew ñ I'd gone to
give Palestinians their cheques from Israeli employers. That's when my
romance with Gaza started. No Israeli journalist knew or covered Gaza. My
editor was very sympathetic. When in 1993 the 'peace process' broke out" ñ
Hass requests the inverted commas round the phrase ñ "Ha'aretz suggested I
cover Gaza. One of the editors said: 'We don't want you to live in Gaza.'
And I knew at once that I wanted to live there."
From the start, Hass recalls, there was "something very warm about the
Palestinian attitude ñ there was a lot of humour in these harsh conditions."
When I suggest that this might be something she had recognised in Jews, Hass
immediately agrees. "Of course. I'm an east European Jew and the life of the
shtetl is inbuilt in me. And I guess I found in Gaza a shtetl. I remember
finding refugees from Jabalya camp, sitting on a beach. I asked them what
they were doing. And one said he was 'waiting to be 40 years old' ñ so he'd
be old enough to get a permit to work in Israel. This was a very Jewish
joke."
But Hass found no humour in the Israeli policy of "closure", of besieging
Palestinian towns and throttling their economy and people. "I spotted as
early as 1991 that the policy of 'closure' was a very clever step by the
Israeli occupation system, a kind of pre-emptive strike," she says. "The way
it debilitates any kind of Palestinian action and reaction is amazing.
'Closure' was also a goal: a demographic separation which means that Jews
have the right to move about the space of Mandatory Palestine. The 'closure'
policy brought this to a real perfection."
Hass found herself fascinated with the difference between Palestinian image
and reality. "Their towns were being portrayed in the Israeli press as a
'nest of hornets'. But I really wanted to taste what it means to live under
occupation ñ what it is like to live under curfew, to live in fear of a
soldier. I wanted to know what it was like to be an Israeli under Israeli
occupation." She has used that word "taste" again, just as she did about
Romania under dictatorship. She says she was still thinking about her
mother's trip to Belsen. "It was this idea of not intervening, not changing
anything. And luckily, this combined in me with journalism." Hass is
possessed of the idea that change can come only through social movements
and their interaction with the press ñ an odd notion that seems a little
illogical.
But there is nothing vague about her vocation. "Israel is obviously the
centre of power which dictates Palestinian life," she says. "As an Israeli,
my task as a journalist is to monitor power. I'm called 'a correspondent on
Palestinian affairs', but it's more true to say that I'm an expert in
Israeli occupation." Israeli reaction, she says, is very violent towards
her. "I get messages saying I must have been a kapo [a Jewish camp overseer
for the Nazis] in my first incarnation. Then I'll get an e-mail saying:
'Bravo, you have written a great article ñ Heil Hitler!' Someone told me
they hoped I suffered breast cancer. 'Until we expel all Palestinians, there
will be no peace,' some of them say. I can't reply to them ñ there are
thousands of these messages."
But many Israelis tell Amira Hass to keep writing. "People misled themselves
into believing that Oslo was a peace process ñ so they became very angry
with the Palestinians. Part of their anger is directed at me. Israelis do
not go to the occupied territories. They do not see with their own eyes.
They don't see a Palestinian village with a settler on its land and a
village that has no water and needs government permission even to plant a
tree, let alone build a new school. People don't understand how the
dispersal of Jewish settlements dictates Israeli control over Palestinian
territory."
As her mother lay dying this spring, Amira feared that she would be trapped
by the Israeli siege of Ramallah ñ where she now lives ñ and spent hours
commuting the few miles to Jerusalem. Now she is alone. The woman who taught
her to despise those who were "looking from the side" died two months ago.
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