Fwd: A Most Courageous and Dedicated Israeli Journalist

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>From: "MER" <MERL at MiddleEast.Org>
>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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