Amira Hass Receives Lifetime Achievement Award
October 25th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Amira Hass: "To me, Gaza embodies the entire saga of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; it represents the central contradiction of the state of Israel – democracy for some, dispossession for others; it is our exposed nerve."
Last week Israeli journalist Amira Hass received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Women’s Media Foundation for her tireless coverage of Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Now based in Ramallah, Hass has also lived in Gaza and the West Bank. Although her analysis and criticisms extend to both Israelis and Palestinians, she has been the victim of several Zionist smear campaigns for her reports about Israel’s crimes. She refuses to be silent however, regardless of all the intimidation tactics that have been launched against her.
The daughter of Holocaust survivors, Hass has also spoken out against Israelis’ misuse of the Holocaust as a silencing tool against all those who criticize the government’s policies and crimes against the Palestinians:
Turning the Holocaust into a political asset serves Israel primarily in its fight against the Palestinians. When the Holocaust is on one side of the scale, along with the guilty (and rightly so) conscience of the West, the dispossession of the Palestinian people from their homeland in 1948 is minimized and blurred.
Hass has been harassed, fined, arrested and vehemently criticized for her reporting, but she has not compromised her integrity or wavered in her duties as a journalist. She has also been praised for her fair and balanced reporting, but points out that this is a troubling notion in and of itself:
There is a misconception that journalists can be objective. 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 – it’s to monitor power and the centers of power.
Hass has been writing about Israel’s occupation of Palestine for more than 20 years.
Below are clips from Hass’s recent appearance on Democracy Now! where you can watch her award acceptance speech and listen to her commentary on current events including Israel’s repeated attacks against the legitimacy of the Goldstone Report.
