By Peggy Simpson
Amira Hass says she is not an expert on Palestinians but on the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
Hass, recipient of the 2009 Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Women’s Media Foundation, has reported on Palestinian issues for the Tel Aviv daily newspaper, Ha’aretz Daily, for nearly two decades. She is the rare Israeli journalist who has lived in Gaza and the West Bank.
And she has been pilloried by both Israelis who don’t want to hear what she reports and by Hamas leaders who don’t want the free media to report on what they are doing. Hass talks with intention about the “apartheid” that she says exists between Israelis and Palestinians.
“The main thing about apartheid is not racism but about this dual system, where people have different rights. They are from different ethnic groups in the same territory… ethnic groups that do not have the same voting rights.”
She had been a skeptic when much of the world was optimistic about the prospect that the Oslo accord of 1993 would bring about a peaceful resolution of the Israeli- Palestinian situation.
“But I didn’t think it would turn out to be as terrible as it has. I predicted in 1999 and in 2000 that things would explode because it was very clear that there was a discrepancy between the promise and the reality of Israeli control and domination over Palestinian life – the creation of the sort of apartheid regime in the country.” till, “the bloodiness of everything is not something that I predicted.”
Hass was born eight years after her parents immigrated to Israel after World Ward II. Her mother was a survivor of Bergen-Belsen, and her father was in ghettos in Romania and Ukraine. She credits them with giving her an operating ethos, more than any journalism mentor.
“I think the main thing that I got from home, from my upbringing, was the principle of equality. Both my parents were communists and Jews. For them, there was the connection of the principle of equality. How they saw communism was very different from what we now know was the reality.”
Hass had tried and discarded academic life when she found a copy-editing job at Ha’aretz. At the time, she also began volunteering for an African group which gave her contact with Palestinians.
“I didn’t know that much about Gaza. The picture of it in Israel was much distorted. So, in 1991, I talked them into letting me write about Gaza. And then, in 1993, when the Oslo agreement was signed, people thought it meant peace so the paper asked me to cover Gaza.”
They didn’t expect her to move there, but she did.
She said Israelis “have learned a lot from the occupation. They have profited from the last 20 years. During the 16 years since Oslo, they have lived very comfortably with the idea that there is no more occupation just because of Oslo, because Israel redeployed their forces and Palestinians ran their own affairs.”
As long as the profits continue and pressure on Israel remains minimal, she sees no change.”
Moral arguments have not been successful over the years. Logical arguments have not been successful either.”
She doesn’t mince words about the shortcomings of the Palestinian security organs.
“The main security is the Israeli Army and Israeli intelligence and the Israeli border police. The Palestinian security is mainly used for policing internally. And Palestinians unfortunately played with it as if it is a government and as if they have authority.”
She said both Hamas and Fatah “use the security service not for liberation from Israeli occupation but against their own people.”
They have fundamentally less power than Israelis, however, she says. “Palestinian security organs have a limited authority over only 20 percent of the West Bank. And they don’t have authority over Jews. A Jew could kill a Palestinian in the West Bank and they would not be allowed to prosecute, whereas Israelis could prosecute anyone, any time. The inequality is so interwoven. It has even rendered the very term ‘security’ ridiculous.”
Hass does not think of herself as courageous. “I don’t want to be falsely modest. But I’m more angry than courageous. I haven’t had to make such sacrifices that would require courage from me…not like in South Africa or the ex-Soviet Union or ex-Germany where people were in danger of their life.”
She used to hope there might be a parallel between two significant “rights” movements: the feminist movement and the human rights movement against the occupation of Palestine. She no longer draws such comparisons.
In Israel, sexist language of 25 years ago is long gone. Feminists have had much success in winning equal pay and prosecutions against violence against them. But Israeli women were directly affected by sexism, as half of the country’s population. They aren’t affected personally by the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
“All Israelis benefit, and there is no (adverse) impact on individual Israelis. So the human rights change is much more difficult.” She also notes that the status of women actually has gotten worse in Palestine during the same period it improved in Israel, “as part of the growing religiosity of Palestinian society…especially in Gaza.”
Hass no longer believes that she or others can use Jewish history to “talk into human hearts and minds” about the human rights inequalities in the Israeli occupation of Palestine, despite repeated stories about how Israelis have access to water while Palestinians often do not, about the high caliber of health and education for Israelis and the dismal levels for Palestinians.
That is why she keeps writing about Israel’s “profit from occupation. That we all have privileges as Jews….any Jew could come any moment and become a citizen but not a Palestinian who was born here.”
She sees minimal prospect of success from the mostly European efforts to boycott Israeli companies working in occupied territories. Their moral arguments are trumped by Israel’s economic power, especially in selling arms around the world, she says. “Russia and Turkey were vocal against the Israeli onslaught in Gaza but then right after that they’re making deals to buy Israeli drones. “
One ray of hope, she says, is that an increasing number of grassroots activists, including lawyers, are “doing a marvelous job of defying the Israeli occupation.” They are using their privileged status as
Jews, to “come out against the regime of those privileges.”
There are “not enough, but some,” and that is part of what keeps Hass going.
Peggy Simpson is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.