Waging Peace, Pages 56-57

Amira Hass (Reluctantly) Accepts Courage in Journalism Award

Former anchorman Marvin Kalb and Amira Hass at a panel discussion sponsored by the International Women’s Media Foundation. (Photo K. Szremski)

CALLING HER lifetime achievement award from the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF) an “embarrassment,” Israeli journalist Amira Hass went so far in her acceptance speech as to call her career accomplishments a “failure.”

The Haaretz reporter, who is the only Israeli journalist to live in Gaza and the West Bank among the Palestinians about whom she reports, was among the IWMF’s Courage in Journalism Award winners who participated in an Oct. 26 panel discussion at the National Press Club with former TV news anchorman Marvin Kalb.

“What one thing would you want American media to do?” Kalb asked the panelists.

“To stop being afraid of covering what the Israeli occupation and the Israeli regime is doing,” Hass replied. “People are actually being imprisoned in Gaza for the last 20 years. Gaza is a big prison.”

“But didn’t they let them out?” Kalb asked.

Incredulous, Hass stopped in mid-thought and stared at Kalb, who seemed to confuse the analogy that Israel’s multi-year blockade of Gaza has turned it into an open-air prison with an actual penitentiary. “Hamas,” he repeated. “Didn’t Hamas let them out?”

Exasperated, Hass replied, “It is a huge detention camp...long before Hamas took over, Israel controlled the life in Gaza. Israel’s closure policy did not start with Hamas in terms of Palestinian freedom of movement.”

Clearly uncomfortable, Kalb cut short the lifetime achievement award winner’s comments. “I don’t want to get into the large issues now. I want to keep it to journalism.”

He then directed his comments to Iryna Khalip of Belarus and Cameroon’s Agnes Taile. Iranian journalist Jila Baniyaghoob was not able to attend the event.

The IWMF is a global network dedicated to strengthening the role of women in the news media worldwide. It established the Courage in Journalism awards in 1990 “to honor women journalists who have shown extraordinary strength of character and integrity while reporting the news under dangerous or difficult circumstances,” according to a prepared statement.

Hass credits Haaretz with allowing her to cover the conflict as openly as she has. But she scoffs at the idea her work is noble or has required sacrifice. She’s simply angry, she said, at the Israeli occupation and the reality of state-sponsored apartheid, and laments her “failure” at getting the Israeli and international public to use honest language when it comes to the occupation.

“It is not my role as a journalist to make my fellow Israelis and Jews agree that these processes are immoral and dangerously unwise,” Haas said in her Oct. 16 acceptance speech, a copy of which she emailed to this reporter. “It is my role, though, to exercise the right for freedom of the press, in order to supply information and to make people know. But, as I have painfully discovered, the right to know does not mean a duty to know.

“Thousands of my articles and zillions of words have evaporated. They could not compete with the official language that has been happily adopted by the mass media, and is used in order to dis-portray the reality—the official language that encourages people not to know.”

—Kristin Szremski, director of media and communications for American Muslims for Palestine.