Amira Hass is an Israeli journalist and author, mostly known for her columns in the daily newspaper Haaretz. She is particularly recognized for her reporting on Palestinian affairs in the West Bank and Gaza, where she has also lived for a number of years.
Life
The daughter of two Holocaust survivors, Hass is the only child of a Sarajevo-born Sephardic Jewish mother, who survived nine months in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and a Romanian-born Ashkenazi Jewish father. Hass was born in Jerusalem and educated at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she studied the history of Nazism and the European Left's relation to the Holocaust. Early in her career, she traveled widely and worked in several different jobs. Frustrated by the events of the First Intifada and by what she considered their inadequate coverage in the Israeli media, she started to report from the Palestinian territories in 1991. As of 2003 she is the only Jewish Israeli journalist who has lived full-time among the Palestinians, in Gaza from 1993 to 1997 and in Ramallah since. In 2006 she compared Israeli policies toward the Palestinian population to those of South Africa during Apartheid, saying, "The Palestinians, as a people, are divided into subgroups, something which is reminiscent also of South Africa under apartheid rule." In September 2014 Hass went to attend a conference in Birzeit University organised by the leftist German Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and the Center for Development Studies at the university. She was asked to leave by two Birzeit lecturers because of a rule against the presence of Israelis. She said that she had attended the university many times and had never heard of such a rule. The international conference's organizers were offended. The regional head of the Rosa Luxembourg Foundation, Katja Hermann, said after the incident that she would not have agreed to hold the conference at Birzeit had she been aware of the policy. The university later issued a statement saying, "The administration has nothing against the presence of the journalist Hass."
Political position
Hass identifies as a leftist. In 2011 she joined the Freedom Flotilla II to Gaza. In a speech in Vancouver, when asked whether there is any hope for the region, Hass answered, "Only if we continue to build a bi-national movement against Israeli apartheid." In April 2013 Hass wrote an article in Haaretz defending Palestinian stone-throwing, calling it "the birthright and duty of anyone subject to foreign rule". She was criticized by left-wing politician Yossi Beilin and Adva Biton, whose three-year-old daughter was critically injured during a Palestinian rock attack. The Yesha Council filed a complaint with Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein and the police, accusing Hass of incitement to violence because stone throwing has caused serious injuries and death among Israelis.
Legal issues
Defamation case
In June 2001, Judge Rachel Shalev-Gartel of the Jerusalem Magistrate's Court ruled that Hass had defamed the Jewish settler community of Beit Hadassah in Hebron and ordered her to pay 250,000 shekels in damages. Hass had published accounts by Palestinians that claimed Israeli settlers defiled the body of a Palestinian militant killed by Israeli police; the settlers said that the event did not take place and that Hass had falsely reported the story with malicious intent. The presiding judge found in favour of the settlers, saying that television accounts contradicted Hass's account and ruling that Hass's report damaged that community's reputation. Haaretz indicated that it did not have time to arrange a defense in the case and indicated that it would appeal the decision. Hass said that she had brought forward sourced information from the Palestinian community and said that it was the responsibility of newspaper editors to cross-reference it with other information from the IDF and the settler community.
Other
On 1 December 2008, Hass, who had traveled to Gaza aboard a protest vessel, had to flee the strip due to threats to her life after she criticized Hamas. She was arrested by Israeli police on her return to Israel for being in Gaza without a permit. After residing in the Gaza Strip for several months, Hass was again arrested by Israeli police upon her return to Israel on 12 May 2009 "for violating a law which forbids residence in an enemy state".
