This is one of the speakers at The Rachel Corrie Foundation’s 2006 Peace Works Conference. Go Here To see the main Peace Works Conference page.
Amira Hass is an Israeli author and journalist for the Israeli daily newspaper Ha’aretz who has lived in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. She was born in Jerusalem in 1956, the daughter of Yugoslavian-Jewish refugees. A journalist for the Hebrew daily Ha’aretz, she covers Gaza and the West Bank. She received the UPI’s International Award and the Sokolow Prize, Israel’s highest honor for journalists. For her work in Gaza, Hass was been nominated for the Robert F. Kennedy Award.
From 1993 to 1997, Amira Hass lived in Gaza and was the first Israeli journalist to stay the enclave so feared and despised by most Israelis that, in the Israeli idiom, “Go to Gaza” is another way to say “Go to hell.”
While there, the Haaretz correspondent wrote “Drinking the Sea at Gaza.” It maps the zones of ordinary Palestinian life. From her friends, Hass learns the secrets of slipping across sealed borders and stealing through night streets emptied by curfews. She shares Gaza’s early euphoria over the peace process and its subsequent despair as hope gives way to unrelenting hardship. But even as Hass charts the griefs and humiliations of the Palestinians, she offers a remarkable portrait of a people not brutalized but eloquent, spiritually resilient, bleakly funny, and morally courageous.
Since 1997, Amira Hass has lived in Ramalla in the West Bank where she continues to work as a journalist. Since 2001 she has written a weekly column for the Italian weekly INTERNAZIONALE
— Parts from Henry Holt and Co. bookpublishers
Books
- Reporting from Ramallah : An Israeli Journalist in an Occupied Land
- Drinking the Sea at Gaza : Days and Nights in a Land Under Siege
Selected articles