PRIZE TO AMIRA HASS

On February the 8'th 2002 the Plum Foundation gave a price of DK 100,000 to the Israeli journalist Amira Hass. The chairman of the Plum Foundation, Tine Bryld, made the following speech during the prize ceremony:

Dear Amira Hass - I have read your articles, I have seen you from a distance in the street and I have admired you since I heard about you for the very first time. So, I am very honoured to be able to give you this: the first prize donated by the Plum Foundation.

A little more than one year ago, some of the board members of the Plum Foundation went to Israel and Palestine in order to see the situation on the ground in the Occupied Territories for ourselves. One of the stated aims of the Foundation is to support humanitarian causes, including the protection of human rights of vulnerable groups and individuals. The civilian population in Gaza and the West Bank no doubt belongs to this category.

None of us had visited the Occupied Territories before and, as most Danes, we had seen TV images of stone-throwing kids confronted by heavily armed Israeli soldiers. A never-ending story of killings, suicide bombers and despair. Since the beginning of the second Intifada in early autumn 2000 we had been following the developments, affecting children and adults alike, with growing concern and observed the daily fatalities - mostly Palestinian, but also including innocent Israeli civilians.

The so-called "peace process", that we heard so much of, was nowhere to be found. Instead, we found a regular occupation by the Israelis of the areas that the Palestinians had been promised in numerous UN declarations and resolutions.

We visited refugee camps that had grown into makeshift refugee townships, spoke with families who had lost work and income and who were trying to survive under the most dismal conditions.

We went to Hebron, which appeared almost deserted due to the curfew imposed on the citizens, while the few Israeli settlers who lived in down-town Hebron were protected by Israeli soldiers, who were also charged escorting the settler children to school every day.

It is impossible not to notice how construction cranes and building sites are to be found everywhere in the Occupied Territories, and how a separate and massive system of so-called "by-pass roads" - as we know them from the apartheid period in South Africa - has been built to serve the settlers and the settlements reaching hilltops strategically chosen so that they surround all major Palestinian population centres. The settlements are constructed as fortresses with barbed wire, guarded by soldiers, whose official task it is to protect the security of the State of Israel, but whose real task it is to protect the illegal usurpation of land and the dispossession of the Palestinians.

Every day brings fewer opportunities for the Palestinians to farm their land and go about their daily business. It is frustrating to see the comfortable villas and the green lawns of the settlements facing the misery in the Palestinian townships, which are pockmarked with abject housing facilities with poor children and adults having to negotiate improvised dirt paths and destroyed roads when they try to go to school or reach their work place. It is hard to witness the humiliation and control of people who are subjected to the ever-present check-points, where one misplaced word or gesture may impede a Palestinian from seeing his or her family, go to hospital or to work.

The old men invited us for tea in the small square. More gathered around us and they said: if you really want to help us, go back to your country and tell what you have seen.

And this is precisely what our recipient of the Plum Foundation prize, Amira Hass, has done for many years in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz. she lived for long periods as the only Israeli journalist in the Occupied Territories, first in Gaza and now in Ramallah, in order to be able to describe the daily reality under Israeli occupation.

Her intentions are clearly to inform and document and she is far from uncritical towards the Palestinian leadership, but always feels solidarity with the civilian population, who are experiencing increasing poverty and de-humanisation through daily humiliations.

One of the articles I remember most clearly is her piece on the stone-thrower and the sniper, where Amira Hass closes in on the fates of some young men who are so alike and yet so different - victims of a political game played by the USA, the EU, the Arab states and Israel. The stone-thrower who after Friday prayers gathers with his friends around burning car tyres and picking up stones; the sniper who is told to shoot - but to avoid targeting children under 12 years of age!

Who is she, this brave woman who moves among the rubble, Israeli soldiers, stone-throwing children, families and farmers? A German journalist followed Amira Hass over a prolonged period, which, initially, was not to the liking of Amira Hass. However, she succeeded in producing a fascinating documentary, which was broadcast in several countries. We are not only seeing the lives of ordinary people, the jokes exchanged between Jews and Palestinians who, for different reasons, have an interest in having bullet-proofed their cars, but first of all we are presented with a portrait of a remarkable individual who, through her honesty, her tenacity when showing us the madness and the powerlessness, but also the necessity of finding a solution that guarantees the right of the Palestinians and the Israelis to live in peace.

The one person, who may have meant most to Amira Hass, is her mother Hanna, whose whole family was wiped out in the Nazi concentration camps. Her mother says: "the difficult thing about reality is to describe it". She gazes at Amira and smiles, knowing that this is precisely what her daughter has mastered. And it is the mother, who gave Amira the ability to see - through her accounts of the time when Jews were sent to be exterminated in the concentration camps.

Amira says: "I am reminded about a scene my mother often talked about. She was put on a transport to Bergen-Belsen and when they arrived, they saw some German women with baskets of food. The women looked with dispassionate curiosity at the new wagonload of human beings about to be killed. Since then I have felt bad when I see others suffer without doing something. One of my biggest nightmares, when I became an adult, was to be placed in a situation where I could only be the onlooker".

I think this is the key to an understanding of Amira Hass and her stubborn efforts to inform and document what is going on in the Occupied Territories. She, who - unlike most others - knows the suffering of the Jews, is bound to feel astonished how the Israeli Jews today treat another large minority, the Palestinians. She herself says that many Israelis use the Holocaust as an excuse for all what has happened and is happening.

The feeling of being a refugee both among her own people and among the Palestinians make her less vulnerable and, perhaps, more credible in both camps. In any case, we have to praise the freedom of speech in Israel, which means that those Israelis who know nothing about the day-to-day existence of the Palestinians may gain an insight which only very few people have the ability to communicate.

And perhaps do not want to communicate. Also in my country, in Denmark, it has proven difficult to entertain maintain an open dialogue on the repression of the Palestinians. In this climate, any criticism of the Israeli occupation may be branded as anti-semitism. It is an intolerable and deliberate confusion of concepts, pre-judging any sensible discussion about a future solution of the situation in Israel and Palestine.

Dear Amira Hass - May this prize help you sustain your will and desire to go on informing and documenting - and may your efforts be conducive to further the will of the politicians to find a more constructive solution than the motto: war on terrorism. It is difficult to discern any light at the end of the tunnel. However, it is heartening to see the courage of the Israeli reserve officers who are now declining to serve in the Occupied Territories. Perhaps they have taken inspiration from your dedicated efforts.