Amria Hass spoke about the similarities of the United States and Israel; both are colonial settler States that practiced ethnic cleansing while Israel has yet to achieve the genocide of its native population that occurred in the United States. There are lots of similarities she sees when visiting the United States.
Hass is the daughter of two Holocaust survivors who preferred to return to their homes in Europe following The Second World War only to find that Nazi antisemitism had infected their communities. They went to Israel as the best of no choice as a place to restart their lives. Both her parents were Communist who did not ascribe to the racist white supremacist values that motivated the core of Zionist leadership and the Israelis in the new State who came to dominate it's politics; always maneuvering with the intent to take all of Palestine, displacing as many Arabs as possible. She recounts a story of her father's shame of witnessing the common place looting of Palestinian fields. We are all in the same boat she said. Her journalism is her effort to not be a passive bystander to the violence that she is aware of committed against Palestinians, as her mother once recounted, German housewives stood, watching with casual indifference, when she was off loaded from a freight car into the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
The questions were off mic and difficult to hear due to the echo of the room. I have included snippets but her answers provide the gist. At least one person was upset that Amira Hass did not go far enough in condemning Israeli crimes which she responds to. Hass ended her talk with her concerned that the people advocating for war in Israel or the region will use that war, as they have done in the past, to attempt further mass expulsions of Palestinians, which we here must focus our efforts on preventing.
Committee For A Just Peace in Israel and Palestine (CJPIP) Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary Tzedek-Chicago Jewish Voice for Peace Muslim Community Center of Morton Grove Chicago Area Peace Action
Amira Hass is the author of several books, "Drinking the Sea In Gaza: Days and Nights in a Land under Siege" and "Reporting from Ramallah: An Israeli Journalist in an Occupied Land", and the recipient of many awards for her journalism and Human Rights reporting. She wrote the foreword and afterword to "Diary of Bergen-Belsen: 1944-1945", her mother Hanna Levey-Hass's account of her time in the Nazi concentration camp.
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