COMMENTARY
by Evelyn Gordon
October 1, 2014
If the world hasn’t yet grasped that Palestinians aren’t interested in peace, it’s certainly not because Palestinians haven’t been working hard to make it clear. Mahmoud Abbas’s “genocide” speech at the UN last week did get momentary attention, being too public to ignore completely. But an even more telling incident has been almost completely overlooked: the expulsion of Haaretz reporter Amira Hass–a woman who has spent decades promoting the Palestinian cause–from a conference at Birzeit University near Ramallah, solely because she is an Israeli Jew.
Nobody, in Israel or outside it, is more pro-Palestinian than Hass. To the best of my knowledge, she’s the only Israeli reporter so dedicated to the Palestinians that she has made her home among them for decades, first in Gaza and then in Ramallah. She reports relentlessly on Palestinian suffering under the “occupation regime” and is a tireless apologist for unattractive Palestinian habits such as stone-throwing. Her latest op-ed, for instance, was an apologia for Abbas’s genocide speech, and her report on her expulsion from Birzeit was similarly forgiving of the bigoted policy that bans all Israeli Jews–though not Israeli Arabs–from the campus simply because they are Israeli Jews. So if students and faculty at Birzeit, the Palestinians’ flagship university, can’t even tolerate having Hass on their campus, what does that say about Palestinian readiness to make peace with the Israeli majority, which doesn’t share her belief that their own country is evil and all justice is on the Palestinians’ side?…..
ArchitectGuy on Israel 