2009 Lifetime Achievement Award
Acceptance Speech
International Women’s Media Foundation
 

Allow me to start with a correction. How impolite, you’d rightly think, but anyway, we Israelis are being forgiven for much worse than impoliteness.

What is so generously termed today by the International Women’s Media Foundation as my lifetime achievement needs to be corrected. Because it is Failure. Nothing more than a failure. A lifetime failure.

Come to think of it, the lifetime part is just as questionable: after all, it is about a third of my life, not more, that I have been engaged in Journalism.

Also, if the ‘lifetime’ part gives you the impression that I am soon going to retire - then this impression has to be corrected as well. I am not planning to end soon what I am doing.

What am I doing? I am generally defined as a reporter on Palestinian issues. But, in fact, my reports are about the Israeli society and policies, about Domination and its intoxications. My sources are not secret documents and leaked out minutes which were taken at meetings of people with Power and in Power. My sources are the open ways by which the subjugated are being dispossessed of their equal rights as human beings.

There is still so much more to learn about Israel, about my society, and about Israeli decision makers who invent restrictions such as: Gazan students are not to study in a Palestinian university in the West Bank, some 70 km’s away from their home. Another ban: Children (above the age of 18) are not to visit their parents in Gaza, if the parents are well and healthy. If they were dying, Israeli order-abiding officials would have allowed the visit. If the children are younger than 18 - the visit would have been allowed. But, on the other hand, second degree relatives are not allowed to visit dying or healthy siblings in Gaza.

It is an intriguing philosophical question, not only journalistic. Think of it: what, for the Israeli System, is so disturbing, about reasonably healthy fathers or mothers? What is so disturbing about a kid choosing and getting a better education? And these are but two in a long, long list of Israeli prohibitions.

Or when I write about the progressively decimated and fragmented Palestinian territory of the West Bank. It’s not just about people losing their family property and livelihood; it’s not only about the shrinking opportunities of people in disconnected, crowded enclaves. It is in fact a story about the skills of Israeli architects. It is a way to learn about how Israeli on the-ground planning contradicts official proclamations, a phenomenon which characterizes the acts of all Israeli governments, in the past as in the present. In short, there is so much to keep me busy for another lifetime, or at least for the rest of my lifetime.

But, as I said, the real correction is elsewhere. It’s not about achievement that we should be talking here, but about a failure.

It is the failure to make the Israeli and international public use and accept correct terms and words - which reflect the reality. Not the Orwelian New Speech that has flourished since 1993 and has been cleverly dictated and disseminated by those with invested interests.

The Peace Process terminology, which took reign, blurs the perception of real processes that are going on: a special blend of military occupation, colonialism, apartheid, Palestinian limited self-rule in enclaves and a democracy for Jews.

It is not my role as a journalist to make my fellow Israelis and Jews agree that these processes are immoral and dangerously unwise. It is my role, though, to exercise the Right for freedom of the Press, in order to supply information and to make people know. But, as I have painfully discovered, the right to know does not mean a duty to know.

Thousands of my articles and zillion of words have evaporated. They could not compete with the official language that has been happily adopted by the mass media, and is used in order to dis-portray the reality. Official language that encourages people not to know.

Indeed, a remarkable failure for a journalist.

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