Haaretz journalist Amira Hass, a radical left winger who often promotes the Palestinian narrative, learned a lesson in Palestinian intolerance this week after being unceremoniously removed from a conference at Birzeit University.
According to Hass’s own account of the incident, two Palestinian academics approached Hass during the conference and asked her to leave, citing “a law at Birzeit stipulating that Israelis (Jewish Israelis, that is) are not allowed on the university grounds.”
University officials, she wrote, indicated that they were afraid “students would break into the conference hall in protest over my presence.”
A faculty member who I have known for 40 years walked past and said: “This is for your own protection [from the students].” And I was at that moment reminded of the image that Israelis commonly have of Palestinians: irrational hotheads. A Palestinian citizen of Israel who came to the conference left out of disgust, in her words, at my ouster.
Hass has a long history of pro-Palestinian activism and has often used her platform at Haaretz to serve as an apologist for Palestinian intransigence. She has described stone throwing as “a birthright and duty” for West Bank Palestinians and stood up for Hamas’s right to build tunnels.
But Hass was less inclined to defend Palestinian hostility when it was directed at her individually:
I am writing about this incident precisely because I did not take it personally. I do not take personally the fact that some faculty members were hiding behind hypothesized angry students and a law that many others seem to be unaware of. In my opinion, it would have been more dignified to tell me explicitly: We do not differentiate between those who support the occupation and those who are against it, between those who report on policies to forcibly evict the Bedouin or those who carry out that policy; for us, there is only one place for every Israeli Jew – outside.
