Palestinian journalist to Madison: Peace is possible

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: Palestinian journalist: Peace is possible -- with hard work : Samara Kalk Derby — 1/27/2009 7:25 am | The Capital Times : -------------------------------- : : Palestinian journalist Amira Hanania was in Madison Monday night, fresh from spending four weeks reporting on the war in Gaza. : "I think I am the only Palestinian journalist who has ever been ice fishing," she said to laughter after she was introduced to a crowd of about 500 for her Distinguished Lecture Series talk in the Wisconsin Union Theater. : Hanania, 27, was the lead journalist for the Ma'an News Agency, the only independent news network in the Palestinian territories. Ma'an publishes news in Arabic and English and is among the most popular Web sites in the Palestinian territories, claiming more than 3 million visits per month. : She recently left Ma'an to take a new job with Future News TV, a 24-hour news channel covering Lebanese, Arab and international news that offers her a wider audience. : Hanania was also the main subject of the documentary "Live from Bethlehem," which premiered before her talk. : Matt Sienkiewicz, a UW graduate student in communication arts, who helped produce the documentary, introduced Hanania, calling her "a responsible reporter who cares more about people than politics -- something that the world desperately needs." : Hanania told her audience that Palestine may seem far away, but that in politics nothing is far from the United States. And she encouraged the mostly student crowd to be active and write their representatives in Congress. : "You have a responsibility to make your country do whatever it can to make the lives of Palestinians, Israelis and all people throughout the world as good and peaceful as possible," she said. : Hanania said she believes in a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There must be a country that is Palestine, the West Bank and Gaza and another country that is Israel, she said. : The Israeli government and the Israeli people need to change their attitudes towards Palestinian, she said. : "We can live together in peace. It will not be easy. It will be as hard as anything in political history. Much too hard for me to explain how to do it tonight," Hanania said. : First, there must be mutual respect, she said. The Israelis must respect that the Palestinians have a right to their land. And the Palestinians must do the same for the Israelis, she said. : "Israel must do better. They must follow the agreements about stopping settlements and closing checkpoints. We as Palestinians must be more united. We need to stop the fighting between us and let the Palestinian Authority become a true government," Hanania said, adding that the U.S. should exert pressure to force Israel to recognize Palestinian rights. : She said that Palestinians have a newfound hope with the election of U.S. President Barack Obama, who she said can help make peace possible. "We are very excited for the future, but we are also worried," she said. : Hanania, who has two small twin sons, said her hardest challenge has been covering the war in Gaza over the last few weeks. She called it painful to see so many innocent people die and feel so helpless. : "Every day I had to report on the deaths of children and other people who had nothing to do with Hamas or Fatah or Israel or anything else in politics. They're just people, and they died for no purpose," she said. : "I could report the news all day, but nothing I could say would do anything to make the loss of innocent people's lives any less terrible." : Too much of the time the Palestinian story is told by everyone except the Palestinians themselves, Hanania said. "There was a time not too long ago when we did not have this chance. Now that we do, we must do it well." : Michael Curtin, a professor of media and cultural Studies in the UW-Madison department of communication arts and former director of the UW Global Studies program, spoke at the beginning of Monday night's event. : "We in the United States like to flatter ourselves with the notion that our media are robust, professional and relatively impartial," Curtin said. : These presumptions were recently tested during the invasion of Gaza when every major news service depended largely on information and access provided by the Israeli military, he asserted. : "This isn't the occasional lapse, nor is it restricted to war zones. News reports about the Palestinian people are, as we all know, quite rare in American media. And impartial reports even rarer." : Curtin credited "60 Minutes" and correspondent Bob Simon for Simon's story Sunday night that offered one of the few accounts of daily life in the West Bank. It also described Israel as an apartheid regime. : Hanania, for her part, is critical of both sides. Israel is wrong for killing innocent people. "It is not self-defense to kill defenseless people," she said. : "But I want to be clear that I do not agree with Hamas and I do not think it is justified to fire rockets into Israel," Hanania said. "They felt that they had no other choices but they were not right to attempt to kill innocent people."

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