Terror attacks against Jews in Judea and Samaria are "legitimate," Haaretz journalist Amira Hass insisted to an audience at Duke University in North Carolina.
Hass gave two separate lectures at the university in March, ISLAMiCommentary reported earlier this month: one entitled “The Israeli Occupation and Jewish-Israeli Dissent” and the other, “Reporting from Ramallah: An Israeli Jew in an Occupied Land."
During the talks, Hass deemed Gaza "a concentration camp" - a term she used even though her mother survived Bergen-Belsen - and called terror attacks on Jews a "legitimate" means of "resistance."
Hass claimed that Gazans "are deprived of so many basic things, because Israel deprives them of peace, (the) basic right of freedom of movement."
She based her "concentration camp" claim on the fact that Israel has required Gazans to travel with a permit back and forth to Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) since 1991 to help stop the steady stream of terror attacks on Israelis.
"From time to time Israel changes — I call it the policy of the goat," she said. "You put inside people’s lives many hardships and then as a kind of goodwill gesture, you remove one of the hardships when you want. But it’s taken as a favor done, not as a right and not as a policy."
Hass further claimed that Israel's security policies were implemented to enforce a system of segregation.
"So if I want to sum up the reality of Gaza: it is a huge prison, it is a huge concentration camp, it is an Israel -meditated, pre-meditated, pre-planned and planned project to separate Gaza from the West Bank," she touted. "In the meantime, the people are prisoners."
Hass also detailed several ways her "friends in Gaza" snuck into Israel, including on potato trucks, from flying to Amman and then passing through the Allenby gate - and even by hiding in cars. She herself was asked to sneak out a "friend" - she admitted she had fake Gaza license plates - but ultimately turned him down.
The journalist also legitimized terror against Jews in Judea and Samaria as an "armed struggle."
"When Palestinians attacked Israelis inside Israel no matter how much they would say ‘oh it’s because of your settlement policy’ there was only one interpretation — that Palestinians target us everywhere," she stated. "Within the West Bank the use of arms is legitimate but it has not produced any real change in the reality. It never stopped the advance of the Israeli colonialist project inside the West Bank."
Hass also advocated making Israelis "pay the price" for their "settlement policy."
"How to make settlements costly to the Israeli public? It can be only from outside I believe," she said. "Can it happen? Of course it can happen, but there must be work on it."
She even threw out a few ideas.
"I’m sure that if — let me imagine — if the United States stopped all security ties with Israel, all security payments to Israel, yeah we know it’s very difficult," she suggested. "If Europe, for example, reissued visas to all Israelis. Now when we go to Europe we don’t need visas. Palestinians of course in the West Bank and Gaza do need visas to go, but if Israelis knew that they cannot automatically fly to Europe and European countries could say we don’t want to have the settlers because they broke international law, but we cannot know who is a settler and who’s not a settler, that’s why all Israelis need to have a visa, or are not allowed to Europe or whatever."
"We can imagine things," she continued. "If there is a political will I think it is possible."
"If there was pressure on Israel and Israel would say ‘ok we have to withdraw the army from the West Bank, and ok settlers can remain,’ most of the settlers would not remain," she added. "Or if Israel decided to, was forced to, imprison 2,000 settlers who are the most violent and most dangerous, the rest would leave."
"It is possible to imagine it. It is possible to do it. The longer it takes, the costlier the price is. But it has to be done. It has to be done not only for Palestinians but for the sake of Israelis and Israeli future."
Hass is well-known in Arab and leftist circles for her aggressive anti-Zionism; she provoked outrage in 2013 for justifying rock-throwing attacks against Jews.
Despite adamantly advocating against the "Occupation" of Israel on its own land, she received a taste of the Palestinian Arab world's true attitude toward Israelis in September 2014, when Birzeit University ejected her for being Jewish despite her anti-Israel views.