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Hana Salah on why she writes
Al-Monitor: Why did you decide to become a journalist?
Salah: Ever since I was young, I had ambitions of becoming a journalist, simply because I was born in Palestine and it’s one of the most eventful places in the world. I was born around the end of the intifada in 1990, and grew up during the collapse of the Oslo Accord with the Palestinian Authority. I was 10 years old when the intifada began in 2000, and lived through all the heated political events and the Israeli siege, which began when I was 16 years old. In addition, there were the massacres, the invasions and the wars, which were a major reason for making me think of journalism as a future profession, to be able to cover these and other events and convey them to the world with professionalism and credibility.
Al-Monitor: Did you have female role models to look up to when you were first starting out? Who?
Salah: I used to watch the news when I was young and I was certain that someday I would become a journalist because I wanted to be the voice of the oppressed. I wanted to cover the events with boldness in a world full of wars and disasters. Palestinian journalists such as France 24 correspondent Leila Auda and Guevara al-Badiri from Al Jazeera were my role models. I used to watch them courageously cover the Israeli army’s invasion of the Palestinian regions and I can still vividly remember them until this day. I was around 14 years old, and Auda, who was reporting for Abu Dhabi Television back then, got hit by Israeli fire while covering an event, and it’s still burned in my memory. She was wounded and still she ran toward the medics. Oprah Winfrey’s success story used to inspire me every time I felt weak and wanted to quit.
Al-Monitor: It seems that there are more and more women covering the news out of the Middle East. What do you think is contributing to that trend? What changes have you noticed in your career?
Source: www.al-monitor.com