Lucy Aharish was a 5-year-old girl who had just finished clothes shopping with her parents in Gaza when the family vehicle was attacked by a terrorist.
The terrorist had shoved a Molotov cocktail into the car — which her father quickly ejected — and threw another on top of the vehicle which ignited, enveloping it in flames. Lucy and her parents escaped unscathed, but her 3-year-old cousin suffered severe burns all over his body and was hospitalized for months.
Aharish is a “trailblazing Muslim journalist, who brings a discourse of tolerance and interdenominational openness to Israel’s public agenda,” wrote the Ministerial Committee for Symbols and Ceremonies headed by former cultural affairs minister Limor Livnat, explaining its choice of the 33-year-old media icon.
It took time for Aharish to develop a nuanced view of the conflict. As a victim of terror growing up in the southern Jewish development town of Dimona, she said she was “very anti Arab culture.” The child of secular parents who moved from Nazareth in the early 1970s following an attractive job offer her father received, Aharish grew up speaking a melange of Hebrew and Arabic at home (“we would always quarrel in Arabic”), and relating to a Holocaust survivor neighbor named Menahem as a grandfather, having never known her real grandparents.
“I gleaned so much from Jewish-Israeli culture; I didn’t even know what the Nakba — a Palestinian term denoting the national catastrophe that followed Israel’s creation — was,” she said.
Escaping her national heritage in school proved impossible, however. Aharish was bullied and would sometimes find graffiti calling her a dirty Arab scribbled on the bathroom walls.
Aharish praised her high school principal Meir Cohen, later to become Dimona mayor and most recently minister of welfare and social services as a member of the Yesh Atid party, for his uncompromising stance against racism.
But the paradigm shift occurred only when Aharish left home to study at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University when she turned 18.
Aharish is sick and tired of the “victimhood discourse” she claims permeates Israeli society, but is markedly more pronounced among Arabs.
In the aftermath of the recent elections, she was accused by a representative of the Arab nationalist party Balad of “blaming the victim” on a TV debate she moderated.
That brazen outspokenness has placed Aharish in hot water with some of her Arab compatriots. When Aharish spoke out publicly against Balad MK Hanin Zoabi for justifying the kidnapping and killing of three Israeli teenagers last year, she was accused by social activist Hanin Majadli of suffering from “an identity crisis.
she said. “I respect their identity, but this is my identity, and let them say whatever they want. I’ve never judged people.
The same victimhood discourse is true for Israel’s attitude to advocacy — or hasbara –she opined.
So Aharish enrolled in theater studies and political science at the Hebrew University. After graduation, she spent two years studying journalism at the Koteret school in Tel Aviv, followed by a six-month media internship in Germany.
Upon her return to Israel, in February 2007, she was hired by Channel 10 TV, to become Israel’s first Arab news presenter. Soon, she was given the Palestinian Affairs beat, reporting regularly from the West Bank.
It took time for her Palestinian interlocutors to get used to the idea of speaking to a female Arab journalist to whom they can’t easily give the runaround.
Over her relatively short career as a TV journalist, Aharish has gained experience in a range of fields: from West Bank reporter to entertainment correspondent on the Guy Pines show; and from news presenter on Channel 10 prime time to editor of an afternoon children’s news bulletin on Channel 1. She has even realized her acting dream, playing minor roles in a number of Israeli feature films and in the 2013 blockbuster World War Z, starring Brad Pitt.
But one job she can never attain, she claimed, is presenter of the evening news broadcast on an Israeli news channel.
As presenter of the evening English news edition and head of prime time on i24news, an international news channel launched in 2013 and based in the Jaffa Port, Tel Aviv, Aharish says she feels more influential than on any local station.
Aharish was surprised to receive the phone call notifying her of the great honor to be bestowed on her, come April 23.
When lighting the torch, Aharish will be thinking about her family sitting in the audience.
Where will Aharish be in 10 years? Not necessarily in media, she thinks.
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