11 Jun 2007
We are 40 years into the Israeli occupation, and the systematic destruction of Palestine, the Palestinians and their culture continues. I am not a Palestinian, but throughout my adult life their story has been important to me.
From my first visit to the Palestinian camps in Lebanon in 1971, which led to my doctoral dissertation "Arabs in the Promised Land," a study of the emergence of Palestinian national consciousness, and later motivated me to establish the Palestine Human Rights Campaign, I have been haunted by the plight of this captive and displaced nation.
Along the way, I have met some extraordinary people, whose commitment to justice and perseverance in the face of adversity, have inspired and challenged me.
First and foremost among them were the people of Ein Al Hilweh, the refugee camp I visited in 1971. They spoke with reverence of their homes, villages and way of life they had lost, of their remembrances of forced exodus in 1948, and of their hopes for the future.
I recall most vividly the grandmother of my host in the camp. Umm Abid was a strong woman who possessed steel grey eyes and a face hardened by history and the elements. The day I left, she looked hard at me and said, "Now you've heard our stories, what will you do?" In some ways, through my work during the past 36 years, I have been answering her question.
I was also fortunate enough to meet Palestinian poets and artists, men such as Kamal Boulatta and Esmail Shamout, who embodied the soul of Palestine in their art.
Then there were the poets such as Tawfik Zayed and Mahmoud Darwish, whose works taunted the occupiers while empowering Palestinians with a bold new language of identity.
Over the years, I interviewed so many men and women who had suffered unimaginable horror under the hand of the occupation authorities.
Lack of anger
What remains with me from all of these encounters was the lack of anger. What these Palestinians wanted most was to return to a normal life and to secure the right to live as free people to rebuild Palestine.
My work also brought me into contact with some extraordinary Israeli human rights activists. Two who stood out as most significant were Felicia Langer and Dr Israel Shahak. Israel, who as a child was interned in the Nazi camp at Bergen-Belsen, chaired the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights. His motto was "Equal rights for every human being" and he lived it.
Derided by her detractors as a Communist, Felicia was an attorney and a passionate defender of Palestinian victims of Israeli land theft, home demolition and political repression. Each week she would write to me in elegant prose, telling me of her new cases and appealing for support. "Your letters from the US," she would say, "can hold back the hand of the torturer, and rein in the bulldozers".
Writing of Felicia and Israel, one young Palestinian said, "They defend us. But they also defend their own, because they remind us all that our two peoples can coexist."
We are not yet done. The occupation continues and new heroes have emerged. There are the courageous internationals such as Rachel Corrie and the Christian Witnesses for Peace, who put their lives on the line to stop abuse. There are also the Israelis in Peace Now's Settlement Watch Campaign and the human rights monitors at B'Tselem. The risks they take are great and their reporting is invaluable.
And then there are men such as Zahi Khouri, Ebrahim Abu Lughod, and Sam Bahhur - Palestinian Americans who, after Oslo, decided to pull up stakes in America and return to rebuild their beloved land.
These are but a few of the many heroes Palestine has produced. I have been inspired by their lives and work. And from them I've learned even more.
The tragedy, of course, is that 40 years later the nightmare continues. But I know Palestinians, their steadfastness and their remarkable ability to breed heroes out of hardship. And I know that there remain Israelis committed to justice and who continue to challenge their people to righteousness. Because of this, I have faith that this nightmare will continue to produce heroes who will, one day, bring it to an end.
Dr James Zogby is the president of the Arab American Institute in Washington, DC.
By James J. Zogby
Gulf News 2007. All rights reserved.
