Palestinian Preaches Nonviolence
Episcopal News Service. December 8, 1988 [88264]
NEW YORK (DPS, Dec. 8) -- Mubarak Awad, the founder and director of the Jerusalem-based Palestinian Center for the Study of Non-Violence, became a familiar name in the world press when he was deported from Israel in the same manner as those Palestinians accused of inciting terrorism.
In exile, Mubarak now lives in Ohio with his wife Nancy Nye, who was the principal of The Friends Girls School in Ramallah, closed now as are all schools for Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza. The Mubaraks have two children, a young son and a teenage daughter; the daughter needs to hear from her father -- who has an intensive travel and lecture schedule -- every other day in order to still her fears for his safety.
Mubarak travels constantly to tell the story of his people, of the great uprising, the intifadah, that gave hope to the despairing Palestinians by defeating their greatest enemy -- fear. The uprising did much more than that, Mubarak says. It has changed the social structure. With their deep involvement in the uprising Palestinian women are no longer second class citizens; and children, being in the vanguard, have shown the way to all the grown-ups.
But there are some grown-ups who themselves have shown the way, even though Mubarak is too modest to give himself credit. His story begins in Jerusalem with his mother to whom he gives all the credit for his ministry of peacemaking.
Mubarak's father was executed by being dragged to death during, the last days of the 1948 war. His widow told her seven children: "The one who killed your father didn't know he made me a widow and you orphans. He didn't know. He just had to kill." Mubarak explains what his mother's attitude came to mean to him and to his family: "It told us strongly not to kill, not to make widows and orphans, that's not to be our job in the world."
His mother, whom Mubarak calls a "very dedicated Christian," refused to go to a refugee camp, had to put five of her children in orphanages, and continued working as a hospital nurse. The family reunited only for vacations. But that was enough for Mubarak's mother to leave an undying imprint of peacemaking on her children. Now she, too, lives in Ohio, near her son and his family.
Mubarak Awad was one of the children who was sent to an orphanage. While there, he came under the influence of an evangelical Christian, Katie Antonios, and the Quakers and Mennonites who worked with her. "I was intrigued by them," he says today. "I always felt there was something odd about them coming all the way from America to help us. They don't ask for our politics; they come just to serve us." A strong resolve formed in the young boy. "I want to be like them."
The next blessing in young Awad's life was that Mrs. Antonios sent him to St. George's Anglican School in Jerusalem. Because of this good fortune, he didn't have to go to a refugee school where feelings of revenge are fostered inevitably, he says.
Mubarak continued his connection with the Mennonites, and they were instrumental in his going to Bluffton College, their denominational school in Ohio. That was in 1970.
Bluffton was an eye-opener to the young Palestinian, because his whole class would go out to demonstrate against the Vietnam War, and then they would return to school and ask, "What did we accomplish?"
Those experiences gave Mubarak the idea that the individual can make a difference. And the question eventually became: "Why not do this with the Palestinian cause? Why not say: 'We don't want to kill anybody, but we want our rights."'
With his cousin Jonathan Kuttab, a well-known Christian lawyer in Palestine, and an artist friend, they speculated on how to bring the idea of nonviolence to the Arab world. By 1983, Mubarak had established a successful career as a psychologist in Ohio, treating young, violent offenders and their families. He decided to go to Israel to show Palestinians there how to avoid taking their frustration out on their loved ones.
Back among his fellow Palestinians, he discovered that the occupation had been getting "inside the people." He organized a workshop to help them get rid of occupation, not in political, but in emotional terms -- how to be in prison and not be a prisoner, as Mubarak puts it. But the response was tremendous, and it did become political. Jews, Muslims, and PLO members came. So he developed his ideas along the lines of "How to get rid of occupation through nonviolent means." Concentrating on women, children, and the aged, he developed 120 points of nonviolent resistance, "precise as to the Palestinian culture."
The next step for Mubarak was organization. He had depended on the written word, having translated books on nonviolence by followers of Gandhi, and Gene Sharp's definitive book, The Politics of Non-Violence. He also established a bookmobile route, taking good books to the refugee camps.
Mubarak believes that the Israelis left him alone because they thought that Palestinian extremists would kill him. At first, Mubarak couldn't even give away his own book -- Nonviolent Resistance: A Strategy for the Occupied Territories -- but he was to find out that it was being read. When the intifadah began, Mubarak's instructions on nonviolent resistance, such as refusing to use Hebrew, boycotting Israeli-made goods, and other acts of civil disobedience, found themselves on the leaflets of the underground. That's how the writer knew that his book was being read at last.
Then the Israelis realized that, from their point of view, Mubarak was indeed a dangerous man who ought to be deported.
And so it is that a Palestinian peacemaker is back among us in the United States, preaching the message of nonviolence, teaching us that the word Palestinian can mean honor and a passion for justice, justice for Jews and Arabs, and laying waste our own prejudices and preconceived notions.