Hamzi K. Moghrabi

by Andrew I. Killgore

In his diaries written a hundred years ago Theodor Herzl, the father of political Zionism, declared his intention of ousting from Palestine the indigenous Muslims and Christians to make way for incoming immigrant Jews. But it was actually the British occupiers of Palestine who in 1937 threw out the first Palestinians. Among these refugees was Hamzi Moghrabi, now chairman of the Washington-based American- Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee(ADC). He was four years old at the time.

The year before, in 1936, the Palestinians had launched a revolt against the British policy of allowing unlimited Jewish immigration to Palestine, which threatened to make the Palestinians a minority in their own country. In that spontaneous explosion between 1936 and 1939 14,000 Palestinians lost their lives. The revolt extracted a British promise in 1939 to limit future Jewish immigration to Palestine. But that promise was broken in 1946.

Between 1936 and 1939 such political figures as Dr. Hussein Fakhri al-Khalidi, later foreign minister and for a short time prime minister of Jordan, were exiled to the Seychelles. Hamzi Moghrabi's father, a prosperous merchant and landowner from Acre in northern Palestine, was among those exiled to Lebanon on false charges that he was aiding the Palestinian rebels. In fact he was treasurer of a welfare group helping widows and orphans of Palestinians slain fighting the British.

Still able to get some income from property in Palestine, the Moghrabi family lived in reduced circumstances in the southern Lebanese town of Sidon. In 1941 they were allowed to return to their old home in Acre. But this prosperous family lost everything in 1948 when Israeli massacres and terrorism forced them and tens of thousands of others from northern Palestine to flee into Lebanon and Syria. Other hundreds of thousands fled to Jordan and Egypt.

Their second exile in Sidon, with no income available from their Palestinian properties, now confiscated by Israel, thrust the Moghrabi family into hard straits. One advantage for young Hamzi, however, was that he could study at the Gerard Institute, run by American missionaries, where he excelled.

His outstanding academic record earned him a scholarship to study medicine at the American University of Beirut. But his dreams of becoming a doctor were dashed when it turned out that the scholarship covered tuition only and that his formerly wealthy family no longer could meet the remaining costs.

So Hamzi Moghrabi joined the ranks of exiled Palestinian refugees who roamed the world in the second half of the 20th century looking for work. His search took him to Manama, Bahrain as a schoolteacher. From Bahrain he headed for Kuwait, where he worked as a typist, translator and office manager.

With enough money saved by 1958 to finance his long-delayed university education, Moghrabi decided to study engineering. He was admitted to the engineering faculty of Colorado State University at Fort Collins. Four years later he had a bachelor of science degree in civil engineering. Later he pursued the Palestinian drive for education at all costs by earning a degree from the Denver Paralegal Institute, by studying hotel design and maintenance at Cornell University and by taking courses in computer applications and real estate at the University of Colorado.

For the next 23 years, from 1962 to 1985, Hamzi Moghrabi worked as an engineer and construction entrepreneur in Egypt, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman and Sudan. In 1976 he established in Beirut his own firm, Consulting Engineering Group. The firm, now based in Westminster, Colorado, near Denver, retains active ties to several Arab countries.

As an engineer/entrepreneur, Hamzi Moghrabi also is program chairman of the Society for International Development (Rocky Mountain region) and treasurer of the Consortium for Sustainable Village Development. He also is a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the Lebanese Engineers Syndicate and the Kuwait Engineers Society.

An Intellectual and Idealist

Immigrating to the United States in 1985, Moghrabi obtained American citizenship in 1988. Despite, or perhaps because of the hardships he has endured since childhood, he is both a thoughtful intellectual and a gentle but determined idealist. He founded the Interfaith Dialogue Group and the North American Coalition for Middle East Dialogue. The latter is designed to bring Palestinians and Jews together on a personal basis to lessen distrust. He also is an active member of the Rotary Club of Northglenn, Colorado, treasurer of the American Committee for Jerusalem and a former president of the American Middle East Club.

Hamzi Moghrabi's boldest and most idealistic plunge to date into civic activism occurred in January 1995 when he became chairman of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. Created in 1980 by former U.S. Senator James Abourezk, ADC fights negative Arab stereotyping in the U.S. media while establishing a grass- roots membership that is said to have reached up to 40,000 at its peak.

ADC provides legal counsel to individual victims of discrimination and monitors anti-Arab bias in the media and in schools.

Such successes came at a high personal cost for Senator Abourezk, however. From his base in Washington, DC, for over 14 years he expended his volcanic energy and all of his personal resources to make ADC a success. Eventually he decided he could no longer continue and he returned to his native South Dakota, where he practices law to repair his personal finances.

When I asked Hamzi Moghrabi if he were wealthy enough to continue his present practice of dividing his time equally between work for ADC in Washington, DC and throughout the U.S. and his business in Colorado, while accepting no salary or expenses from ADC, he responded indirectly, "If I were wealthy now, I certainly wouldn't be rich very long." But he feels that ADC simply must continue and that given the size and affluence of the Arab-American community in the United States, it ought to be able to sustain itself financially. He estimates that among 400,000 Jordanian/Palestinians alone in the U.S., 15,000 are physicians and 8,000 are professors.

The ADC chairman's most notable personal qualities include an ingrained rationality, and determination. He sees justice as requiring that he regain possession of the family property in Palestine. He argues that U.N. Resolution 194 is not broad enough in that Palestinians are given only two choices: return to Palestine or compensation for lost property. His view is that inasmuch as Americans can legally own property in Israel, Palestinian Americans ought to be able to reclaim that very property.

He is aware of the complications involved. But he points out that some Jews whose property was seized in Nazi-occupied Europe have regained the actual property in lieu of compensation. He shares the almost mystic Palestinian attachment to land, representing permanence, as against the transitory nature of money.

The chairman of ADC is married to the former Hoda Abdo of Nablus in the West Bank. He and his wife have two daughters, Lina of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and Roba of Washington, DC. Lina and her husband have three children.