From Television Images to Personal Involvement in a Never-Ending Struggle

By Katherine Hughes-Fraitekh

My first clear memory of interest in anything Middle Eastern was during my sophomore year in high school in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was 1978, and I remember the intensity of my emotions as I saw on television the White House ceremony marking completion of the Camp David negotiations. As I watched my president, Jimmy Carter, a man I greatly respected, presiding over the historic Anwar Sadat-Menachem Begin handshake, tears rolled down my cheeks and I felt proud to be an American.

I'm not sure why this event affected me so deeply. I grew up in middle America, the descendent of Scotch-English-Irish and German ancestors, in a family that never traveled overseas. The only Arab American I'd ever known was a friend whose father's family had emigrated from Lebanon years earlier. Little did I know then that 10 years later I would be personally involved in the continuing search for peace in the Middle East, attending meetings with Secretary of State James Baker and the Palestinian peace delegation.

At the University of Texas at Austin I majored in government with a specialty in international affairs. I chose to do my year-long honor's thesis on the effects of rapid modernization on traditional Islamic populations.

To convince my skeptical advisers that I could handle the project, I read more than 100 books on the Middle East in one semester. One author argued that Middle Eastern modernization, spurred by oil revenues, was proceeding 10 times faster than had industrial development in the West. Therefore, political, social, economic and psychological upheavals were inevitable. This intensive immersion began to reverse the denigrating generalizations about the region I had acquired from the mainstream U.S. media over the years.

After receiving my degree, I headed to Washington, DC, hoping to land a job in international affairs. I found that although there were more international jobs available than in Albuquerque, NM, or Austin, TX, there also were many more qualified applicants. So my Middle Eastern education in this period was confined largely to conversations with an Israeli and a Syrian, neither of whom ever met the other. I would listen curiously to one's position on a Middle East issue over coffee or at work, and then present it as if it were my own in conversation with the other. Over many months, I was surprised to discern that I was in closer agreement with the "radical" Syrian position, which seemed more rational to me, than that of my friend from "allied" Israel.

A three-month Eurail trip in 1987 gave me my first glimpse of an Islamic country. When I traveled by overnight train from Thessaloniki, Greece to Istanbul, Turkey, a lone and somewhat anxious female, a young conductor on the train became my self-appointed guardian, locking my train compartment door so that I could sleep without fear and checking on me periodically throughout the night.

I began to see the problem that I had studied in the abstract with blinding clarity.

He spoke not a word of English, nor I a word of Turkish, but he led me to safe and affordable lodgings upon the train's 5 a.m. arrival in vast and confusing Istanbul. During my week's stay he introduced me to his beloved and historic hometown, picking me up early in the morning for a day of exploration and then dropping me at my pension when darkness came. This was my first of many encounters in the Middle East with its fabled code of honor and hospitality.

Back in Washington, DC, I enrolled in a joint International Development and Middle East Studies graduate program at The American University and Georgetown University. When the intifada erupted in Gaza in December 1987, I joined students in front of the Israeli embassy and the State Department, protesting the Palestinian civilian casualties.

Strangely, until this time, I had known only peripherally about this single most fundamental Middle Eastern issue. When, during one of the first protests in which I was participating, the chant "PLO, yes! Israel, no!" went up, I felt very uncomfortable and wondered if the FBI was keeping files on those of us in the demonstration.

It took me many more months of reading and discussions with Palestinians and their American supporters to supplant the media-induced demonization of the PLO with its reality—that of a national movement and quasi-government for a dispossessed people which includes, in addition to revolutionary militants, educators organizing schools, doctors building hospitals, and social workers seeking to ease people's pain and poverty. At last I was able to explain to other uninformed Americans, including my parents, that the PLO members were neither angels nor devils, but the Palestinian people's chosen political representatives.

Through personal acquaintance with several Palestinians whom I admired greatly, including one who had survived the Sabra and Shatila massacres and another whose father was a founding member of the PLO and head of its education department, I began to comprehend the tragic consequences of the 1947 U.N. Partition Resolution, the subsequent wars, occupations, displacements and violence. I decided that if I were to make any significant contribution to solving the problems, I needed to experience them at first-hand.

Witnessing the Intifada

So I traveled to Jordan, Israel, and the occupied Palestinian territories in the early days of the intifada as a member of a fact-finding delegation sent to witness and document human rights abuses. My parents were frightened, yet supportive, making me promise again and again not to do anything impulsive. Their intuition flashed through my mind when, toward the end of my trip, I watched helplessly in Gaza as heavily armed Israeli troops chased and threatened groups of Palestinian children, some of them already wearing casts on arms methodically broken during previous roundups. I thanked God then that I carried no weapon, because the desire to use one against those brutes might have been uncontrollable.

During my stay in the region, Israeli stories I heard sounded increasingly hollow, condescending and arrogant, while the usually understated Palestinian accounts had the ring of naked truth. I experienced simultaneous adrenaline-charged fear and exhilaration when I came under fire for the first time in Bethlehem. Within weeks I felt like a veteran, having been shot at by soldiers during that first market clash, at a funeral in Beit Sahour, and in daily protests in the Gazan refugee camps of Jabalya and Shati. Each time that I and other civilians were targeted, I felt a compulsion to stand up and shout: "My taxes are paying your salaries, I order you to lay down your guns."

Between such fantasies, however, I began to see the problem that I had studied in the abstract with blinding clarity. I realized that my country's official human rights reports had been omitting evidence of offenses by our Israeli allies for years, and that the U.S. media and government had insidiously planted in American minds the argument that state terrorism is somehow acceptable, while acts of terror by individuals whose countries are being stolen from them are not.

I saw with my own eyes the falsity of claims that Israelis were killing Palestinians in self-defense. And I realized that the Palestinians, not the Israelis, were the underdogs, struggling bravely for their national existence against inexorable Israeli pressure, backed by unconditional and seemingly inexhaustible American military and economic aid. These startling insights led me to question all of the other "truths" I had been spoon-fed through the years, but which I could no longer count on as certainties.

I returned transformed and ready to "spread the word." But although concerned organizations were spending large amounts subsidizing delegation tours like my own, there was no efficient institutional structure developed to utilize "returnees" like myself, willing and able to act as educational resources. Frustrated, I finally found someone to sponsor development of a slide show production and then presented it at university, church and civic functions, wrote newspaper articles, and took part in formal debates. At one of those university lectures I met my husband-to-be, a Palestinian journalist from Nablus, who through the years has taught me many valuable academic facts as well as an extremely personal side of what it means to be Palestinian.

Other stereotypes were erased through my close friendship with a Kuwaiti woman during my last year of graduate school. I learned that at least some conservative, religious, Arab Muslim families raise daughters to be independent and totally support their rights, choices and career aspirations; that religious Arab women can possess views and values very similar to my own; and that these same women can be at least as independent, forceful and open as any of their American counterparts.

During travels the next summer, I stayed with the family of a Damascene friend. There, in a reputedly closed and unfriendly society, I was surprised to encounter the same warmth toward me as a person and fascination with American universities, cities and lifestyles I had found among the Palestinians. I realized that Americans have no natural enemies among the Arabs; rather, it is largely our government's unconditional support for Israel that baffles and angers them.

After returning from Syria and completing my master's degree, I started a professional job with a nonprofit organization in DC that sent American students, educators and members of Congress on visits to Arab countries and young journalists for apprenticeships on English-language newspapers in the Middle East. This was during the period of Saddam Hussain's invasion of Kuwait and the U.S.-led war on Iraq. Troubling as this period was for a deeply divided Arab and Muslim world, and for the clear U.S. double standard toward the Kuwaiti and Israeli occupations which it highlighted, it led me to the most exciting job of my life.

I was approached after the war by the director of the Palestine Affairs Center in Washington to work with the Palestinian delegation on preliminary talks to re-start the peace process, and I gladly accepted. After several months of building trust, I attended meetings between Hanan Ashrawi, Faisal Husseini and U.S. State Department and National Security Council representatives.

Fascinating Interactions

It was fascinating to see the interaction between the participants. Secretary of State James Baker's sincerity and knowledge of the matter impressed me as the serious issues later put on the table in Madrid were discussed, and each side's positions clarified. I also gained great respect for Dr. Ashrawi's intelligence and command of the English language during the negotiations and as we worked on press releases and reports together.

By the time of the formal Madrid Conference in late 1991 and the negotiations that followed, however, I no longer was personally involved. I had become the mother of a son and accompanied my husband to Atlanta, GA, where he enrolled in graduate school at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

There was a strong feeling of déjà vu for me two years later on Sept. 13, 1993 as I watched on television the signing ceremony between two historic enemies in the Middle East, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, officiated over by a southern Democratic American president. I watched the handshakes with tears of hope once again, but this time I had no illusions that I was viewing the final step toward real peace in the area, nor was I overly proud of my country's involvement.

In the summer of 1994, after my husband completed his studies, we took our two-year-
old son to visit my husband's family in Nablus and to decide about working with development issues in the newly autonomous Palestinian areas. It was my first return to the occupied territories since my 1988 delegation trip, and my husband's first visit to his homeland since 1988 as well. Neither of us were prepared for what we found.

An Unrecognizable City

Nablus was almost unrecognizable. Six long years without municipal administration had destroyed the city's infrastructure and, as in other West Bank towns, there was no enforcement of traffic, health, zoning, or trash disposal regulations. Unemployment stood between 50 and 75 percent, and bright students who had missed three years of school due to Israeli closures were unable to pass their high school exit exams and continue on to college. Women, relatively liberated before and during the early stages of the intifada, were losing ground rapidly as fundamentalist Islamic movements exploited the situation to gain support.

Respect for any kind of authority, including parental and societal, had dissolved. We witnessed small bands of teenage zealots using the threat of violence to close down businesses, enforce strikes, and punish dissenters, all in defiance of the exhortations of Yasser Arafat's new Palestinian National Authority and the proclamations of the new municipality.

The solidarity and communal trust which I recalled from the beginning of the intifada had been eroded by years of Israeli infiltration and repression. Massive immigration to cities by rural Palestinians displaced by Israeli settlers had broken up traditional neighborhoods and added to the distrust.

Soldiers still patrolled the streets, often putting the city under curfew. One day we watched from a nearby roof as they used anti-tank missiles to blow up an entire apartment building with three activists inside.

Palestinians, so hopeful after the initial Madrid Conference, have seen little, if any, improvement in their daily lives since the signing of the secretive Oslo and Cairo accords. They survive by relying on deep reservoirs of internal strength and family support, but worry that all of the sacrifice, pain and deaths since the outbreak of the intifada will lead only to a limited autonomy.

As we returned, discouraged, to the United States, my mind kept turning back to my tears of joy in 1978 and 1993 as I watched the historic handshakes. Now my naïveté was gone and I realized that the hardest work to attain an independent, democratic Palestinian state still lay ahead. Nevertheless, each renewed contact with the steadfastness and determination of the Palestinian people living under occupation serves to energize and motivate me to continue to do my small part in the struggle.

Katherine Hughes-Fraitekh is currently living in New Mexico and working on a book about her experiences.