A West Bank Stone Thrower’s Story Makes Ripples Of Hope in a Sea of Hopelessness

By Geraldine Brooks

“Peace in His Time: A Young Man’s Desperate Dreaming in the Holy Land” was the cover story of the Washington Post Magazine on Feb. 14. In the 20 years I have worked as a reporter, few articles I have written have drawn as much response as this one.

By phone, letter and e-mail, readers contacted me from thoughout the greater Washington area, from sheep farms in Pennsylvania, from offices in New York and even from Israel: “Thank you,” said one typical e-mail, “for giving a face to the suffering of the Palestinian people.”

The letters came from all kinds of people. Many were Arab-Americans, but there were also responses from others whose childhoods had been touched by instability—Pakistanis, Iranians and Jews.

Most of the people who contacted me wanted to know if there was a way to help Raed, and all the other boys and girls of the camps, to pursue their dream of an education and a future. One correspondent had a specific plan.

Fahim Qubain, a Palestinian-American from Lexington, Virginia called to tell me that he and his wife, Nancy, intended to raise the funds to send Raed to graduate school this fall. Within a week of our initial conversation, his ambition had grown. Instead of “a one-shot proposition that might ease and soothe our consciences,” he said, he dreamed of establishing a fund that might then grow to provide scholarships for all the other “Raeds” of the refugee camps.

Dr. Qubain was born in Ajlun, Jordan in 1924 and educated in Ramallah at the American Friends School. He came to the United States in 1946, gaining a B.A. in political science at Guilford College before obtaining a Ph.D. in international relations at the University of Wisconsin (Madison) and pursuing a career as an academic and government consultant. His books include Education and Science in The Arab World (Johns Hopkins Press, 1966), a definitive study on the educational resources of the Mideast.

Now retired, Dr. and Mrs. Qubain have contacted numerous organizations and individuals interested in “giving some hope to the hopeless.” The fund would differ from other charities aimed at helping Palestinians by targeting those at the very bottom of Palestinian society.

As I learned during my years covering the West Bank and Gaza, youngsters like Raed are enormously diffident, restricted both physically and emotionally from reaching outside their limited circumstances. The young boys—and even more, the girls—of the poorest camps live lives hemmed in by restrictions of all kinds.

They not only have to contend with the physical barriers imposed by occupation (documents that limit travel, armed road blocks, area closures) but by the social mores of the very stratified Palestinian society that draws harsh distinctions between refugee and non-refugee, underclass and middle class, daughters and sons. So far, it is the most radical factions of Palestinian society (Hamas, Jihad) who have reached down to these excluded children.

The Qubains, who are Quakers, believe it is time for those who seek peace to do the same. “It is my hope and dream that in its small way, a scholarship fund would be a source of ‘healing’ not only for the innocent children of the camps,” Dr. Qubain says, “but a ‘healing’ between Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Arabs.”

The Qubains would like to hear from anyone who supports this goal. Their e-mail is qubain@rockbridge.net. Geraldine Brooks is a free-lance journalist and author of Nine Parts of Desire, available from the AET Book Club.

SIDEBAR

Water as a Weapon

Hebronite Kayed Jaber cries as, on May 19 under heavy security, Israeli bulldozers destroy his water cistern. In the occupied territories Israeli authorities are bulldozing Palestinian water cisterns and reservoirs they say are built without permits. In the midst of critical water shortages, Palestinians are forbidden to collect rainwater, while Israel is informing the Jordanian government it can no longer adhere to the water-sharing commitments it made as part of the U.S.-brokered peace treaty between the two countries.