From the Gulf War to Palestine—The Evolution of an Advocate

By Katherine M. Metres

For my 16th birthday, my best friend gave me a black-and-white houndstooth scarf. My Lebanese-American father said to me, teasingly, "That's a Palestinian scarf." Feeling as if I'd been accused of colluding with terrorists, I denied it with annoyance.

That was just six years ago. Today, being Arab American and a passionate supporter of Palestinian rights are the most meaningful aspects of my life. But it wasn't until college that I was conscious of being Arab American at all, much less pro-Palestinian.

The Gulf war was a pivotal coming-of-age experience for me. I was a first-year student at the University of Michigan, a school I had chosen in part for its tradition of student activism.

That fall, I attended a presentation by the campus chapter of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) on "Arab Americans, the Gulf Crisis, and Internment." The speaker described the hardships of Japanese Americans interned during World War II, and charged that the U.S. government had contingency plans to do it again to Arab or Iranian Americans in the event of war in the Middle East.

By January, the campus was near hysteria over the prospect of the coming war. Reservists were being called up, and my father was an officer in the Naval Reserve. I also had a brother of draftable age. When they told us how many body bags were being sent to Saudi Arabia, everyone around me began to anticipate another Vietnam. Learning that innocent Arab Americans were being interrogated by the F.B.I. and that others were the victims of anti-Arab hate crimes, I thanked God my family didn't have an obviously Arabic surname.

The teach-ins my college friends and I attended taught us about a region of which we had known nothing. We also learned that the U.S. government was willing to "kick butt" to punish an Arab occupier, but had supported the Israeli occupation of Arab lands for decades.

When the Gulf war was over, I transferred my passion for human rights and my awakened interest in the Arab world into a summer internship with Amnesty International on Capitol Hill. As a government relations intern on Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, it was my responsibility to handle inquiries on human rights conditions in specific cases and countries, as well as to bring human rights concerns to the attention of U.S. and foreign embassy officials. It was in this context that I heard former Arab League Ambassador Clovis Maksoud describe the denial of national rights—"collective human rights" as he called them—to the Palestinian people under occupation and in the diaspora.

I returned from Washington eager to prepare for a career in foreign relations. I concerned myself with learning about the root causes of human rights abuses and of armed aggression so that I could understand and someday help prevent or resolve international conflicts before my country again resorted to the destructive methods chosen by the Bush administration.

A Lot to Think About

That fall, spurred on by nothing more noble than the requirements of a scholarship, I became a member of my campus ADC chapter. The first activity I attended was a lecture by Dr. Haidar Abdel-Shafi, then the head of the Palestinian negotiating team. His viewpoint impressed me and gave me a lot to think about as I went home for the summer.

In addition, the head of the ADC chapter had given me a gift subscription to the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. As I perused the pages month by month, a whole new world opened up to me. Slowly, I began to see the reality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In place of the media image of Palestinian terrorists, I began to see a people struggling for the freedom to control their own destiny—and often being thwarted by U.S. favoritism for Israel.

The next fall, I was asked to chair the campus ADC chapter. When I accepted the job, I knew that I had no idea of what I was undertaking. Nonetheless, student members who had come directly from the Arab world wasted no time in educating me on their concerns for the Palestinians and Lebanese who were bearing the brunt of Israeli military occupation and bombing raids.

Simultaneously, I contributed to campus debate on political issues as a Michigan Daily editorial board member and columnist. My first column, which focused on anti-Arab racism and hate crimes spawned by the Gulf war, drew accolades from a wide sector—including the chair of the campus American Movement for Israel (AMI). Cheerfully, I pressed on—and stepped on a political land mine.

The day after presidential candidate Bill Clinton held a campaign rally on campus, I published a column asserting that his promised emphasis on human rights rang hollow as long as he ignored Israel's repressive military occupation of Arab lands. I argued that Clinton's pro-Israel rhetoric would damage the peace process. Quoting his statement that "If I ever let Israel down, God would never forgive me," I posed two questions to him: "Wouldn't it be best for Israel in the long term to resolve its conflicts equitably? And, you're running for president of which country?"

Even though my student editor told me she didn't think the column was "based in fact" and that "some people would consider this anti-Semitic," I felt very proud of that column. Still, the confrontation with the editor, who frankly told me she considered herself an Israeli, left a bad feeling in my stomach. My suspicions were confirmed when she told me a month later that my biweekly column would be canceled. Even though she was the one who had hired me, based on my writing clips, to add a "new perspective" as an Arab American, my column suddenly was "not what we're looking for."

I spent the rest of the year championing free speech on the Palestinian-Israeli dispute. Based upon the manner in which my own column had been canceled as a direct result of my criticism of the intrusion of U.S. domestic politics into the Middle East peace process, I became convinced that something was very wrong with the national debate on the issue. This awareness culminated in my speaking on the topic of "Academic Freedom: The Reality and the Ideal" as part of ADC's oratorical competition at the 1993 convention in Washington, DC. I won the first prize of $500, and I knew just how I should spend the money—for tuition at a Palestinian university.

So, in the summer of 1993, I set out to see for myself the reality of the Palestinian-Israeli confrontation. In the Paris airport en route to Tel Aviv, I met Dr. Abdel-Shafi and a priest from Beit Sahour. Dr. Abdel-Shafi told me that the negotiations were faltering because of the American draft of principles, which ruled out some concessions that the Israelis had already indicated they were willing to make! My column appeared to be coming true, and as an American I felt ashamed.

The Palestinian priest regaled me with humorous anecdotes all the way to Tel Aviv. But the atmosphere changed when I was confronted by Israeli airport security people upon arrival. Again and again they demanded to know: "Why are you going to Bir Zeit University? Why do you want to study Arabic?" They took my bags into a back room and returned them only after I was further interrogated by a supervisor.

Intimidated, Then Welcomed

When I finally was released I learned that the Palestinians who were to meet me had been unable to reach the airport due to the closure of the occupied territories. So my new priest-friend took charge of transporting me from the airport to the West Bank. This pattern of being intimidated and harassed by Israelis, and then comforted and welcomed by Palestinians, continued throughout my stay. Contraryto my expectations, the Palestinians never discriminated against me for my government's policies (I wouldn't have blamed them) or for my inability to speak their language. I only hope most Americans treat Arab visitors as considerately.

For seven weeks, then, I lived on the West Bank, studying Arabic and the Palestine question at Bir Zeit University. Living under occupation brought the problems into sharp focus and gave me visceral experience in the importance of enforcing international humanitarian law. I never got used to looking down the barrel of a gun, as a person walking along the streets of Ramallah is forced to do whenever an army convoy passes. In reality, I was safe from the soldiers because I was American. It was the Palestinians who had to fear for their safety.

During my first week in Ramallah, my roommate and I heard shots from our hostel window. The next day we found out that two young men had been killed by undercover Israeli death squads. One of the men had been "wanted." Instead of arresting and trying him, as in a truly democratic country, the Israelis had simply killed him and an unaccused companion.

Another time, I was in Ramallah window-shopping when a settler drove through the center of town. (This is forbidden by order of the Israeli authorities.) A couple of teenagers hurled rocks toward the vehicle, and then a hand came out of the vehicle window with a gun and began shooting wildly into the busy marketplace.

A few weeks later, the whole city of Ramallah was put under a military curfew of indefinite duration after an Israeli soldier was murdered. The students were warned that if we violated the curfew we could be shot on sight. Our planned excursion to the Galilee had to be postponed.

Nevertheless, eventually we visited the Galilee, the Jordan Valley and the Negev, and the university trips turned out to bethe most eye-opening experiences of the summer. Viewing the sites of dozens of Palestinian villages that were destroyed in 1948 and 1949 to change the demography of the new state of Israel was heart-wrenching. I was particularly galled when we saw that the remains of al-Ghabisiyya village had been hidden from the road by a forest planted in artificial rows. One grave still marked by a handmade wooden cross seemed to beckon to the conscience of Christian visitors.

Equally disturbing was the obvious fact that even the occupied territories were being stolen from the Palestinians piece by piece. The countryside surrounding Jerusalem supported an unbelievable number of Jewish settlements, and almost all the agricultural land in the Jordan Valley had been confiscated for the use of Israeli moshav (cooperative) and kibbutz (collective) farms.

When it was time to leave, a close friend I had made during my stay gave me an olive-tree necklace that says "Palestine" in Arabic. (Such jewelry was illegal by order of the Israeli military authority.) "I want you always to remember Palestine," he told me, "because a country is much more important than one person."

I returned to Ann Arbor, eager to share my experiences and new insights, in the same month that the Declaration of Principles was signed on the White House lawn. I wrote an opinion piece for the Michigan Daily entitled "Real Peace Starts With Real Palestine," in which I stated that the agreement could be helpful in providing the Palestinians a small space to organize for democracy and a better life, but that Israel was far from being in compliance with international law in terms of protection of populations under military occupation, land and water confiscation, political prisoners, and the refugees' right of return. I attacked Zionism at its roots for displacing and disenfranchising the indigenous population of Palestine. At the suggestion of a Jewish friend, I also noted that the Zionist movement in the 1940s deprioritized rescuing Jews from the Nazis in favor of building a strong state and a "Jewish national museum" in Palestine. Long discussions with this friend about the historical persecution of Jews in Europe and its similarities to Israel's treatment of the Palestinian Arabs had deepened my conviction.

A Phone Call

A couple of weeks after the article was published, I received a phone call from a man who told me that he was very interested in my article. He said that his father had been born in Palestine, and that he didn't know very much about the issue. At his request, I agreed to meet him for lunch to share what I had learned.

Afterward, I opened the campus newspaper and found an entire article by this man—who turned out to be an Israeli American—attacking things I had said in the article and during our discussion. He wrote that upon reading my article, he was curious to discover the origin of my "hate." Upon finding out I had spent the summer at Bir Zeit University, which he described as "a hot bed of Islamic fundamentalism," he wrote that his question had been answered.

Never mind that as a Christian and a feminist I am not sympathetic to Hamas. Never mind that I had spent hours detailing the history of how most of Palestine was overrun by Zionist forces in 1948-49, why the Palestinians refused partition, and why the PLO preferred secular democracy in all of Palestine but would settle for just the territories. Never mind that I told him the most impressive and surprising thing I found in the occupied territories was the Palestinian spirit—dedicated, positive and warm, not revanchist in the least.

Why did the Michigan Daily print the article without at least checking to see if I had consented to be quoted by this imposter, or whether I had been quoted accurately? The pro-Israel opinion editors admitted that they had been personally delighted to receive something "from the other side," although they already had printed an equally inaccurate, but less personal, rebuttal to my article.

A New Dimension

Meanwhile, my struggle for Palestinian rights was taking on a new dimension. Missing my Palestinian friend, Majed, I invited him to spend Christmas with me and my family in Chicago, or to come at a later date and look at U.S. graduate schools. Majed had graduated from his university and wanted to continue his sociology studies, which necessitated going abroad.

He applied to the Israelis for an exit visa, but after a month he was still getting the runaround. Therefore, he decided to use another method. As a West Bank "resident" (Palestinians born and raised in the occupied territories are not citizens of any state), he was entitled to Jordanian travel documents. His Jordanian passport was renewed and brought to him from Amman by a cousin.

Then, to apply for a visa to the United States, he had to travel to the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem. Entering occupied East Jerusalem is illegal for West Bank Palestinians under current Israeli rules, but somehow Majed avoided the heavily armed soldiers at the checkpoint. However, he was denied a U.S. visa.

When I got the news, I was shocked and angry: Why couldn't a Palestinian intending to study in the United States visit for a few weeks? Consulting with others, I found out that refusal was the norm.

On advice I received at the University of Michigan, I called area peace organizations to obtain an invitation for Majed to lecture. Finally, word arrived that the visa had been granted!

Majed packed his suitcase, said good-bye to all his friends and traveled to the Allenby Bridge to cross into Jordan to start his trip to the U.S. After he had waited four hours in line, an Israeli official told him he could not travel because his "name is in the computer." He tried again the next week, but the Israeli soldiers would not budge.

Majed was frustrated but not defeated. He went to the Palestinian human rights organization al-Haq for help. Assigning him a lawyer, al-Haq sent a letter to the Israeli authorities requesting clarification of the problem. That was at the end of January, and the letter still has not received a response.

The nature of the problem, however, became crystal clear when Majed met with an Israeli intelligence officer. The officer reminded him that he had been put into administrative detention for his activism while a member of the Bir Zeit student council. He had not been charged with a crime or tried, but he had been held in solitary confinement and threatened with rape if he did not provide information about Palestinian activism.

"We want to punish you because you did not give information when you were in prison," the Israeli intelligence officer said. "If you decide to give us information, we will let you travel."

Nobody should have to live under such repression. And no person of good conscience should remain silent when others are treated so inhumanely. To those who have persecuted me for questioning U.S. support for Israel's occupation and its disenfranchisement of the Palestinians, I am (strangely) grateful. The red flags they raised for me made me realize that one of the greatest tragedies of this century has been the support of the United States—the beacon of freedom?—for Zionist oppression.

Yet in the midst of this tragedy the Palestinian spirit survives, flourishes, and inspires. I wear my "Palestine" olive tree every day, and I will not forget.

Katherine Metres is a 1994 honors graduate of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. In recognition of her scholastic achievement and commitment to human rights, the university recently named her one of two outstanding undergraduates. In addition, she received the Virginia Voss Memorial Scholarship for excellence in journalism.