Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 1997, Page 20

Personality

Naila Asali: Chairwoman, American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee

By Andrew I. Killgore

One bit of Palestinian lore says delegations from Nablus, Palestine's largest West Bank city, used to meet incoming Ottoman Empire governors in Beirut to register their complaints and "demands" before the Turkish officials even arrived at their new posting. This particular folktale is actually true, a testament to the self-assertive confidence of a city also noted for its fair women and the best Kanafeh (a sweet dessert) made in Palestine.

Naila (Abed) Asali, chairwoman of the Washington, DC-headquartered American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), and a true daughter of Nablus, thinks not just in terms of ADC's countering the still-present anti-Arab stereotyping in America's Israel-leaning media. Her goal is for ADC eventually to rival B'nai B'rith's powerful Anti-Defamation League (ADL), but of course without the illegal spying on U.S. citizens that has prompted FBI raids on ADL offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

She said during our interview at her Washington office, "B'nai B'rith was started in 1843. We're here only since 1980, but we can do anything they can do." She radiated confidence and determination that Arab Americans can and will achieve the honored position they deserve in American society.

Mrs. Asali's secondary schooling was at Ramallah's Friends (American Quaker) Girls' School. Then she earned B.S. (1963) and Masters (1965) degrees in chemistry at the American University of Beirut (AUB). She is one of thousands of living testimonials to the fact that these two American-established institutions in Palestine and Lebanon, and others like them in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Egypt and elsewhere, not only represented the best of American idealism, but also have left an immeasurable positive legacy both in the Middle East and in the United States as well.

As Naila Asali reminisced happily about some of her American teachers from Ramallah days, I thought of America's later betrayal of our basic ideals by setting up and sustaining an apartheid state in Israel whose policies created millions of Palestinian refugees, including the Asalis.

Naila Abed and her husband, Ziad al-Asali, met and fell in love at A.U.B. in 1960. But marriage had to wait until both finished their studies. The fact that Ziad was Muslim and she Christian was only a minor complication, as relations between the two religions in Palestine were traditionally good. After receiving her Masters degree in 1965, Naila worked at A.U.B as a research assistant.

By 1967 they were ready to marry and head for the United States, where Ziad was to study psychiatry. But the outbreak of the 1967 Arab-Israel war, and its dramatic consequences, postponed everything. For one thing, suddenly both were refugees who couldn't go home because Nablus and the West Bank were occupied by the Israeli army, and family financial help was disrupted.

So it was al-Khobar in Saudi Arabia for a year rather than the United States. It was there that their first daughter, Justine, was born.

In 1968 the Asalis reached the United States, where Ziad took his residency in internal medicine and established a highly successful practice in Springfield, Illinois. Meanwhile Naila was earning an additional Masters degree in information systems from Sangamon State University. She also took courses in accounting at the same university.

Those courses plus outside reading led to her taking the certified public accountant examination for the state of Illinois. She passed and became a CPA.

Naila Asali went to Jerusalem to give birth to her second child, a son, Tariq (Jim), now 25. The choice of Jerusalem was a conscious political statement by the Asalis that Palestinians will not relinquish their claim to the Holy City and to Palestine. Jim, who took his law degree from George Washington University, practices law in Philadelphia.

Layla, the second daughter and youngest child at age 19, is a student of history at Princeton University. She is also systematically studying the Arabic language to maintain her facility in her parents' native tongue.

Even as these words were being written, the Asali's first daughter, Justine, now 29, was giving birth to a nine-pound baby boy. Her husband, Dutch-American Kurt Van Engen, is a new graduate in law from Washington, DC's American University.

Justine holds a BA degree from American University and an MA in fine arts from Georgetown University. Her further ambition is to become a physician. Obviously the new baby may delay Justine's medical studies, but who can doubt that any member of this obviously brilliant family will not achieve her dreams.

Delighted over the health and vigor of her new grandson, Naila Asali comments, "What a gene pool that baby has. All the stock that went into the present-day Dutch, plus all the people who ever came to Palestine and left their descendants there—Canaanites, Hebrews, the old Philistines, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Turks, the European Crusaders and others."

In an elegantly written note to the Washington Report, Justine Asali van Engen related a story about her father and mother. Dr. Asali, a former head of Arab-American University Graduates (AAUG), had said to his wife that he was glad she was going to participate in the 1996 ADC convention and equally glad that she was not in a time-consuming leadership position.

But when she returned from that convention, she had been elected chairwoman of the ADC board of directors by unanimous vote. Both Ziad and Naila Asali agreed that there was nothing she could do but accept.

Since her election to the position she has traveled from Illinois to Washington, DC on ADC business at least once a month. Both the travel and living expenses in the nation's capital are borne entirely by the Asali family. Naila Asali, who has twice the energy of most people, has not been content to rest on her academic and professional laurels. She is president of Harmony, Inc., a real estate development company inSpringfield, Illinois. The company purchases parcels of farmland, subdivides them into lots on which houses are built and then sells the lots or builds houses on them. This business in the middle of the United States by a family from 7,000 miles away in Palestine is a big success, which says something else about the indomitable Palestinians.