The Mideast matters to the Midwest

I’ve frequently had to explain to family, friends, and coworkers why I’m so interested in the Middle East, especially Israel and Palestine. I’m an Irish-English-German-and-Dutch American mongrel, with a lapsed half-Catholic background and no family ties to Arab or Muslim people. I grew up in a fundamentalist Protestant town among the casually anti-Semitic, for whom it was natural to talk about how they had “Jewed someone down” on the price of something. Most of these people had never known a Jew, and neither did I until I went to college.

College and graduate school, however, opened my eyes to the world outside the Midwest. I had been interested in politics since I was ten or eleven, and became an activist in electoral politics as soon as I could vote. But during my time at the UI, especially, I met people outside the classroom who educated me about issues and political positions outside of what I’d heard in the media and outside the party lines of the Democrats and Republicans. I was radicalized by these people—most of them socialists, some of them Jewish, and a Palestinian fellow grad student named Saed Abu Hijleh.

I was one of a large number of people who knew Saed during his time at the UI. He was unusually courteous yet warm and instantly likeable. He was a member of the General Union of Palestine Students while he was at the UI and I met him through my own involvement with Operation U.S. Out, which organized against the first Gulf War in Iraq. During that time, GUPS permanently raised the level of local awareness about the Israel-Palestine conflict. By the time Saed graduated and returned to Nablus in the West Bank, he and other GUPS members had influenced many of us to continue to educate ourselves and others about the plight of Palestinians in their Israeli-occupied country.

Because of my acquaintance with GUPS, I was involved in People for Justice in Palestine very early in its history as a local activist group, first on campus and later in the broader community. But my involvement at first was a relatively small part of my general commitment to left activism. Then as now, I felt that a just solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict was critical to international peace, but Palestine was only one of several focuses for me, and PJP was not at the very top of my list of priorities.

That changed in the fall of 2002. A Palestinian woman had been murdered and her husband and son injured by the IDF while she sat on her front porch embroidering, and PJP was trying to raise awareness about the case. Only when I finally heard the son’s first name did I realize that my friend’s mother—a lifelong activist for peace and justice—had been shot to death in front of him. And only then—thinking of my own mother, her meticulously careful embroidery that had inspired my creativity, her infinitely greater care for others’ comfort and feelings, and the terror and grief I felt just a few years before when she had been seriously ill—only then did the terrible injustice suffered by my friend’s people come home to me, to my very heart.

The murder of Shaden Abu Hijleh, whose four children had graduated from the UI, was not widely noticed here beyond the circles that GUPS and PJP were able to reach. Local media barely mentioned it. The UI Alumni Association wouldn’t touch the story. Clearly, I thought, it was a story—and a side of a much larger story—that needed to be heard.

www.remembershaden.org