Susan Abulhawa is a rising star on the United States lecture circuit – invite her when you need a personable Palestinian-American to communicate hatred of Jews and Israel. She is the daughter of Palestinian refugees of the 1967 War, who went to Jordan, then Syria, and ended up in Kuwait where Susan was born (but could not become a citizen). She then went to Jordan, from there for three years in the Dar El-Tifl El-Arabi, an East Jerusalem orphanage, and finally moving to the United States at age 13.
She completed graduate studies at the University of South Carolina in biology and established a career in medical science. She currently lives in Pennsylvania with her daughter and works as a medical writer. In 2001 she founded Playgrounds for Palestine, an NGO that builds playgrounds in Palestine and in UN refugee camps in Lebanon. The first playground was erected in early 2002 and since then playgrounds have been built in Bethlehem, Nablus, Rafah, Khan Younis, and Hebron. She is also a Board Member of Deir Yassin Remembered.
Abulhawa is also an eloquent and moving pro-Palestine advocate with a knack for demonizing Israel and an ability to spread anti-Jewish falsehoods and slander with grace and cunning.
She has been writing newspaper essays about the plight of Palestinians for many years and was published in the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, Christian Science Monitor, Philadelphia Inquirer, as well as other major and minor US and international newspapers. She also contributed to two anthologies.
Her first novel is Mornings in Jenin (Bloomsbury USA, 2010), which was originally published in 2006 as The Scar of David, and has become an international bestseller, translated into 26 languages. The “historical fiction” novel presumes to describe the effect of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the eyes of one family over four generations.
Susan Abulhawa claims that in the late 1690's, her great (times 5) grandfather came to an East Jerusalem village called Attour (sic.). “I can trace my lineage back six generations to that village in East Jerusalem, Mount Olives.”
Susan Abulhawa furthermore tells us that before the 1690’s, the family lived in Deir El Hawa (sic.), 20 miles west of Jerusalem. This village is given as an example of what happened to the Palestinians during the Israel War of Independence or the Nakba (day of the catastrophe) as the Palestinians call it. She tells us that this village was one of the 420 villages that were 'cleansed' of Palestinians and today the site is a pile of brick and concrete belonging to Israel.
True, Dayr al-Hawa, a small village with only 60 inhabitants in 1945, was destroyed in the 1948 war. What goes unmentioned is that the village was destroyed in battle between Jewish forces and a heavily armed battalion of Egyptian Army soldiers and Muslim Brotherhood volunteers, who had occupied the village as part of the general invasion of Palestine by Arab countries, an invasion with the clearly stated goal of annihilating the country's Jewish inhabitants. The battle in this small village actually demonstrates how desperate the situation of the Jewish people was at this time in their War of Independence, as the Egyptian army coming from the south almost managed to link up with Jordanian forces who were seizing Jerusalem, thereby cutting the country in half.
Susan Abulhawa, in one of her articles, tell us that “Israel is a country that was founded by Europeans who came to Palestine, formed terrorist gangs who set about a systematic ethnic cleansing of the native Palestinians from their homes on 78% of Historic Palestine in 1948.”
Despite this effort to picture Jews as foreigners having no connection with the Land of Israel, Abulhawa's own family history should have shown her that this was not true. Any family living on the Mt. of Olives would have seen with their eyes every day the vast Jewish graveyard that literally covers the mountain from top to bottom. It contains over 150,000 Jewish graves, dating from every century from the 21st to the 10 millennium BC, the time of the Kings of Israel who reigned in Jerusalem. Point of fact: The Mt. of Olives has had an active Jewish cemetery for over 3,000 years, and this attests to the presence of an active Jewish community in Jerusalem throughout this time.
True, in the years from 1948, when East Jerusalem fell into Arab hands, and up to 1967, when it was retaken by the Jews, the Mount of Olives was free of Jews, since the Kingdom of Jordan prohibited them from visiting (in direct violation of the agreed armistice with Israel). The Arab occupiers also attempted to wipe out the evidence of Jewish presence in the area. They damaged 38,000 tombstones, plowed the land in the cemeteries, cut four roads through the cemeteries, used the ancient tombstones as building materials for army camps and latrines, and built several buildings, including the Intercontinental Hotel(today's Seven Arches Hotel) and a gas station, on top of ancient graves at the mountain's summit.
Abulhawa's family would have also know, living in a village next to Jerusalem, that at least from 1882, long before the founding of modern Israel, Jews outnumbered Muslims among the total population of 21,00 in Jerusalem at the time. Decades later, after the British conquered Palestine and carried out its first modern census in 1922, Jews were the clear majority of inhabitants in Jerusalem, with Jews 33,971, Muslims 13,413, and Christians 14,669, for a total of 62,578 inhabitants of the city. The British authorities severely limited Jewish immigration to Palestine
One of the recent lectures that Susan Abulhawa gave was at the 7th Annual KIE Fall Lecture of Cal State Bakersfield's Kegley Institute of Ethics on October 18, 2011. The title of the talk was Palestine: The People, the Story, and the Moral Flexibility. The mission of the Kegley Institute is given as “to enhance the quality of its community by stimulating thought and involvement in ethical issues.”
Abulhawa, went through a PowerPoint presentation regarding the history of Palestinian territory. She said Palestinians have long suffered because of Israeli atrocities, including torture and murder of civilians. She said Palestinians had been on that land long before Israelis showed up, and there's no reason why Palestinians should leave a land that's rightfully theirs.
One member of the audience, Howard Silver of Bakersfield, found the lecture to be a blood libel. In his words: “I was horrified by Susan Abulhawa's lecture….” “Nothing had prepared me for this lady's distortions, hatemongering, and cascade of lies worthy of the pages of Der Sturmer (the Nazi newspaper).”
“Abulhawa hurled classic anti-Jewish blood libels. Using staged photos and doctored videos as ‘evidence,’ she charged that Israeli soldiers sadistically torment and kill innocent Palestinians, including children and babies. Adding to the demonic image, she claimed that Israeli soldiers also target household pets, and tie up the legs of horses to torture them.”
“And Abulhawa baldly lied. She declared that Israel does not allow Christians to live in the country when, in fact, pluralistic Israel is the only Middle Eastern country where the Christian population has flourished instead of declined since 1948. She accused Israel of ethnically cleansing Palestinians when, in fact, the Arab population in Israel and in Gaza and the West Bank has soared since 1967.”
“She even charged that it is a "myth" that no Palestinian Arab state has ever existed, that the land "has always been Palestine" and that Palestinians had let Jews live there. In fact, of course, the land had been a Jewish nation for more than 1,000 years until the Roman conquest in the first century, and a Jewish population always remained for the next 2,000 years. No state --Palestinian Arab or anything else -- ever replaced the Jewish state until Israel was re-established in 1948 and discussion began about creating the first Palestinian Arab state in history. Abulhawa was denying Jews' rights and history.”
“I was horrified because this toxic propaganda may have seemed legitimate to the audience, especially to students, as it had the sponsorship of the respected Kegley Institute. I never thought such bigotry would be acceptable at an American university. I grieve because this kind of demonization justifies homicidal aggression against Israel and Jews, and because history has cruelly taught that such irrational bigotry endangers its target, poisons its host and threatens civilized values.”
“I was horrified because Abulhawa is an anti-Israel extremist, yet was treated as mainstream. If her views are normalized, then I fear that peaceful coexistence is further away than ever, and that Palestinian extremism, which has been so destructive for both peoples, will continue. Blood libel was alive and well in Bakersfield on Oct. 18.”
In a continuation of her activities on the lecture circuit, Susan Abulhawa was due to visit Smith College on Oct. 26, 2011 to speak on “Women and Culture in Resistance.” The lecture was scheduled to examine the nature of a new wave of noteworthy achievements and creations originating in Palestine and the Palestinian diaspora. This explosion of literature, drama, art, design, music, hip-hop, dance, poetry, and film addresses issues of resistance and empowerment.
What messages does Susan Abulhawa convey in her essays and lectures?
Her talks are based on establishing lies as truths by repeating them with a straight face and getting others to repeat them too. She has a very convincing way with words.
Her arguments have the following themes:
1) Her main theme is that a Palestinian State can be established through a Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign.
“It will be the masses who will also bring Israel’s Apartheid crashing. The continued expansion of international action demanding the implementation of Palestinian basic human rights is inevitable.”
“Increasingly, people of conscience, including our Jewish brothers and sisters, throughout the world are speaking up for our rights, often at great personal expense to themselves. Academics, labour unions, churches, and civic institutions around the globe are divesting from Israel. We should stop engaging in theoretical debates about a dead and bloated two-state solution, rummaging through the wreckage of countless peace initiatives, giving up more and more, hoping this merciless military occupation will have mercy on us. “
“How triumphant do you think Israel feels with the world turning against them? Peoples of the world are seeing them for the apartheid state that they are and their growing isolation surely doesn’t feel very triumphant to them. In fact, we are unrivaled in our power on the ground level internationally. Our struggle for freedom is the longest running and best known around the world. Harnessing that advantage is the path we must continue to take. Taking our case … to the populations of the world is where our energy should be focused.”
2. Palestinians are the native people with 3,000 years of history
“We are the indigenous people fighting for freedom, struggling to live dignified lives in our own homeland. We are the natives of the Holy Land in ever sense of the word “native” – historically, ethnically, culturally, legally, and even genetically, we are the natives. If you take samples of our DNA, the results will show genetic markers specific to that region of the world. Our strength is in our roots.”
“It is not simply about reclaiming stolen property. It is the affirmation that, in the 21st century, it is not OK to uproot a society for the sole purpose of replacing them with another "chosen" people. Finally, it is Israel owning up to her sins against the natives of the land, and therefore, it is the true language of peace.”
3. The Jews have no historical connection to the land which they occupy as racists
“Israel is a country that was founded by Europeans who came to Palestine, formed terrorist gangs who set about a systematic ethnic cleansing of the native Palestinians from their homes on 78% of Historic Palestine in 1948. “
In Israel's desire for religious purity, “Israel legislates the notion of a Chosen People with exclusive rights and privilege for Jews. Israel is … employing racist policies to "Judaize" the land whereby property and resources are confiscated from Christians and Muslims for the exclusive use of Jews.“ “Our great crime is that we are not Jewish. We are oppressed, denied, humiliated daily, dispossessed and robbed because we are not Jewish. “
“A nation that discriminates against and oppresses those who do not belong to a particular religious, racial, or ethnic group is not a light onto nations. It is a blight. And to recognize such racism as a human or national right goes against every tenet of international law. It defies the basic sense that the worth of a human being should not be measured by their religion, any more than it should be measured by the color of their skin or the language they speak.”
“That Israel has employed every imperialistic tactic to subjugate, humiliate, break, and expel an entire nation of principally unarmed civilians because of their religion is not a right. It is a moral obscenity. That every Jew from Europe, Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Australia be entitled to dual citizenship, one in their native country and one in Israel, while the rightful heirs to the land linger as refugees without citizenship anywhere is not a right. It is an outrage.”
[Note: Jews see themselves, and are seen by others, as members of a nation: a community of people who share a common language, culture, ethnicity, descent, and history. The Jewish religion is considered part of their national culture and the Land of Israel is their homeland.]
4. Palestinian’s have the human right to possess all of Palestine - including the land that is now the State of Israel
And we don’t need to continue down a path of denigrating and racist negotiations. We are a native people who deserve to live in their native homeland with full human rights. It’s that simple.
“Palestinian freedom is non-negotiable”
and “Human Rights are non-negotiable”.
Our demands are self-evident truths that we should pursue without apology, without negotiations, without compromise, and without fear. That’s how every freedom movement achieved its goal before us, and that is how we will achieve ours. THAT is our most effective path forward, not negotiations.
The two-state solution was and remains an instrument to circumvent the basic human rights of Palestinians in order to accommodate Israel’s desire to be Jewish. It is time for our shared land to be the inclusive and diverse country it had been. It is time for leaders to follow the people’s determined movement toward a single democratic state, with liberty and justice for all, regardless of religion.
5. Delegitimize Israel as a colonial oppressor, practicing state terrorism, indiscriminately killing and expelling Palestinians, practicing genocide.
Israel has been wiping Palestine off the map, expelling us and stealing everything we have. Israel has never been vague about its nefarious intentions to have all of Palestine without Palestinians.
Palestinians have lived subject to the whims of soldiers at checkpoints; of airplanes and helicopters raining death onto them with impunity; of curfews and restrictions and denials; and of violent armed settlers who fancy themselves disciples of God. There are home demolitions, land confiscations, rapacious building of Jewish-only colonies, endless checkpoints, targeted assassinations, bombings of schools, hospitals, municipal buildings and malls, closures and denials, imprisonment and torture of men women and children alike, the separation of families, the daily humiliations.
And on goes the inhumanity -- the constant expulsions, systematic theft, destruction of livelihoods, uprooting of trees -- especially olive trees which are so precious to Palestinian culture -- curfews, closures, institutional discrimination, and on and on.
6. Develop horrific stereotypes of Jews: vindictive, heartless, thieves, murderers
Israelis simply take property belonging to Palestinians. But not in their cruelest hour did the Apartheid regime wreak such wanton murder and destruction.
Israel cuts off the movement of food, medicine and other basic goods to the Gaza strip, causing massive malnutrition, economic collapse and misery. Israel rains death from the skies on an already battered and starved Gaza, murdering over 3000 human beings and maiming thousands more in a single month. Schools, universities, mosques, police stations, homes, water treatment plants, factories, and anything that supports civil society, including the only mental health clinic in Gaza, have been blown to rubble from planes that rain death from clear skies without any resistance….
They ghettoized Gaza and turned it into an open air prison – a concentration camp of civilians with no way to earn a living, no way to defend themselves and no place to run from the slaughter bombarding them from air, land, and sea. Half of Gazan children under 12 have lost their “will to live.” Can anyone fathom the kind of oppression that leads small children en mass to lose their will to live? The entire population of Gaza is terrorized and traumatized. No one is spared the insecurity and fear. Imagine, please, that you are a Gazan.
Susan Abulhawa’s first novel, Mornings in Jenin, was published in 2010 by Bloomsbury and was originally published in 2006 as The Scar of David (Journey Publications). She describes Mornings in Jenin as a work of historic fiction, where fictional characters live through real history, and encourages anyone to do their own research to verify the accuracy of the historic events that form the backdrop for the novel. We will show later that the book is full of historical falsehoods of events that never occurred.
Bernard Henri-levy tells us that he is distressed to think that a book like Susan Abulhawa's, a concentration of anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish clichés masquerading as fiction, can become a best seller and be praised by many in the media.
The book is about a fictitious Palestinian family from the village of Ein Hod, whose inhabitants left for Jenin during the war that accompanied the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.
It is told in the first person by Amal, who is born into that family in an UN-administered refugee camp in Jenin. Through Amal, we hear the stories of her brothers: one, as a stolen boy who becomes an Israeli soldier; the other who is sacrificing himself for the Palestinian cause and will become his enemy.
The tale opens with Amal staring down the barrel of a soldier's gun—and moves backward to present the history that preceded that moment. In 1941 Palestine, the Abulheja family, Yehya and Basima and their two sons are living on an olive farm in the village of Ein Hod. Their oldest son, Hasan, is best friends with a refugee Jewish boy, Ari Perlstein as WWII rages elsewhere. Both brothers fall in love with Dalia, who marries the elder son, Hasan.
The Abulheja family are forcibly removed from their ancestral home in Ein Hod and sent to live in a refugee camp in Jenin. Amal’s brother Ishmael, the son of Hasan and Dalia, is lost in the mayhem of people fleeing for their lives. An Israeli soldier gives the child to his wife, a Polish Holocaust survivor, and Ishmael is raised by a Jewish family and grows up as David, an Israeli soldier.
During the 1967 war, Amal’s eldest brother, Yousef, comes face to face with David, his brother the Jew. Yousef recognizes his brother by a prominent scar across David’s face.
Amal’s own story threads it’s way through six decades of Palestine-Israeli tension, eventually taking her into exile in Pennsylvania in America.
In an excerpt from the book, Susan Abulhawa describes the expulsion of the inhabitants from the village of Ein Hod in polemical terms proving her ability to convey high emotion with her words. “My father, Darweesh and other men were ordered to dig a mass grave for the remains of 30 people who had been burned alive. At the gate, soldiers whipped their batons, herding the terrified masses like cattle through the narrow exit. Soldiers fired their guns and it began to rain bullets, and without water, my family stumbled into the hills beneath a parched sky.”
“On the edge of Ein Hod, by the town’s eastern water well, expectant soldiers stopped the fleeing souls and ordered them to empty their valuables into a blanket spread on the ground. My uncle begged the soldier to spare him his steed. With an impatient and callous perturbation, the soldier shot Fatooma [the horse], then put a bullet through my uncles chest.“
“They awoke early to the sound of gunfire and a bullet missed a man standing in prayer and hit the donkey behind him instead. Soldiers were under orders to move the Arabs further east. By mid afternoon, dehydrated and spent, people staggered and fell. Some lay dead or dying in the heat. Pregnant women miscarried. Small babies starved.”
“Finally, the exiled wanders came upon a main road, where an Iraqi infantry took the infirm and disabled, including Mama, in the bed of a truck to the nearest town Jenin. All of it carried away in the backwaters of the bigoted notions of entitlement of another people, who would eventually settle in the vacancy and proclaim it all, all what was left of forty generations of Palestinians in the way of architecture, orchards, wells, flowers and charm, all of it as the Jewish history of foreigners arriving from Europe, Russia, the United States, Ethiopia and other corners of the globe! The village mosque, in the very center of the town, was turned into a brothel.”
The only problem with this description is that it does not match historical reality at all.
There is no evidence of an expulsion of the 700-900 Arab villagers of Ein Hod in 1948. Two Israeli soldiers involved in the attack on Ein Hod testified that there were no residents in the village when they arrived:
Naftali Blumenthal's testimony: We had to stop shooting aimed at cars passing at Route 4 [the main road between Haifa and Tel Aviv]. It was clear that the shooting was carried out east of the road, from the hills above. But it was not known exactly where the shooting came from. In May 1948 we planned an attack on a village which was placed where Ein Hod is today. We viewed the village - we did not detect signs of residence.
Testimony of Baruch Gross: "We moved toward Ein Hod in the morning, from highway 4 heading east. The village was suspiciously quiet, we feared of a possible ambush. We crawled from rock to rock until we reached the village in the afternoon. There we found a blue-eyed man with his donkey. He fried a pigeon's egg omelet on a British kerosene cooker (Primus). A search was carried out in the village for residence (sic.), we did not find any sign, not even animals droppings. At about 15:00 I reported that the village seems to be deserted for a long time."
If one is sceptical about the words of the Israeli Jews who were involved in the action at Ein Hod in 1948, one can compare their statements with the description given by Meron Benvenisti of the same event. Benvensiti has long been one of the most vocal critics of Israel's policy toward the Palestinians and the West Bank and is an advocate of the idea of a bi-national state.
Benvenisti agrees with the testimony of the two Israeli soldiers that during the 1948 War the village's [Ein Hod/ Ein Hawd] inhabitants took part in armed attacks against Jewish vehicles on the Haifa-Tel Aviv Highway and, along with other villagers from the area, at first held out against the Israeli army; but in July of 1948 they fled the village, apparently without a battle.
Meron Benvenisti also tells us that the abandoned village of Ein Hod was first populated in July of 1949 with Jewish immigrants who had arrived a few months previously from Tunisia and Algeria and, in a country overwhelmed with hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees, had been sent to establish a farming community in the Ein Hawd's area.
So the reality of Ein Hod is of a population exchange that occurred in 1948-1972 with Palestinians leaving for surrounding Arab countries and Jews arriving who had been driven out of their homes in other Middle Eastern countries. While UNRWA calculated the number of Palestine refugees as 711,000 in 1950, from 1948 until the early 1970s, 800,000-1,000,000 Jews left, fled, or were expelled from their homes in Arab countries. In contrast to the image that Susan Abulhawa gives us of Jews coming from Western countries, there were in fact more Jewish refugees displaced from Arab countries then there were Arab refugees displaced from Palestine.
Susan Abulhawa would have us believe that Palestinian Arabs became refugees simply because the Jews wanted to drive them out. But again a return to real history tells us that on 29 November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly approved a plan to resolve the Arab-Jewish conflict by partitioning Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. The Jewish leadership accepted the partition plan but five countries of the Arab League, namely Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, backed by Saudi Arabian and Yemenite contingents invaded on the night of 14–15 May 1948. Israel lost 6,373 of its people, about 1% of its population at the time, in the war.
When reading about a refugee camp, one imagines tents and shacks, with problems of infrastructure. This is not true when we consider the Jenin Refugee Camp which is the place where the fictional Abulheja family went to live. The Jenin camp was established in 1953, and is located within the municipal boundaries of the City of Jenin. (see map and picture above). It is an integral part of the City of Jenin and its continued existence as a refugee camp is for political reasons which have nothing to do with reality.
The Jenin Refugee Camp was established on land leased from the government of Jordan by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNRWA ). All homes are connected to public water and electricity infrastructure, and nearly all are connected to the municipal sewerage network (see picture above). In 2007, Jenin had a population of 39,004 with an additional 10,371 in the adjacent refugee camp.
Any astute reviewer can show Susan Abulhawa's "facts" to be historically incorrect, missing in context, or distorted, but no one seems to go to the trouble. This is not a learned discussion over the facts of the situation but rather a polemic intended to delegitimize the Jews and their homeland of Israel.
We have, for instance, Robin Yassin-Kassab in his review of the book for The Sunday Times who is ready to concede that at "times you want to criticise Abulhawa for laying the tragedy on too thick, but her raw material is historical fact.”
Indeed, the words of Christopher Meyers, director of CSUB’s Kegley Institute of Ethics, who invited Susan Abulhawa to speak, make its clear that the facts of the situation are irrelevant.
Christopher Meyers provides an intellectual justification for the inaccuracies – even outright lies – in Susan Abulhawa talk’s on the pervasive violation of Palestinian rights in the Occupied Territories.
Does he believe Abulhawa was one-sided? Absolutely. This, however, he explains as legitimate, since she had a single-minded purpose, to present only the Palestinian plight, and only through their eyes. This meant that she does not need to also describe the despicable horrors carried out by militant Palestinians and on Israel's amazing achievements as a multi-ethnic democracy.
Does he believe she exaggerated some of her claims or took some images out of context? Probably. But again he is able to excuse this since it is a common tactic of activists, and it is the audience’s job to critically evaluate the claims and to seek further information when skeptical.
But he believes – with no real basis for believing – some of the stories and images were probably accurate and truthful even if others were not. If this is so, then he finds in a true academic abstraction that the situation of Israel represents the possibility of "the banality of evil,” a concept introduced by philosopher Hannah Arendt." Why? Because the best, most cultured, most civilized societies -- and he includes Israel in this category -- have shown themselves capable of doing terrible things.
But, he has a strange idea of the meaning of ethics which his center supposedly represents when he accepts a lecture on hatred against Jews and Israel in order to justify his own fascination with the concept of the banality of evil. So he can ignore outright falsehoods if he knows beforehand that Israel is guilty of mistreating Palestinians. And he has no need to place events in the context within which they occur. A man who stands outside the real world and lives in a world of abstractions.
I assume that Susan Abulhawa is making a good living out of her writings and activism for the Palestinian nation. She is obviously a talented writer and speaker, and we will probably hear much more from her in the future. I believe however that if a Palestinian State occurs, she would not be ready to move from Philadelphia USA to an Islamic State of Palestine. In any case, as an American woman in her cultural reference points, an outspoken educated woman, and an unwed mother, she would probably not be welcome there.
Further Reading:
Israel Law Center Launches Student Hotline to Combat Anti-Israel Hostilities on American Campuses
Hind Awwad: Palestinian boycott coordinator provides a Sweet Face for Hatred against Israel
Denis MacEoin fights hatred at Edinburgh University
Ben Cohen and the Fight against Hatred
Severely limited
