The Role of Charity in Our Struggle
Laila Al-Marayati
WHEN I WAS growing up as the daughter of what I considered to be a strict immigrant Arab father, my sense of identity as an Arab-American in general, and Palestinian specifically, was conflicted. I struggled with the bifurcated worlds of my father’s relatives who came over, one by one, from Gaza or Kuwait, and my mother’s family who also migrated to California, but was from Missouri. I was not sure if we were Midwestern, Southern, Middle Eastern or just American. However, there was no mistaking my late father’s resolve and dedication to all things Palestinian. It was not until years later, when I visited Gaza, that I was able to understand his attachment to Southern California, which was almost the spitting image of his homeland, down to the ubiquitous sabr plant, or prickly pear, whose fruit he adored, and which served as a sort of namesake as he was called Sabri.
The sabr plant felt like it should be the national plant of Palestine as it embodies the attributes of sumud, or steadfastness, which is the defining characteristic of the Palestinian people. Tough on the outside, protective of the tender, life-giving water on the inside; thorns for protection, but beautiful blossoms and fruit, to be shared generously. Growing in all conditions, with or without water, seemingly even without adequate soil, but ever present.
I knew little of the history of Palestine while I was growing up. I could not really find Jerusalem on a map and had a vague idea of the geography of the region in general. Everything changed when my father sent my sister and me to visit our family in Gaza in 1980. I thought it was a trip to help us identify with his homeland, to meet our relatives and to learn about Palestine. I figured out later (brilliant 19-year-old that I was) that the purpose was to introduce me to potential spouses from among my cousins, a common practice among our community. That did not happen but after traveling throughout Palestine with my aunts, uncles and cousins, my sense of Palestinian identity was forever solidified. Little could we have imagined that the ability to travel freely would not last and that this experience was never to be repeated.
My uncles met us at the airport in Tel Aviv, a mere 30-minute drive from our home in Khan Younis. On our way out of Gaza, young Israeli soldiers flirted with us and let us pass easily through what would become the nightmare of Erez. We drove to Haifa and Nazareth, where we enjoyed a picnic by a lake with an Iraqi Jewish family. On another day trip, we visited Bir Zeit in Ramallah where my lack of education was quickly addressed after a meeting with enthusiastic activist professors who loaded us up with brochures, books and other items describing the Palestinian struggle. We enjoyed the famous knafeh of Nablus and visited Bethlehem. A memorable visit to the Haram al Sharif in Jerusalem with a tour through the Old City and the souk reinforced everything else that we had taken in, while my Anglo-American identity quickly receded into the background.
That was in 1980.
In the years that followed, my relationship with my father was difficult as I navigated young adulthood as an American woman. I cared about what happened in Palestine and elsewhere, but it was not a priority for me at that time and I felt that the Palestinian cause was in good hands with my father whom I believed wanted to return at some point.
Indeed, he did. After leaving Gaza in the 1950s to pursue an education in the US, he met and married my mother in 1959. He returned to Gaza in 1964 with his wife and three of his children. He did not go back again until after Oslo, as he was one of the members of the diaspora who truly believed it would provide the opportunity for the creation of a Palestinian State. Although a physician by training, he threw himself, together with his brothers, into creating businesses to elevate Gaza: helping to construct the airport, investing in a flour mill, initiating projects to improve access to medical care and services. He wanted to enable Gazans to get the care they needed in Gaza and not have to travel elsewhere. Throughout those years, I was busy with college, then medical school, then residency, marriage and a new baby. I had dreamt of going back to Palestine with my father one day, now as a mature adult daughter, no longer a surly adolescent. Just one more year, and then we would go.
In the midst of my over-committed life, I agreed to serve on the US Commission on Religious Freedom (USCIRF) as an appointee of then-President Clinton. The year was 1998. My sons were four and six years old and I was working full-time. As an activist member of the Muslim American community, I felt that I had no other choice but to agree. I served with John Bolton, Elliott Abrams, Nina Shea, David Saperstein, the then Archbishop Theodore McCarrick, among others. Eventually, I knew that I had to ensure the Commission addressed religious freedom, and lack thereof in Israel as well. Their main focus, at the time, was on Sudan, Saudi Arabia, the former Soviet republics and East Asia, including China. Part of the fact-finding mission included trips to the region in question and, eventually, we decided a trip to the Middle East was in order. Of course, most of the Commission did not think that it should include Israel, but I insisted. I made up for lost time by further educating myself about Palestine, learning that day by day the Oslo agreement was breaking down, that infringements on freedom of movement throughout the West Bank and in Gaza due to Israeli settlements were creating an intolerable level of despair and frustration among the Palestinian people. My father encouraged me to continue, to have courage and to represent our community, even in the face of open hostility from other Commission members.
When I announced, a year later, that I was expecting our third child, a girl, my father suggested that we name her Jenin, after the town in northern Palestine. She was to be the youngest of 10 grandchildren. Three months after her birth, my father died suddenly at the age of 66, the day after returning from a trip to Egypt. As the patriarch, not only of our nuclear family, but of his extended Palestinian family—and, indeed, a huge segment of the Palestinian and Arab community—the loss left a gaping hole. My dream of traveling with him one day was gone. It became clear that he was the glue that kept his family together, as conflict quickly ensued regarding property and business matters in Gaza.
I eventually recovered from the immediate shock and had to get on with being a mother, working full-time, not losing control in front of my patients, and serving on the damn Commission. However, it became even more important for me to continue his work after he died, or some semblance of it, as an activist for Palestine. Several months later, I was on a trip to the Middle East, first to Egypt, then Saudi Arabia, and finally, to Tel Aviv. Of all of the Commission members, I was the only one harassed in Saudi Arabia, as a Muslim woman traveling without a mahrem, (or guardian) even though the group was worried about how a rabbi and priest would be treated. Misogyny can be relied upon to rear its ugly head under all circumstances.
Several Commission members chose not to travel to Israel since they objected to the notion that there were any religious freedom violations of any kind there. Meeting with non-Orthodox Jews, Christians as well as Muslims, told another story. I documented it, along with our knowledgeable staff member, Khalid el-Gindy, in a dissenting opinion.29
The day we visited the Al-Aqsa compound, I went to pray in the small mosque under the Dome of the Rock. I am not sure what happened, but I was overwhelmed with emotion, sobbing uncontrollably, thinking of my late father and everything he believed in. I knew, then, that I could not let his dream for Palestine die with him and that, as the next generation, I was obliged to continue. My first responsibility was to assert myself within a group of neocons and Zionists, to speak up for the rights of religious minorities in Israel. I had to show them what should have been self-evident—that preventing Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, both Muslim and Christian, from practicing their faith in their houses of worship was a matter of religious freedom no different from the violations faced by people of minority faiths throughout the world. Once again, on the way out of Tel Aviv, I was the only Commissioner who was interrogated, now by the Israelis, who only desisted when the US Embassy staff intervened. We issued our dissent to the official Commission report the day before my term on the Commission expired, as I knew that efforts would be made to prevent me from publishing it at all, using the timing as an excuse.
Not much happened as a result, but in Washington DC at the time, issuing such a statement from an official government body was unprecedented. Clearly, the battle continues in the American political sphere but shortly after that, I had to turn my attention elsewhere.
While the events of 9/11 occurred 20 years ago, it sometimes feels like they happened yesterday. Words cannot describe our shock, horror and even shame as Muslim Americans, when we watched in real-time the devastation in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. The terrorist threat had come to the US with a vengeance, and we braced ourselves for what would be a horrible backlash. Countries that used terrorism as an excuse to engage in gross human rights violations would now get a free pass since the anti-terrorism fight was everyone’s fight. This included Israel. Ariel Sharon, Prime Minister at the time, went on to wage war on Palestinians engaged in what had started out as a non-violent uprising against the oppression of the Oslo regime. Devastation and destruction reigned throughout the West Bank and Gaza; lives were lost, and the horror of reciprocal suicide bombings began, which resulted in global solidarity with Israel.
In the US, non-profit, charitable organizations which had been supporting Palestinians and other Muslims elsewhere were shuttered, as the Patriot Act enabled the government to freeze assets, make accusations about wrongdoing and harass donors and employees alike, with impunity. Now that Palestine was on fire and the people were suffering from Jenin to Rafah, our channels of support were cut off. Even though the perpetrators of 9/11 were from the Arabian Peninsula, all of the energy against US charities in the interest of fighting terrorism was focused on those who supported Palestine.
Barriers were created, seemingly overnight, to anyone around the world from Europe to the Gulf, who wanted to provide humanitarian support to Palestine. The bombs continued in a pattern that exists to this day on the part of Israel in response to Palestinian resistance: disproportionate, excessive force that results in collective punishment against a civilian population. Every. Single. Time.
So, as a former donor to the above organizations who was outraged that I could no longer support those in need, I joined with other like-minded individuals, friends and humanitarians, who had founded a new organization, KinderUSA (Kids in Need of Development, Education and Relief) in 2002. Little did we know that the US Treasury Department assumed that we would pick up where others had left off in supporting “terrorists.” This resulted in the launching of a Grand Jury investigation that ultimately went nowhere, harassing and arresting our staff in Israel, interrogating my family and me upon return from a family vacation and more. Confident in our own practices and commitment to providing humanitarian assistance in a legal and transparent manner under all circumstances, we were certain that we could withstand the efforts to defame and undermine our work.
Shortly after I joined the organization, I was able to travel once again to beloved Palestine, this time with my youngest sister. We could not go through Tel Aviv anymore (Palestinians who do travel through Tel Aviv can tell you about their mistreatment there), so we had to traverse the Sinai desert by car, entering via Rafah. While there, we visited with our NGO partners on the ground who were implementing our projects. We also visited with people at the World Food Program and saw local Palestinians selling the dry goods that they had received. I was shocked to learn that the olive oil the WFP procured was not Palestinian and that their donations included canned meat and no fresh produce. In Gaza! One of the richest agricultural regions on the planet! Families were given handouts that they had no choice but to accept. Our executive director, always thinking outside of the box, came up with the idea of instead producing vouchers for families to use that could be redeemed by local merchants to purchase food, clothing, school supplies, etc. The use of vouchers is now commonplace among humanitarian groups in general; such a program was first implemented by KinderUSA in Palestine.
Similarly, insofar as we knew, then, that we needed to provide food assistance differently, in a way that supported the local community, while providing LOCALLY GROWN fresh and nutritious produce to the community, we launched our Farmer’s Project. It provides seeds and other tools to local farmers who then grow the crops that we then purchased and provided to the neediest families. In addition, over the years, we have employed female heads of household to provide additional products such as cheese, dates, jam, etc. with the food baskets.
Early on, with our focus on childhood nutrition and well-being, we engaged with a female-run business to provide hot meals to children in the local schools in the poorest areas. This included schools run by UNRWA as well as the Ministry of Education. Eventually, UNRWA took over and began providing hot meals to their own students. So then we focused on the government schools, especially pre-schools, throughout Gaza. We continued to provide vouchers in both the West Bank and Gaza for school supplies and uniforms, the cost of which could often prevent families from sending their kids to school at all.
As has been widely reported, the availability of clean drinking water is limited throughout Gaza due to the high rates of salinization as well as to ongoing contamination due to constant disruptions to the processing of sewage. We have worked on projects that make clean water available in schools, just to bring them up to a level that would be expected for children anywhere.
I traveled again to Gaza in 2009 with another Board member, shortly after the attacks of that year had wiped out significant infrastructure, particularly in the northeast part of the Gaza Strip. On that trip, we focused on identifying partners to address the psychosocial needs of children who suffered from unprecedented cases of post-traumatic stress disorder. We learned, at that time, about the tremendous limitations of the healthcare system, in general, throughout Gaza and its shortcomings in terms of mental health, in particular. The siege of Gaza had begun a few years earlier and was beginning to take its toll since the ability to bring in skilled trainers from outside, to send Gazans abroad (even to the West Bank) for training, or to obtain needed equipment to repair hardware like CT scanners or ventilators, etc., was severely curtailed. Yet, our commitment continued, while our respect for the incredible resilience of the people of Gaza mounted. On that trip, I learned what they could do with recycled rebar, how they had to destroy the concrete remains of buildings by hand, how they turned small plots of land adjacent to their homes into thriving potato farms, how they created art and embroidery, and preserved Palestinian traditions through dance, music and storytelling. Their commitment to education and excellence meant that they would rebuild the destroyed schools and university buildings and get on with teaching, learning and growing, once again.
My last trip was in 2013, before Israel’s onslaught of Operation Protective Edge in 2014. My sister and I traveled once again across the Sinai, this time with another aging uncle, who had business to attend to in Gaza. We were greeted warmly by the border officials in Rafah and stayed with relatives for 10 days, visiting our projects and partners in the refugee camps from Jabaliya in the north to Rafah in the south. We visited a school for the hearing impaired in Bani Suhaila, where the students were accomplishing amazing things in art, science, and language, while the staff was so enthusiastic in its efforts to support these children. They were also our partners in the hot breakfast program for local pre-schools that we visited, as well. Gaza City, as always, was a lively hub where we connected with other humanitarian groups and community members. Children everywhere loved to have their photos taken with us and to practice their English.
From 2002 to 2013, I was able to witness the growth of my own family in Khan Younis, meeting new cousins and their children every time. The El-Farra family has been in Gaza for centuries and is extensive, to say the least. On our first trip in 2002, right after we arrived in Egypt, a helicopter gunship had attacked an area near our town, Khan Younis, destroying a building and killing many of its inhabitants. Everyone was worried about our safety and tried to discourage us from continuing the journey. I called my aunt in Khan Younis, and she said, “Don’t worry, that was in another neighborhood. Most welcome!” I thought, “Who am I to be afraid when she goes through this every day, when her daughter gets up each morning, gets her kids ready for school, and goes off to work as a teacher herself.” That’s when I really understood that just getting up and getting on with life is a form of resistance for Palestinians. Having a healthy meal, not going to bed hungry, wearing a uniform and shoes that fit contribute to a sense of dignity and well-being that is elusive, but essential, not just for survival, but for thriving. Similarly, on that trip, we attended a wedding celebration full of joy, and again I realized, life has to go on, in spite of the daily threats of death and destruction.
I remember watching families gather on the beach for the day, preparing elaborate meals, followed by hookah as they made the best of such a bad situation, not letting the reality of the ongoing captivity interfere with living.
In 2002, we were unable to go to the beach at all due to the presence of the Gush Katif settlement and over 20,000 Israeli soldiers. After they had left in 2005, Gazans were once again able to enjoy the shoreline, as they have few other outlets, living as they do in the most densely populated place in the world. Drinking Arabic coffee at a “resort” in southern Gaza in April, watching my uncle proudly ride a camel on the beach, made me feel like I was on vacation in the Mediterranean. We were so happy at that moment. Later, visiting the fields in eastern Gaza, smelling the jasmine and orange blossoms, reminded me of my father, who once had a farm of his own in Southern California. His whole life was an attempt to recreate the beauty of Gaza.
On that trip in 2013, my sister and I decided to approach Gaza from a different perspective, that is, as a destination of immense historical interest, both in ancient and modern times. With the help of local guides (relatives, once again) we sought out and found amazing places, like a Turkish bath from the Ottoman period that is still in use in Gaza City, an ancient Byzantine monastery (St. Hilarion), buildings from the time of the Crusades, one of the oldest mosques in the world (Omari), to name a few. Often, people think of Gaza only in terms of war, hardship and misery but, through the challenges, the people there find opportunities to laugh, love and give of themselves. Their rich history, abiding faith, and endurance enable them to see beyond the limitations of their present circumstances—though there should be no mistaking the degree of hardship faced both by the people of Gaza and their sisters and brothers under occupation in the rest of Palestine.
Watching horrific crimes perpetrated against our people while we live in comparative luxury, creates survivor’s guilt, which many seek to assuage through charitable giving. We often struggle with the concern that we are just applying a band aid, when the real problem of the Occupation has to be addressed in order for the humanitarian catastrophe to end. We agree with that perspective but remain drawn to the reality that helping a child survive today means she will be able to thrive tomorrow and will be ready to do her part to end the Occupation. I once read an article featuring a business leader engaged in philanthropic work, who said something like “If you can’t provide help on a large scale, why bother?” I have thought of that often, wondering if what we are doing on a small scale with a modest budget is truly making a difference in the larger struggle, overall. But I cannot underestimate the impact of the generosity of our donors that is expressed with love and support for the people of Palestine.
Each year brings different struggles and new obstacles in providing humanitarian support, but they are nothing in comparison to the hurdles Palestinians face on a daily basis. We have to do our part on multiple levels whether in raising awareness, speaking up, providing support, lobbying members of Congress and more. The struggle continues.
29 United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, Addendum to the Report of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, May 14, 2001, last accessed October 1, 2021, https://www.uscirf.gov/sites/default/files/resources/may%202001%20annual%20report%20addendum%20with%20dissent.pdf