IBRAHIM ABU LUGHOD:A PALESTINIAN

Washington Watch

May 28, 2001

Dr. James J. Zogby ©

President

Arab American Institute

Dr. Ibrahim Abu Lughod died in Palestine last week. Much will be and should be written about the man. He was a great leader, literally one of the fathers of Arab American activism. He was, as well, an intellectual and a scholar. He was also a gifted speaker and a powerful debater. But more than all of this, he was a Palestinian. The fire of his nationalism burned bright. Everything he did was driven by his commitment to Palestine. And it was contagious.

Brahim loomed large in my life. He was, for me, both a mentor and a role model. He found me in the early 1970s and pushed and prodded me into becoming the activist he knew I could become.

At the time I was a graduate student pursuing a doctorate in Islamic Studies. He appreciated the value of my earning a degree, but he saw the politician in me, he said, that should be nurtured. He invited me to join the Association of Arab American University Graduates (AAUG), a group that he and Dr. Edward Said, had helped to form a few years earlier.

And so it was, a year later, I found myself at my first AAUG convention in Washington, DC. I was there to read a rather lengthy paper I had written on the Palestinian revolt of 1936-1939. It was my first outing of this kind and I was still quite young and nervous. But Brahim had read the paper and encouraged me to do it.

It was 1973 and the mood at the convention was both electric and energizing. President Nixon was in the throes of impeachment and the Middle East was at war.

That was the AAUG, back then. It was the major political vehicle for Arab Americans. It formed and shaped a community and created a political identity. It brought us together and inspired us. It was, as well, a school for Arab Americans. It taught us and gave us the opportunity, as young scholars to present papers before our peers and to publish our work and reach a larger audience.

More than that, the AAUG, in its day, brought those of us who were just coming of age into contact with the political and intellectual giants of the Arab world.

Two years later, Brahim asked me to run for vice president of the organization. I was but 31 and was unsure of how I would do. He came and spent a weekend with my wife and I and talked me through my concerns. In long conversations he both instructed me and strengthened me.

The next year (1976) he gave me an assignment. He was bringing three Israelis to the United States to attend that year’s AAUG convention. He wanted me to organize a national speaking tour for them. The entire experience was transformative. The three who were coming were Tawfiq Zayyad, Emile Touma and Felicia Langer.

Tawfiq was the poet-politician whose leadership helped to transform the Arab community in Israel. Emile was a gifted intellectual and writer. Felicia was a passionate human rights lawyer who was the first great defender of Palestinian victims of the Israeli occupation.

Both their appearance at the convention and their tour were successes and produced, for me, two products. Brahim gave me the papers from the convention and asked me to add my own and put them all into a book. “New Perspectives on Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews,” with an introduction by Dr. Ibrahim Abu Lughod, became my first published work.

The other product was more what Brahim had in mind, when he pressed me to begin in this work in the first place. I had grown restive with college teaching and frustrated with the AAUG. I wanted to become more politically active. The tour had energized me.

It had brought together an extraordinary national network of organizers and activists, and Felicia’s and Tawfiq’s stories had created a sensation. Out of all of this we

launched the Palestine Human Rights Campaign (PHRC) a national organization devoted to defending Palestinian rights in the United States.

Brahim encouraged me. While some others did not understand a human rights effort, he did. His support was critical to our early success as was his constant mentoring. He pushed and he prodded. He offered praise when it was in order and sharp criticism when, it too, was called for.

He had a rather distinct style of speaking. I told him once that he spoke like a machine gun, with short staccato-like sentences that commanded both attention and respect. My wife would say that she could always tell when I was speaking with Brahim on the phone because “your heels would click together and you would stand at attention—periodically nodding in assent.”

What I came to realize was that the PHRC was important to Brahim because it was about Palestine. It defended Palestine. It brought Americans to support Palestine and it kept the name of Palestine alive in the press.

The PHRC was a success and Brahim was proud of the effort. I left the group in 1980, when I co-founded the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC). Brahim was somewhat disappointed, because, as he noted, he had hoped I would remain focused on Palestine. When I left ADC in 1984, he called me with another project. He and Edward Said commissioned me to prepare a paper on how to do Palestinian information work in the United States. He hoped, he told me, it would create a springboard to bring me back into full-time work for Palestine.

I did the paper, but as committed as I was to Palestinian rights, I was also committed to Lebanon and broader U.S.-Arab relations and most especially to empowering Arab Americans politically, and so in 1985 I founded the Arab American Institute.

Brahim’s life was changing, as was mine, and for a time I only heard from him on special occasions. He called me, for example, in 1988 to express his excitement at my successful effort to bring the Palestinian issue to a public debate at the Democratic Convention.

In 1992, Brahim, ever the committed nationalist, returned to Palestine to teach at Bir Zeit University. He knew that if Palestine was to be built, he wanted to be a partner in its construction. While others were only critics, he was a builder. For a while I did not hear from him, but in 1996 I received an email from Brahim. I had written an article comparing the struggle in Ireland with that in Palestine. He loved it, he said. His praises meant as much to me at 50 as when I was 30.

After that we communicated by email and occasionally by phone. When my son took his lawyers’ project, “Palestine Peace Project,” to the West Bank, he met with Brahim. Brahim was pleased with his effort and I was quite proud.

It was my son Joseph who called to tell me that Brahim had died. I was moved to tears to learn that Brahim was to be buried in Jaffa. It was the city of his birth and the city to which he had always worked to return. Indeed, in all the years I knew him and was privileged to learn from and work with him, Palestine was his goal. It was his passion and, as I have said, it was contagious.

To Brahim I owe much of what I accomplished in my formative years. And I know as I write this that there are hundreds of others who can and, I hope, will write the same.

We can only hope that we can be as helpful and supportive and inspirational to the next generation, as Brahim was to ours. For comments or information, contact <jzogby@aaiusa.org> or <aai@aaiusa.org>.