by Jean Zaru (edited by Diana L. Eck and Marla Schrader)

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review by Kohleun Adamson

Before reading Jean Zaru’s Occupied with Nonviolence, I had only basic abstract knowledge of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, augmented by a summer of learning firsthand its effects on the lives of women in Jordan and the West Bank. So, I am struck by Zaru’s ability to offer a voice that is representative of many of the Palestinian people. Occupied is a collection of Zaru’s speeches and essays, and although the text addresses political issues, it does not carry a formal, argumentative structure. Rather, it lives by Zaru’s conviction that “by telling our stories, we resist the diminishing of our lives. We resist vague and generalized abstractions and we maintain the urgency and intensity of the concrete” (p. 4). Reading Zaru’s book feels like sitting down to hot tea and listening to a neighbor share her wisdom and experience, the pain of her heart, and her reasons for hope —all with precise detail.

Zaru begins by explaining the complexities of her own identity as a Palestinian woman who is a Quaker Christian leader, naming the stigmas which make this life difficult. Compassionately, Zaru reminds readers that “Palestinian Christian” is not an oxymoron, and neither is “active, empowered pacifist.” She notes with sadness the shrinking population of Christians in Palestine—Palestinians who have left the West Bank because they have little support from Christians in the West and now feel forgotten and ignored (pp. 3-4).

While in the Middle East I encountered sentiments of abandonment from Arab Christians. They spoke of wishing American Christians would see them as valid children of God, as sisters and brothers of one body. One ought to respect Zaru for naming this division, because though ignoring it might cause fewer waves, remaining quiet harms perceptions from both Eastern and Western perspectives, feeding misunderstanding and allowing us to simplify and define others by preconceived categories.

In the years following the establishment of the nation of Israel and the displacement of Arab Palestinians in 1948, Zaru was a young girl in Ramallah. Since then she has lived in and near Palestinian refugee camps. She tells the stories of her family and those of multitudes of Palestinians who have been exiled and separated by the Israeli occupation. She writes of people on both sides of the wall that have not been permitted to cross over to see their families, which in Middle Eastern cultures is devastating. (I remember waiting with my traveling companions, all of us American citizens, at the border between Jordan and Israel for six hours because we had told officials of our plans to visit Bethlehem. A woman ahead of us in line was turned away because border control reported that the family member whom she hoped to visit did not actually exist.)

As a woman in a male-dominated society, Zaru also understands the limitations that are placed upon her because of gender roles, and she encourages women to come together as members of a marginalized, often invisible, group. While progress continues, she writes, “On the whole, girls are supposed to serve and to conform” (p. 2). Zaru is troubled by this unequal distribution of power, specifically in government and religious settings, especially since women in the Arab world are spoken of as the “glue” of society. How can women hold together their families and communities if they have little power to make decisions and implement practices that would secure them? The issue of gender politics is disputed by women and men in the Arab world, (much as is true of the West) because people have differing desires and views on personal empowerment. As one Jordanian women’s studies scholar told me, “Jordanian women have rights; they just don’t know it. Men and women can have different kinds of power.”

In the Deishah Refugee Camp in Bethlehem lives the woman with an olive tree tattooed in green across her forehead. She and her family have lived on land they have owned for generations, since long before Nakba (“the disaster”) in 1948 when Palestinians were expelled from their homes in the West Bank. The boundaries of the refugee camp were later constructed around their home, which they built by hand from stone and filled with beautiful artwork. As of July 2008, the house and outbuildings had been demolished three times by Israeli troops. When we asked to speak specifically with the woman of the house, her husband and our translator were surprised, until my traveling companion said, “We would like to hear from a mother’s heart.” It then made perfect sense to them that we sought a woman’s perspective. The woman told us one of her sons was sentenced to prison for 500 years, another just released, and a third killed. Although her husband was the one who rebuilt the physical ruins each time they were torn apart, the woman spoke of her own kind of reconstruction. She rebuilt a life in the hope that her two living sons, her only remaining children, will someday return home to stay. “Every thing I do is for them,” she told us, “I will rebuild.” This woman brought us tea and offered food, and although she had kept to herself until we sought her out, she held her family together. Zaru writes about similar situations, and points out that, although this woman is strong and persistent, her voice is not considered by those who decide the state of her homeland.

The struggle at hand in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, as Zaru writes, is a daily struggle for basic human rights, specifically—but not limited to—property rights. For Zaru, property rights are a central manifestation of oppression, and she writes about her own brother not being permitted entrance to the West Bank. She is pained by the repeated demolition of homes in her communities. These actions taken by Israeli officials, in addition to the building of Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories, are violations of internationally recognized human rights. So how does this sort of violence continue? The personal experiences which Zuru shares as part of her own family’s story contrast sharply to the political and military decisions that lack any empathy and so often result in systemic violence.

Calling attention to the structural nature of violence and discrimination in the cultures involved in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Zaru suggests that we consider factors beyond weaponry in thinking about violence that occurs in relations between neighboring countries, between individual neighbors, and between peoples of differing religions. We need also to be reconceptualizing local human rights and the economy. To break down the institutions of violence, Zaru advises that those who seek peace must not only change the actions of dominance to peaceful actions; they must change themselves inwardly to a humble and self-reconciling individual. “But,” she cautions, “ the inner peace of which I speak is not simply being nice, or being passive, or permitting oneself to be trampled upon without protest” (p. 69). Wisely, she admits that there are contributors to unrest that are out of one’s control and also that those under oppression are not always blameless and not always gracious. The goal, however, to is resist the structures of violence, to recognize them and to not be silent, to speak truth to power—a long held practice of resistance in the Friends (Quaker) tradition.

One of Zaru’s greatest strengths in this collection may also be her greatest obstacle for reaching readers who may be skeptical of a Palestinian woman writer. She is writing from her own life and the lives of her Palestinian neighbors. There are problems one can recognize and name only after she or he has been in a place, walked its ground, lived its history. Zaru has done that, and these conflicts between Palestine and Israel, between Western perspectives and Middle Eastern perspectives, and between violence and nonviolence have become daily issues for her. Thus, much of what she believes about them is intuitive or acquired through experience. Diane Eck, who teaches comparative religions and is director of the Pluralism Project at Harvard University, is a longtime friend of Zaru and co-edited the collection of Zaru’s writings. In an introductory note, Eck wrote that she has asked for references Zaru cannot give. Not because she has fabricated her information, but because she has been at this struggle for peace and justice so long. And because for some things the only reference is a voice, collective or individual, speaking out against the norm and against the “acceptable” vocabulary of discourse. Jean Zaru does this in Occupied with Nonviolence. She speaks unapologetically, but with such knowledge, wisdom, and compassion, that when she speaks people need to listen.

Copyright 2009 by Kohleun Adamson. This article was first published in the print edition of Christian Feminism Today, Vol. 33, No. 3 (Fall, 2009) and is reprinted by permission.