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Live from Palestine | About the Author
Contributor Bios
AMER ABDELHADI is general manager of Radio Tariq Al Mahabbeh, TMFM 97.7.
ABDEL FATTAH ABU-SROUR was born in Aida Refugee Camp, in Bethlehem. He holds a PhD from Paris-Nord University in Biological and Medical Engineering, and works with a pharmaceutical company in Beit Jala. Also a painter, poet, actor and playwright, Abu-Srour founded Al-Rowwad Cultural and Theatre Training Center for Children in Aida camp in 1998.
ALI ABUNIMAH is cofounder of The Electronic Intifada and vice president of the Arab-American Action Network, a Chicago-based social service and advocacy organization. He is a contributing author to The New Intifada: Resisting Israel's Apartheid and Iraq Under Siege: The Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War.
LAURIEANN ALADIN is a writer and member of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, the Palestine Solidarity Committee, and Amnesty International. She is cofounder of the international women's coalition, The Families Project and author of To the Bazaar with Dadaji. Aladin resides in Seattle, Washington.
GHASSAN ANDONI is executive director of the Palestinian Centre for Rapprochement between Peoples, based in Beit Sahour.
HUWAIDA ARRAF is a Palestinian American and cofounder of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). She attended the University of Michigan, focusing on Arabic and Judaic studies and political science. Arraf spent a year at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and studied Hebrew on a kibbutz.
HANAN MIKHAIL-ASHRAWI, PhD, is the founder of MIFTAH, the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy, and an elected member of the Palestinian Legislative Council. She spent two years as the Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research. In 1994, she founded the Palestinian Independent Commission for Citizen's Rights (PICCR) and served as its first Commissioner. In 1991, she was named Official Spokesperson of the Palestinian Delegation to the Middle East.
NABILA ASSAF was born in the United States but moved as a child with her family to Palestine in 1976. She grew up in the villages of Arrabeh, Jenin, and Ramallah. She went on to study industrial engineering in Jordan and the United States, and has worked in Palestine, Jordan, and the US. Her work has appeared in Al Jadid magazine, Mizna literary journal, and Media Monitors Network. She currently resides in Alexandria, Virginia.
IDA AUDEH is a Palestinian who lives in Boulder, Colorado, and works as a technical writer for a software company. Prior to moving to Boulder, she lived in Alexandria, Virginia, where she worked as a production editor and supervisor for academic publishers. She is the compiler, translator, and editor of interviews conducted in Jenin refugee camp, Bethlehem, and Nablus, published in the Journal of Palestine Studies, Summer 2002 issue.
MUSTAFA BARGHOUTHI, M.D., is a physician, Palestinian civil society leader, and the president of the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees (UPMRC). He is the founder and director of the Health, Development, Information and Policy Institute (HDIP), a policy think-tank, and leader in the field of health research based in Ramallah. Dr. Barghouthi received his medical training in the former Soviet Union, after which he received his MSc in Business Administration and Management from Stanford University.
LINDA BEVIS is a high school Social Studies teacher and a lawyer who worked for two years with a Palestinian human rights organization, al-Haq, in Ramallah during the first Intifada. She lived in the People's Republic of China for two years, grew up in Lebanon and Canada and holds Master's degrees in both International Studies and Education. Bevis is a member of the Palestine Information Project, the Palestine Solidarity Committee, and ISM Seattle.
NOAM CHOMSKY, Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is a world-renowned linguist, philosopher, and political analyst. He writes extensively and lectures around the world on international affairs, US foreign policy, and human rights. He has published 14 books with South End Press, including Fateful Triangle, Propaganda and the Public Mind, and Rogue States.
RACHEL CORRIE (1979–2003) grew up in Olympia, Washington where she worked at a mental health clinic and was active in her labor union and with Olympia Movement for Peace and Justice. She was a student at Evergreen State College before she joined an International Solidarity Movement delegation in Palestine.
ARJAN EL FASSED is a human rights lobbyist at NOVIB (Oxfam Netherlands) in The Hague. He previously worked at LAW, a Palestinian human rights organization. One of the founders of the Electronic Intifada, his articles have been published in the Washington Post, Newsday, Toronto Star, Jordan Times, Ahram Weekly, the Independent, European Voice, Daily Star, Herald Sun, several major Dutch newspapers, the journal Peace Review, and other publications.
HANAN ELMASU is a Palestinian-Canadian human rights consultant and the international advocacy officer at Addameer Human Rights and Prisoner's Support Association, based in Ramallah.
JORDAN FLAHERTY is a union organizer and a direct action activist. He has written for the Village Voice, New York Press, Labor Notes, and Left Turn magazine. He helped start Direct Action for Justice in Palestine, a New York City coalition that works to send activists to Palestine. Flaherty dedicates his chapter in this book to his friends in the Azza refugee camp, Bethlehem.
KAREN GLASGOW (translator) lives in Paris, France, and is a translator of French and Arabic, with the Elias Junior English-Arabic Dictionary and Ibrahim Aslan's Night Shift to her credit.
NETA GOLAN is a Jewish Israeli peace activist who left her native Tel Aviv to live in Ramallah. In the past couple of years of Israeli-Palestinian violence, she has often acted as a human buffer separating Israeli troops and Palestinian civilians during tense moments. In April 2002, she was voluntarily holed up in Yasser Arafat's West Bank compound during the month-long siege.
ISLAH JAD is a lecturer of politics and development in the Women's Studies Institute and the Cultural Studies Department at Birzeit University. She is cofounder of the women's coalition Women's Affairs Committee.
KATHY KELLY has been nominated three times for the Nobel Peace Prize, and has received numerous humanitarian awards. She helped initiate, and presently helps coordinate, Voices in the Wilderness, a campaign to end the UN/US sanctions against Iraq. She has helped organize and participated in nonviolent direct action teams in Haiti, Bosnia, and, most recently, Iraq. In April 2002, she traveled to the West Bank, where she was among the first internationals to enter the post-invaded Jenin refugee camp. She is a contributing author to Iraq Under Siege: The Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War.
PAUL LARUDEE, PhD, first visited Palestine in 1965 and has spent a total of 14 years in the Middle East as an educator and US government advisor. He was one of seven ISM participants wounded by Israeli fire in Beit Jala on April 1, 2002, and also participated in the August 2002 ISM campaign in Nablus.
ROB LIPTON, PhD, is a longtime member of A Jewish Voice for Peace and participated twice in International Solidarity Movement activities in the West Bank during 2002. During the early 1990s he was the Los Angeles director of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a liberal media watch group. Currently he works as a poet and public health researcher in Berkeley, California.
EDWARD MAST is a playwright whose work and solo performances have been performed in several cities in the United States as well as Europe and the Middle East. His play Sahmatah, cowritten with Hanna Eady and concerning one of the Palestinian villages destroyed in 1948, has been touring Israel/Palestine and Europe since its premiere in 1998. Mast has published several articles and poems, and is co-author of The History of Eastern Europe for Beginners, published by Writers and Readers Inc., in New York. He is a cofounder of the Palestine Information Project in Seattle and works with the Palestine Solidarity Committee.
JOHN PETROVATO is a bookseller from western Massachusetts, a board member and recent general director of the Institute for Anarchist Studies, a non-profit which gives funding to radical writers, and coorganizer of the Renewing the Anarchist Tradition conference.
RENAD QUBBAJ is the coordinator of Grassroots International Protection for the Palestinian People, a member project of the Palestinian Network of NGOs (www.pngonet@p-ol.com). She is based in Ramallah.
MAIA RAMNATH is a global justice and anti-war activist, as well as a dancer, writer, and graduate student in colonial history. She has contributed articles to NYC Indymedia, Clamor, and the Movement Research Journal. She was in the West Bank with ISM in April 2002.
FAWZIA REDA, a translator and map designer, studied at Cairo University, the University of Minnesota, and the American University in Cairo, where she later taught. She established and headed creative departments for several prominent publishers, including Dar Al-Fata Al-Arabi, Beirut and Cairo. She has also freelanced as a writer, graphic designer and creative strategist with the International Committee of the Red Cross and UNICEF. Reda is the founder and creative director of Cultural Connexion, a nonprofit NGO based in the US with liaisons in Nablus and Ramallah, and cofounder of the international women's coalition, The Families Project.
GEORGE N. RISHMAWI is a coordinator for the Palestinian Centre for Rapprochement between Peoples, based in Beit Sahour.
THOM SAFFOLD is a member of the International Solidarity Movement's Michigan office.
EDWARD W. SAID (1935–2003) is the author of more than 20 books, including Culture and Resistance; Orientalism; Culture and Imperialism; Out of Place; The End of the Peace Process; Power; and Politics and Culture.
ABDUL JAWAD SALEH is currently a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council (Independent). During his 22 years in exile in Jordan he authored several books on the legal implications of Israeli administrative orders in the Occupied Territories. Since the Israelis allowed his return to the West Bank, he has received overwhelming Palestinian electoral support and was appointed the Palestinian Authority's Minister of Agriculture in 1996.
MARK SCHNEIDER is an organizer experienced with the struggles of the environment, poor people of color discriminated against by banks, homeless people asserting their rights, anti-war movements, and the two solidarity movements with the Palestinian and Iraqi people. As a member of the Colorado Campaign for Middle East Peace he joined the Winter 2001 ISM campaign in Palestine, and spent two weeks in Iraq in 2000.
KRISTEN SCHURR spent two months living and working with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza during the Israeli invasion of spring 2002. She was deported after serving a week in an Israeli prison for delivering food to the Palestinians trapped inside Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity. She is a freelance journalist for Free Speech Radio News and a contributor to Democracy Now, WBAI in New York City, and KPFA in Berkeley. Her writing has appeared in Left Turn, ZNet's Mid-East Watch, CounterPunch, Ms. Magazine, Cairo's Al- Ahram, and NYC's Indymedia.
MICHAEL SHAIK is an Australian activist who worked with the International Solidarity Movement in Beit Sahour in Spring 2003.
GHADEER SHAKA'A is a lecturer of Immunology at the Department of Medical Technology at al-Quds University in Abu Dis. She obtained her education at Najah National University and the University of Birmingham. Originally from Nablus, Shaka'a now resides in Ramallah.
ADAM SHAPIRO is an organizer and activist with the International Solidarity Movement. He holds Master's degrees in Political Science from NYU, and in Arab Studies from Georgetown. He is a PhD candidate in International Relations at the American University. Before becoming active with the ISM, Shapiro spent four years working with Seeds of Peace, a nonprofit, US-based organization working with youth in regions of conflict.
STARHAWK, a committed global justice activist and organizer, is the author or co-author of nine books, including The Spiral Dance, The Fifth Sacred Thing, and Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising. She is a veteran of progressive movements, from anti-war to anti-nukes, is a highly influential voice in the revival of earth-based spirituality and Goddess religion, and has brought many innovative techniques of spirituality and magic to her political work. Her website is www.starhawk.org.
NANCY STOHLMAN is a Denver writer and the organizer for the Colorado Campaign for Middle East Peace. She was in the West Bank with the International Solidarity Movement during the Spring 2002 incursion, and her journals from Palestine were circulated internationally. She has been published in Common Dreams, Counterpunch, The Palestine Chronicle, Snowline Poetry Journal, and The Bloomsbury Review. She also wrote the novel The Lotus Eaters.
LINDA WOLF is a social activist, distinguished writer and photographer. She is co-author of Global Uprising: Confronting the Tyrannies of the 21st Century and Daughters of the Moon, Sisters of the Sun. Wolf resides in Bainbridge Island, Washington.
BRIAN WOOD is a member of the Colorado Campaign for Middle East Peace. He has lived in the West Bank for a year and a half, acting as a witness to the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine and as an active nonviolent resister in solidarity with the Palestinians. Immediately after the Spring 2002 incursion, Wood entered the Jenin refugee camp to assist with humanitarian relief efforts, and was part of a group that conducted 40 hour-long interviews with inhabitants of the camp.
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