The Fletcher School

Reprinted from The Boston Globe
By Joseph P. Kahn,
Globe Staff, 4/29/2004

Should hope exist for a lasting peace between the Israelis and Palestinians, an unlikely prospect if recent headlines are any indication, then it may well rest on the slim shoulders of Amal Jadou and others of her generation.

The 30-year-old Jadou, a graduate student at Tufts University's Fletcher School, is neither a diplomat nor a politician -- at least not yet. Nor does she aspire to be a media star, although her face and voice are familiar to both sides of the Middle East conflict. As the first woman to report and anchor the news for a Palestinian television network, back in the 1990s, Jadou interviewed dozens of peacekeepers and pols in a region that has known little peace during her young lifetime. "I loved every aspect of it, but it wasn't who I am," Jadou says. "From age 20, I knew what I wanted to do, which is serve my country and change the status quo."

Her mother, a high-school mathematics teacher, "challenged me to use this life to make a difference," adds Jadou, who will be in Cyprus this June serving as an academic adviser to a student symposium run by the Washington-based International Institute for Mediation and Conflict Resolution.

Politically, Jadou has already demonstrated her resolve to make a difference, having been elected to seats on local and regional committees in Bethlehem while still in college. Ultimately her sights are set on the 88-member Palestinian Legislative Council, where she hopes to become a strong voice for women's issues and prisoners' rights. The PLC was born during the 1996 Oslo peace summit and now functions as the central law-making institution in the occupied territories.

"Even though I still hold older, more traditional values," she says with a smile during a recent interview at Tufts, "I would be very progressive on that body."

The past few weeks have been particularly difficult, she concedes, as the cycle of violence has escalated. Meanwhile, the Bush administration has publicly endorsed the permanence of Israeli settlements on the West Bank. News of the George Bush-Ariel Sharon agreement, which surprised and angered many in the Arab community, including US allies in the region, left her "stressed," Jadou says.

"Both sides are exhausted and in pain," she says in another of several conversations held over the course of this semester. "They cannot go on like this. The Israelis cannot go on with the occupation. And our lives cannot continue like this, either."

The day after Hamas leader Ahmed Yassin was killed by Israeli rocket fire last month, Jadou says, her mother and others were detained at school for several hours. Jadou was worried about both her parents' safety, yet she steadfastly refused to assign all blame to one side.

"I get so angry at the bombings," she says of the attacks on Israeli citizens and other innocent bystanders. "It's so counterproductive. It only makes us look worse in the eyes of the world." Young suicide bombers, she adds eloquently, "exploded on the inside long before they exploded their bodies."

What Jadou is right now is a scholar, one of only three singled out for a special prize this year by the Tokyo-based Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund, an organization that supports young scholars with a potential to "shape tomorrow's world," as the SYLFF website puts it. Jadou is on track to earn her doctorate next year while taking courses at Harvard Law School's Program on Negotiation.

Her dissertation topic is the role of the United States in Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, and her thesis adviser, Eileen Babbitt, says Jadou, who grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp near Bethlehem and whose first name means "hope" in Arabic, brings a perspective to the topic rarely found in the sheltered world of academe.

"Most people raised in the conflict are not able to look at it from a broader viewpoint," says Babbitt, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations who has worked extensively with both Israelis and Palestinians on Middle East peace issues. "It's really remarkable, and very encouraging, to see her motivation to understand it in more creative ways."

Jadou makes frequent trips back home and plans to spend July and August there, writing her thesis and educating young Palestinians about the ongoing conflict. While finishing her studies in the Boston area, she does as much public speaking as she can squeeze in. Over the past two years, she has appeared before numerous high school, college, and church audiences around New England. Being a Muslim and a highly educated woman has allowed Jadou to put a face on, and a voice to, a cause usually only filtered through news dispatches and op-ed columns, particularly in Western nations.

When she speaks of the pain of occupation, of the terror of being threatened by armed guards for curfew violations or the smell of tank fumes outside her bedroom window late at night, Jadou bears witness to a struggle defined by suicide bombings and retaliatory bombardments. As a teenager, she took part in street demonstrations and threw stones at Israeli soldiers. One uncle, a medical student, was killed while working in a refugee camp in Lebanon in 1982. Two years ago, one of her closest friends died in an artillery attack on her camp. That same summer, Jadou herself was confronted at gunpoint when she snuck out to her grandparents' house after curfew.

"If I were a man," says Jadou, "I would have been shot. No question."

As a young adult, she has turned from rock throwing to research and from confrontation to education. In doing so she has found allies in people such as Israeli lawyer (and Harvard Law grad) Allegra Pacheco, who represents Palestinian political prisoners in Israel, and young people from around the world who are reaching out across boundaries of culture, ideology, religion, and gender.

"I have learned from such experiences," says Jadou, "that I should be reaching out to and working hand in hand with such Israelis to create better lives for future generations."

Sister Miriam Ward, who teaches at St. Michael's College in Vermont, invited Jadou to campus last fall to speak about liberation theology from a Muslim perspective. Ward has been leading biblical-studies groups to the Middle East for 30 years and met Jadou shortly after she came to the Fletcher School in September 2001.

Vermont audiences "saw the human face of occupation and how Amal, as a young woman, is trying to get beyond that," says Ward, who visited Jadou and her family last summer. Rather than voicing a stridently anti-Israeli line, notes Ward, "she's trying to convey the message that the occupation has got to end, for the sake of both the Palestinians and Israelis. That's the bottom line."

Many Palestinians in their 20s and 30s "have never met an Israeli who wasn't carrying a gun," notes Ward, so for young people like Jadou to preach a message of hope and peace, not hostility and bitterness, is significant. "Her record speaks for itself," says Ward.

The oldest of five children born in a family that has long prized education as a force for social and political change, Jadou grew up in the Aida Refugee Camp, one of 19 such camps located on the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The camp has 3,500 residents and has been in existence since 1948. Her father, now retired, worked for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. All four of her siblings are college graduates. All have entered medicine, engineering, or journalism. Her parents still live in the three-room house where Jadou was raised.

"My relationship with the camp is intriguing and one I am still struggling with," Jadou wrote in an essay submitted for the SYLFF prize. "I love the camp so dearly because it is part of Palestine and because of the warmth of its people." Yet, she continues, "I detest the camp because it is the symbol of my, and my people's, oppression."

Her first visit to America came in 1998, when Jadou was researching her master's thesis exploring similarities between Native American tribes and the Palestinians. Living on the Lakota and Cherokee reservations was a "shocking experience," Jadou recalls, the first time in her life she experienced another people's suffering first-hand.

"It was not what I knew of the United States from watching Western movies on television," she says. "I belong to a monotheistic religion -- Islam -- and their spirituality was a real eye-opener for me."

As 2001 dawned, another breakdown in the Middle East peace process triggered Jadou's decision to apply to the PhD program at Fletcher. She made the decision, she would later write, while she was huddled under a staircase listening to the roar of artillery explosions and a newscast quoting a US official saying, "We have tried all means possible to resolve the Middle East conflict, but we failed." It was then and there, she says, that she decided to study the full scope of that failure.

She arrived on campus just days before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. It was a difficult time to be a Muslim in America, she acknowledges. A group of students watching the horror on TV asked Jadou if Sept. 11 were a "Palestinian anniversary" of some sort, implying there might be a connection. Jadou hid in her room, not knowing what to do. Eventually she joined in a campus-wide discussion that helped defuse tensions and demolish stereotypes.

"There was a burden here," she says, touching her shoulders "that not everyone felt. But in the end, this community was very supportive."

Babbitt helped organize another campus-wide meeting following an angry exchange between Jewish and Arab students that threatened to escalate into violence. Jadou, she says, made "a particularly poignant statement" during the meeting.

Last spring in Texas, Jadou attended a conference on globalization and leadership with other young scholars. She gave a presentation on leadership and action, with an emphasis on women's issues. In September, she'll travel to Tokyo to pick up her $5,000 prize from the SYLFF. There she plans to meet with Palestinian representatives along with members of several human-rights organizations. With an offer to teach international diplomacy at Birzeit University's Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Institute of International Studies in Ramallah in the West Bank as soon has she finishes her doctorate, Jadou is assured of a foothold in the academic world. It's unlikely that will be the only arena in which she'll make her mark.

Babbitt, for one, thinks there is "no question" Jadou is destined to become a leader of her community.

"People from both sides, Jews and Arab, seek her out," notes Babbitt. "She has strong feelings and clear loyalties, but she's a bridge builder, too. And it's hard for people of Amal's generation to be taking that view these days."

Joseph P. Kahn can be reached at jkahn@globe.com.