One Jewish Woman’s Fight for Palestine

 By: Yasmin Mogahed

For Jennifer Loewenstein, April 19, 2002 was a “waking nightmare”. She stood silent at the edge of the camp, in disbelief–and horror.

Listening to the sound of wailing, she watched as medical workers lay out the bodies of the dead. The corpses, wrapped in white, were loaded onto the back of a pick-up truck.

“I will never forget this time,” Loewenstein recalls. “I stayed in the camp for two days, picking through the ruins and debris of people’s former lives–watching children and families look for their belongings–anything they could salvage from the wreckage.”

Loewenstein was in Jenin.

She had spent much of the previous two years working as an editor and freelance journalist at the Mezan Center for Human Rights in Gaza. During that time she traveled frequently to the Rafah refugee camp to visit friends. It was in that way that she came to know Rafah so well and later started the Madison-Rafah Sister City Project in December of 2002.

But Loewenstein’s decision to take on the plight of the Palestinian people was not an easy one. She has since been shunned by her community and accused of being a “terrorist sympathizer” and “self-hating Jew”–a term she considers as ludicrous as calling her a “self-hating human” for opposing human rights abuse.

Despite this opposition, Loewenstein continues her struggle to expose an injustice she wasn’t always aware of herself.

“I never really knew much about the plight of the Palestinians until I was much older,” says Loewenstein. “I didn’t begin to question all the information I’d gotten on Israel and on Arabs until I got to college (at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem).”

Loewenstein grew up in a secular Jewish family, but was instilled early on with a concern for Israel. She still remembers the day when her favorite dress was sent to her cousin overseas. She was only six, but gave up the dress because her family in Israel needed it.

Although her parents were not “avid Zionists”, their loyalty to Israel was strong. But even stronger than their loyalty to either Israel or Judaism was her family’s loyalty to peace.

“One year at Christmas/Hanukah time we refused to celebrate either holiday,” remembers Loewenstein. “Instead we made a ‘Peace Tree’ and celebrated our hope for peace.”

Her mother’s concern for peace was complemented by her struggle for civil rights. Loewenstein never forgets the day that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated because it devastated her mother so much.

It was this early awareness of civil rights that Loewenstein carried into adulthood and would bring with her to Jerusalem. In 1981 she traveled to Israel for a semester-long study abroad program. During her stay she was exposed to a world she never knew existed.

One day during a tour of Gaza Strip instead of listening to the tour guide, Loewenstein sat at the back of the bus and looked out the window. She discovered “thousands of people living in tents and shacks.” Loewenstein was appalled.

“It was the first time I had ever seen this kind of poverty and the first time I understood the meaning of “occupation” in a concrete way,” says Loewenstein. “I saw a woman with about three children carrying a jug of water on her head and a soldier watching her and the others around her with his gun slung over his shoulder.”

It was at that moment that she first realized “something was terribly wrong.” But nothing she saw that day would prepare her for what she experienced in April of 2002.

Loewenstein was among the first internationals—and only a handful of Americans–to enter the destroyed Jenin refugee camp the day after the Israeli incursion.

“When I got into the camp area I could not believe my eyes. It had been devastated. Thirteen thousand people had lost their homes,” describes Loewenstein. “The camp was destroyed beyond recognition – flattened into a heap of rubble and dust. The smell of death was everywhere.”

What was most traumatic for her was the discovery that many of the dead were unarmed civilians. “Not all the dead were fighters,” says Loewenstein. “Some were old men, women and children.”

The horrors that Loewenstein experienced in Jenin made her struggle all the more urgent–a struggle she fights, not as a Jewish woman, but as a human being.

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Zainab Al-Ghazali's Memoir in Nasir's Prison

When I attended a talk by Wael Ghoneim at the London School of Economics in January I was quite surprised when he briefly referred himself to the crowd as not a fan of the late President Jamal Abd al-Nasir. I asked my father why... and I learnt he had imprisoned quite a considerable number of Ikhwan Al-Muslimun (Muslim Brotherhood) members. So the dude made some mistakes.. I had not been aware of how grievous these mistakes were until I read Zainab Al-Ghazali Al-Jubaili's memoir of her time in Prison under Nasir's reign.

Al-Ghazali was an active president of the Muslim Ladies' Group in the early sixties. And had given her life to the cause of Islam at the tender age of 18. She swore allegiance to the founder and leader of the Muslim Brother hood, Hassan Al-Banna, only shortly before he was assassinated by Nasir's secret police. Under Nasir's rule the brotherhood was supposedly disbanded but Al-Ghazali and two other men helped in restoring it. Ironically, nasir was one a member of the brotherhood too. I doubt he started off bad, but he probably ended up evil... which seems to be the trend among Egyptian presidents. 

Al-Ghazali describes in her book, her distaste of the Egyptian society's lacking moral conduct (having been influenced by the British) and it's rulers who seemed content at it's lack of Islamic practise. She and a few others then created a plan to educate the youth in the matters of Islam in order to endorse a practising society and eventually establish an Islamic state. 

In the 60's Nasir had experienced a failed assassination by the Ikhwan al-Muslimun, this resulted in thousands upon thousands of members being imprisoned under the emergency law (which still presides in Egypt to this day thanks to Sadat and Mubarek), where men and women were snatched from their homes and thrown into military prison with no warrant, allegation or even suspicion. The accused were then tortured to provide names and information about the assassination and attempts at future assassinations... not knowing they had given the group further motive for assassination.

Al-Ghazali's tale was just one of many who remain unnamed and unacknowledged, but her tale took such a wide public notice when she was released from prison in 1971 because she was a woman, and no one had any idea a woman could have been treated so brutally by the state. She resided in military prison for approximately 2 years, where she was starved, whipped, beaten, crucified, set at by mice, snakes and starved dogs. She was made to sit in a room of filthy water and beaten if she moved or slept. She was suspended in the air, hanging upside and given 500 lashes (five times the amount of the Islamic punishment for fornication), then put back in the cell of water or thrown to dogs. She was dragged from prayer, given nothing to drink, humiliated and forbidden from the toilet for days on end. The cycle would repeat itself until she wrote down a false confession or gave names of relevance, which she simply didn't do, she just became so close to death that she had to be hospitalised several times. 

Naturally, one cannot easily understand her experience, perhaps only those who have experienced the same pain and torture can truly empathise with her. But her faith (Iman) in Allah was truly inspiring as she described how she would recite chapters of the Quran, or repeat the 99 names of Allah while being tortured to get her through it. Growing thicker skin in the process was probably inevitable and so some of her words I found too strong, she had undoubtedly developed a passion against the government and believed the Nair regime to be acting so wholly ungodly. I'll admit that I did not agree to every word she said, but what was undeniable was her strength of character, her gutsy bravery and her true adoration for her religion and the one God. She and the brotherhood suffered what no humans could possibly endure yet she bore it all with the strength of Allah and that in itself is evidence to His presence.

She was very delicate when writing about the attempted rapes against her, she described a few encounters, one where the soldier wished to do her no harm and was subsequently beaten and shot for acting against orders. The other encounter was where the soldier begged her to confess to something or say any names, she naturally refused as she had been doing all along, and when he approached her she bit down on his neck, the next thing she knew... a body was lying in front of her (her captors were obviously shocked, she says it was Allah who gave her strength to protect her self). The third attempt was where her torturer said he ordered a group of men to be intoxicated by alcohol and hashish before she was to be thrown at them, but in fact they had become so intoxicated that they had to be hospitalised. These events show she had been protected, but if she had been really raped, which seems inevitable for a woman in a military prison for two years, then I doubt she would have written about it, it probably being too disturbing for her to repeat.

Despite the pain she went through, the saddest thing about the book I found was the role of doctors, they would check on the inmates only to keep them alive for further torturing; bringing them back to conscious with smelling salts when they had passed out from too much torture.

I cannot portray how much this book affected me. In some ways I feel ashamed, in other ways I feel betrayed. But the most certain effect on me has been the reaffirmation of my faith, that despite living a cyclic routine in a busy modern city, Allah is always there, affecting everything I do. I hope Zainab Al-Ghazali's books and biography continue to inspire future generations to come.

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