Hug Wendy Pearlman

By Reima Malik and Jawad Ali

Wendy Pearlman is our new candidate for the Hug-a-Jew award. Wendy is a beautiful young Jewish American woman from the Midwest who has taken time from her busy life as a PhD student at Harvard to write a very important book about the Middle East. Her book is called Occupied Voices, and it allows ordinary Palestinians under Israeli occupation to tell their own stories.

We met up with Wendy at the Modern Times Bookstore in San Francisco, where she was reading from the book and signing autographs like the rock star that she is. We at MWU! often joke that Hug-a-Jew is performing art as much as it is a magazine article. Wendy’s readings and monologues at the book tour are pure art. She makes a compelling case that hearing the stories of ordinary Palestinians is one of the key steps in understanding and solving the Middle East conflict. Then she proceeds to tell a few spellbinding stores of hope, desperation and pain. We highly recommend the book. We also urge you to look out for Wendy Pearlman speaking at a bookstore near you.

MWU!: How is the book tour coming along?

Wendy: It’s been a very interesting and rewarding experience. It is really an amazing opportunity to meet people and to talk about issues I care about. What has been most gratifying is to find people who feel like the book resonates with their own lives. For example, I usually read from one of the interviews in which a Palestinian woman recalls the good relations her family had with their Jewish neighbors before 1948. When I read that excerpt at a signing in Los Angeles, a Palestinian man in the audience raised his hand and said that he had a similar story: he was born in Jerusalem before 1948 and had been delivered by a Jewish doctor. Sitting a few feet away from him at the bookstore was another Palestinian man who said that he too had been delivered by a Jewish doctor. There are so many stories, I wish I could record them all.

MWU!: Are you reaching a new audience, one that is unfamiliar with the Middle East?

Wendy: That is definitely one of my goals. Today at Modern Times it was a bit of preaching to the choir. But that is not always the case. At each signing I speak for about a half hour and then open the floor to questions. It can get pretty heated. Once a group of pro-Israel supporters launched a protest to convince Borders to cancel my reading. They said that I was a terrorist-sympathizer and that the talk would be an “affront to the Jewish community.” Borders told them that they have a policy of not censoring writers on the basis of political content, and invited the protestors to attend the talk and express their views. They did, and we had an intense hour and a half of questions and comments – and criticisms!

MWU!: And what were their objections? Does the hostility make you nervous?

Wendy: It did at first, but now I’m getting used to it. I try not to focus on the hostility of the individual person, but rather on misperceptions that I might be able to address. There are some comments that I hear over and over. Often people say, “But Israel wanted peace and it was the Arabs who declared war in 1948.” I try to contest that inaccurate view of history, explaining how the partition agreement looked to Palestinians, and talking about how the fighting began much before Israel declared statehood. Or people say, “Let the Palestinians go to Jordan or some other Arab country.” And I’ll say that this is the crux of the problem: the failure to recognize that Palestinians have an attachment to their homeland that is real and legitimate. And so many people ask questions about Palestinian textbooks teaching hate. I try to say that Palestinian children today have experienced Israel bombing their towns. They sit at checkpoints, they have been prevented from going to school. They all know someone who has been killed or injured. These kids don’t need textbooks to teach them to be angry at Israel. Israeli policies themselves take care of that!

MWU!: Would you like to do a sequel on lives of ordinary people in Israel?

Wendy: Yes, I really would. There needs to be more space for both Israelis and Palestinians to see each other as human beings -- as people with whom they can relate.

MWU!: What is next for you?

Wendy: Now I go back to school and begin writing a dissertation prospectus.

MWU!: But your book has all the elements of excellent political science. Why not
develop it into a dissertation?

Wendy: No, it would never fly. This is a book of human stories. My aim was to give Americans some window into the human dimension of the Palestinian experience, to help them empathize with what Palestinians have suffered and the need for a just solution that will at last give them their freedom and right to self-determination. But this is a bit removed from what I do at school. Political science as a discipline puts more emphasis on statistics and game theory than on the experiences of ordinary people. My dissertation will have to be something that uses more theory and scientific methodology.

MWU!: Will the book be coming out in Israel?

Wendy: That would be a dream-come-true for me. We’re doing all we can to get it in bookstores there. But we don’t have an overseas distributor, so as of yet the book is only barely available outside the U.S. I would love to see the book come out in Hebrew. Few Israelis ever go into Palestinian towns and refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza. They don’t know what life is really like there. The book tries to capture something of that for people who haven’t had the chance to see it with their own lives.

MWU!: Do you plan to go back?

Wendy: Absolutely. I just hope I don’t have problems getting back in!

MWU!: How did you get started with Palestine?

Wendy: I saw you come in late to the talk. You missed the first part of the presentation didn’t you? I spent a college semester abroad in Morocco, where I started studying Arabic. I kept on with Arabic and Middle East studies, and I wanted to see more of the Middle East. In January, 2000 I took advantage of the chance to go on one of those free a trips to Israel. After I finished the 10-day tour of Israel, I went to the West Bank to study at Birzeit University. What I saw in the Occupied Territories made a huge impact on me. Since then, not a day has gone by in which I haven’t in some way thought or read or written or talked about Palestine. All the internationals I know who’ve spent time in Palestine feel the same way. Being there has changed us. So I feel an obligation, a moral obligation, to do what I can to contribute to ending the occupation. I don’t know if what I do makes any sort of difference, but I couldn’t sleep at night if I didn’t feel like I was trying.

MWU!: Is there something particular about your Jewish heritage that makes you
want to stand up to injustice?

Wendy: To be honest with you, I have to say I’m a little uncomfortable with this Hug-a-Jew business! Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice to be hugged. But I see myself as a human being doing what she feels is the right thing to do. For me, trying to stand up for Palestinians’ rights is a matter of human decency and human dignity. Being Jewish is important to me, but I don’t think I care about Palestine because I’m Jewish. I care about it because, as a human being, I have to speak up when other human beings are oppressed.