Jerusalem Women Speak 12: Speaker Biographies
26 July 2006
Jerusalem Women Speak 12: Speaker Biographies
Partners for Peace is pleased to announce that the speakers on the Twelfth national Jerusalem Women Speak: Three Women, Three Faiths, One Shared Vision tour will be Ghada Ageel, Shireen Khamis and Rela Mazali. We hope you will join us in welcoming these three exceptional women to our communities.
Detailed biographies for Ms. Ageel, Ms. Khamis and Ms. Mazali are featured below. For more information, including a schedule of the Jerusalem Women Speak tour see here.
Jerusalem Women Speak:
Twelfth National Tour, October 2006
Speaker Biographies:
Ghada Ageel:
A Muslim Palestinian, Ms. Ageel’s work is shaped by her identity as a Palestinian refugee. In 1948 Ms. Ageel’s family was expelled from their homes and lands in the village of Beit Daras in what was then known as mandatory Palestine and is now part of Israel. Ms. Ageel’s family had lived in Beit Daras for more than ten generations and has never received any compensation for their homes or the 75 acres of lands that they owned. She was born and raised in the Khan Younis Refugee Camp in the southern Gaza Strip.
Ms. Ageel currently lives with her family in Gaza and works as an academic counselor for the Academy for Educational Development (a US AID organization) while pursuing her Doctorate in Middle East Politics from the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom. Her work has given her wide experience in different areas of the workforce.
While born into a Muslim family, Ms. Ageel was raised in a secular household. She graduated High School in 1988, during the first Intifada (Palestinian uprising) but did not have the chance to pursue her studies further for Israel had forced all the Palestinian universities to shut down during the uprising.
At the outset of the Oslo Peace Accords in 1993, Ms. Ageel went to study Hebrew in Israel, an experience that exposed her to the vast inequalities between Israeli living standards and those she had grown up with in the Refugee Camp. She also taught Arabic courses at the Palestinian Abraham Center for Language and Dialogue in Gaza. The Abraham Center promotes education for dialogue and Ms. Ageel’s pupils included both international and Israeli students. Ms. Ageel also participated in forums held in Israel to raise public awareness concerning the life of Palestinians living in the occupied territories and worked as a translator and fixer for journalists from around the world.
In 1994 Ms. Ageel enrolled at the Islamic University in Gaza where she earned her BA in Education while raising her daughter, Ghaida. In 1999, she received a scholarship from the University of Exeter to pursue a Masters Degree in Politics. Her second child, Tarek was born that year.
In 2000, Ms. Ageel returned from the UK and resumed her previous work as a media translator and fixer. She also began to write weekly web diaries about her life under Israeli occupation.
Ms. Ageel’s focus turned to the events of 1948 and the Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe) where more than 750,000 Palestinians were forced from their homes and lands in what is now Israel. Fearing that the story of Palestinian dispossession would be lost along with the generation that experienced the Nakba she started an oral history project with an Australian colleague.
The project asked Palestinian refugees to remember the events that drove their families to refugee camps, and collected the life histories of seven Palestinian women from Gaza who lived through 1948 and the period before. This project resulted in a book (not yet published) covering these women’s narratives of everyday life and experience through successive wars and dislocations.
Ms. Ageel lives on the front lines of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Many friends and family members have been arrested by Israel or injured in Israeli attacks. In 2003, her cousin was paralyzed when he was hit by shrapnel from a missile fired by an Israeli Apache helicopter in Gaza. Despite such painful events, Ms. Ageel clearly expresses a hope that Palestinians will experience a brighter future: “My hope is to have a just peace, to be able to offer my children safety and a hopeful future. I hope for freedom for the future of my community and my people and I hope for a commitment from the international community to make these hopes a reality. We have suffered long enough. It is time for injustice to stop and the occupation to end.”
Shireen Khamis:
A Christian Palestinian, Ms. Khamis has seen the course of her life shaped by occupation and two Palestinian Intifada’s. Ms. Khamis was born in Beit Jala, adjacent to Bethlehem. She grew up during the first Intifada and is now living as a Palestinian youth during the second uprising. During this time she has witnessed the siege and shelling of her city and its ancient neighborhoods.
Ms. Khamis’ family has lived in Beit Jala for centuries. The Khamis family has suffered recently as Israel confiscated many of their lands in order to build illegal settlements or for undefined “security reasons”. In 2003, Ms. Khamis watched as Israeli bulldozers uprooted her family’s olive groves in order to build the Separation Wall on their land. The 25 foot high wall now surrounds Beit Jala along with Bethlehem and the adjacent villages and lands, cutting Palestinians off from Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank.
Many members of Ms. Khamis’ extended family lost their jobs in Israel as a result of Israeli policies in the Bethlehem region. The majority of Ms. Khamis’ relatives are now living in Jordan or Latin America. In this way, her family history parallels that of many Christian Palestinians who have been forced to leave their homes in search of better opportunities for their families.
Ms. Khamis graduated in 2005 from Bethlehem University with a BA in Business Administration and a minor in Marketing. She is now a Project Coordinator with TAM- Women Media and Development, an organization seeking to empower Palestinian women through media training and education.
TAM is based in Bethlehem but focuses its efforts on women in villages and parts of the West Bank that are often neglected. Ms. Khamis’ work also focuses on developing and improving the Palestinian media by holding workshops and training sessions for the staff of local television stations.
Ms. Khamis’ efforts are not restricted to her professional work. She is also active with a number of local organizations working on promoting democracy, non-violence, human rights, gender equality and conflict resolution. She has also participated in a number of workshops on these topics. Her work has taken her around Palestine and as far abroad as Europe.
Ms. Khamis currently lives with her family and 4 brothers and sisters in her parents’ home in Beit Jala. She is often frustrated by the complete control Israeli soldiers hold over Palestinian citizens. At any moment the Israeli soldiers can enter Beit Jala and impose curfew, imprisoning the population in their homes. Many Palestinian civilians have been killed and injured in these incursions. Israeli soldiers have often targeted the area around Ms. Khamis’ home and many neighbors have been injured, including a six year old boy who lost his hand in an Israeli bomb attack.
Ms. Khamis explains that these Israeli invasions destroy every attempt for the people of the area to revive their economic and social life. The tourist industry, which residents of the Bethlehem area have long depended on for income, has also suffered greatly.
In the face of this desperate situation Ms. Khamis focuses on the experience of her own generation and the youth of Palestine: “The young generation is the one who suffers most. They are growing up without hope in the future and are denied all the activities of knowledge, experience and entertainment. Despite the daily attacks and crimes by the Israeli military, however, I believe that my people will reach out for our freedom someday. I believe that we can live peacefully and equally like any other nation in the world.”
Rela Mazali:
A Jewish Israeli, Ms. Mazali’s political work sets out to address the community in which she lives. She was born in 1948, the year the state of Israel was founded, on Kibbutz Ma’ayan Baruch in the Galilee, at the intersection of the Lebanese, Syrian and Israeli borders. In 1952, due to her father’s psychology studies, the family left for the US where Ms. Mazali spent some of her formative years.
After graduating High School in Israel in 1966 she was conscripted and served in the Israeli military during the 1967 war, doing intelligence work in the Galilee. She later obtained both her Bachelors and Masters degrees in English Literature and Literary Science from Tel Aviv University. Ms. Mazali is now a mother of three and lives with her partner in Herzlia, on Israel’s Mediterranean coast.
A writer and translator by profession, Ms. Mazali is a major figure in the peace and feminist movement in Israel. She is one of the founders of New Profile, a grassroots organization started in 1998 which focuses on challenging militarism in Israeli society and raising consciousness to the militarization embedded in Israeli culture while providing support for Israeli youth who resist military service.
Ms. Mazali has also worked for the Association of Israeli Palestinian Physicians for Human Rights and held consultant positions with the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Ford Foundation. She was one of eight Israeli women nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 by the One-thousand Peacewomen project and served on the Jury of Conscience at the 2005 Istanbul session of the World Tribunal on Iraq along with author Arundhati Roy, American playwright Eve Ensler, and others.
Ms. Mazali is an accomplished writer of prose in both Hebrew and English. Her most recent book is Maps of Women’s Goings & Stayings (Stanford University Press, 2001). She has published numerous short stories, academic articles, polemic and essays, as well as two children’s books (one co-authored with her daughter) and educational curricula on topics including gender equality, children’s rights and peace education.
In the early nineties, Ms. Mazali initiated and assisted direction of the documentary “Testimonies” (1993), co-produced with British Channel 4, about the experiences of Israeli soldiers in suppressing the first Intifada. In 2001, she created the widely used slogan: “We Refuse to Be Enemies,” which the Coalition of Women for a Just Peace in Israel included in their public campaigns. Later that year, she was a keynote speaker at the Jewish Unity for a Just Peace Conference (JUNITY) held in Chicago, which encouraged Jewish-Americans to speak against the occupation.
Ms. Mazali finds inspiration in the growing movement of young Israelis who are refusing military service: “In Israel today, many thousands of eighteen year olds . . . are resisting conscription into a military which they do not see as simply or mainly a defense force, by governments which they do not believe are prioritizing the needs, rights and human security of their citizens. As successive Israeli governments continue to opt for conflict rather than negotiating a fair and viable peace through the true redistribution of land, water and other resources, rising numbers of young Israelis are telling them, ‘No, I won’t go.’ This, for me, is a central source of hope.”
