Jerusalem Women Speak 2002 Bios
16 October 2002
Jerusalem Women Speak 2002 Bios
JEAN ZARU
Christian – Quaker
Palestinian
Jean Zaru, 62, is from Ramallah, Palestine. A Quaker by birth, she taught ethics and Christianity at the Friends Boys School in Ramallah. She also taught at the Friends Girls School, where her husband was the principal. Currently, she is the Presiding Clerk of the Ramallah Friends Meeting in Palestine.
During the 1948 war, relatives and friends of her family from the towns of Ramle and Lydda became refugees. About 100 people lived as refugees on the land of Jean’s family in Ramallah. One family shared their three-room apartment for over six months.
Her parents’ house is very close to a still-existing refugee camp. Four generations were born in these camps without running water, with poor sanitation, over-crowding, and no political solution to their situation.
During the 1948 war, Jean was eight years old. During the 1967 war, Jean’s oldest son was eight years old. She raised three children and seven grandchildren under military occupation. There is a symmetry of experience that runs from generation to generation.
In 1967 her husband was almost killed when the Israeli military bombed Ramallah. Her brother, a graduate of Haverford College and Harvard University, was not allowed to return home, she says, despite the fact that any Jewish returnee from any part of the world can enter under the Law of Return and live on confiscated Palestinian land.
Her brother joined the Palestinian struggle for liberation through education, communication, and research. He was among the disappeared in Lebanon in 1976. Even today she does not know what happened to him though she is convinced he is not alive.
Jean is one of the founding members of Sabeel, a Palestinian Liberation Theology Center in Jerusalem, and is currently one of the Vice-Chairs of its Board of Directors. She has been and continues to be the keynote speaker at numerous conferences around the world and her papers have been published in numerous books. She has spoken to non-governmental organizations and church groups in Holland, Denmark, England, Sweden, Norway, Australia, South Africa, the United States, Canada, Geneva, and Nairobi.
She was involved with the local and international Young Women’s Christian Association for many years and served as President of the Board of Directors of the East Jerusalem YWCA. She is committed to issues of justice for women.
From 1983-91 she was a member of the Working Group on Interfaith Dialogue of the World Council of Churches. She continues to serve as a member of the Council of the International World Conference for Religion and Peace.
Over the years, Jean has participated in many dialogue groups. She has engaged in dialogue with Jews through the World Council of Churches’ interfaith commissions and through the World Conference on Religion and Peace. Some of the dialogue was fruitful; some was painful. Other non-dialogue encounters — such as with occupation soldiers — were not on an equal basis and had no potential to transform the unjust situation of military occupation.
She is a peacemaker and committed to nonviolent struggle to end the occupation of her country.
ADI DAGAN
Jewish
Israeli
Adi Dagan, 31, currently lives in Herzeliya, Israel while working at the Bloomfield Science Museum in Jerusalem. She started learning Arabic because she has Palestinian colleagues and friends at the museum.
Her father was born in Romania and immigrated to Israel in 1962. A Zionist, he was arrested by the Communist government of Romania and held for nine months in prison on the charge of being an active Zionist. Her mother was born in 1936 in pre-state Israel and was a social worker before retiring.
A grandparent who came from Russia before the Second World War worked in building roads and later was among the founders of Davar newspaper in Tel Aviv. Her grandparents used to keep in their house new immigrants who arrived at night to the Tel Aviv harbor on ships from Europe, escaping the British patrols. They were the only surviving members of their family.
Over the past eight years she worked for several social justice and human rights organizations, including Adva, a center for research on social equality in Israel, and the Israeli Organization for Family Planning.
Adi served for two years in the Israeli military in the Education Force which is mainly responsible for bringing cultural activities (lectures, theater, entertainment, etc.) to the soldiers.
Adi has been active in the peace camp since she was a teenager. The tumult of the past two years in Jerusalem has led her to engage more deeply in both political and human rights activities.
Six months ago she joined Machsom Watch, an organization of women who go to different checkpoints around Jerusalem to document and influence the attitude of the army toward Palestinians. Adi writes, “It is very important for me not only to try and help the people in the checkpoints, but also to hear from them and to witness with my own eyes what is going on under the Israeli occupation. I want to live in a safe and secure Israel and that is why I am working for a just peace.”
MUNA SHIKAKI
Muslim
Palestinian
Muna Shikaki, 22, lives in Ramallah, Palestine. She is the Program Assistant at Defence for Children International/Palestine Section.
Muna was born in Kuwait. Her father is a refugee from Zarnooqa, a village that was destroyed in the 1948 war. He spent his early years living in a tent in Gaza before securing a scholarship that enabled him to study in Jerusalem, Birzeit, Lebanon, and Columbia University. Her mother and mother’s parents are Bosnian Muslims who moved to the Palestinian village of Caesarea when Ottoman rule in the Balkans was collapsing. They fled during the 1948 war and became refugees in the West Bank.
Muna spent her childhood moving back and forth between the United States and the West Bank as her father was not permitted by Israeli authorities to live permanently in the West Bank because of his refugee status.
As a high school student in Tulkarem and a college student at Birzeit University, her love of writing and journalism enabled her to explore controversial issues within Palestinian society, including concerns about the Palestinian Authority. She has focused much of her attention on women’s rights. Her long-term career goal is to found a women’s magazine in Palestine. Muna was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship and will begin an MA in Magazine Journalism in the United States next year.
She has spent the last two years going to University, organizing activities for a cultural center, and working as a program assistant for a child’s rights organization, all under the difficult conditions of closure, checkpoints, and curfews.
Her early experience in 1994 with Building Bridges for Peace, a program in Denver, Colorado that brings together young women from the United States, Israel, and Palestine to discuss political and social issues, and to view each other as individuals rather than political adversaries, had a deep and lasting impact.
Despite the last two years of fighting she continues to harbor hope for neighborly relations with Israel and reconciliation with the Israeli people — but with Palestinians as equals not subject to curfews and checkpoints.
