WEDNESDAY,JUNE19,2002
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN -15
Professor meets Arafat, discusses peace in Mideast
By Todd Smith Kansan staff writer
When Deborah Gerner first met Yasser Arafat, she was impressed with the leader's charm.
Now she saw in his frail stature the toll the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had taken on his life.
Left: Palestinians at checkpoint Qalandia. Right: A guard checking peoples items at the checkpoint at Qalandia, Palestine
On May 18, Arafat met with Deborah Gerner, professor of political science and a specialist on conflict resolution, and a dozen other Arab, European and American scholars and journalists to discuss the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The conference, "The Second Transformation of Palestine," took place at a hotel in Ramallah, Palestine, and was sponsored by Berzeit University. Gerner was invited to the conference by the university.
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Gerner said she met Arafat once before in the 1980s.
Gerner said Arafat talked about the peace negotiations and how they needed assistance from the U.S. government.
"He has the ability to talk to people and look at them intently so that you feel as though he is talking directly at you," Gerner said. "Until then I had never understood why Palestinians had such affection for him."
"That is what kept coming up over and over again," she said. "At one point he said, 'We are not asking for the moon.'"
Gerner said she thought the central
issue to the conflict was that Israelis were occupying Palestinian land in violation of U.N. resolutions and international law.
She said Palestinians also had to face blockades and checkpoints on roads between different parts of their territories.
"This means that if you are sick, you come in an ambulance and are stopped at the checkpoint, put on a stretcher and walked across the checkpoint area, and then put on another ambulance at the other side." Gerner said.
Her first-hand experiences of the conflict in the Middle East carry over into her classes.
Omur Yilmaz, graduate student from Cyprus, said she took Gerner's Politics of the Middle East and International Mediation and Conflict Resolution classes.
Yilmaz said Gerner's familiarity with the issues in the Middle East added practical knowledge to Gerner's courses and application to political science theories involving conflicts in countries.
Gerner lived in Ramallah in 1996 and has made about 20 trips to the Middle East since the mid-1980s. She taught international studies for graduate students at Birzeit University in Palestine.
The conference honored the late Palestinian-American Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, a scholar, author and activist who died May 23, 2001, in Ramallah at the age of 72. Abu-Lughod had been a doctoral adviser to Gerner when he taught at Northwestern University. The international studies program at Birzeit was renamed in his honor.
"It is one thing to talk about theories, it is a completely different thing to talk about the real experiences that leaders have, Yilmaz said. "Especially when she has observed leaders coming to the table to talk and negotiate."
The conference was supposed to be held at Birzeit University but the current conflict made it too difficult to hold it there.
On June 12, Gerner returned to Palestine with a group of Quakers focusing on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Quakers have been involved in a search for peace in the area since 1948.
"The Quakers have a long history working towards peace and reconciliation, so this is a continuation of that activity," Gerner said.
She said she found the Palestinians welcoming, warm and hospitable people that place a high value on education. Yet, they are understandably angry and demoralized.
"Palestinians have lived under occupation since 1967," Gerner said. "We forget that an entire generation of people have grown up only under occupation."
As a political scientist, Gerner has written and edited books on the Middle East conflict. Gerner edited Understanding the Contemporary Middle East in 2000. The second edition of her book, One Land, Two Peoples: The Conflict over Palestine, was published in 1994.
Contact Smith at tsmith@kansan.com. This story was edited by Mike Gilligan.