About 30 eighth-graders at a small Jewish day school in Pittsburgh have learned about the Middle East through a Jewish perspective. Not surprisingly, Palestinians aren't perceived as allies. Today, they will hear another perspective.
Hanadie Yousef is standing in front of them. She is a senior chemistry major at Carnegie Mellon, but she is also a first-generation Palestinian American; not surprisingly, she is also pro-Palestinian.
Community Day school invited Yousef and Ziv Ragowsky, a former Israeli Defense Forces infantry officer, to discuss their views of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for the eighth-graders, their parents, and faculty members. This is nothing new for the speakers. They have taken their point-counterpoint discussion of the conflict to other schools and churches, but this presentation is different.
Yousef realizes there is more tension--subtle, guarded body language and frustrated sighs--when she says Palestinians face daily struggles to find employment, buy food, and seek medical attention. But if she's frazzled, no one can tell. Her voice is steady, her body language is confident, and not a lock of her fashionably jostled hair seems out of place.
About 15 minutes into the Both Sides Now program, the audience starts lobbing questions.
If the Palestinians are peaceful people, why are there so many suicide bombers? Yousef and Ragowsky agree that suicide bombing is a deplorable act, but she suggests that the violence is a product of hopeless living conditions caused by the "occupation and settlement expansion inside Palestinian territory."
What do you think when you hear people describe themselves as Zionists? Ragowsky says he feels proud, whereas Yousef says she feels uncomfortable.
This is heavy stuff, and it's barely 9 a.m. For the next 45 minutes, Yousef rattles off her family history (her parents are from Jerusalem, and her extended family still lives in the region), asserts her views, and recalls statistics at a rat-a-tat pace. She is at ease in the realm of world politics, though, interestingly, the 21-year-old says she plans to pursue a doctorate in molecular cell biochemistry, not international affairs.
During her four years at Carnegie Mellon, Yousef has been president of the Arab Student Organization, a council member of the Muslim Student Association, and a participant of the Middle East Peace Forum and the Pittsburgh Palestine Solidarity Committee. She also served as a consultant for the Carnegie Mellon graduate students who created PeaceMaker, a video game that educates players about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Her viewpoints don't always make Yousef a popular figure. She's received hate mail, some calling her an anti-Semite, partly stemming from her pro-Palestinian editorials in The Tartan student newspaper. But Yousef shrugs it off, seemingly as easily as she fields questions from an apprehensive crowd. You can't take a stand and expect everyone to agree with you, she says: "I'm trying to start a dialogue and promote peace."
--Allison Schlesinger
