Conference 2007 - Bios of speakers and workshops leaders

05/05/2007

Ratib Mahmoud Abu Rahma

Ratib Mahmoud Abu Rahma, was born and lives in Bil’in village near Ramallah. He teaches social work at Al Quds University. Mahmoud is a member in the Bilin Committee for Popular Resistance. From 2002- 2004 was elected as the president of the Bil’in sports club. Currently he is a board member of the Cooperative Society in the Governorate of Ramallah. He has participated in and organized many workshops and lectures with children and women on topic such as drama, communication skills, and trauma intervention.

Nidal Abuzuluf

Nidal Abuzulus is the Assistant Director of the YMCA Beit Sahour; the coordinator of the Network of Christian Organization in Bethlehem (NCOB), a Board member of Defense for Children International DCI/ Palestine Section and Advisory Board Member of Jadal Cultural and Development Center; former President of the Student Council at Bethlehem University and an ex-political prisoner.
nabuzuluf@shepherdsfieldymca.org

Sam Bahour

Sam Bahour is a Palestinian-American businessman and activist based in Al-Bireh/Ramallah, Palestine. He is Managing Partner of Applied Information Management (AIM), a management consulting firm specializing in business development with a niche focus on the information technology sector. Sam was instrumental in the establishment of PALTEL and the PLAZA Shopping Center and currently serves as a Board of Trustees member at Birzeit University and is the Board’s treasurer. He is also a Director at the Arab Islamic Bank and Dalia Association. Sam writes frequently on Palestinian affairs and has been widely published. Sam is co-editor of HOMELAND: Oral History of Palestine and Palestinians and may be reached at: sbahour@palnet.com.

Mustafa Barghouti

Mustafa Barghouti is the Minister of Information in the newly formed unity government of the Palestinian Authority. He is the General Secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative; physician; social, political, human rights and peace activist; one of the most active grassroots leaders in Palestine; campaigner for the development of Palestinian civil society and grassroots democracy; outspoken advocate of internal reform; international spokesperson for the Palestinian cause; leading figure in the non-violent, peaceful struggle against the Occupation; and organizer of international solidarity presence in the Palestine, Mustafa Barghouthi has made an extraordinary contribution to initiatives to peacefully challenge the ongoing Israeli Occupation of Palestine and bring it to end, as well as efforts to build the institutional framework of Palestinian civil society and promote the principles of internal democracy and good governance. He writes extensively for local and international audiences on civil society and democracy issues and the political situation in Palestine, as well as on health development policy in Palestine.
www.almubadara.org, www.palestinemonitor.org

Omar Barghouti

Omar Barghouti is an independent Palestinian political and cultural analyst whose opinion columns have appeared in several publications. He is also a human rights activist involved in civil struggle to end oppression and conflict in Palestine/Israel.

He holds a Masters degree in electrical engineering from Columbia University, NY, and is currently a doctoral student of philosophy (ethics) at Tel Aviv University. He contributed to the recently published philosophical volume, Controversies and Subjectivity (John Benjamins, 2005). He also contributed to The New Intifada: Resisting Israel’s Apartheid (Verso Books, 2001). He advocates an ethical vision for a unitary, secular democratic state in historic Palestine.

Mohammad Nayef Dweikat

Mohammad Dweikat is the Executive Director of the Palestinian Body for Dialogue, Peace, and Equality and Secret ary of the Coalition to End the Occupation in Palestine. He has a law degree from Najah National University in Palestine and a Diploma in Law fro the University of Jordan in Amman. Mohammad was the Assistant Director-General of the Hadi Company (1999-2001) and the Director of Public Relations in the Abdon Company in Nablus (2001-2004). He is currently the professional advisor to the Legal Advisory Office in Nablus and to non-governmental organizations. Mohammad can be reached at: director@hasm.org

Rowan Al Faqih

Rowan Al Faqih is a researcher and filmmaker living and working in Ramallah. She is a member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.

Stéphane Frédéric Hessel

Stéphane Frédéric Hessel is the Ambassador of France in Tel Aviv. During World War II he was sent to the deportation camp of Buchenwald and Dora. After the war he took part in the writing of the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" adopted by the United Nations in 1948. He is member of the French support committee of the "International Coalition for the Decade for the Promotion of a Culture of Peace and Non-Violence". In 2003, along with other former resisters, he signed the petition "For a Treaty for a Social Europe". He participates in the actions in support of Palestine.

Jeff Halper

Jeff Halper is an Israeli Professor of Anthropology and the Coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), a non-violent, direct-action Israeli peace and human rights organization that resists the Israeli Occupation on the ground, and especially its policy of demolishing Palestinian homes, and advocates for a just and sustainable peace in the region.

Jeff grew up in Hibbing, Minnesota, and received his Ph.D. in Cultural and Applied Anthropology from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee before moving to Israel in 1973. He was been nominated by the American Friends Service Committee for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, together with the Palestinian intellectual and activist Ghassan Andoni. Jeff is the author of Obstacles to Peace, a resource manual of articles and maps on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, published by ICAHD. His new book, An Israeli in Palestine, on his work against the Occupation, will be published in September by Pluto Press. He can be reached at: icahd@zahav.net.il

Amira Hass

Amira Hass is the Haaretz correspondent residing in the occupied Palestinian territories since end of 1993. First she lived in Gaza for three years and now in Ramallah. She is the author of the following books: Drinking the Sea at Gaza, Reportig from Ramalla, Domani andra peggio.

Hanna Knaz

Hanna Knaz was born in New York and now lives in Kibbutz Gan Shmuel. She is a registered nurse with a specialty in Gerontology. Hanna has been working to end the occupation since the beginning of the first intifada and is active in Women in Black, Physicians for Human Rights, Faculty for Israeli/Palestinian Peace, and the Coalition to end the Occupation and for a Just Peace. She is the grandmother of six.

Jean-Claude Lefort

Jean-Claude Lefort is a French Member of Parliament (Communist Party) since 1988. He is a member of the Commission for Foreign Affairs in the French Parliament and Secretary of the Delegation of the French Parliament for the European Union. He has attended to all the sessions of the process of Marwan Bargouthi and is very much involved in the solidarity movement

Mairead Corrigan Maguire

Mairead Corrigan Maguire is one of the co-founders of the Peace People in Northern Ireland along with Betty Williams and Ciaran McKeown and is its honorary president. Mairead and Betty won the Nobel Peace Prize in l976.

Mairead is an active pacifist passionately commitment to nonviolent social and political change. She believes “When we reject nuclear weapons and war, when we uphold Human Rights and International Law, when we build non-killing, nonviolent societies and world, refusing to kill each other but seeking nonviolent solutions to our problems, then we will have come of age as the human family”. She is active in inter-church and inter-faith organizations and travels to Israel and Palestine to support Mordechai Vanunu.

Her book: The Vision of Peace – Faith and Hope in Northern Ireland was published by Orbis Books, New York (translated into Tamil and Urdu). www.peacepeople.com, email: info@peacepeople.com

Luisa Morgantini

Luisa Morgantini is the Vice President of the European Parliament. She was born in Villadossola, Italy. Since 1982 she has been dealing with Middle East issues and mainly Palestinian - Israeli conflict. She has supported especially women’s associations in Israel and Palestine and in other Mediterranean Countries.

She was one of the founders of the ‘Women in Black’ anti-war movement and the international network ‘Women for peace in conflict zones’. In 1995 she received the Israeli ‘Women in Black’ Peace Prize for her role in building bridges between Palestinians and Israelis.

Luisa Morgantini is a member of the European Parliament in the European United Left/ Nordic Green Left Group - elected the first time in 1999 and again in 2004. She is a member of the Subcommittee on Human Rights, of the Delegation for relations with the Palestinian Legislative Council, of the Euro-Mediterranean Parliamentary Assembly, and substitute member of the Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality, of the Committee on Constitutional Affairs, of the Delegation to the ACP-EU Joint Parliamentary Assembly and of the Delegation for relations with the Pan African Parliament.
www.luisamorgantini.net

Mohammad Elias Nazzal

Mohammad Nazzal joined the Palestinian national struggle as a student. He was arrested and sentenced ‘for life’, however, after ten years in Israeli prisons, he was set free in an exchange of prisoners which occurred in 1985. As an activist in the first intifada he was captured and put in prison in 1988 for six months and again imprisoned for four years in 1990.

Mohammad worked as the manager of the Land Department in the Palestinian Authority and carried the responsibility of the portfolio dealing with “Settlements and the Wall”. He took part in establishing many of the popular committees especially the popular committee in Bil’in and because of his active role in the grass- roots resistance he was chosen by the representatives of the popular committees to be the coordinator of “The national committee for popular Resistance”.

Ilan Pappe

Ilan Pappe is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Haifa University in Israel. The is also the President of the Emil Touma Institute for Palestinian Studies

He was born in 1954 in Haifa. He received his D. Phil from Oxford University, 1984 and has been teaching at the University of Haifa since that time, where he also lives.

His books include Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1947-1951 (Macmillan/St. Antony’s Series, London and New York 1988); The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948-1951 (I. B. Tauris: London and New York 1992); The Aristocracy of the Land: the Biography of the Husaynis, (Jerusalem 2003 in Hebrew; currently considered by Princeton University Press); The Modern History of Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples, (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge and New York 2003), The Modern Middle East (Routledge: London and New York 2005) and The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld Publications: Oxford 2006).

He edited Islam and Peace (Givat Haviva in Hebrew 1992), Arab-Jewish Relations in Mandatory Palestine (Givat Haviva 1992 in Hebrew), Jordan: The Making of a Pivotal State with J. Nevo (Frank Cass: London and New York, 1994, History from Within: Politics and Ideas in the Middle East, with M. Maoz, (I.B. Tauris London and New York 1997), Seven Ways to Peace (with Asad Ghanem and Sara Ozacky-Lazar, Givat Haviva in Hebew, 1999), The IsraelPalestine Question (Routledge: London and New York, 1999) and Across the Wall: The Israeli/Palestinian Academic Dialogue Group Enemy (with Jamil Hilal, forthcoming in I. B. Tauris).

George N. Rishmawi

Greorge N. Rishmawi was born in Beit Sahour. He graduated from Birzeit University with a degree in English language and literature. He has been a long-term nonviolent activist and Co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). He is currently the Director of the Palestinian Centre for Rapprochement between People (PCR) and the General Manager of the International Middle East Media Center (www.imemc.org).

George S. Rishmawi

George S. Rishmawi is a Palestinian non-violence peace activist from Beit Sahour. In his capacity as cofounder and coordinator for Siraj, Center for Holy Land Studies (www.sirajcenter.org), he organizes the Palestinian Summer Celebrations, which bring international visitors to Palestine for first hand experiences of living with Palestinian families and working with Palestinian activists. George is an expert in alternative tourism including cultural tours, political missions, and environmental hiking tours. He is a cofounder of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a board member of the Network of the Christian Organizations in the Bethlehem area, and former board member of the Palestinian Center for Rapprochement between People in Beit Sahour.
george@sirajcenter.org