The hacky sac intifada

The most popular movement on college campuses is divided between moderate Arab students and radical lefty white kids who have adopted the Palestinian cause as their own.

By Christopher Farah

Oct. 9, 2003 | Charlotte Kates is a South Jersey gal, hailing from the state of casinos, beach resorts and all-American suburban sprawl. Fayyad Sbaihat is a West Bank guy, raised in the stateless land of intifadas, uprooted olive trees and sprawling piles of Palestinian rubble, of the post-house demolition variety.

While growing up, Kates enjoyed trips to the public library to check out her favorite books. Sbaihat, on the other hand, spent much of his childhood playing a strange version of hide-and-seek with Israeli soldiers -- they tried to throw him in jail, he tried to throw rocks at their heads.

Kates' father is a truck driver, her mother is a bank teller and her brother is a U.S. marshal. Sbaihat's father and uncles have all done time in Israeli prisons for civil unrest, and his religious Muslim mother will only leave the house if wearing a scarf on her head.

Kates speaks English with a typical East Coast twang. Sbaihat still rolls his R's a little bit, and his H's come from somewhere deep in his Semitic throat.

Both Kates and Sbaihat are college students in America. But only one of them is a radical pro-Palestinian activist who says that Israel has no right to exist. Only one of them advocates Palestinian resistance "by any means necessary" to liberate all of the land "from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea," land currently under the control of "Israeli oppressors."

Guess which one of them it is. Here's a hint: This one often wears a red kaffiyeh, or Arab headdress, as a clothing accessory, and also liberally sprinkles his or her speech with Arabic catchphrases like "nakba" -- "the catastrophe" of Israel's creation in 1948. Still not sure? Fine, one more: This person is a leading member of the organizing committee of a national Palestinian activism conference slated for this coming weekend near Rutgers University, in New Brunswick, N.J. The forum has been the subject of intense criticism from figures like New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey and Rutgers University president Richard McCormick, who called the group's views on Israel "reprehensible."

If you remembered which one lives in New Jersey, that last clue probably gave the answer away, didn't it? Yes, that's right: The kaffiyeh-wearing activist is the all-American Kates.

This irony is not an isolated one in what has emerged as the fastest-growing protest movement on U.S. college campuses: Palestinian liberation. But as the movement has expanded, it has developed its own dramatic, internal conflict between white American students, eager to revel in their disdain for American "imperialism" and embrace the most extreme positions, and Arab students, determined to find a sympathetic mass audience through more a diplomatic approach. This battle over the movement's soul might best be represented by the differences between the American, Kates, and the Palestinian, Sbaihat.

True, Sbaihat is himself a pro-Palestinian activist at the University of Wisconsin, where he is a graduate student. He speaks Arabic, and certainly understands the meaning of "nakba." He's also been known to wear a kaffiyeh every now and then, and he's just as passionate about defending the rights of his people as Kates is about defending the rights of ... well, his people.

His experience with his cause also has personal roots; Sbaihat could only watch on television as the Israeli army literally flattened large swaths of his home city of Jenin last year. "It was one of the most horrifying times. Many people I knew died," he says. "I definitely view the Palestinian cause as more of a personal issue than one of international justice and human rights."

But compared to Kates, Sbaihat sounds like a virtual peacenik. "I see suicide bombings as a dangerous sign of the grave situation that Palestinians have come to," he says. "Bombings are an obvious indication of despair and helplessness, but they haven't been effective. They provide an excuse for the Israeli government to grow more radical, and cause isolation in the already small Israeli peace camp."

Sbaihat and many fellow pro-Palestinian activists throughout the country recently decided to break off from the New Jersey conference coordinated by Kates' group, New Jersey Solidarity -- in part because they felt Solidarity was portraying its own extreme political ideology as representative of the entire pro-Palestinian movement. Instead, the rebelling activists will hold their own conference the weekend of Nov. 7, at Ohio State University.

The nationwide schism is the climax of long-festering tensions within the Palestinian-advocacy movement, stretching back to the beginning of the Palestinians' second intifada, or uprising, three years ago. In September 2000, after several years of relative calm under the Oslo peace accords, Palestinians once again engaged in active -- and sometimes violent -- resistance against Israeli rule. An ocean away, the Palestinian struggle caught the attention of American leftist activists. The same people who pass out neon flyers on every campus calling for the U.S. government to "Free Mumia!" had found a new cause. Well, not exactly a new cause; the plight of the indigenous Palestinians had long struck a chord with anti-imperialists. But an old cause with a new urgency, and a broad national and international appeal.

Enter Berkeley, the unofficial capital of collegiate counterculture and all things anti-.

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