Editor’s note: Anyone who is active in Palestinian issues in New York has come to recognize an attractive, outspoken family– Debbie Mardon and Mahmoud Bitar and their kids Joel and Jenna. Debbie looks like the girl next door, but she is unstoppable, Mahmoud has the softest smile you could ever see. Jenna is a compelling speaker. It turns out the family took a long time to awaken to the issue despite Mahmoud’s Palestinian origins. In fact, Mahmoud went by the name Michael for 30 years. Debbie watched Fox News. The cover story of the latest issue of the Indypendent, a free, New York City-based newspaper, tells the family’s story. Excerpt below. You can read Alex Kane’s whole article here.
When Debbie first met Mahmoud, she did not understand what it meant to be someone from Palestine. Mahmoud was uncomfortable with his heritage, and he let people, including Debbie when they started dating, think he was Jewish or Italian. Debbie recalls how “people said things to him like, ‘You’re not a Palestinian, you’re too nice.’”
Born in the Old City of Jerusalem in 1958, Mahmoud was brought up immersed in the politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He lived in Jericho, a city in the West Bank, for the first ten years of his life after his family moved there because his father had set up a station in Jericho selling fruits and vegetables. In 1967, when the Six-Day War broke out, Mahmoud and his family returned to Jerusalem after Israeli bombs killed three of his relatives.
As soon as Mahmoud and his two brothers were college-aged, their parents sent them to the United States. Mahmoud, now a U.S. citizen, arrived in the United States in 1977 on a student visa…
For most of their marriage and while raising Jenna and Joel, Mahmoud rarely talked about his childhood in Palestine.
“I never got a greater picture, it was just bad things were happening to the Palestinians, or at least my family that was Palestinian,” Jenna said. “I visited there before I knew what was going on, for three weeks, with my grandparents when they were alive. I lived the life they lived for a bit, saw the checkpoints, but I didn’t understand.”
THE 9/11 FACTOR
The September 11, 2001, attacks jolted Debbie’s political perspective, and made Mahmoud more nervous about his background as a Palestinian, especially as thousands of Middle Eastern men were profiled and arrested throughout New York City.
Debbie had just dropped Jenna off at school when she returned home and watched the second plane hit the World Trade Center on television.
Debbie turned to Fox News for clarity.
“That was the first time I started learning about foreign policy, and why someone would attack us,” Debbie said.
But Debbie and Mahmoud rarely discussed post-9/11 politics.
“We didn’t discuss it, I just listened. Debbie’s a leader by nature, so she always led with the remote control,” Mahmoud recalls. “She had the remote control with her so she would pick the information, and I would retreat when I had really had enough of it.”
Debbie’s family started attending the Redeemer Presbyterian Church almost 20 years ago. While they were initially drawn to the church, which met at Hunter College, by a smart and interesting pastor, over the years the congregation became a second family for all of them.
However, they were forced to leave this community in March 2008 after Mahmoud, who worked at the church on Sundays, was accused of stealing a CD of a church sermon. He was arrested by a City University of New York security guard and charged with assaulting an officer, resisting arrest and misdemeanor theft — charges that Debbie and her family say were ridiculous and were later dropped.
“It was a small thing in the larger world, but it happened to us,” Debbie recalls. “I thought that we would be immune to all this, and that the community we were a part of would care about truth and care about justice being served, but they didn’t care about either of those things. It opened my eyes to greater injustices. I used to think that people who went to jail were probably guilty. But now, I thought, ‘Oh my goodness! There are all these people in jail that are probably innocent.’ Michael could’ve gone to jail, but he had a private lawyer. What happens if you’re poor?”
Nine months later, on Dec. 27, 2008, Israel invaded the Gaza Strip, beginning what would be a devastating assault.
“It was during Gaza that we started to awaken,” said Joel, who at the time was first foraying into politics by joining an antiwar organization at Hunter College and reading books about U.S. foreign policy and the Israel-Palestine conflict. “Killing civilians indiscriminately with U.S. weapons, paid for with our tax money, seemed to be so hideously wrong.”
During what Amnesty International called “22 days of death and destruction,” Debbie could not avoid the Gaza conflict, especially because Mahmoud’s brother Farid, who was glued to Al Jazeera’s coverage of the assault, was emotionally devastated.
Joel, who was reading books like Noam Chomsky’s The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians, also started to talk with Debbie about the detrimental impact of U.S. foreign policy on Palestine.
After those 22 days were over, Debbie started going to lectures and protests about the conflict and soon found herself enmeshed in the world of Palestine solidarity activism. Although described as the “leader” of the household, she was the last person to finally call herself an activist.
The assault on Gaza also made Mahmoud become more engaged with the Palestine solidarity movement.
“It’s a natural conclusion to what happened in Gaza,” Mahmoud says. “Our breath is being taken out of us. I felt an urgency to start having a voice.”
In the last two years, the household has been transformed. Jenna describes how sometimes, before she goes to sleep, Debbie will run into her room and “just read me books out loud,” including passages from the work of Chris Hedges and Michael Parenti. “She’ll come and say, ‘I have to read you this passage, it’s so good’ and it’ll be something sad and depressing,” Jenna says, laughing.
These days, it is nearly impossible to miss Debbie and members of her family at activist events related to Palestine.
