Activist pushes for Palestinian cause
Should he ever run for office, Ned Hanauer would be a conservative attack adman's dream come true. It's easy to imagine the script: left-leaning, Israel-bashing, Palestinian-loving, Dennis Kucinich-voting peacenik. There's even fodder in the biographical sketches that Dartmouth's class of 1960 compiled for its 25th reunion; in his career description, Hanauer included "agitator."
Alternatively, those inclined toward Hanauer's point of view might say he echoes the prophetic gadflies of the Bible, exhorting his fellow Jews to reach for the highest rung of their ideals. The wiry 66-year-old is the sole staffer of an organization he founded 32 years ago to push for Palestinian rights, Search for Justice and Equality in Palestine/Israel.
The mouthful of a name is in keeping with the soft-spoken intensity Hanauer brings to the cause. He answers questions about his work and the Middle East with lengthy questions of his own; if you're short of reading material -- or even if you're not -- he'll send you off laden with papers, pamphlets, and brochures.
Titularly the executive director of Search for Justice, he lectures, writes opinion pieces, lobbies journalists, and brokers meetings between them and Middle East specialists and human rights activists.
His customary sailing direction into the wind dates back at least to his group's founding. The year 1972 turned out to be an unfortunate moment to launch a campaign for Arab rights; several months after Search for Justice started, Arab terrorists murdered 11 Israeli Olympic athletes, to worldwide revulsion. Yet then and now, Hanauer keeps going.
"He has sort of a professor's knowledge of the politics and the history of the issue," says the Rev. Jeffrey L. Johnson, a Lutheran pastor in Wayland who is on Search for Justice's steering committee. "He really has mastered the details. And then he has this personal passion for justice. . . . And he's certainly not shy."
Hanauer said the United States should drop its "blanket, one-sided, knee-jerk support of Israel," insist that the Jewish state sledgehammer its settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, and grant greater rights to Palestinians as part of a two-state peace deal guaranteeing both sides' rights. American Jewish leaders must be more vocal in condemning Israeli extremists, he said.
He's agnostic about Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's offer to withdraw Gaza settlements, waiting to see if Sharon dismantles all the settlements and avoids a shell game of simply relocating some to the West Bank.
"There's an Arab proverb: Don't look at the tear running down the cheek of the hunter. Watch the finger on the trigger," Hanauer said. Israel's defenders often point to the Palestinian state offered to and rejected by Yasser Arafat at the 2000 Camp David negotiations; Hanauer sides with those who dismissed it as a lousy offer in which Israel retained settlements and control over Palestinian water resources and other essentials.
Palestinians have their own sins to answer for, he says. Their "major failing has been that the leadership, including Arafat, have not pushed an organized, massive, nonviolent resistance, which would be more effective and cost less lives on both sides and be much more likely to evoke international support. The first intifadah [in the late 1980s] was much more nonviolent. It was more stone-throwing, boycotts, demonstrations, strikes, and so forth. There were no suicide bombings."
In the end, Hanauer said, justice for the Palestinians will secure Israel, which in its 56-year history has "lurched from war to war, losing thousands killed, tens of thousands wounded, all sorts of families grieved."
Search for Justice's letterhead brims with adviser luminaries -- the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Noam Chomsky, and Mel King among them. While willing to lend their names to the cause, many, though not all, are otherwise uninvolved with Search for Justice.
"Most of the energy for Search comes from Ned," said Johnson. "The steering committee meets every six weeks or so and helps to support Ned and provide direction. [But] the main star here for Search is Ned. . . . It'll keep plugging along as long as Ned is up and running."
Hanauer's interest in the conflict stems in part from being Jewish and having "an interest in the Middle East maybe more than, say, the Korean peninsula." The son of "very conservative" parents, he found his liberal instincts blossoming in the synagogue and the academy, including a college course on imperialism in the Third World, which touched a natural empathy with the weak. (Perhaps rare among Massachusetts natives, Hanauer's dislike of the New York Yankees is less a function of nativity than sensitivity: "I was always out for the underdog.")
As for the intractability of the Middle East conflict, well, this is a man who supported Kucinich for president. Hanauer explained his philosophy with a borrowed line: If you're working for something that can be realized tomorrow, maybe it's not that important.
Rich Barlow can be reached at rbarlow.81@alum.dartmouth.org.
