By Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO— There is a school in Gaza named for the father of Nonie Darwish. Officially, Lt. Col. Mustafa Hafez was the head of Egyptian "military intelligence" in Gaza, but in reality he was the commander of  the fedayeen who crossed into Israel and killed civilians.  A terrorist mastermind was how the Israelis thought of him.  Arabs had a more reverential title for him, especially after his assassination by the Israelis in 1956.  In their view, he was a shahid, a martyr.

Darwish was eight years old when the Israelis bombed her father's office in an explosion that also wounded her older brother. Along with the rest of her family, she returned from Gaza to Cairo where Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser led the mourners who visited her family home. At one point Nasser put little Nonie on his knee and asked her and other children which of them would avenge the blood of their father by killing Israelis?

So, when a mixed group of students and faculty members assembled at San Diego State University on Monday evening, April 24, to hear Darwish discuss the Arab-Israeli conflict, you can imagine how the Arab students and how the Jewish and Israeli students felt about her.

But, unless you already know the remarkable story of Nonie Darwish, chances are you would imagine wrong.  If there was hostility, it came mostly from the Arabs.  If there was sympathy and outright support for her message, it was mainly from the Jews.  In fact, a coalition of Jewish student organizations were among the sponsors of her talk on-campus.  Prior to the speech, she had dinner at D.Z. Akin's Delicatessen with leaders of San Diego State's Hillel chapter.

Of course, as a child, Darwish hated Israelis—not only for assassinating her father, but because she was taught to do so.  Jews were evil incarnate, she was instructed to
                                                                          Nonie Darwish (seated, second from right) is surrounded by
                                                                                                  Jewish admirers at DZ Akins delicatessen: Standing, from left,
                                                                                                  are Josh Klemons, Alina Katz, Jaime Nacach, and Rebecca Stein-
                                                                                                  berger. Seated are Scott Westle, Heidi Amundson, Darwish and.
                                                                                                  at right, SDSU's Hillel Director Jackie Tolley.

believe. Stories often were told that Jews would slice up the belly of a pregnant Arab woman just to settle a bet on whether she was carrying a boy or a girl.  She was warned never to accept candy from a Jew, because it surely would be poison.  In the mosques, imams likened Jews to dogs and apes, and called for jihad against infidels. Some of her class mates would read jihadist poetry, and imagining the ecstasy of death, would cry that they wanted to be martyrs.

Darwish said that even when she was a child, some things about what everyone said just didn't compute.
When Nasser made a famous speech nationalizing the Suez Canal and citing the offenses against Arabs by Israel—including the killing of her father—Darwish noticed that her nation's leaders said nothing about how Arabs, too, had been killing Israelis.

If Israelis were such fanatical murderers, what happened that night two months before her father was killed when Israeli commandos stormed her house and found only her, and women and other children?  Why did the Israeli commandos leave without harming them?  Her father's fedayeen killed civilians on the other side; why didn't the Israelis act likewise?

Darwish also wondered why one of her favorite soldiers—one of the men who regularly guarded her family's house in Gaza—had to be killed while being questioned by Egyptian interrogators. 

But Darwish said she kept such questions to herself.

Darwish went to American University in Cairo and remembers how joyful her fellow Egyptians were when Nasser talked before 1967 about throwing Israel into the sea.  She recalls how when the war came, the Egyptian press reported victory after victory—in reality lies after lies. In six days, Israel defeated not only Egypt but its Arab allies.  

After Gaza was captured, Israelis began digging into the military archives.  Darwish said they found that her father had sent letters to his superiors challenging the wisdom of the fedayeen operations which he commanded.  Such incursions only served to increase tensions, he said.  They made no military difference. He had asked for a transfer back to Cairo but his superiors kept delaying it. The Israelis killed him before his delayed transfer date, but who, she asked herself, really was responsible for her father's death?  A military enemy or a government intent on sowing destruction?

As a 20-year-old student living in Cairo, Darwish said she made a friend of a girl who wasn't a Muslim like she was, but a Coptic Christian. They were sitting together when they heard an imam's sermon amplified over the loudspeakers of a nearby mosque. "May God destroy the infidels—the Christians and the Jews!" shouted the preacher.  Darwish had heard such rhetoric before, and hardly paid any attention to it.  "But I looked at my friend's eyes and I saw fear. It was the first time ever I felt there was something wrong in the way my religion was being taught." 

She had heard such words before, but never knew the people who were the intended targets of the words.  "This gave me a little hint: the way we are teaching hate against people, could my religion be wrong?  This is when I first started doubting."

After graduation from college, Darwish became a journalist with the Middle East News Agency (MENA).  "I discovered that everything was government-controlled," she said. "Part of my job was to censor the foreign correspondents.  I discovered that Egyptian information was fabrications and lies.  They gave us what the government wanted us to know."

The Yom Kippur War was launched in 1973.  Following the truce, Nasser's replacement, Anwar Sadat, made his historic journey to Jerusalem, which subsequently led to the Camp David talks with Israel's Prime Minister Menachem Begin.

Darwish said she believed if her father had been alive, he would have gone with Sadat, or at least cheered him.  Mustafa Hafez was a professional soldier, but not a hater.  He would have seen the wisdom of peace, his daughter said.

In 1978 at age 30,  Darwish moved to the United States in order to marry a man who was a Coptic Christian—something a Muslim woman was forbidden to do in Egypt.  Her husband had permanent residence in the United States, and she was able to come to Southern California as his wife.  Today, Darwish is remarried to another Christian man.  To protect her family's safety, she does not disclose her American family name.

She said she came to appreciate the fact that in the United States "all religions are respected and protected."  But in the early 1980s, she said, she heard talk among fellow Muslims about how important it was for many more mosques to be built in America, how Muslims should set for themselves a goal to Islamicize America. "I thought this is not the kind of religious life I want to have in America; it is not the kind of life I want in America."

An Egyptian acquaintance who, like her and most other women of Egypt, had never covered her hair, one day called out her name.  Darwish didn't recognize the woman at first, because she was covered from head to toe.  The acquaintance invited Darwish to come and visit her.  When Darwish did, the acquaintance immediately wanted them to pray together, and she urged Darwish to cover herself up.  The woman said people should dress as Muslims in order to show that they are proud to be Muslims.  "I didn't visit her again; I felt she was inviting me for the purpose of recruiting a radical."

Darwish said the growing militancy disturbed her, but she kept quiet. 

Back in Gaza, her brother—the one who had been with her father when he was killed by the Israelis— collapsed from a stroke.  Egyptians who were close to him immediately debated where they should take him—to Cairo, or to the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem?  They decided upon Hadassah, and "he was unconscious in Israel for 2 1/2 months—he had what (Prime Minister Ariel) Sharon had, an aneurysm, and they treated him so well.  He survived.  He is now 95 percent better.  When that happened, my view of Israel completely changed.  I wanted to thank the people of Israel for occupying the moral high ground, for treating Arabs at the same level.  This is unheard of, especially since he was the son of a Shahid."

In the summer of 2001, she acquiesced to her children's request to visit Egypt.  Her three American youngsters wanted to see the land in which their mother had been raised. As soon as they got to Cairo, Darwish noticed almost all the women were wearing head scarves.  The cab driver cursed Christians and Jews as part of his ordinary conversation. There was unemployment, garbage in the street, pollution in the Nile River.  Yet in the newspapers, there was no discussion of such domestic problems. "In the newspapers you read of no problems but Israel and the United States."

Visiting Alexandria, Darwish and her family went to the beach. Her one-piece swimsuit was conservative, and she had a towel around her, yet a woman covered from head to toe  while standing on the beach, glared at her as if she were a prostitute. "Countries are supposed to move forward, but after 20 years, it had moved backwards," Darwish said.  "My oldest daughter, who was almost 18 then, on the way back to the United States, told me, 'I love my cousins, but thank you for bringing us up in America.'"  The daughter said she never before realized how special a country America was.  She said she could not believe how much Egyptians hate Jews.  Having many Jewish classmates, the daughter could not understand why; "she was brought up to respect every religion."

The family arrived back to the safety of the United States on Sept. 10, 2001.  When they woke up the next morning and turned on the television, they saw the first plane crash into a twin tower of New York City's World Trade Center.  Perhaps an accident, they thought.  "When the second plane hit the twin tower, I thought 'this is terrorism—this is the anger I left behind'—and lo and behold the leader, Mohammed Atta, was an Egyptian."

That was when Darwish decided she could keep quiet no longer. 

She started writing articles about how the culture of hate in Islam must be reformed; how Arab moderates must speak out against terrorism, how Islam must not be destroyed from within by the haters. The articles were sent around the Internet, prompting speaking invitations from a variety of groups.  She got e-mail responses, some encouraging her, others denouncing her as a traitor to Muslims.

"My hope is that the Muslim and Arab community living in the United States can try to be advocates for peace," she says.  She said Muslims would do well to emulate the multiculturalism and the respect for other religions that characterizes civic life in the United States.  Muslims must recognize that Bethlehem is holy to Christians, Jerusalem is holy to Jews, and that both religions belong in the Middle East along with Islam.  The Muslim world must learn to respect, rather than hate, such minorities within its own ranks as Kurds and Shi'ites. 

And the Jews? What does she think the Jews must do to bring about this peace?

"I think Jews have been doing a lot," she replied. "I think they should keep doing what they are doing. They are showing good will and trying to help, but they are always rejected, like in Iran, when the earthquake happened.  Most of the dialogue groups and interfaith groups that exist are initiated by Jews, not by Muslims, so keep doing what you are doing.  Believe in yourself, and believe that you are not the monsters that we have portrayed you as."