FARMINGTON, MI — There are many who know Terry Ahwal as a longtime, highly effective government official, fundraiser, and as someone influential in politics. She was an assistant executive in Wayne County, the state’s largest.
She had successful careers in development and was a Democratic National Convention delegate for Bill Clinton; she’s run Detroit’s chapter of Habitat for Humanity, and three years ago, at age 65, climbed Tanzania’s famed Mt. Kilimanjaro.
But she is somebody else, too. A Palestinan refugee, a woman who was once a terrified 11-year-old girl huddling in her basement and screaming in terror as Israeli jets dropped bombs on targets near her home in Ramallah, on the West Bank near Jerusalem.
That was June, 1967 and the Six-Day War, in which Israel inflicted massive defeats on a group of Arab nations. Ramallah had been administered by Jordan before that war, though Palestinians considered themselves an independent people.
But on June 10, she emerged from her shelter to find what she describes as “the birth of our nightmare — our introduction to hell.”
“Words cannot describe the vile Israeli occupation and its impact on our lives. Cruelty and violence became the new norm. Few, if any, saw us as fellow humans.” She lived under it until her family, worried about her future, sent her to Detroit when she was 16.
The current war and what even President Biden has called Israel’s “over-the-top” attacks on Gaza came just as Terry Ahwal was publishing her memoir, a book she had worked on for years: Keeping the Dream Alive: My Quest for Peace and Justice. (Pathbinder Publishing, 2024.) The book is not a nuanced work of political science or history, but is simply, as the subtitle says, a memoir.
The current war has, however stirred memories, and gotten her book, which is extremely readable, a fair amount of even national publicity, as has her statement that she will not vote for President Biden for reelection, to protest America’s support for what she sees as a racist and genocidal Israel.
Not that she has anything good to say about Donald Trump. “I know he’s worse.” But she has had enough of the way her people have been treated for decades. “I want people to know that Palestinians are human beings,” and deserve to be treated accordingly, Ahwal said, when I asked what was the main thing she wanted readers to conclude.
Whatever you think about the current war, or the issues between Israel and the Arab nations, her memoir is searing, has the ring of truth, at least as she saw things unfold from her vantage point, and ought to be widely read, especially perhaps by those most pro-Israel. Ahwal writes that she saw men, including her father and even young boys beaten unmercifully for no apparent reason.
Some readers may note that the Israelis in the book are essentially stereotyped as nearly all demons, and that it is never mentioned that Israel launched the Six-Day War because it was clear that the Arab armies were about to attack Israel. She also barely faults Hamas for their barbaric attack on Israeli citizens last Oct. 7.
Still, again, this is a memoir, not a history, and Terry Ahwal is not anyone’s stereotype. She knows she will be called an anti-Semite, but is anything but. She admires U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, was close to the late U.S. Sen. Carl Levin, and her husband, author Bob Morris, is half-Jewish. Nor is she an apologist for Arab leaders, who she mostly dismisses as “autocrats who care about enriching themselves, not about their people.”
Matter of fact, she is really only focused on Palestinians, not other people in the region. “This is our country, not Jordan or some other. If you don’t like things in the United States, do you just move to Canada? No. You try to change them here.”
She is also not Muslim, but Roman Catholic, and can trace her ancestry back to the 13th and 15th centuries. “I’m always meeting Americans who can’t believe there are Catholic Palestinians,” she said with a laugh. And while nearly all Americans sympathetic to the Palestinians are in favor of a two-state solution, she isn’t.
She thinks boundaries would be artificial, and the balance unequal. Instead, she says “let’s live together in one state with total equality, regardless of religion,” where everyone would have a vote.
“Once they give us their freedom, they can achieve their security,” she says in her book’s conclusion. It’s difficult to imagine persuading Israel to believe that, or to agree to create a single state where Arab voters outnumber Jews.
But not many women in late middle age decide to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro and succeed, either. “Although thousands of miles away, I feel that I am still under the Israeli occupation. Yet I still think I have more power than they do,” she said. More power, because she believes she has truth and justice on her side,
Whatever your politics, this is a book worth reading.
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(Editor’s Note: A version of this column also appeared in the Toledo Blade.)
