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Current Issue
Title:
The Grief Counselor of Gaza
Eyad Rajab El Sarraj, in 1998, received the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders. In his acceptance speech he said that the award reminded him of a Palestinian whom he had left behind in prison. “Don’t forget me,” the man begged. “Please...don’t forget me.” Eyad Sarraj has not forgotten. He has been imprisoned himself more than once—and tortured—by the Palestinian Authority for protesting its human rights violations and its corrupt practices. Trained in Egypt and at London University, England, Dr. Sarraj is founder and president of the Gaza Community Mental Health Program, the major provider of rehabilitation for Gaza’s numerous trauma victims. Also a recipient of the Physicians for Human Rights Award, Eyad is a member of the International Rehabilitation Center for Torture Victims, Secretary General of the Palestinian Independent Commission for Citizens Rights, and an active member of the Campaign against Torture and the International Campaign to End the Siege. We are honored to welcome Dr. Sarraj to the pages of The Link.The title of his article, “The Grief Counselor of Gaza,” is ours, not his. We did change it to “A Grief Counselor in Gaza,” thinking the author would prefer the more modest description. Certainly, there are other doctors and nurses in Gaza doing extraordinary work under the most stressful conditions. We suspect, however, that they would be the first to tell us we were right in reverting to the original title. In his recent tour of the Middle East, President Jimmy Carter had lunch with a dozen or so Palestinian leaders from both Fatah and Hamas. At that meeting he embraced Eyad Sarraj, whom he called a courageous human rights leader and longtime acquaintance. (The press thought, wrongly, that Sarraj was a Hamas member, and it became an international news story that the former U.S. president had embraced a Hamas leader.) When Carter returned from his fact-finding trip, he wrote an article that appeared in The Guardian on May 8, 2008. We think this is such an important assessment of the situation in Gaza, we have reprinted it in its entirety on page 11. On page 12, we introduce a new feature “From The Link’s Links.” Each issue will profile a link to a website listed on the Resource page of our website: www.ameu.org. The hope is to put a human face on the digital address by interviewing one of the people involved with the website. To launch our new feature, we have invited Nadia Hijab, senior fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies, to tell us about the Institutes’s website: www.palestine-studies.org. This includes not only its flagship publication, Journal of Palestine Studies, but other unique services, such as its Congressional Monitoring Project, which Nadia explains. Finally, it is with sadness we announce the death of Leila Haddad. While hers was a very special presence here in the New York City area, her quiet dignity was felt by many well beyond our tri-state area. A personal reflection is offered on page 16.—John F. Mahoney, Executive Director, July 2008.
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