An Interview with Bay Area activist Barbara Lubin
Christopher Brown (christo)
Published 2006-10-06 16:56 (KST)
Education has played a big part in Barbara Lubin’s life. In fact, it was education, a broad-based education, that made her realize that she was getting a distorted view of what went on in Israel and the occupied territories.
Lubin was born into a conservative Zionist family. She had been taught that the Jews needed to establish a state of their own, so that what had happened to her relatives during World War II, when their land was occupied, and family members murdered in camps, should never happen again. For much of her life Barbara Lubin felt that the Zionist ideal was the right thing.
However, in 1982 her eyes were open to a new horror: a new form of occupation, enacted by Israelis. In 1982 the massacres of Shabra and Shatila occurred in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon.
Lubin probed more and began to see that Eretz Israel (Greater Israel) was built on land owned by Palestinians. Since her awakening, Lubin has been a tireless promoter of Palestinian rights and recognition.
Lubin is the founder and executive director of The Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA) based in Berkeley, California. MECA has delivered, since 1988, millions of dollars in humanitarian aid to children’s clinics, hospitals, schools, and women’s organizations in the Occupied Territories and Iraq. Her tireless work is an inspiration too many.
I received the chance to speak to Barbara Lubin, via telephone, about the growing crisis in the West Bank and Occupied Territories. [Read the interview]