Media Pro Greta Berlin Will Show Her Power Point Presentation Anywhere in U.S.

By Pat McDonnell Twair


Activist Greta (“Um Ribhi”) Berlin.

“IT'S THE CHILDREN, it’s always the Palestinian children who burn into my memory,” lamented International Solidarity Movement (ISM) volunteer Greta Berlin as we watched televised images of the latest Israeli assault on Gaza’s Rafah refugee camp.

“Their eyes watch you,” she continued, “especially the little ones; the tiny boy who was hit in the head by shrapnel in Jenin, the small girl who watched the Israeli bulldozers mangle her home in Nablus.

“Now these same children’s eyes look out in TV footage from Rafah as they witness Israeli bulldozers demolish their homes and see American-made Apache helicopters fire missiles on them. How will they ever see a better world,” Berlin asked, “when the Israeli military forces this deliberate carnage on their families?

“Palestinians count on us internationals to help,” explained the successful businesswoman, whose leg is scarred by a wound from an Israeli rubber-coated steel bullet. “They ask us why the U.S. is paying the Israelis to bomb them. I told them I would come back and tell every American I could what is truly happening. I’m mad and sad, and I don’t know what else to do.”

Berlin’s 2003 journey to Palestine as an ISM volunteer was part of a decades-long struggle to find justice for the Palestinians that began in 1967.

“On June 5, 1967,” she recalled, “I went to sleep as a nice high school English teacher with two young babies. On June 6, when I woke up and heard Israel was driving the Palestinians off their land for the second time in 19 years, I vowed to make Americans aware of this travesty.”

The vivacious Berlin halts to explain her circumstances at the time. “My husband, Ribhi, was a 1948 refugee from Safad. I met him in 1963, just as I was entering graduate school at Bowling Green State University. He looked like Omar Sharif—the young Omar Sharif. He swept me off my feet.”

The couple married. Their daughter, Kristen Raifa, was born in 1964, and a son, Michael Ribhi, was born in 1967.

Berlin stopped teaching for two years and worked full-time to send medicine and aid to the Palestinians. She and her husband founded a non-profit charitable organization, Pal Aid International, and asked multinational drug companies for unused cough medicine, aspirin and other over-the-counter items. She collected blankets and clothing.

“I had so much confidence in the good I was doing that I persuaded airlines traveling to Beirut to deliver the goods for free to the Lebanese Red Cross, which then turned them over to the Red Crescent Society for refugees.”

Berlin and many volunteers oversaw dozens of garage sales and raised enough money to purchase a BMW ambulance in Germany, which she and her husband escorted for delivery in Lebanon.

Owing to her master’s degree in mass communications and theater arts, Berlin knew how to approach the media, which publicized her activities on behalf of the Palestinians.

However, she told the Washington Report, “The publicity backfired. All of a sudden, the IRS was auditing my husband’s engineering firm, the FBI was questioning us. The final straw was in the early 1970s, when the Jewish Defense League phoned late at night and said if any passengers were murdered in the airline hijackings that were going on at the time, my children would be killed.”

Berlin wasn’t afraid for herself, but she wasn’t willing to risk her children’s lives for her activism. She attributes the breakup of her marriage to the FBI and JDL harassment.

By 1978, she had carved out a unique and lucrative career as a media and presentations coach for engineers and health care workers. Her first client was a petroleum services company. Today, she is commissioned by multinational corporations to conduct seminars for their employees all over the world.

What prompted her to become an activist for the Palestinians after a quarter-century hiatus?

“In 1997, my daughter was on a tour to Palestine sponsored by Queen Noor,” she related. “When the group entered Israel, the border goons asked her where her father was born. She replied he was a Palestinian from Safad. They refused to let her enter and detained her for nine hours.

“How dare they!” Berlin exclaimed. “My ex-husband cannot return to his birth city, his children cannot see their father’s birthplace, but any Jew from anywhere in the world is welcome to live in Palestine.”

From then on, Berlin said, she wrote letters to the editors of major U.S. publications and to her congressman protesting each new Israeli outrage against the Palestinian people. With the onset of the current intifada, she increased her efforts—and, when she heard about the nonviolent ISM founded by Dr. Ghassan Andoni, Neta Golan, Adam Shapiro and Huwaida Arraf, began toying with the idea of going to Palestine.

“After Rachel Corrie was intentionally crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer in April 2003, I contacted ISM and was on a plane to Tel Aviv three months later,” she explained.

On July 20 of that year, Berlin joined 27 other new volunteers at ISM headquarters in Beit Sahour. “We were Dutch, Swiss, British, Swedes, Americans, members of Jews Against The Occupation, and one crazy Irishman,” she said. “Our ages ranged from 19 to 64.”

The group went through two days of intensive training on nonviolent techniques and how to protect oneself when settlers attack (never fall to the ground). ISM put Berlin to work writing press releases on upcoming demonstrations and reports on Israeli attacks against unarmed civilians.

“Many foreign journalists would turn out for our demonstrations, but never Americans,” she said with disgust in her voice. “CNN told me all their film footage had to go through the Israeli military or they’d be kicked out of the country. Well, why didn’t they test them? CNN reporters sat drinking at the American Colony Hotel and writing stories verbatim from Israeli ‘Offense’ Force releases.”

She wrote numerous announcements of a July 28, 2003 demonstration at Anin, outside Jenin. Thirty to 40 internationals and 30 Israeli peace activists marched in front of 400 Palestinians to a gate in the apartheid wall separating farmers from their land. Armed settlers and soldiers in tanks and armored personnel carriers were ready for them.

The younger ISM volunteers shook the gate, while others broke the lock with bolt cutters. The gate swung open and tear gas, noise bombs and rubber bullets filled the air. Berlin saw one ISM volunteer fall after he was shot in the stomach by a rubber bullet. Then Thomas, who had been on the gate, was shot in the back. Berlin ran to help Thomas, and felt pain in her right calf.

“My adrenalin was pumping and I didn’t realize I’d been shot by a rubber bullet,” she said. “My main concern was for Thomas. The Israeli army says it doesn’t shoot at women. I have proof that’s a lie.”

Within five minutes, seven people had been wounded by rubber bullets.

“Journalists say if it bleeds, it leads,” Berlin noted. “We got plenty of media coverage July 28, when we peacekeepers literally bled for the Palestinians. And it wouldn’t have had to happen if Israel would allow the U.N. to have observers protecting the Palestinians from human rights violations.”

The wounded ISM volunteers remained on the job, she said, reminding the media that they were shot with rubber bullets, whereas the Israelis use live ammunition on Palestinians, and shoot to kill.

Though her family was concerned for her safety, Berlin said they supported her decision.

“Impossible to Explain”

“It’s impossible to explain why I went there,” she added, “just as I can’t find an answer for why the Palestinians burrow into your soul and remain there.”

As she bore witness to the slow genocide of the Palestinian people, Berlin rode in ambulances to deter Israeli soldiers from firing into them or beating up the medics. She and her fellow ISM volunteers helped tear down Israeli barricades blocking Palestinian roads, and broke curfews to bring bread to the people of Jenin.

She saw Israeli tanks spray DDT out of the rear of their tanks in heavily populated areas of Jenin, which has registered an increase in miscarriages, fetal deaths and deformed infants.

“This land and its people are dying,” she warned, “and the world does nothing. I hold little hope that anyone will stop the Israeli government headed by a man famous since 1952 for annihilating Palestinians.”

Berlin took heart over an incident that occurred Aug. 2. Internationals finally managed to get into Qalqilya, and began to throw paint balls in the green, red, black and white colors of the Palestinian flag on the hated apartheid wall. Next they wrote slogans. On the other side of the wall, Israeli peace activists were doing the same.

“Eet is eeelegal to write on the wall,” came a heavily accented voice over a bullhorn.

The volunteers shouted back repeatedly, “Eet is eeelegal to occupy Palestine.”

A heavy presence of international media protected them that day.

“On Sept. 14,” said Berlin, “I left that paranoid upside down country called Israel. But my heart always will be with those people who called me Um Ribhi.”

In the months she has been back in the U.S., Berlin has compiled CDs with graphic photos and first-person accounts of Israel’s criminal behavior. And she is giving public addresses on her journey to Palestine.

“I’ve been told I was brave and did something many people only dream of doing. I don’t feel any of that,” Berlin sighed. “I just feel unbelievably sad.”

Because she wants to keep her promise to the Palestinians that she will inform Americans about what Israel is doing to them, Berlin says she will take her power point presentation anywhere in the U.S. where an audience of more than 100 Americans is guaranteed. She can be contacted at <tecspk@yahoo.com>.

Pat McDonnell Twair is a free-lance writer based in Los Angeles.