Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October/November 2000, pages 49, 113

Memorial Service Remarks

Grace Halsell (1923-2000)

A portion of the remarks delivered by John F. Mahoney, executive director of Americans for Middle East Understanding, at the Aug. 21 memorial service for Grace Halsell

I met Grace Halsell in 1981 when she was in New York City to promote her new book, Journey to Jerusalem. A best-selling author—Soul Sister sold over one million copies, I read recently—Grace’s name gave her easy entrée to book publishers, who knew they had a ready market for her works.

I met the MacMillan editor who handled Grace’s manuscript—an Irish Catholic not unlike my own good self—some years later and, after a few cups of strong tea, he confided what had happened when he picked up the manuscript. He told me he had never seen anywhere—books, movies, television—what Grace was describing about Palestinians losing their land and homes and their treatment under Israeli occupation. He felt sure her version of the facts wasn’t true, but if he rejected a book by Grace Halsell he was going to have to have a good explanation.

So he gave the manuscript to a friend at the Israeli Consulate, who returned the next day and said: “You’re not going to print this, are you?” Asked to point out the errors, the Consulate friend could reply only that the book “lacked balance.” Convinced then that the book was factually correct, the editor pushed forward with publication. But, under pressure, MacMillan withdrew its promotional support—no book party, no book tour. Grace was left to promote it herself, which she did with characteristic determination.

She’d travel just about anywhere to tell the American public what was happening under
a military occupation that their tax dollars were paying for.

A snapshot of what followed next was made known to me in copious notes taken and typed up by Grace nearly two decades ago. I will read from them:

Nov. 21, 1981: I’m in Madison, Wisconsin, to give a talk at the Madison Civics Club. This the first talk I’ll make under auspices of Washington, DC lecture agent Judith F. Geller, who has asked to represent me. For this talk, Geller makes a formal contract with the club’s president, Mrs. Charlotte Spohn, in which Mrs. Spohn agrees that the club will pay a lecture fee of $1,000, one third of which will go to Geller, the remainder to me.

At the hotel, where I’ve spent the night, I look over my notes. As in previous talks I’ll be discussing the Christians, Muslims and Jews I write about in “Journey to Jerusalem.” I telephone my mother in Texas, asking for her good wishes.

I walk across a downtown Madison street to the club building. Once on the podium, I look out to an audience of 1,000 persons. I spot two friends, the Rev. Humphrey Walz, a retired Presbyterian minister, and Mrs. Walz, who have driven to Madison from their home in Janesville. Per the contract specifications, I am to talk for 50 minutes. Geller, to my surprise, had contacted the club’s president and said, since I am speaking about Arabs and Jews—a “sensitive subject”—she wants to hear the tape of the Madison talk. The club president makes a tape and sends it to her.

Nov. 22, 1981: I speak to the Woman’s Club of Sewickley Valley, Pennsylvania, my talk having been arranged by lecture agent Geller who signed a contract with club president Mrs. Theodore Kane.

Following a club luncheon, I begin at 1:30 p.m., and am near the end of my talk. I’ve talked about being in the home of Aviva and Reuven, who are members of “Peace Now” and favor a Palestinian state, and am relating my having spent time in the home of Linda and Bobby Brown, third generation Americans who became militant Jewish settlers on land confiscated from Palestinians. Suddenly I’m startled to hear shouting: “I want to know who invited you to speak at this club? Who are you? What are your credentials to speak about Israel? That land, all of that land, belongs to the Jews.” Stunned by the unexpected outburst, I see a woman, not far from the podium, on her feet and shaking a fist at me: “I am shocked that this club would invite you to speak!” Before I can attempt a response, she hurls her ultimate weapon:

“You—and your talk—smack of antisemitism!”

With that, she sits down. After I wrap up my talk, I’m greeted with applause from an audience no less startled by the rude shouting than I. “Don’t worry,” a club member assures me: “That one woman represents only one voice. I’m sure the majority appreciated your talk.”

Nov. 24: Judy Geller calls. “I heard about the problem, the woman shouting at you,” she begins. “Did you give the same talk you gave in Madison?”

“Yes,” I respond. “I said nothing different.”

“I don’t understand. My husband and I listened to that tape together, we thought it fair, evenhanded. Now my husband says the woman’s outburst and accusations sound to him like McCarthyism.”

Nov. 25: Geller again calls. Her voice now high pitched, nervous. “I’ve received a strong letter of protest, of complaint from a woman who is very important.” I ask Geller if she will send me a copy of the letter? Then I could make a reply.

“I can’t send you a copy of the letter,” Geller says. “That would be breaking a confidence. But I can tell you she’s very powerful and she’s very upset. She’s making certain demands, certain threats.

“She is a club member and a former president,” Geller says. “I can’t show you the letter. But I’ll read it over the phone.” I listen then, not to specific complaints or items dealing with what she might term factual untruths, but to an attack on my character, my integrity. She calls me “unreliable” and not the type of person who should be given the right of addressing the Sewickley Valley Woman’s Club that had “high standards” for its speakers.

I remind Geller that out of several hundred women only one became emotionally distraught. “I hope you do not act or take any action based on one woman’s ‘painful experience.’”

Geller is silent. Then, she admits: “I’m getting a lot of pressure.”

Dec. 1: I get a check from Geller. She has taken her third of the proceeds. She’s sorry, she says, but she must drop me from her roster of speakers.

The Presbyterian minister mentioned in Grace’s notes is a man now approaching 90 and still living in Wisconsin. I phoned him to tell him of Grace’s death. We talked about Grace and her work, and at one point I said: “Grace was certainly a good friend of the Palestinians.” There was a moment’s silence and Humphrey replied: “What Grace was was a good person.”

Grace and I never discussed our church affiliations and I never knew which, if any church, she attended. But if being a Christian means comforting the afflicted, visiting the imprisoned, and walking in the shoes of the most marginalized in our world in order to publicize their plight, then Grace Halsell was one of the finest Christians I have ever known.

I had the privilege—and pleasure—of accompanying Grace on three of her trips to the Middle East. Each time she would start out with a large overstuffed duffle bag, which I would help her lug from place to place. But the bag would get lighter as the trip progressed because Grace would give away the clothes that she had crammed inside it. Often as we left a refugee camp or went to visit a Palestinian family whose home had been demolished, Grace would quietly go up to a mother and ask if she would do her the favor of taking some clothes to save her the trouble of carrying them back. By the end of the trip the bag would be pretty much empty of clothes and in their place would be voluminous notes she had taken of interviews documenting the daily harassment and humiliation that Palestinians were suffering under military occupation. Once she brought back an entire cassette of interviews with young Palestinian men who told of the tortures they endured in the Israeli military prisons. And when she returned home to Washington, she’d spend hours, usually rising early in the morning, to write articles and books; she’d travel just about anywhere to give a lecture; she readily accepted radio and TV interviews—all for the purpose of telling the American public what was happening under a military occupation that their tax dollars were paying for.

I have focused on Grace’s connection with the Middle East because her concern for the Palestinians, for Palestinian Christians and Palestinian Muslims, remained the focal point of her work as a journalist for the last quarter-century of her life.

Grace Halsell had no acquaintances, only friends. Her friends included presidents, diplomats, and university professors; they also included the taxi driver who drove her to see the presidents, diplomats, and university professors, and the waiters who served her when she dined with the presidents, diplomats, and university professors.

We who are gathered here today are joined in friendship with Grace. But her circle of friends extends well beyond the walls of this church and stretches all across this country: from Harlem to Howard University to Mississippi, to the Navajo Reservation in California, even, I suspect, to Sewickley Valley, Pennsylvania. And well beyond the borders of our country to Mexico, Peru, China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, Russia, and Bosnia. There are people in these places, and in so many other small towns and villages most of us probably never heard of, who found in Grace Halsell a friend, a soul sister, someone who cared.

And that’s the thing of it: Grace really did care.

And, God knows, we will miss her so very much.