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The recent huge demonstrations in Israel protesting proposed judicial changes led me to think about the situation of the Palestinian people, almost 2 million of whom are Israeli citizens. I decided to speak with a couple of old friends of mine in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Hawaii Manoa — Ibrahim “Brahim” Aoude and Noel Kent — who have been longtime supporters of the Palestinian cause. 

Despite, or perhaps because of, being about halfway around the world from the refugee camps in which millions of Palestinians have had to live since the creation of Israel in 1948, Aoude and Kent have actively worked with others to inform the local community about ongoing events and crises affecting them.

Born in what was then Jaffa, Palestine, Aoude has devoted decades of deeply committed activism and advocacy on behalf of his people. He arrived in Hawaii in 1969 from Lebanon, where his family had to migrate and he was raised, to join his brother.

He enrolled at Honolulu Community College and later earned a doctorate in political science from UH Manoa, married a local Filipina and began teaching in the UH system in the early 1980s when we met. 

Aoude can be regarded as one of the leading representatives of the small but active Palestinian movement in Hawaii, which is centered at UH Manoa rather than in the community where he estimates they number roughly 300 to 400. His efforts and those of others have kept Hawaii’s people apprised and, at times, moved to act by the tragic plight of the Palestinian people, still with no nation of their own, which receives scant coverage in the local news media.

I have long considered Aoude the most knowledgeable person in Hawaii on contemporary politics in the Middle East and not just the Palestinian situation. Given his access to Arabic-language news sources, I used to encourage him to submit op-ed essays to the Honolulu newspapers to inform the public about that part of the world. But he seemed to prefer doing that via his “Island Connections,” which was produced by the ethnic studies department. 

Between 2001 and 2022, as a public scholar, Aoude was the executive producer and host of this program on which he reviewed and deliberated problems facing the Palestinians and other issues in the Middle East and Hawaii with informed guests from the islands, the continental U.S. and the Middle East.

Aoude has also advanced the Palestinian cause as an academic. He is the editor of the Arab Studies Quarterly, one of the foremost journals in that field, which was co-founded in 1979 by fellow Palestinian Edward Said. This distinction clearly demonstrates international recognition of his scholarship in Arab studies. He thus was invited to contribute a chapter to an edited book, “,” which was published last year.

Also last year, Aoude co-organized an international conference co-sponsored by the ASQ journal at UH Manoa — “Politics, Media, Art, and Culture in the Contemporary Arab World.” It provided a rare opportunity for people here to hear presentations and interact with some of the leading scholars in Arab studies.

Aoude explained why he considers Israel a racist state.

“If you are an Arab Jew, then you are a second-class citizen, while European Jews are first class, and African Jews are third,” he said. “Palestinians who are Israeli citizens don’t have the same rights as others,” including to land, water, education and other public resources.

“Israel refers to Palestinians as Arabs because it doesn’t want to recognize their indigeneity,” he added. “As a settler colonial state, it was established by ethnic cleansing of the Indigenous population” and seizure of their land, which continues to the present by Israeli settlers.

Advocating From Afar

The — who fled or were forcibly displaced from what is now Israel following the United Nation’s partition of British-ruled Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states in 1948 — has been a source of conflict for decades.

Aoude is joined locally in his advocacy efforts by others, including Jewish Americans. That includes another very good friend of ours, Noel Kent, who also is a professor emeritus of ethnic studies at UH. He has been concerned about the predicament of the Palestinian people since 1969 when he was working on a kibbutz and was appalled by the racism against them by Israelis. 

Born and raised in Brooklyn, Kent came to Hawaii in 1965 through the East-West Center and later received a doctorate in political science from UH Manoa. He is especially well known for his book “” on the historical transformation of its economy following Western contact to the dominance of tourism by the 1960s.

Kent began the . BDS, which was started in 2005 by Palestinian civil society organizations, is an international effort modeled after a similar movement against the apartheid regime of South Africa in the 1990s.

It calls for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israeli corporations and institutions until three principal conditions have been met — full equality for Palestinians in Israel, an end to occupation of their lands and implementation of their . 

In 2009, Kent initiated a UH faculty petition demanding that the University of Hawaii Foundation divest its financial investments in Israeli corporations. 

In 2014, Kent, along with 30 other UH Manoa faculty (including myself), signed a statement that asserted “strong opposition” to the university’s “condemnation” of a resolution adopted by the American Studies Association the previous year, which called for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions.

When I asked Kent about being Jewish and supporting the Palestinian cause, he replied, “My family came from Russia where they were treated as third-class citizens. They came to America in the 1920s to escape anti-Semitism. That Jews would now be perpetrators of ethnic violence against others is abhorrent to me, infuriates me.” 

A Modern Pogrom?

Kent contends that Israelis have “forgotten Jewish history,” in which hundreds of thousands of Jews were massacred or forced to flee for their lives. He considers Jewish settlers attacking and killing Palestinian villagers with the complicity of Israeli security forces as a contemporary example of a pogrom.

The protests that have erupted in recent weeks in Israel are focused on trying to stop Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government from weakening the judiciary with reforms critics see as undemocratic. Kent would like to see the Palestinian cause included in the unrest.

“The current crisis in Israel shows the need for reevaluation of uncritical U.S. support (billions of dollars a year in military arms, etc.) and for championing the human and democratic rights of Palestinians,” he says. 

Thousands of miles away in the middle of the Pacific, the Palestinian movement for equality, liberation and their homeland is supported by a small group of committed advocates. Most are not Palestinian but share the group’s strong desire for justice and an end to its racist oppression.