NSU Horizons Fall 2006

32 horizons alumni journal F or Khawla Abu-Baker, Ph.D., a Palestinian Israeli and alumna of NSU’s Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, one person can make a difference. As both a woman reared in a traditional patriarchal society and a Palestinian living in Israel, Abu- Baker is intimately familiar with the issues, risks, and hazards Arab women face each day. Her profes- sional work has been an impassioned response to the social problems she witnessed growing up, she said. After receiving her doctoral degree in family therapy in 1997, Abu-Baker returned to Israel to found the first private family ther- apy clinic in the Palestinian-Arab community. The following year, she joined Emek Yezreel College, and is currently a senior lecturer and researcher in the Department of Behavioral Science. In the coming year, she will direct a new certificate program of culturally sensitive fam- ily therapy at the college. Shortly after her return to Israel, Abu-Baker directed a mental health project in the West Bank to help mourning Palestinian families who lost relatives during the Second Palestinian Intifada, a wave of violence that began in September 2000 between Palestinian Arabs and Israelis. Later, she directed a clinical project at a boarding institute for sexually abused Arab girls. Abu-Baker spoke recently with Horizons by cellular phone. Her university office, located in northern Israel, was closed amid a continued military conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, which operates just north of the Israeli border, in Lebanon. “My experience in the U.S. was both wonderful and exhausting,” she said. “On the academic level, I studied a specialty that does not exist at the Ph.D. level in Israel. On the cultural level, I had an extraordinary experience. I gained new friends with whom I continue to have enduring relationships.” She has published 11 books and 28 articles and chapters, as well as given 54 workshops and lectures at inter- national conferences in East Asia, Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and North America. She also authored texts on Palestinian- Arabs in Israel and studies of cross- generational sexual abuse within the extended family. Abu-Baker has participated in 42 local academic conferences and symposia; serves on the board of several journals and regularly pub- lishes and lectures in Arabic, Hebrew, and English. Most recently, Abu-Baker lectured extensively in the U.S. in support of her book, Coffins on Our Shoulders: the Experience of the Palestinian Citizens of Israel (University of California Press, 2005), which she co-authored with Dan Rabinowitz, a senior lecturer at Tel-Aviv University. Abu-Baker said many in her com- munity were not familiar with the practice of family therapy, so she promoted the profession as a frequent guest host on an Israeli radio station broadcast in Hebrew and Arabic. She also wrote a column in a national Israeli newspaper in an effort to raise awareness of her profession and her services. In a related effort to serve and advance her community, profession, and gender, Abu-Baker established the Mar’ha (“Woman”) Institute to research issues of importance to Arab women in the Middle East. Currently, she is involved with a project aimed at developing tools for treating incest trauma among Arab female victims. She has found that Arab women do live diverse lives— from the very traditional to the fully modern—but that the status of Arab women is sometimes subject to political reali- ties. “Some regimes are supportive of women’s rights; some are more repressive. During wars, women suffer, and tradi- tionally, the struggle of women has been made secondary to Making a Difference in the Middle East Khawla Abu-Baker, Ph.D., class of 1997 By Randy Abraham Continued on page 35