Berkeley Conference Speakers--Partial List

KEYNOTE SPEAKER:  Jean Zaru—Palestinian Christian from Ramallah (West Bank); founding member of Sabeel; spiritual leader in the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers); member of the International Council of the World Conference for Religion and Peace; former president of the Jerusalem YWCA; author of A Christian Palestinian Life: Faith and Struggle & Overcoming Direct and Structural Violence: Truth and Peacemaking in the Palestinian Experience.

Rev. Dr. Fahed Abu-Akel—Moderator, 214th General Assembly, Presbyterian Church USA; Palestinian from the village of Kuffer-Yassif in Galilee; Executive Director of Atlanta Ministry with International Students.

Isham Ahmad—Birzeit University in the West Bank, professor of politics at St. Mary’s, Moraga, CA.

Mubarak Awad—Psychologist in Washington, D.C.; founder and director of Nonviolence International, advocating peaceful solutions to the Palestine-Israel conflict. 

Anna Baltzer—Jewish-American, granddaughter   of a Holocaust survivor; Fulbright scholar; volunteer with the International Women’s Peace Service; author of Witness in Palestine: Journal of a Jewish American Woman in the Occupied Territories; presentation covers checkpoints, settlements, demonstrations, Israeli activism, environmental issues, the Separation Wall, and more.

Phyllis Bennis—Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies focusing on Middle East and United Nations issues; has written widely on Palestine, Iraq, and U.S. domination of the U.N., including primers  on Palestine and Iraq; former co-chair of the U.S. Campaign to End Israeli Occupation.

Chris Brown, former Christian Peacemaker Team member in Hebron

Craig and Cindy Corrie—Parents of Rachel Corrie, 23,  of Olympia, WA, killed by an Israeli bulldozer in Rafah Camp, Gaza Strip, March 2003.

Mitchell Plitnick—Director, Jewish Voice for Peace.

Mazin Qumsiyeh—(Qumsiyeh.org) Served  on the faculties of Duke and Yale Universities; on steering committee of the U.S. Campaign to End the Occupation; executive committee of Palestinian American Congress (http://www.pac-national.org/) and board of the Association for One Democratic State in Israel/Palestine (one-democratic-state.org).  His third and latest book is Sharing the Land of Canaan: Human Rights and the Israeli/Palestinian Struggle.  

Rosemary Radford Ruether—Carpenter Emerita  Professor of Feminist Theology at Pacific School of Religion; author of The Wrath of Jonah: The Crisis of Religious Nationalism in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (2002) and Amerika, Amerika: Elect Nation and  Imperial Violence, scheduled for publication in June 2007. 

Donald Wagner—Professor of religion and Middle Eastern studies at North Park University in Chicago and executive director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies; author of Anxious for Armageddon (1995) and Dying in the Land of Promise: Palestine and Palestinian Christianity from Pentecost to 2000 (2003).

Stephen Zunes—Professor   of Politics/International Studies at the University of San Francisco, teaching courses on Middle Eastern and African politics, nonviolence, conflict resolution, and globalization; prominent specialist on U.S. Middle East policy; author of Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and  the Roots of Terrorism.