Mark Braverman (born 1948) is an American psychologist and activist for Palestinian rights. He is the executive director of Kairos USA, a pro-Palestinian group for American Christians.
Early life and education
Braverman was born in 1948 to a Conservative Jewish family in Philadelphia, United States.
He has written that his grandfather was "a fifth-generation Palestinian Jew" who "was born in the Old City of Jerusalem" and was "a direct descendant of the Lubavicher Rebbe." The grandfather emigrated to the U.S. early in the 20th century.
He has said that he was brought up a Zionist. “Zionism was mother's milk,” he has written, “together with love for and connection with my family, almost all of whom live in Israel. I was raised as a Conservative Jew – I was a product of Solomon Schechter Day School, President of Philadelphia Region USY and National Vice President, and a camper and then counselor at Camp Ramah.”
He has described his grandmother as “a sweet woman with a big heart” who got her family through the Great Depression and struggled with “a tyrannical father and an equally tyrannical husband.” She also, according to him, harbored a deep contempt for gentiles and was a member of Hadassah, the women's Zionist organization. For her, he has maintained, “there were no Palestinians and there was no Nakba. There was only this precious reality of Israel, this wondrous repository of Jewish culture, this bulwark against the Nations Who Seek to Destroy Us.” He has said that this grandmother was “a product of her upbringing and of her times,” which “for the Jews of America...were simpler times.”
Evolving views of Israel
Braverman has written that he first traveled to Israel in the early 1960s with other people from Camp Ramah. Elsewhere, he has written that he “fell in love” with Israel when he first visited Israeli relatives at age 17. But though those relatives “warmly embraced me,” he has said, he “noticed the fear and sense of superiority in the way they talked about 'the Arabs.'” It reminded him, he has maintained, of white racists in the U.S. talking about people of color in the years before the Civil Rights era, and it was then that he saw “that there was a fundamental flaw in the Zionist project.”
Still, his “love for Israel stayed strong,” and after college he lived on Kibbutz Sasa, “ignoring the implications of the pre-1948 Palestinian homes turned into Jewish housing and the abandoned olive groves on the edges of the newly-planted apple orchards.” Over the years, he has written, his “concerns about Israel increased in direct proportion to the pace of illegal settlement-building;” the “pictures of Israeli bulldozers uprooting three hundred year-old olive trees and Jewish soldiers restraining Arab villagers crying hysterically over the destruction of their groves” changed his view of the Israeli tree-planting of his youth. Yet, he has said, he continued to cling to “the Zionist narrative: the Occupation, although lamentably abusive of human rights, was the price of security.”
But when he went to the West Bank in 2006, his view of Israel changed entirely. He “saw the hillsides denuded of trees to build concrete Jewish settlement cities” and “saw Arab houses leveled and gardens taken to make way for a 30 foot-high concrete wall cutting through Palestinian cities and village fields.” He decided that the argument that the wall's purpose was to defend Israel was “a lie.” And he “realized that, no matter what rationales were advanced in justification of Israel’s current policies, these actions would never lead to peace and security for Israel. I saw that the role of occupier was leading Israel down a road of political disaster, and the Jewish people down a road of spiritual peril.”
These observations, plus his personal encounters with Palestinians during the same 2006 trip, “fundamentally changed” his views of Israel, Braverman has maintained. A profile of him recounted his daily walks, during that visit, “from Israeli West Jerusalem to Arab East Jerusalem,” where the director of Sabeel, a Palestinian aid organization, called herself a follower of Jesus, whom she described as “a Palestinian Jew who said, ‘Love your enemies.’” “This,” according to the profile, “all made sense to him.”
Braverman has since “devoted himself full-time to the Israel-Palestine conflict,” which he has called “the greatest crisis in Jewish history since the Babylonian exile.”