Mark Braverman
Mark Braverman 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.”
Current views
Braverman has written that while he “grew up believing that Israel was the key to Jewish survival,” he now feels that “our task is to rescue Judaism from an ideology that has hijacked the faith, continues to fuel global conflict, and has produced one of the most systematic and longstanding violations of human rights in the world today.” He rejects the idea that Zionism has liberated Jews “from the powerlessness and humiliation of the ghetto,” arguing that “in reality Zionism has served to keep Jews trapped in an isolationist, exclusivist past” and “yoked...to a theology of territoriality and tribal privilege.”Braverman has asserted that “Palestine is being destroyed. Israel has all the power. The Palestinian people — a good, patient people — are being ground into the dirt, their leaders killed, imprisoned or exiled, their young people impoverished and robbed of a future. Any possibility for nonviolent protest is made all but impossible by a brutal military occupation.” Jews, he has said, have “blood on our hands.” As for Palestinian terror, “we must look to the cause.”
Braverman has called on Christians not to “give the Jewish people a free pass,” as he puts it, “out of a sense of guilt for anti-Semitism.”
Braverman has said that “by and large the Palestinians are a peaceful, patient people – and at this pass an angry, humiliated and pained people.” He attributes their plight largely to a “relative lack of organization...in the face of the highly organized and effective Zionist colonial project.”
In a letter to an American rabbi who disagreed with his views, Braverman insisted: “We are doing wrong. We have blood on our hands.” He said that “for most of my adult life” he had chosen “to ignore this truth. Then I saw it with my eyes. Rabbi, you must go and see.” Describing the “Separation Wall” as consisting of a “sanitized Israeli section” and a “real” section which “snak through the West Bank on stolen land, separating Palestinians from Palestinians,” he denied that its real purpose is security, and argued that the checkpoints perpetrate “baseless humiliation and oppression...in our name.”
While acknowledging to the rabbi that the Hamas Charter is “an ugly thing,” he insisted that it “has to be seen in the context of the idiom it uses, and in the political context of a response to the secular PLO regime which was not working.” He further denied that Hamas, since its 2006 electoral victory, had vowed to destroy Israel, and he rejected the claim that there is widespread anti-Semitism in Gaza.
The only way for Israel to be compelled to obey international law and “behave...decently toward the people of Palestine,” Braverman told the rabbi, is for the U.S. “to change its policy of an unconditional green light.” He dismissed concerns about what would happen if Israel became a non-Jewish state: “What if Israel no longer had a Jewish majority...? So what?” He also waved away concerns that “Israel, with the best Army in the world and the full backing of the US, is on the verge of destruction by a ragtag popular movement with basement bombs,” saying that such concerns are “our victim complex talking...the legacy of the trauma of the Holocaust.”
He has written: “I am a proud Jew. I love Israel. And I am heartsick about her.”
Career
Psychologist and consultant
Braverman has extensive experience as a clinical psychologist with an expertise in “traumatic stress and its effect on individuals in disasters, mass violence, organizational change, conflict, and critical incidents.” He describes himself as an “organizational consultant” with a specialty in “corporate crisis management and employment issues related to mental health, work-related stress, organizational change, and conflict and violence in the workplace.”He has “worked with private corporations, government agencies and public entities across the globe in the prevention, response, mitigation and recovery from disasters, violence and potentially business-ending crises -- providing training, policy development, and acute crisis intervention services.” He has also worked as a consultant and trainer for various federal agencies in connection with “workplace violence policy, workplace traumatic stress, and occupational health issues,” and testified in 1992 before a joint U.S. Congressional Subcommittee on “the causes of violence in the U.S. Postal Service.”
CMG Associates / Braverman Group
Braverman and his wife, Susan, founded the founded Crisis Management Group in 1988. Seeking “to respond to the needs of companies, communities and public entities that had experienced a traumatic event,” the Bravermans “developed the industry’s first Workplace Psychological Trauma Intervention Program for Digital Equipment Corporation – a program that has served as a model for the subsequent development of employee-focused critical incident intervention in the workplace.” CMG, later the Braverman Group, gradually expanded its scope, offering “a range of innovative Employee Assistance Programs, providing plans to meet the needs of each client organization.”Kairos USA
Braverman is currently the executive director of Kairos USA, an American Christian movement that was inspired by Kairos Palestine and that has issued its own statement, entitled “Call to Action: a U.S. Christian response to the Palestine Kairos document.”Founded in June 2011 by American Christian clerics, theologians, and laypersons, Kairos USA describes itself as having been founded in response to “the 2009 call of our Palestinian sisters and brothers in Christ to stand with them in their struggle for their fundamental human rights.” Kairos USA describes itself as “taking a bold, prophetic stand for justice in the Holy Land” and as “expressing our love for our sisters and brothers in Israel who for their entire history as a state have been suffering from the social, psychological and spiritual costs of militarization and war itself.”