Berkeley’s Barbara Lubin, Longtime Champion of Palestinian Human Rights, Dies at 84

Bay Area activist Barbara Lubin, who worked for more than half a century in support of disability rights, international peace and Palestinian human rights, died on Saturday in Berkeley, her family said. She was 84.

Throughout her life, Lubin’s tireless advocacy brought her from antiwar demonstrations to the Berkeley school board to the streets of the West Bank and Gaza.

“Barbara will be remembered as a person who never saw an injustice she didn’t try to right, never saw somebody’s pain that she didn’t try to ease and never turned away when something was in her way that could have made somebody’s life better,” her husband, Howard Levine, told KQED.

Lubin was perhaps best known for co-founding the Middle East Children’s Alliance in 1988. As part of her work with MECA, she helped deliver millions of dollars in aid and support hundreds of community projects for children in the occupied Palestinian territories, Iraq and Lebanon.

“She started an organization at a time when it was very hard in the United States to do work for Palestine, to be in solidarity,” Zeiad Abbas Shamrouch, MECA’s executive director, told KQED. “For us as Palestinians, in that period, to have an ally in the U.S. supporting local initiatives was huge.”

Lubin, who spoke often about her Jewish identity, strove to bridge national, ethnic and religious boundaries in her work, MECA said in a statement announcing her death. She is survived by her husband, Levine, her four children and seven grandchildren.

Born in Philadelphia in 1941 to a family that supported Israel, she dropped out of high school after the 10th grade to support her family following the death of her father, her son said.

In the late 1960s, Lubin became an anti-Vietnam War activist, dressing as a man to infiltrate military enlistment centers and pass out leaflets. She also worked as a draft counselor, advising young men about their options, and was arrested blocking a naval ship at the Port of Delaware.

In 1969, her son Charlie was born with Down syndrome. His treatment by his medical providers and his exclusion from education in Berkeley, where the family had moved in 1973, led Lubin to sue the district over their lack of opportunities for students with disabilities. She eventually mounted a successful run for the Berkeley school board.

“The moment Charlie came home from the hospital, my mother’s politics really were organized — not necessarily as consciously political, but as attempts to find ways to build a life for Charlie,” said Barbara’s son Alex Lubin.

In the early 1980s, Lubin became active in the fight to bring rent control to Berkeley after Ozzie’s Soda Fountain, a restaurant in the Elmwood neighborhood that her son Charlie loved, was sold to developers.

“The next day, my mother had a table out in front of Ozzie’s,” Alex said. “She started the Elmwood Preservation Society. And she fought the developers, and she worked with other people to draft legislation for the first commercial rent control law in the United States.”

The Elmwood rent measure was passed by Berkeley voters in 1982, followed by similar ordinances covering Telegraph Avenue and West Berkeley, before all three were blocked by the California Legislature in 1988, according to research published in a UC Berkeley law quarterly. 

Next, Lubin became active in the movement opposing U.S. military intervention in Central America and joined a group of female peace advocates who barricaded the entrance to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1984 as part of a nonviolent anti-nuclear proliferation protest.

It was in those years that she was approached by a group of Palestinian and Arab students from San Francisco State University, who asked her why, for all of her advocacy in the Bay Area around disability rights and leftist politics, she never took a stand on Palestinian human rights.

“My mother’s response to them was, ‘Why would I say anything? I’m Jewish.’ She thought it wasn’t her issue,” Alex said.

The students convinced her to join a delegation that included Jeanne Butterfield, a leading immigrant rights attorney, as well as local politicians and interfaith leaders, to visit the occupied Palestinian territories.

The tour, in early 1988, took place shortly after Palestinian civilians launched an uprising against Israel’s military occupation and documented human rights violations, including home demolitions, forced deportations and the suppression of political and educational activities. The uprising, which included both nonviolent protests and deadly attacks, was met with violent and brutal crackdowns by Israeli forces.

“She saw Palestine for the first time, and she saw many of the forests that her family contributed money to develop through the Jewish National Fund when she was a little kid,” Alex said. “And she was appalled. She was sickened by the injustice she saw. She had always believed that what was good enough for Charlie, what was good enough for her kids, was good enough for all kids.”

Within a year, Lubin formed the Middle East Children’s Alliance with Levine, a journalist who became Lubin’s husband and partner. The organization’s early board included luminaries such as Edward Said, a Palestinian-born postcolonial academic and literary critic; Sen. James Abourezk, the first Arab to serve in the U.S. Senate; and poets Allen Ginsberg and Maya Angelou.

The organization today is one of the leading groups raising funds and awareness for the plight of Palestinian children, as well as children across the Middle East. Under Lubin’s leadership, the alliance built playgrounds and safe water infrastructure in refugee camps in Gaza, donated ambulances, delivered medicine and food, and led dozens of American delegations to the Middle East.

In the 1990s, Lubin smuggled food and medicine into Iraq during the U.S.-led international sanctions. In 1999, MECA sponsored the first and only U.S. tour of Ibdaa, an internationally acclaimed youth dance troupe from the West Bank, which introduced thousands of Americans to the stories of Palestinian refugees, farmers and prisoners through traditional dance and choreography. The tour included a performance at the Alcatraz Indigenous Peoples’ Sunrise Ceremony on Thanksgiving.

Abbas, who has helmed MECA since Lubin’s retirement in 2018, recalled meeting her for the first time in the early 1990s, when he was a young man living in Bethlehem’s Dheisheh refugee camp, surrounded by a fence that was “eight meters high.” He was put off at first, he said, by her intense questioning about his and other Palestinians’ circumstances, but he quickly grew to respect and value her fearlessness and pragmatism as she returned time and time again.

“​​She was in no way someone who would take a few steps back,” Abbas said. “All the time, she moved forward. Her legacy will live with us with all the work we are doing.”

On May 29, 2018, the Berkeley City Council proclaimed June 4 “Barbara Lubin Day” in Berkeley, to honor her decades of extraordinary activism.

According to Nora Barrows-Friedman, a friend and journalist who worked with Lubin on her unreleased memoir, much of the work Lubin spearheaded in Gaza — as well as MECA’s ongoing efforts following her retirement — has been destroyed or severely damaged by Israeli military campaigns over the past two years.

“I think what carries me on is my anger at injustice,” Lubin said, in a statement shared by MECA. “I know a lot of people say it’s not good to be angry, but in reality, it’s the anger at the unfairness in this world that just spurs me on. When I think something is really wrong, I’m not going to be quiet. I get up, and I fight, and I try and change it.”