In late 2000, Palestine was at the beginning of a new crisis. After years of working toward a final settlement agreement with Israel, and nearly achieving it at Camp David, the hope of peace was shattered in an explosion of violence—the al-Aqsa Intifada. Roger Heacock, a professor of history at Bir Zeit University in Palestine, was upset by the response to the renewed conflict by foreign nationals living in Palestine. Most of them began to leave, many directed by the United Nations and other international agencies that em-ployed them.

Heacock set about to rally the remaining foreigners. In his November 2000 Manifesto of Foreign Nationals Living in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Heacock and other co-signers asked why so many foreigners had “abandoned the Palestinians to their fate at the very time when they are most in need.” Despite the constant security threat, Heacock’s alliance proclaimed that they would “remain ...; as workers and witnesses to the struggle and the hardships of the Palestinian people.”

Heacock has been living outside the United States since 1970. He was teaching at Colorado College at the time and says he “turned against U.S. policy” in Vietnam and became part of a quixotic movement for a “reverse brain drain” to protest American military action. A birthright Quaker, he had been a conscientious objector since the early 1960s and increasingly identified with the internationalist movement, which Heacock says “supports the liberation struggles of occupied people everywhere.” Arriving first in Geneva, he took up a teaching position at the Graduate Institute of International Studies and later taught at the American University in Cairo and the University of Paris, where he met his wife, Laura Wick. He even brought his family to Nicaragua for a while during the Sandinista era in an act of solidarity with the ongoing socialist revolution.

As a child of an American diplomat who grew up in several Western European countries, Heacock always had a more international outlook than his American-bred classmates. Yet he admits that he stayed more on the political sidelines during his time at Swarthmore, when “the movements for integration, peace, socialism, and communism were rife in the ‘Kremlin on the Crum,’ which was regularly visited by the likes of Pete Seeger and Gus Hall, head of the U.S. Communist Party.” He participated in attempts to integrate white establishments in Chester and rallied against the embargo on Castro’s Cuba. He also remembers attending a rally for John F. Kennedy and, “along with others, holding up a sign that read, “Mr. Kennedy: What is your Program for Peace?” Given that his family’s Philadelphia Quaker roots stretch back to the 17th century, his later interest in peace action after college does not seem surprising.

Heacock’s academic works are similarly focused, ranging from an assessment of 18th-century European landscape design and its influence in the Middle East to overarching reviews of American foreign policy. He manages to use his fluent German, French, and Italian in his published work. Heacock also teaches and consults with students in Arabic, which he learned during his time in Cairo.

Heacock came to Palestine in 1983, in the wake of U.S. and Israeli action against Palestinians in Lebanon. He and his wife wanted to “bear witness and live in solidarity with the occupied Palestinians.” They settled in Ramallah, just north of Jerusalem, and have stayed there through the 1987 intifada, the Gulf War, and now the second intifada. Their three children have all grown up there, which Heacock says has led them to question their identities, as they are truly global citizens—half-French, half-American residents of Israeli-occupied Palestine.

His 16-year-old son Jamal, the youngest child, attends the French school in West Jerusalem. A little more than a year ago, the commute to school from Ramallah was safe and quick, but it is now an intense, often dangerous journey through two Israeli border checkpoints. In early September of this year, a bomb exploded in front of Jamal’s school. No students were hurt, but Heacock admits that “it has been infernal every day worrying about my son; it’s been a terrible year.”

In these heavy times, he keeps a copy of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in his book bag, a rather erudite choice for “escapist literature.” But he claims that “it is actually quite funny” and then comments about Chaucer’s racier themes that are edited out of classroom editions.

It is this kind of delightful humor and congenial outlook on life that contribute to Heacock’s optimism regarding eventual peace and the establishment of democracy in Palestine. Yet he maintains that “the current violence will never end until the occupation ends.” And as he wrote in his Manifesto, he intends to re-main to see that happen.