Community & Alumni Blog
Kathy Bergen: Working for justice in the Middle East
Kathy Bergen is one of four people who received CMU's 2014 Blazer Distinguished Alumni Award at Fall Festival this past weekend. The awards celebrate alumni who, through their lives, embody CMU's values and mission of service, leadership, and reconciliation in church and society.
The Israel-Palestine conflict is an abstract concept for most Canadians, but not for Kathy Bergen.
Kathy Bergen.
Since 1982, Bergen has been with a variety of organizations working for justice in the Middle East. She has spent 16 of the past 32 years living there, and says she knew being there felt right when she first visited as part of an Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary study tour.
Shortly after the study tour, Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) hired Bergen to be its peace education worker in Jerusalem.
“I came to Jerusalem and I felt like it was my home, that this was my city,” Bergen said during a recent Skype conversation from Jerusalem, where she was serving for six weeks with MCC. “It is a place that I resonate with and feel totally at home in. I never had culture shock here—I just felt totally a part of this culture, a part of this land.”
Bergen says that in 1982, she stopped working and started living out her life’s commitment: to work for peace, which will only result if there is justice and equality for both Palestinians and Israelis.
During her first nine-year stint in the Middle East, Bergen’s work took her into the local Palestinian Christian and Muslim communities, as well as the Israeli peace movement. She organized study tours in Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel for study groups who came to the Middle East from universities, seminaries, colleges, and churches from around the world.
After the Gulf War in 1991, Bergen lived in Geneva, Switzerland where she was the director of the International Coordinating Committee for NGOs on the Question of Palestine (ICCP). This office coordinated information and solidarity work among more than 1,200 non-governmental organizations and more than 400 individuals from around the world, including Israeli and Palestinian NGOs, working on issues related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
After that, Bergen spent 12 years in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania as the National Coordinator of the Middle East Program of the Peacebuilding Unit in the national office of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)—a Quaker organization that works for peace and social justice in the U.S. and around the world.
In 2006, Bergen moved to Ramallah, a Palestinian city north of Jerusalem, where she was the Program Coordinator for the Friends International Center in Ramallah, a Quaker ministry that has worked for peace and justice in Palestine since the 1850s. She held the position until June 2013.
Bergen, who holds three undergraduate degrees, a pre-Master’s degree in educational psychology, and a Master of Divinity, has received multiple awards for her 32 years of work on Israeli-Palestinian issues.
She says her passion for social justice dates back to her time as a student at Canadian Mennonite Bible College (CMBC), one of CMU’s predecessor institutions. Bergen was one of the founding members of CMBC’s peace club, a student group that still exists today as the Peace and Sustainability subcommittee of CMU’s Student Council.
The peace club tried to make students aware of peace and justice issues, participated in demonstrations about Canada’s involvement in the Vietnam War, and got involved in local peace issues. Creation care and simple living was important to the group.
For Bergen, it was a rich time of discovering what it means to work for peace and justice.
“You don’t work for peace,” she said. “You work for justice, and peace is the result of working for justice.”
Bergen was an elementary school teacher for two years prior to coming to CMBC. She enjoyed teaching, but wanted to study theology at the same academic level she had studied other subjects in the past. She graduated with a Bachelor of Theology in 1972.
“The main reason for coming was to figure out where I was coming from as a Christian and as an Anabaptist Mennonite,” she said. “I think the latter was probably the most significant—discovering who the Anabaptists were in a new way, and what is required of me as a result of being an Anabaptist.”
After finishing her time in Ramallah, Bergen moved back to Canada in July 2013 and currently resides in Waterloo. She continues to be involved with Middle East issues and has been back to Palestine and Israel three times in the past year.
Bergen doesn’t see the Israeli-Palestinian situation as a conflict, but rather a case of one group being dispossessed by another group. She is critical of Israeli policies that dispossess Palestinians from their land and oppress the Palestinian people, and wishes more people could learn about the Palestinian narrative.
“I can be one of the many Westerners that gets the word out about who Palestinians are, what they think, and what their needs are,” she said. “And their needs are to have self-determination and enjoy the full spectrum of human rights like everyone else.”
She hopes people in Canada educate themselves about the situation in the Middle East, and work toward a just peace between Palestinians and Israelis.
“When I think about working for justice, which would result in peace, I am hopeful that others will take this on as their vocation,” she said. “I could have gone back to teaching, but I feel like my commitment was and is in the Middle East.”
The other three recipients of the 2014 Blazer Distinguished Alumni Awards are Lorlie Barkman (MBBC '90), John Neufeld (CMBC '95), and Odette Mukole (CMU '07). Read about John here and Odette here, and look for an article about Lorlie coming soon.
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