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Palestinian-American author Ibrahim Fawal.

Dr. Ibrahim Fawal is a retired filmmaker, film professor and author of the award-winning historic novel On the Hills of God.

Fawal, born in 1933, has long been a driven man. Seared into his consciousness at the young age of 15 was the 1948 image of Palestinian refugees expelled from their homes in the newly-declared state of Israel streaming into his hometown of Ramallah, in the West Bank. "They were pitching tents anywhere they could: churches, schoolyards, open fields and cemeteries."

Traveling from Ramallah to the American South to California, Fawal became the first student from the Middle East to receive a Master's degree in film from UCLA. In 1961 he served as "Jordanian" First Assistant Director on David Lean's classic film, released the following year, Lawrence of Arabia.

He remained haunted, however, by the memory of uprooting and loss endured by so many of his fellow Palestinians. The experience came spilling out many years later with his writing of On the Hills of God, published in 1998. "We were the generation of the Nakba [catastrophe]. As teenagers, we were not interested in dating or football, we were worried about survival and about losing our country." His book, winner of the PEN-Oakland Award for Excellence in Literature, recounts the turmoil of the Nakba and his own experience with the upending of Palestinian life.

Fawal wrote the book for Americans, many of whom over the years confided to him that they knew little or nothing about the losses endured over the years by Palestinians. After a quarter century teaching in Alabama, Fawal maintains, "The American people are kind and fair-minded; if only they knew the other side of the story. Therefore it is essential for them to understand the enormity of the injustice that has been inflicted on the innocent Palestinians." Fawal describes the novel as a favorite with professors in the United States who "deemed it an excellent introduction to the troubles in the Middle East." It has been translated into Arabic and Indonesian.

For many years, Fawal's students referred to him as a doctor despite his protestations of inaccuracy. One day in 1996 he declared he was "going to make an honest man" of himself. And indeed, at age 63, he headed to Oxford to begin a PhD program. His thesis, "Youssif Chahine," a study of the life and career of the foremost film director in the Arab world, was published by the British Film Institute. He describes the mid-life experience at Oxford as "one of the finest things I've done."

Today, in retirement, Fawal is working on two books from his home in Birmingham, Alabama.