Authors: Sally Armstrong
The women’s groups saw their work as critical: some observers said Hamas (the Palestinian Islamist organization that has
formed the elected government in Gaza since 2006 and whose military wing claimed responsibility for most of the suicide bombings in Israel) was attracting a hundred new members a day who wanted revenge for the harassment and humiliation they faced at the checkpoints. (The Israelis claimed such humiliation was a small price to pay if it stopped even a single suicide bomber.)
The polarization of right-wing and left-wing attitudes defied reconciliation on my trip a decade ago, just as it does today. The right says that Israel would be a sitting duck if the occupation ended. The left says that the violence won’t stop until Palestine is a sovereign state. The right says, “Our army is in the occupied territory, so we have to support it.” The left regards the Israeli settlements in the occupied territories as bones in the throats of the Palestinians. Many blame the deeply held belief among Israelis that God wants Jews to have this land as the underlying barrier to peace. Samia Khoury, a Palestinian who was born in Jaffa in 1933 and has lived all her life here in this ancient land, says, “There is too much injustice based on biblical interpretation.”
Khoury comes from a long line of community leaders that includes the founders of Birzeit University, the Palestinian school chartered in 1953. She remembers being chased out of her home in Jerusalem, where she was a student in 1948. “There’s not a single family who hasn’t been hurt by this,” she says. Her brother, who was president of Birzeit University, was expelled from the Palestinian Territories for almost twenty years and only permitted to return as a goodwill gesture by the Israeli government. “In every family, someone has been killed, deported or humiliated,” she says, but she says the real danger lies in the fact that the new generation of Palestinian kids has never known Israelis as anything
but occupiers, whereas she knew them as friends and neighbours.
Speaking to me at her home in East Jerusalem, Khoury said she was living in “sorrowful painful times.” Like almost everyone in Israel and the Palestinian Territories, she thought the situation had never been as bad as it was during the Second Intifada. She feared the future, especially for her five grandchildren. “When the children go to school, they have to cross checkpoints. Families can’t even visit each other. Our lives are consumed with fear. We are constantly asking, did they cross, did they reach, did they arrive?”
The women on the front lines of the peace process think women on both sides understand each other. Gila Svirsky, who has been a Woman in Black since the organization began, accuses the politicians of being the obstacle to peace. “The leaders are driven by power needs and conflict,” she said. “Militarism is pervasive in both societies: glorification of the fighter, giving one’s life for the homeland, a hero’s halo around the martyr or fighter pilot—this has to stop.”
If it were up to the women, Palestine and Israel would have signed a peace accord in the late 1980s, Svirsky says. Women from both sides met in Belgium in 1988 to find a path to peace. They had to meet offshore because there was a law that said Israeli citizens could not meet members of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) on Israeli territory. At the time, Svirsky says, “Every Palestinian with self-respect belonged to the PLO.” In her opinion, the ongoing meetings by women’s groups at that time built up a pro-peace attitude on both sides.
But despite the much-heralded, U.S.-sponsored peace talks in subsequent years, the women have not been invited to the table. Even after the United Nations adopted Resolution 1325 in
2000, which called for “equal participation and full involvement of women in all efforts for the maintenance and promotion of peace and security, and the need to increase their role in decision-making with regard to conflict prevention and resolution,” the negotiations were left to the male warriors, the seekers of power, turf and control: precisely the people that women peace activists see as part of the problem.
On May 7, 2002, Israeli and Palestinian women took their plea to the UN Security Council, where Terry Greenblatt of Bat Shalom (part of the Jerusalem Center for Women) spoke on behalf of the women’s peace movement: “We envision a settlement based on international law, which would endorse sharing the whole city of Jerusalem, the dismantling of the settlements and a just solution to the question of refugees according to relevant UN resolutions,” she said.
Approximately two thousand people had been killed and countless more wounded since the Second Intifada began on September 29, 2000. An Israeli military action, presumably to rout the terrorists in the Palestinians’ midst, had precipitated both that intifada and the rash of suicide bombings that followed. Suicide bombers started vaporizing themselves and innocent Israeli citizens in the name of God, and although the Quran does not sanction suicide, many clerics in the Middle East supported the violence and declared the bombers martyrs.
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I met the Israeli and Palestinian women in 2002, when my editor sent me to Israel and the West Bank to find out what women were doing about the peace process. The Second Intifada was raging.
Suicide bombings had increased in frequency. Israeli army incursions into the West Bank and Gaza Strip had become more brutal. Everyone was in harm’s way.
Remarkably, these Israeli and Palestinian women were working together to try to turn the intifada into peace talks. Even an Israeli mother who had lost a child to a suicide bomber spoke of the need to stop the occupation. Her name—Nurit Peled Elhanan—had become synonymous with the double-edged sword in the Middle East. Her heartbreaking story was made even more so by her sense of justice and fairness.
As I climbed the stairs to her house in West Jerusalem, the scent of flowers spilling out of pots on every step leading to the family’s apartment caught my attention. At the top of the stairs, the entrance to the house was under a canopy of vines and blossoms that suggested a paradise off the beaten path. But a bold sign on the door—Free Palestine—and the intertwined Israeli and Palestinian flags stuck underneath it suggested that there was more to this Israeli home than the aromatic stairway.
Inside, I came face to face with an almost life-size photo of Smadar Elhanan. Her big brown eyes were happy, trusting, twinkling back at me, the essence of innocent childhood. Smadar was just two weeks shy of her fourteenth birthday when a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself and this beautiful little girl to bits on September 4, 1997. Four others died in the same attack, as well as the three suicide bombers. Two hundred were wounded, mostly young people who had flocked to Ben Yehuda, a popular pedestrian street, to meet their friends.
A few hours after the tragedy, Smader’s mother, Nurit, received a phone call from Benjamin Netanyahu, then the prime minister of Israel; she’d known him since high school, when they
were classmates. But his condolences were of little consolation to a woman who believed the government was complicit in the violence. She told him his government was responsible for her daughter’s death and hung up the phone.
Nurit and her family had paid an unspeakable price for the fifty-year struggle between two peoples. By 2002, suicide bombing had created an air of near panic in Israel and the attacks by the Israeli army on the West Bank only fuelled the fires of revenge. Palestinians and Israelis alike claimed the tension and terror had never been as bad. Together, they were perched like birds on the branch of a burning bush.
Nurit Elhanan, a lecturer in language education at Hebrew University, was part of the groundswell of Israeli and Palestinian women who were furious with the politically intractable positions on both sides of the conflict. Although Elhanan didn’t belong to any one group, she spoke at their rallies and told me, “The women’s peace movement is the only one that’s active, serious, doing something about this.”
She believed it was her insistence that her children needed to make up their own minds that led her daughter into harm’s way. Elhanan knew the dangers of the streets, and on the day Smadar was killed, Nurit had told her that she couldn’t go downtown alone. Smadar replied, “This is my city. I must be able to walk in it. If you say no, then I will have to go without your permission.”
Her mother was still consumed by every detail of the day her daughter went downtown to sign up for jazz-dancing lessons and instead met death. We sat in the garden below the flower-filled staircase while Elhanan told me about Smadar’s growing independence. “My husband and I had taken the kids on a
vacation to the Sea of Galilee some weeks before, and my older sons had asked if they could bring along a couple of friends. One of them made quite an impression on Smadar. Although he was several years older than she was, she had sort of a crush on him.”
He was the one who called Elhanan to say there’d been an explosion and that he’d seen her daughter in the area. Smadar had approached the young man on Ben Yehuda Street, but he’d waved her off because he was talking to a friend. Elhanan told me he’s now consumed with guilt, wishing he’d talked with her, even for a moment, so she might have lingered where he was and not walked on into the path of the suicide bomber. “I raced to the street and looked and looked for my little girl,” Elhanan said. But she did not find her.
Grapefruit trees were laden with fruit, and songbirds were feeding from the nut-bearing bushes as the sun was starting to set. A woman who had suffered too much and too long, Elhanan didn’t seem to realize that her right eye twitched when she talked about her child. The twitching stopped only when the conversation turned to the politicians she was enraged with.
She described the bomber as one of the consequences of mistreating innocent civilians. “Look at these Palestinian kids. They suffer hunger, humiliation, oppression, torture, and they see their parents suffering that, too. It doesn’t take much to convince them to kill those happy kids in downtown Jerusalem. It’s the Samson story. Only we are the Philistines.” She knows that those kids, as she calls them, are used by a larger organization: “Someone is in charge of training the suicide bombers. The organizer brainwashes the kids who do it. The parents of suicide bombers invariably say they haven’t seen the kids for a couple of years.”
After every suicide bombing since, Elhanan said, she got a phone call from investigators saying, “That was your guy.” She believed the calls were made to taunt her for speaking out on behalf of peace—to imply that the same person who masterminded Smadar’s death had struck again.
A lot of people said the politicians were stalled because neither side wanted to make the first move. Elhanan believed the crisis was not as complicated as the politicians suggested. For instance, she said, a casino had been closed in Jerusalem when Palestinian and Israeli business tycoons couldn’t agree on who had jurisdiction. But because their own livelihoods depended on it, politicians from both sides of the conflict soon reached a deal and reopened the casino. That didn’t take an American intervention, she said. “This shows that when an issue affects them directly—unlike the deaths of children—they are quick to find a solution. All of us, Israelis and Palestinians, are victims of politicians who gamble the lives of our children on games of honour and prestige. To them, children are worth less than roulette chips.”
Elhanan picked at flower pods that were strewn on the garden table. Her voice dropped as she flicked the floral debris off the table. “You have to put off your truth, your opinion, your belief, and study the others to communicate. Men can’t do that. Women are all the time in a ‘polylogue,’ having several conversations at once, bridging differences, adjusting to each child that is born.” It’s women, she insisted, who understand the price of violence.
After one of the suicide bombings, she wrote an essay using the Dylan Thomas poem “And Death Shall Have No Dominion” to reflect the crisis in Israel. “Here death governs: the government of Israel rules over a dominion of death,” she wrote. “Each attack
is a link in a chain of horrific bloody events that extends back thirty-four years and has but one cause: a brutal occupation.”
Later, we left the solace of the garden to walk down the street to a protest rally with nine-year-old Yigal, Elhanan’s youngest son. Her older sons had moved to Paris. She didn’t even want them to visit, as she couldn’t bear the fear she felt when they went downtown to meet their friends.
It was dusk when I left Elhanan. Her story, her courage and her profound sadness stayed with me while I walked the streets of Jerusalem. But it was her soul-searing words about the legacy of these terrible times that haunt me still: “In the kingdom of death, Israeli children lie beside Palestinian children, soldiers of the occupying army beside suicide bombers, and no one remembers who was David and who was Goliath.”
The intifada didn’t end until 2005. The women who saw themselves as the best bet for peace had at last persuaded the United Nations to take action on Resolution 1325, which was five years old, and to organize a way to bring women into the work of negotiating a peace. Later that year, under the auspices of UNIFEM, the International Women’s Commission for a Just and Sustainable Israeli-Palestinian Peace (IWC) was launched. The commissioners were twenty Israeli women, twenty Palestinian women and twelve internationals who came together to try to bridge the conflicting narratives among Israelis and Palestinians by providing an opportunity to tell the story of the conflict in a way that acknowledged the suffering on both sides. It promoted a women’s rights perspective, which the women felt had been absent from efforts to build peace. Over the course of five years (2006–2011), IWC members engaged in high-level political advocacy at home and abroad, drawing on the words and insights
of women experiencing the impact of the conflict in their daily lives. Like others who had worked on a peace plan for the region, the women on the IWC agreed on the two-state solution based on the 1967 borders. But they added a new goal: they would mobilize a million women and thirty-two heads of state to carry the plan to the UN. Committees were struck to move the plan forward.