Bowing with his palms pressed together, a man at the back of the audience addressed the evening’s featured speakers and said, “I am from Ramallah. Thank you, thank you for telling your stories, for telling the truth.”
This man’s response encapsulates best the two-hour Partners for Peace presentation “Jerusalem Women Speak: Three Women, Three Faiths, One Shared Vision." Ghada Ageel, Shireen Khamis, and Rela Mazali – Muslim, Christian, and Jewish, respectively – spoke about their experiences enduring the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as part of the twelfth annual Jerusalem Women Speak national tour of over 30 U.S. cities. The event was held in Barre on October 21st and was cosponsored by PeaceVermont, Central Vermont Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, the American Friends Service Committee-Vermont, and Vermonters for a Just Peace in Palestine/Israel. The three women spoke at a number of other Vermont venues in the preceding days, including Bennington College, the University of Vermont, Burlington College, and the Ohavi Zedek Synagogue of Burlington; sponsors included the Vermont Chapter of the National Organization for Women, the American Association of University Women – Bennington Chapter, UVM’s Center for Cultural Pluralism, and the UVM Women’s Center. The remarks made by each woman at the Barre Labor Hall are presented below.
Shireen Kham
I was three years old when the first Intifada peaked in 1987. To tell the truth, I can’t remember much about this stage in my life. Although the Palestinians suffered a lot in this stage and many citizens were killed, many of them youths, I can’t remember much about this stage – only the sad faces and the misery in the eyes of the people who surrounded me. I couldn’t figure out the reason for this pain and misery.
It was in the year 2000 that I discovered the ugly face of occupation. That was when I had to live in my city, a very historical and beautiful town – five minutes from Bethlehem and 10 minutes from Jerusalem – had to see my beloved city bombarded and shelled and see people running and escaping. We had to make our house a shelter for many people; [eventually there were] 17 in the house and we ran from one room to the other [for protection]. I realized then the pain and the sorrow in the faces, realized the reason for this life and for the pain in my family’s eyes.
And now it isn’t only my family who has these faces, these sad faces. In Palestine, if you walk in the streets you will see the pain in all the eyes – children’s eyes, young and old people. Everyone is living a miserable life.
We live [near] Bethlehem. To describe life there, I could tell you there is nothing, but [it is] the same as living inside a prison. Wherever we stand and look we can see the wall surrounding us as a people. This is the 25-foot high wall that surrounds the area of Bethlehem and prevents us as citizens from leaving it to go to Jerusalem, which was only 10 minutes from my home. My country is also under a demographic threat. As Christians in the area we used to be 25 percent of the population before the establishment of Israel in 1948. That year, among 750,000 refugees there were 50,000 Christians displaced. That number was about 35 percent of the Christians at that time. Since then, the number has [decreased] and now you can find in Palestine only 2 percent are Christians.
Bethlehem suffers a lot now because of this closure and the wall. We depended for years on tourists and the tourism trade to survive and go on in our lives. Now, we can’t have tourists anymore – it is a ghost city. Those who insist on coming, the tourists and pilgrims have to come by Israeli buses with Israeli tour guides and can’t stay for more than 3 hours in the area. They can’t sleep in the hotels that we built for them; can’t eat in the restaurants that we opened for them; and can’t shop from our souvenir shops. Sometimes I wonder if Christ was born in my city, because I can’t see any care from the whole world [about] what is really happening in Palestine and in Bethlehem in particular. When we used to move from one place to another in the United States, I started seeing some decorations for Christmas and wondered if he [Christ] was born here or there. We have nothing and in Christmastime it is a miserable city.
We also depended on agriculture to survive – we had olive groves, grapes, wine, and many agricultural products. Now, more than two-thirds of the land in the Bethlehem area is confiscated and the population of Muslims and Christians live on less than one-third of the original land. We lost five acres of our [family’s] land to build settlements for illegal settlers who came from all over the world to live in my land. It was confiscated in 2004 and was a disaster for my family. This was the last land that was kept for us as a Palestinian Christian family and because it was a precious land, the olive trees roots go deep inside this land, the same as our roots as Palestinians go deep inside this land. To tell you the truth, I was glad my grandfather wasn’t alive to see his last land confiscated and his olive trees uprooted; he knew the story of each olive tree. For my father and [his] siblings it was disaster. They used to go this time of year to pick olives from these trees.
The violations of human rights and international law do not stop at confiscating lands. We have to live on a daily basis with crimes and violations practiced by Israeli defense forces. You may hear that Palestinians practice individual terrorism and explode themselves in Israel. Israel also practices such terrorism. You can see how in Hebron, where 400 settlers live protected [by] 1200 Israeli soldiers – and they practice violence against citizens. They beat children on their way to school, women, men, everyone. They attack them every day, but you never hear that in your news. They live illegally in Hebron on a daily basis and with the protection of soldiers they commit crimes against the people of Hebron.
Also, Palestinians have to live and suffer from checkpoints that they [the Israelis] put in the Palestinian territories. These points separate towns, villages, and cities; they separate Palestinians. You hear in the news that it is to protect the Israeli state, but to these points are always between Palestinian territories. There are about 500 checkpoints between Palestinian territories. They prevent kids from going to school, teachers, workers, employees, men, women from going to work. They prevent mothers from visiting their children. They are one of the most humiliating experiences one can face in [her] life, because you have to wait no matter who you are. We can see how children face Israeli soldiers with guns while going to school. 225,000 children and more than 9,300 teachers have to pass through a point on way to or from school. But children have to take class in the street [because they can’t get through the checkpoint]. You can find also women giving birth in the streets because they were not allowed to reach the hospital. In the last six years more than 68 women gave birth in the streets and [we had] more than 34 cases of miscarriages and four deaths because women didn’t get sufficient assistance. You may see people in ambulances, patients waiting for hours and hours and not allowed to reach hospitals, so many people die on the checkpoints because they were denied access to hospitals.
As young women in Palestine, we are living in a dark tunnel and can’t see any hope for the future. We are facing this, just as everyone is facing this, because Israeli weapons do not differentiate between children and adults, citizens and armed, men and women, Muslim or Christian. We are all under the threat of Israeli weapons. I asked two children while filming them for a documentary about their hopes for the future – 14- and 15-year old children. I said, “What are your plans and hopes for future?” They said, “Nothing, we wish to die.” I wonder why they wish to die. Of course, I am living also in the crisis, but I never wished to die. But the life is so hard for them; they are not treated as children. They have to work and are afraid to reach a checkpoint because they can get captured. There are hundreds of kids under 18 in Israeli prisons and they can get killed. Israel does not differentiate, never.
And how we live now, in the West Bank and Gaza, we are being punished under the boycott of the international community. Everyone thinks that he is punishing the government of Hamas, our government that won the election. Well, you are punishing the whole society because since March there have been no salaries for employees in the public sector; since September there has been no school, no hospitals, no organization in the public sector is working. That means children are not going to school, patients can’t get treatment.
I’m here today to ask you to rethink and to consider our situation as Palestinians, because on each day we lose more people, more land, lose our freedom, and lose the hope in life. Thank you.
Ghada Ageel
I would like to give you a joke. Three people passed away – a British, an American, a Palestinian. They did not do good and were sent to hell. They missed their families. The American asked the Devil [if he could] call his family; he spoke for five minutes and asked how much [he had] to pay. The Devil said, $5 million to call the U.S, hell to paradise. The [Brit] was very good at lessons – he talked for 1 minute and a half and he handed over $1.5 million. Now it is the Palestinian’s [turn] – We like to joke and joke, and never make point, and we ask how everyone is, and [about] Gaza... He talked for 20 hours, and [then] asked the Devil, how much shall I pay? The Devil said: “Nothing. It’s a local call from hell to hell.”
That’s the place that I come from, the Gaza Strip. As a child I was deprived of carrying toys because of occupation. As a [teen] in high school I was deprived of the university because the Israelis closed it for six years. As a mother I was deprived of breastfeeding my son because of occupation, because of a checkpoint – for seven days I was unable to reach home. I went to visit my mom in a camp and on my way back, from 20 minutes away, I was held for seven days, waiting in heat. And now I am unable to return home because of occupation. The borders of Gaza were closed in June and since then I have not been able to return home. I went to the United Kingdom to celebrate my work as a student and they declared the border closed.
I grew up in a camp, during the 1970s. Many people want our history to start from June 2006 when the [Israeli] soldier was captured or Hamas came or suicide bombers initiated terror; but you know very well that our population started even before 1948. Even in 1948 my grandparents were expelled from their land in the village. In the ruins of my home state, Israel was established. To live in a camp is misery and poverty. I remember queuing with my grandma for secondhand clothes and food donations – thanks to Oxfam. Despite all of this, I was raised as a child loving peace. You hear [that] we study a curriculum of hate; that was imposed under Israeli occupation.
I didn’t know much except that these Jewish illegal settlers, after occupying 78 percent of Palestine, would follow us to the camps, restricting our movement and making our lives hell. As a teenager in 1987, the Intifada erupted and I couldn’t go to high school because of strikes and curfews. I used to phone [for ambulances] to come and evacuate the wounded people and bodies of people. Many times ambulances were denied and we had to carry [them] by hand to the only hospital for around 200,000 people.
Well, that was the 1980s. In 1993, [there was] a new peace and two-state solution. We wanted peace and freedom and I took that initiative and went to Israel to study Hebrew. It was like in Alice in Wonderland. I couldn’t imagine that I was one hour from camp. It was the first time I had left Gaza and I couldn’t imagine this injustice. I felt the bitterness – how come we live in that misery with water 15 minutes a day, no sewage, and schools of sixty per class, and they live in this paradise? The feelings of injustice increased because I was seeing one million Jewish immigrants brought to occupy Palestine. You speak about a two-state solution to become the future, which is 22 percent of occupied Palestine. You know that, according to international law, it is prohibited to use occupied land for the sake of the occupied. But this did not happen in Palestine.
I returned to Palestine and started to invite Israelis to come and see how we live, to study Arabic and learn about Arab culture, the same as I was shown. They were also shocked and said, “We didn’t know, didn’t hear or see in our media, about this.” We said, this is a new era, we shouldn’t think about the past – now we all work for peace. The hardest minutes were when we worked with my grandmother. She received them, offered them tea, talked with them, and exchanged some Hebrew she used to know before, when they all lived together.
But peace from 1993 to 2000 brought us nothing but misery, more confiscating of land, more restrictions. So the settlers of Gaza, 2,000 became 8,000; a quarter million became a half million illegal settlers. Talk about peace, while it was very far from peace. This is the new Intifada, no more stones and soldiers and live bullets. This time it is F-16s and this time American Apache helicopters, and bulldozers that crushed the body of [the American student] Rachel Corrie in the camp next to where I come from. And when these shellings come, I carry my son and escape. You have to escape in the middle of the night. They shut electricity [off] and then bulldozers and tanks come. I carried my son – here, you run for sport, I run for my life. Here, you take off shoes to feel comfortable. There, when I ran with my one-year-old son, without shoes, I was humiliated.
So, how do we live now? We are living a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, 1.4 million are prisoners in this area, because last September we did withdraw and the illusion of the world was Gaza is free. They left, but took the key and locked us in – no imports or exports. No humanitarian assistance. Life is paralyzed, yesterday like today, today like tomorrow. Last week we lost 42 people by Apache, again American Apache, and it wasn’t in American news. Among them children, five family members, a bomb landed in their home. Imagine if those were Israeli citizens. You have always [got] to look to us as human beings. When I see my son I am sad; when I am hungry, I am angry and can do unpleasant things. I have a cousin [who was] hit in 2003; an innocent bystander when they sent their death missiles, shrapnel paralyzed his spinal cord. It was a tragedy; we accepted it, part of the conflict. But we cannot accept now that they shut the only electric power in Gaza. My 27-year-old cousin’s respirator needs electricity; we have to look for batteries because Gaza is sealed out of the world. For a few weeks we don’t have batteries and are afraid he will have his last breath. Fisherman can’t fish. Farmers cannot export. People can’t go to schools. Doctors and teachers don’t receive salaries. This is punishment.
So I came here to speak on behalf of those neglected and forgotten people and tell you what is going on. I work with media, but my story has never reached you because of policy and agendas of newspapers. American people tire of hearing of 58-year-old conflict and want… more sudden news. I’m coming to tell you that the United States is involved in this conflict, in a very negative way, very negative way. Peace in Palestine is not only peace for Palestine and Israel, but for all the world. If you opt to let Gaza drown in hunger, it is – I don’t know how [else] to call it but [a] war crime. So, thank you for coming to listen to this historical evening.
Rela Mazali
This space is kind of inspiring to me, connecting to the past where labor unions were meaningful in our society. My parents were Zionists, they were Americans. They left the United States in 1947, went to a kibbutz and went to build what they thought would be a just socialist national society. I was literally a child of their dreams, a child of that dream. And it took me many years to start seeing outside of the dream, to start realizing that the dream as a narrative was one that blinded all of us to another reality.
I was in my 30s when I started working with a group that was publishing alternative editorials, self-funded alternative editorials in a newspaper because the facts were not being published in any newspaper. One of the first incidents we publicized was when two villages, two Jerusalem villages were refusing to accept Israeli identity cards and were conducting a campaign of non-violence resistance to Israeli annexation of the Golan Heights. The Israeli military and government shut off their water and electricity and this was not reported by Israeli media. Some people in this group had learned of this from their friends and publicized this fact in the media. Some of us, maybe those of us who were younger, were convinced that publicizing this fact would be earthshaking and the Israeli public would be in an uproar about it. Here we are, thirty-something years later, and the entire Gaza Strip is being subjected to exactly the same policy and this time it is not top secret, not something that individual citizens have to publicize. The whole world can see, it is declared, and Israel is doing it with full impunity.
This is one instance of an erosion of moral red lines that I’ve experienced in many ways in my society, and very painfully. For instance, I was working on a film in 1990-1993 in which we interviewed a marksmanship expert training undercover units which were in fact death squads shooting Palestinians suspected of involvement in what Israelis defined as “terrorist cells,” under broad definitions. These were top secret, not supposed to be public knowledge, then. When we interviewed this man, he was angry when I asked him about the summary executions he was teaching young soldiers to carry out. He denied the existence of executions and almost throttled me as he rose out of his chair and wanted executions to be struck from the protocol. But today, it is a declared government policy. In 2003 it became a declared government policy – targeted assassinations – and Israelis carry it out on broad scale by sharpshooters and helicopter gun ships and bombs released by F-16s. This is a process of the destruction, not only of Palestinian society, but also the society I live in.
Most Israelis, despite that these facts are out there and have been for a long time, can’t deal with this reality. And the way they deal with this reality to a large extent is through holding on tightly to the belief that they are offered by leaders and culture that we have no other choice, this is imposed upon Israel, it is all only self defense. And there are many aspects of brutalization that this causes. For instance, a culture of guns goes unremarked and they are all over the place, in the most busy market in Tel Aviv there are people everywhere with automatic rifles, AK-47s, most produced in the USA. And nobody thinks anything of it because they are supposedly only there for our protection. But that “our” does not necessarily include Israeli women, because 47 percent of women murdered by family members in Israel were murdered by military rifles. This is not considered phenomenon that needs to be addressed. There is no anti-gun lobby in Israel.
Another erosive aspect is the way in which masculinity is construed and in a complimentary way the way in which femininity is construed. Becoming a man means, to large extent, going through service, being a soldier with everything that entails. An enormous number of artifacts in Israeli culture convey the message that soldierhood is attractive, exciting. …This is one of many ways in which there is a systematic obscuring, systematic masking of the fact that young men are exploited by the leaders who repeatedly choose to go to war to achieve military gains. That young men are, in fact, cheap, and something that society, not individual families, but society can afford to forfeit, at least some of them. And parenthood, as a result becomes conscriptive within Israeli Jewish society with a very strong paradox introduced into the heart of what it means to be a parent. Because you are raising children whom you want to keep safe and responsible and know how to take care of themselves, and also telling them from a very young age that they will have to place themselves at the disposal of state violence when they are 18.
Indeed, the exploitation of young people leaves its mark in many ways. Until last summer, the number one cause of death in the military was suicide for many years. And 80 percent of women, young women, experience sexual harassment as soldiers in military, another aspect of normalized violence in society. One-third of children live in poverty today as a result of the priorities that keep investing enormous sums in military, and 40 percent of Holocaust survivors live in poverty today in the country that claims to be a safe haven for the Jewish people. All of this is carried out with U.S. support. The U.S. invests over $3 billion per year in military aid to Israel; three-quarters comes back to the U.S. into the military-industrial complex because aid is earmarked for purchases here. So your taxes and policy are driving Israeli militarization and it is tearing apart both societies.
There is in Israel a substantial resilient resistance movement to all of this. New Profile (www.newprofile.org) is a feminist group of men and women challenging Israeli militarization and supporting the draft resistance movement in Israel, which is very broad-based. Fifty percent of every group of 18-year-old candidates for service don’t go in at all, or get themselves out early on. I’ll end with a few excerpts from a letter by a young man imprisoned earlier this week, a conscientious objector from our organization. He has been sentenced to 14 days of prison. That probably will be one of a long line of prison sentence; Israel repeats short-term sentences for refusers, indefinitely. He writes to the military and state:
“My refusal to enlist is in protest against longstanding military occupation of Palestinian people, one that deepens and entrenches the hatred and terror between them. I refuse to serve an ideology that doesn’t recognize right of all nations to peaceful coexistence. …I am outraged by the starvation and incarceration of millions of people behind walls and points. I refuse to serve the arms industry, mega-corporations, greedy contractors, preachers of racism and cynical leaders whose business is the advancement of suffering…I refuse to kill, I refuse to oppress, I refuse to occupy.”
For more information about Partners for Peace, visit www.partnersforpeace.org.
Assistant Editor Mary Fratini is a freelance journalist living in Barre. She can be reached at maryfrat@vermontwoman.com.
