The birth of a poor child in a shelter in the occupied land of Palestine, more than two thousand years ago, is being celebrated these days, amidst multiple contradictions. These are days of good wishes for peace, a peace that we have left in the bloody hands of the warlords. Palestine is in the news again, scores of children are being born on the floors of destroyed hospitals, dying in the rubble of their homes, or maimed by shrapnel from the bombs of people who believe they are God’s chosen ones. Only a sick humanity could watch live this slaughter of thousands of innocent children without being outraged by the new “Herods” and by governments that look the other way.
By Ovidio Bustillo
However, when pain, destruction, and death are the protagonists of current affairs and it seems that there is no room left for hope, empathy, or a minimally luminous horizon, critical voices, testimonial actions, and proposals for a radical change, of course, emerge from the very epicenter where violence is taking place, which are worth knowing, promoting, disseminating and supporting. They are protests and proposals that emerge from the best of human beings and give us a glimpse of light from the darkness of the darkness of violence. We have gathered together some that seem significant to us and that guide us towards unavoidable steps towards a just solution to a long and complex conflict.
The narrative of victimhood
We have gathered the testimony of Nurit Peled from an interview recently conducted by Olga Rodríguez. Nurit is the granddaughter of one of the signatories of Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948 and the daughter of a historical general who turned towards pacifist positions, studying the Arab language and culture, as she believed that if we know each other we can live together. She is an academic and researcher on racism and propaganda in Israeli textbooks. Twenty-five years ago, a Hamas attack in Jerusalem killed her 13-year-old daughter and in the recent attacks, she had relatives in one of the kibbutz near the attacked area, which has not prevented her from maintaining a critical position towards the government, which accuses her of defending Hamas.
He denounces that education in Israel is racist, traumatizing, and aggressive, teaching from the age of 3 to live the trauma of the Holocaust and to believe that there is another holocaust around the corner to be perpetrated by Arabs. Teenagers educated in this way grow up predisposed to kill any Palestinian. This kind of education explains why there are so many people who say “kill them all” because they are a threat. Nurit calls for a critical education that helps to think for oneself and to overcome the victimization of Jews in Israel, making people believe that they are still the innocent and defenseless Jews of Nazi Germany unjustly persecuted for no reason. Nothing could be further from the truth. Today the state of Israel has reversed its roles, they are not victims but executioners, occupying power, colonizers, and usurpering territories, homes, lives, and property of the Palestinian people. In the name of Judaism, a culture of power, racism, and cruelty has been created. It is essential to break this false narrative, because only from a truthful analysis, adjusted to reality, will it be possible to find just solutions to the conflict.
Solidarity and Empathy in the Face of Dehumanisation
To be able to carry out the inhuman task of eliminating your fellow human beings, at least two conditions are necessary: to have nurtured hatred in such a way that it erases any hint of rationality or compassion, and to degrade the enemy humanely to the point of animalisation. The words of Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant in justifying his war crimes in Gaza speak volumes: “We fight human animals and we act accordingly”. In an interview with Uri Weltmann, Tamir Sorek, an Israeli sociologist and leader of the Jewish-Arab Solidarity Network, offers an opposite approach to this justification of all atrocities. “While ministers dehumanize the Palestinians, I am part of a coalition of Jews and Arabs that shows that there is an alternative. The movement1 is active in more than 12 cities with the task of fighting racism and advocating peace, equality, and unity between Jews and Palestinians. They carry out activities such as erasing graffiti replacing phrases like “death to Arabs” with “equality for all”, putting up bilingual posters reading “Only peace will bring security”. They support Arab and Jewish families where members have been killed or injured. Despite the repression they face, the movement is growing. Tamir concludes the interview with these words: “While warmongering government ministers dehumanise Palestinians, encourage racist violence and plan a war that will last for months, our message is that there is an alternative. We demand a peace between Israel and Palestine that respects the right of both peoples to independence, security, justice and freedom. This implies an end to the occupation and the creation of an independent Palestinian state in accordance with UN resolutions, as well as full equality within Israel for Arab-Palestinian citizens, both as individuals and as a national minority. Only in this way can we ensure the security and wellbeing of Israelis and Palestinians alike”.
Respect, the key to any solution
Once again, Olga Rodríguez, who knows the region well and has good contacts, offers us an interesting interview with two friends and peace activists, one Palestinian, Bassam Aramin, and the other Jewish, Rami Elhanan. A good analysis of violence is fundamental to the resolution of any conflict, as well as the necessary mutual recognition and willingness to dialogue in order to reach a just peace. In Bassam’s words, “We know that the conflict did not start yesterday, Hamas did not invent the conflict, the conflict was invented by Hamas and Islamic Jihad and Alfatah and other organisations”. Both know first-hand the suffering that violence causes, having lost a daughter; Rami in a Hamas attack; Bassam at a checkpoint on his daughter’s way home from school. Far from fuelling hatred, both have decided to use this pain to try to bring about positive change between Israelis and Palestinians. Both are members of an association of those affected by the loss of loved ones. They also share affection, complicity, tell their stories at conferences and advocate the need for a just peace agreement. Let’s stop this endless cycle of violence,” says Rami, “because it will never end unless we talk to each other. One word is a must for any agreement: respect… Once you get that, everything else is a technicality. Both insist on the need for dialogue, armies are not the solution to anything. “October 7 proves that neither fences nor walls nor any technology can protect any place. If you fight for your freedom, you will keep fighting and nothing will stop you. The only guarantee is a peace agreement that gives the Palestinians their right”. For Bassam, “the ideology of killing forever does not work. We will finally have to sit down and negotiate, so why not do it now? Let’s negotiate now. Let’s save our lives now, because we know that in the end we will have to sit down and talk. So, let’s talk now.
It is impossible to reconcile Zionism and ethics
These are not the only testimonies. A year ago, we published “Go Down, Go Up, Go Down”, a film project that has now become a reality, in which Elad Abraham reflects on his life. His Jewish grandparents were expelled from Europe. He was born in 1982 during the war in Lebanon and in 1983 they emigrated to Argentina. Educated in Zionism, when the dictatorship broke out in Argentina he went into exile in Israel. “I went to Israel to look for a better future and found myself stationed in an Israeli army control tower”. “When I realized that it was the expulsion of my grandparents from Europe that endorsed these same practices of expelling Palestinians from their land, it was too late”. He was declared insane and expelled from the army. “A soldier who thinks is a soldier who begins to stop being a soldier”. For Elad, it is impossible to reconcile Zionism and ethics and he asks himself “How much more can we continue to exploit the Sohah, the Holocaust, to continue to consider ourselves victims?”. In a society as militarized as Israel’s, where women have to do two years of compulsory military service, men three, and do regular military training until the age of 51, when they are no longer reservists, every year dozens of conscientious objectors refuse to do compulsory military service, to be part of an army of occupation and to support a system of apartheid. Dissident, minority, punished, and criminalised thought, but which carries within itself the seeds of hope for change. Mesarvot is the name of the network of support and solidarity that brings them together.
The critical feminist look.
On 4 October, three days before Hamas’ cruel intervention, thousands of women from the Israeli Women for Peace movement and the Palestinian Women of the Sun movement marched from Bethlehem to the Dead Sea. Although it had little repercussion in the press, as violence and wars “sell” more than the struggle for peace, it was an important milestone that demonstrates the plurality of Israeli and Palestinian society, and a determined desire for peace on the part of part of the population. Spreading this type of action is not only a way of making other realities known but also a contribution to peace and hope. In the manifesto, they read they said: “We, Palestinian and Israeli mothers, are determined to stop the cycle of bloodshed and change the reality of the difficult conflict between the peoples for the sake of our children’s future”. In an interview, to the question “Why is a request for peace also a feminist cause?” one of them answers: “The first reason why it should be a feminist cause is that women and children are the main victims of all kinds of war, of armed conflict. Women are often used as bargaining chips. The fact that women are raped is very strong. We are raped to harm men. The absence of war should be a feminist cause. Primarily it is because we are the main victims. Secondly, because we are 50% of the population and therefore, we must be involved in decision-making. We cannot be left out of these kinds of actions that are so important and that influence so much of our lives. And thirdly, because the feminine or feminist look is a different look. We look at what is going to happen in terms of practical issues, education, health… The male look is a look that is more about strategy, about where the boundaries are going to go, and who gets what territory. We generally look beyond that, that is, at education, health, economics, things in practical day-to-day life. She adds: “Peace will be or we will not be. There is no alternative in this region. Either it is peace or we will continue killing each other, dying, losing people, burying people, spilling blood. We had this experience that women can bring an alternative voice and that unfortunately we are never included in the decision-making process, it is always a male decision-making making, process and it does not always lead us to the same points. And they always talk about territory, they talk about limits, they talk about this, but they don’t talk about other things. And of course, we base ourselves very much on United Nations Resolution 1325, which talks about the need to involve women in decision-making, and that is a fundamental part of our movement”. In the same vein, Women in Black Against War, which since 1988, in the context of the 1st intifada, has brought together Jewish and Palestinian women, has recently spoken out: “Time and again it is clear that there is no military solution to this conflict, nor can there ever be. In war there are no winners. Only peace will bring security.
The necessary involvement of governments and citizens.
Both inside and outside Israel, there have been many protests from the Jewish world against Israel’s use and abuse of violence. Particularly significant have been the protests that have taken place under the slogan “Not in our name”, such as the one that brought together thousands of Jews in New York. These protests belie the claim that the opposition to the brutal aggression is anti-Semitic. Also noteworthy are the protests in many countries by civilians in defense of the Palestinian people, very often against the position of their governments, which have settled for timid appeals for restraint or are openly complicit in the genocide. The rollback of freedoms concerning the banning and demonization of the Palestinian flag is deeply preoccupying. The brutality of Israel’s vengeance has brought out a transversal solidarity with a multitude of acts and campaigns in schools, colleges, universities, associations, parties, neighborhoods, towns, cities, sports clubs, cultural personalities, and a very long etc., in a demonstration that when our governments are not up to the task of defending human rights, citizens take the trouble to remind them. The inequality of the alleged war between Israel and Hamas is enormous and falsified by the media. Despite everything, any critical mind is capable of understanding that on the one hand, there is the state of Israel, a colonial power, with an apartheid regime over the Palestinian people, with a powerful army and an experienced system of repression and control, and on the other hand, a clandestine armed group, capable of inflicting pain, but ineffective in defending the Palestinian population or regaining control of the territory. We are not going to be an anti-militarist collective who encourages “democratic” countries to arm the Palestinian people by appealing to their right to defend themselves against occupation, in the same way that the sending of arms to Ukraine was argued, but we do want to expose the double standards, especially of the US and Europe, so “sensitive” to Ukraine and so insensitive to Palestine, supporting the extreme violence of the powerful state of Israel and abandoning the Palestinian people, who have the right to defend themselves and to be protected by the international community. Following the comparison with Ukraine, sanctions on Israel are missed in the same way that they have been applied lavishly to Russia. The involvement of states is both just and necessary to stop war crimes and seek solutions to the conflict. I do not know to what extent we are aware that the so-called “values of the West” are being definitively buried in the rubble of homes in Gaza, the blood of the innocent dead or wounded, and the desperate cries of those who lose everything, even their lives, in the face of desperate indifference.
Note 1.- See Standing Together (movement)
Standing Together (movement) – Wikipedia Standing Together (Hebrew: עומדים ביחד, Omdim Beyachad; Arabic: نقف معًا, Naqif Ma’an) is an Israeli grassroots movement that aims to unite the Israeli-Arab and Israeli-Jewish communities. [1] It is the largest Arab-Jewish grassroots movement in the country. [2] Standing Together began operating in 2015,[3] and has around 5,000 members as of October 2023. [2] The movement opposes neoliberalism and the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. The movement aims to promote LGBT rights, women’s rights, workers’ rights (including disability benefits) and full equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel. [3][4]
