Sustaining Hope in the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict

From Bridges: A Journal for Jewish Feminists and Our Friends, Volume 10, Number 1, 2004.

Collecting the writing in this issue has been a work of love, and hope. Though Bridges has published work by Jewish, Israeli, and Palestinian peace activists in every issue for 14 years, this is the first issue to focus full attention on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Our intention for this collection began with looking for work that could help disrupt the raging "us or them" dichotomy: In most Jewish environments, if a person shows any sympathy for Palestinian suffering under the occupation, she/he is assumed to be "against" Israel, on the other hand in many settings if a person identifies as a Jew, or god-forbid, a Zionist, it will be assumed that she/he is indifferent to Palestinian suffering. Here are the voices of Jewish Israeli women committed to both Israel's future as a safe center for Jewish life, and no less, to justice and security for Palestinians.

In response to Bridges' Call for Submissions for writing by Jewish Israeli women whose lives are intimately connected to ha'aretz - the land, its people and future, and who still refuse to see the Palestinian people as "the enemy," one contributor wrote: "Your letter practically moved me to tears. Strangely, paradoxically, I think what Israelis need more than anything at the moment is to be loved . . .. No matter how deeply people [in Israel] may think we are doing the right thing and can choose no other course, it's very hard to feel lovable while we're behaving in this way. And the kind of jingoistic love that consists only of support for our defense of the sacred ground hardly begins to cover the pain of grief, trauma, desperation, uncertainty, radical insecurity, and self-loathing. Thank you for being able to love us in a different way."

There are many ways we could have chosen to frame a collection of work on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. There are a few other recent collections of "left" Jewish voices, The Other Israel: Voices of Refusal and Dissent edited by Tom Segev, Jonathan Shainin, Roane Carey, for one, and Wrestling with Zion (reviewed here on page 113) but until now there has not been a collection by women in the Israeli peace movement who emphasize empathetic and intimate connections to the struggle for change within Israeli society.

Over the many months we've worked on putting this issue together, the war in Israel/Palestine has only gotten more desperate and the level of discourse among American Jews steadily uglier. A few examples:

• In October 2003, American Jewish ethicist and widely respected progressive leader, UCLA Hillel rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller allegedly kicked a freelance journalist after she reportedly called him "worse than a kapo" while he was inviting Palestinian students to a Hillel event featuring former Shin Bet director Ami Ayalon and Palestinian representative for Jerusalem Sari Nusseibeh.
• Bridges' new Yiddish editor, Faith Jones, was shunned by many of the organizers and participants at the Fall 2003 National Council of Jewish Women's conference "Transforming the Jewish World, A Feminist View," after she eloquently made connections between her Yiddish activism and her peace/anti-occupation activism.
• In the Spring of 2003, long time Bridges editor Enid Dame and her partner, poet Donald Lev, were viciously yelled at, accosted, and shoved when, holding peace signs, they attended a big Israel Solidarity March in New York.

Even among the Bridges editorial group, it became harder to agree on what we wanted this collection to be. Managing editor Clare Kinberg focused on emphasizing and building the narrow majority of Israelis and American Jews who now support two-states, an end to Israeli occupation of lands captured in 1967 and solutions that were outlined at the end of the Clinton administration (and now in the Geneva Understandings). Rosa Pegueros has consistently emphasized the importance of Americans understanding the pressures Israelis live with that result in their supporting Sharon and his militaristic approach. Jessica Stein and Faith Jones have over the course of this year expanded their activism from Women in Black to Jews Against the Occupation, which advocates against U.S. aid to Israel.

While we all agree that the work collected here is vitally useful, our differences pained us. In tense e-mail discussions, we tried to hash it out: Jessica wrote: "My politics on Israel have changed a lot in the past year. I wish I'd known enough/been passionate enough to speak out when we first started putting together the issue. But now that we're nearly done with it, I wonder why we chose to include only Israeli voices - not a wide range of anti-occupation activists from all over the globe, and, especially, not the voices of Palestinians. By publishing so overwhelmingly pro-Zionist voices, I feel like we are trying to 'play it safe' in a way that I don't entirely agree with."

On the other side of our editorial debates, Rosie Pegueros wrote: "We are always struggling to balance our own needs, desires, and beliefs as individuals against the needs, desires, and beliefs of the community. How do we register our disagreement with the Israeli government and yet accept their choices? What if we don't accept their choices? Does it make any difference to us that the majority in Israel do? . . . And if the Palestinians and the other Arab nations who would just as soon 'push the Jews into the sea,' as the old phrase goes, if they succeed and Israel ceases to exist, then where will the expelled Jews go? We walk a very thin wire when we criticize because we can destroy the thing we love most if we are not restrained."

In this collection, Jewish Israelis speak for themselves, though the issue appropriately leads off with a heated discussion between two Jewish women, an exchange of letters between Israeli poet Lois Bar-Yaacov and American poet Adrienne Rich. Their concerns and questions, their conflicts of perspectives, help frame the work contained here. Other than Rich's letters, and a review by Daniel Lang/Levitsky of the outstanding new collection Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish American Responses to the Israeli Palestinian Conflict (edited by Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon), all of the work is by Israelis (living in the U.S. and in Israel) or by Americans who have recently lived in Israel. When we made the decision to include only Jewish voices in this issue, the editors also committed ourselves to publishing Palestinian women in future issues.

Sarah Ozacky-Lazar, co-director of Givat Haviva The Jewish-Arab Center for Peace and Naomi Chazan, former member of Knesset use their decades of experience working for Jewish Palestinian reconciliation and co-existence to contribute very different pieces expressing their respectively personal and political paths.

In contrast to these veterans' essays are the testimonies of young women refusing to serve in the Israeli army. Ozacky-Lazar remembers the responsibilities and hope placed on her and her classmates - the "first generation of redemption" - the young refusers witness the excruciatingly disappointing reality of the third generation.

Terry Greenblatt and Hannah Safran, both long-time activists in the specifically feminist peace movement, relay the daily, hands-on work they do. Their work, and that of other feminists such as Rela Mazali of New Profile, is about deeply transforming Israeli society while urgently working to change the current situation. Each poem, vignette, and personal reflection by these peace-minded Israeli women calls out for our understanding and support. Our plea to each of you reading this work is to use it in building a strong and successful movement for peace.