04/16/07 Women Share Stories To Bring Peace
Women Share Stories To Bring Peace
The Capital Times
Monday, April 16, 2007
Katrin Madayag The Capital Times
For Tor Dal, getting to work is a question of transportation. The 29-year-old Jewish Israeli lives in Tel Aviv and can bike, drive or take the public bus. She faces no checkpoints and doesn't see the cement walls that separate Palestinian and Israeli communities.
It isn't as simple for Palestinians Huda Abu Arqoub and Amal Nassar, both residents of the Israeli occupied West Bank.
Nassar, a nurse and physiotherapist, must pass several Israeli checkpoints to get to her hospital in Bethlehem. It's the same for teacher and educational consultant Abu Arqoub, who supervises teachers throughout the West Bank.
For them, every day is different, dependent on the mood of an Israeli soldier at a checkpoint.
It's a "daily violation of rights," Abu Arqoub said.
As part of the Partners for Peace - Jerusalem Women Speak tour, these three peace-builders stopped in Madison Sunday and today to share their unique perspectives as a Jewish Israeli, Christian Palestinian and Muslim Palestinian. This 13th tour included presentations by the women at Fitchburg Memorial United Church of Christ and Edgewood College Sunday.
Despite having just met on April 6, the women said they are already learning from each other's experiences as well as connecting with Palestinian and Israeli activists in the United States. Most importantly, the women are testifying to the daily realities they face.
"Once upon a time in the Holy Land, there were people living there before 1948," said Abu Arqoub, a 36-year-old Muslim Palestinian. Her grandmother had fled her home in Hebron in the West Bank but kept the rusty key of the house. She said she would return to finish baking the bread she had abruptly abandoned 40 years ago.
When Abu Arqoub was 10, she visited the old family home. "I wanted to finish baking the bread," she said. "I smelled it."
Israel occupied the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem after the Six-Day War in 1967, displacing thousands of Palestinians. Israel launched a pre-emptive war against its Arab neighbors after Egypt expelled a United Nations peacekeeping force from the Sinai peninsula.
Today, Abu Arqoub lives in the West Bank and works for the Palestinian National Authority's Ministry of Education, chronicling the plight of Palestinian children, from their trek to school through checkpoints to the lack of after-school centers. At the checkpoints, they are searched, and soldiers rifle through their bags. Children are often late for school, but so are the Palestinian teachers, she said.
Checkpoints are a way of life in the occupied territories, where Palestinians cannot drive on main roadways.
Nassar, a Christian Palestinian, understands the frustration of checkpoints and restrictions. Bethlehem is like an open-air prison, she said.
Nassar, 46, works at Bethlehem's Caritas Baby Hospital in an Israeli-controlled zone. Because of closed roads and checkpoints, mothers carrying their disabled children are often late, crying after suffering degradation and exhaustion, she said.
She crosses those checkpoints on her way to her family's 100-acre land southwest of Bethlehem. Her grandfather purchased the property in 1916, but the family has been fighting a court battle since 1991 to keep the state from confiscating the land.
Nassar said she appreciates the freedom she's had on the American tour. Happy to be away from the conflict for a while, she said, "I enjoy that I don't have my passport with me" all the time.
Dal, an Israeli activist with several peace organizations, was born to South African Zionists, and she said she lived a typical Israeli life. Her father fought in the 1948 war, and she trained soldier-teachers for at-risk youth.
At 21, she visited South Africa and learned her family was been part of the system of apartheid.
"I am an oppressor," she said, because of her compliance.
She likened attitudes of Israelis to her own experience of passing Tel Aviv University and blandly noticing the ruins of the Palestinian town upon which it was built. The ruins are in front of your eyes, but you don't see it, she said.
Becoming a leftist activist has been hard because it's against the mainstream, she said, but she believes the occupation doesn't serve the Israeli people's interests. Corporations and businesses like Caterpillar financially benefit from the occupation.
Israelis believe that without American support, they would not exist, Dal said. What they don't realize is that of the $5 billion in American aid, more than half is given in arms, bullets and fuel.
"I don't want to feel guilty anymore of things that were done in my name," she said. "I don't want to be an occupier. I want to be a citizen."
For many Palestinians, the face of Israel is Ariel Sharon or the Israeli soldiers at checkpoints, Abu Arqoub said. Palestinian children see soldiers with dogs searching their homes and abusing their parents.
"You can't convince people there's peace by signing papers," she said.
Peace can't come when you don't know the other side's story, she said. And the walls are keeping apart young Israelis and Palestinians who don't know another way of life.
Peace won't come from handshaking, but from the people, Nassar agreed. She is a founding member of Tent of Nations, a program that brings together locals and international people to her family's land to live, eat and learn together ways of nonviolent resistance.
Dal believes that peace comes from solidarity and taking the power away from the authorities bent on keeping people separate.
The Israeli "narrative doesn't have to come at the expense of another," Dal said.
The women will speak at the University of Wisconsin Humanities Building at 7 p.m. tonight before continuing the tour throughout Wisconsin.