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June 30, 2006
Peace activists meet
Middle East session illuminates problems.
CASSANDRA SAVAGE
The Middle East working group of the World Peace Forum presented
a workshop Monday on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
A diverse audience gathered at St. Andrews-Wesley Church for the
event Palestine and Israel: No Justice, No Peace. The evening was
billed as an attempt to talk openly about Israel's occupation of
the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The evening was emotionally charged, with some audience members
wondering how the living memory of the Holocaust plays into the
conflict, while others wondered how it is, after all we've witnessed
and learned throughout history, that racism and ethnic hatred persist
in our world.
Sid Shniad, a member of Jews for a Just Peace and part of the Middle
East working group of the WPF, chaired the meeting.
"The confrontation between Palestinians and Israelis provides
us, I think, with one of the world's longest lasting crises,"
he said. "Despite countless rounds of peace negotiations, a
solution to the crisis appears as remote as ever.
"Israel has announced plans to define its borders with Palestine
unilaterally by annexing Palestinian land in the West Bank and portions
of Jerusalem. Far from putting an end to this decades-old crisis,
such a step would be in flagrant violation of international law,"
he claimed. "Furthermore, it is guaranteed to generate further
confrontation and upheaval."
The evening's key event featured three women speakers – Miryam
Rashid, Nurit Peled-Elhanan and Cindy Corrie – sharing their
own views of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Rashid has lived in the Palestinian territories for five years -
first as a teenager with her Palestinian parents during the first
intifada, and later as an adult scholar with an MA in Middle East
studies. As a teen, she said, she lacked the vocabulary to articulate
what it meant to live under what she called a military occupation.
"I remember that I actually realized my parents can't protect
me, my teachers can't protect, nobody can protect me," she
said, "so I turned to God ... just let me live and I will be
so good."
At that age, Rashid said she couldn't fully understand why her family's
water and electricity was shut down at night, while the neighboring
settlement enjoyed light and heat at all hours, why Palestinians
and Israelis used different colored licence plates or why her male
friends were "humiliated" by soldiers in the streets.
Today, however, she has the words to talk about it. "Next year,
it will be 40 years of Israel's military occupation of the West
Bank and Gaza Strip and that in itself creates a humanitarian crisis,"
she said. "After graduate school, I was a little bit idealistic....
I still thought that it's worth trying to steer things in a direction
that's more just and more equal. [But] the framework of negotiation
simply has to change."
Peled-Elhanan was the recipient of the 2001 Sakharov Prize for human
rights and freedom of thought and her family are members of the
Israeli-Palestinian Bereaved Parents for Peace and the Parents'
Circle. She said her goal is to eliminate what she calls anti-Arab
racism from the Israeli education system.
"Our children live immersed in a racist discourse," she
said, adding that this is a key reason for the current conflict
and a plausible theory for its decades-long persistence. Her work,
she said, is her attempt to shift the frame through which children
view the "other" and create space for peace in the future.
When asked why she didn't speak at a synagogue or another religious
venue, Peled-Elhanan remarked, "I speak to people. I don't
speak to races or religions." The audience applauded this statement.
Corrie's daughter, Rachel, was killed by an Israeli army bulldozer
in March 2003 while she was involved in a protest to prevent the
demolition of a Palestinian home.
"Tonight reinforces something that I feel so strongly about
and I think it's something that we, whether we are in Canada or
the U.S. or in other countries, can do something about," said
Corrie, "and that is to make sure that the voices of Palestinians
and that the voices of Israelis who have important messages to bring
to us are heard."
During the question period, one audience member asked what concrete
solutions could exist in a region filled with a painful history
of ethnic hatred. The solution, said Peled-Elhanan, is to have Israelis
and Palestinians meet, to have children on both sides know the other,
not as an enemy, but as a fellow human.
"When you know someone," she said, "you do not fear
them."
Cassandra Savage is an MA candidate in the School of Communication
at Simon Fraser University.
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