Jewish voice for peace and justice

Catholic New Times, June 29, 2003 by Terry Greenblat

Editor's note: The Jewish Voices for Peace and Justice, Canadian Jews opposing the 35-year Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, converged at the University of Toronto on June 8, for a one-day conference on the issue. Key note speaker Terry Greenblatt, the director of Bat Shalom, an Israeli National feminist organization of Jewish and Palestinian Israeli addressed the attendees. The following is an excerpt from her speech.

I've spent the last few years speaking before audiences in Israel and abroad, before the UN Security Council and in European parliaments, in kibbutz clubhouses, at international conferences, symposia and think-tanks, on the floor of my office with young women activists, sitting over coffee in the King David hotel with wealthy progressive Jews or over mint tea in the American Colony hotel with the American actress Jane Fonda, with Winnie Mandela, with countless women leaders, groups and individuals. I advocate for the political positions and desires of thousands of Israeli women and for the hundreds of women's peace and anti-occupation initiatives around the world who remain committed to a just, viable and peaceful resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict, and who believe that Israeli, Palestinian and international women have an exceptional contribution to make and part to play in peace-building ...

I have become a disobedient, illegitimate and dangerous voice in the global Jewish community ... to quote Susan Sontag, "To fall out of step with one's tribe ... is a complex and difficult process. It is hard to defy the wisdom of the tribe, the wisdom that values the lives of its members above all others. It will always be unpopular, always deemed unpatriotic, to say that the lives of the members of the other tribe are as valuable as one's own. It is always easier to give one's allegiance to those we know."

I am not a politician, nor a political analyst, nor a Middle East expert, an academic or human rights advocate. I am no more, and no less, than an Israeli feminist political activist who is doing her part in developing the kind of transformational politics that many of us believe will prepare our society for the changes that a just peace will require of us, and in serving as a trustworthy partner to the Palestinian women we work with ...

Much of what we Palestinian and Israeli women do, what political feminists have historically seen as our mission, is to challenge and re-frame reality. And so, from the uncomfortable margins where so many of us live, we introduce joint political positions and values into the public discourse of both societies, propose alternative formulas for moving out of the current paralysis, as well as ensure a consistent joint condemnation of the individual and collective abuses of individual and national rights. We have developed the foundations of an authentic political dialogue grounded in transparency, feminist ideology and politics, and honourable intention that have remained sustainable and productive as the turmoil and violence escalate all around us ...

And we together mourned the invisibility of responsible leadership, one in which I can turn on my radio, and hear an enthusiastic and inspirational prime minister say that the Road Map may not be perfect, but it is the only game in town and we are going to give it a chance, because either we go in with serious and responsible intentions to make this work, as painful and as expensive as it might be for us, or we are dooming ourselves to live in the darkness of our souls, in the darkness of our identity as an occupier, and without the grace or humility to know that we turned out the lights ourselves ...

We in Bat Shalom are exposing the difficult issues to the light, believing that it is only in the dark silence that racism, Arab and Jewish fundamentalism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism grow their poisonous tendrils. The individual and collective fears that accompany us along the way are inevitable and sometimes overwhelming. When an Israeli woman from the Labour party tells a room full of Palestinian women that she continues to do this joint work because she believes them when they say that challenging her to understand and acknowledge the right of return does not mean that they want to destroy her state of Israel, or when a Palestinian woman from Ramallah spends two and a half hours crossing three checkpoints to participate in the meeting, and as she dabs tissue at the sweat and the dust caked deep in the lines of her face says that she still believes there is a place beyond hate, beyond the anger and pain of occupation and oppression where we will one day be able to meet, then I as an Israeli Jewish woman believe that I am doing what I am supposed to be doing.