#or do anything to prevent Palestinians from giving birth

[nataliesnews]

Tag Maier, Nasreen, gays, murders     7/8/2021

I got my third vaccination and have felt no bad effects. Maybe a bit more tired than usual.

This week our group, Tag Maier, went out to wish Ahmed a happy birthday.  Six  years ago he  lost his parents and little brother when settlers threw a Molotov cocktail into their home at night. He was saved and is now being looked after by his grandparents. It was his birthday and we went carrying presents. Varda and I took him eye glasses for swimming. Others bought him this setup for soccer and it took the  lady on the side to show the men how to set it up. We have visited every year since that horrible event.

But this is what his head looks like. Also he has no real ear. The grandfather said that when he is 18 they will have plastic surgery as it really bothers him. One does not want to think what memories he carries.

A happier occasion was when Varda and I went to Khan el Achmar for a party for Nasreen.. Her father gave a party for the village and he said that their hope was that this was to encourage other girls to follow her example. It was unbearably hot   28 degrees at 20.00 at night

Nasreen, the daughter of Eid Abu Khamis, graduated from high school in Jericho and passed her matriculation exam - the second ever in Khan

Celebrate in Khan al-Ahmar tonight!

 She smashed the glass ceiling and enrolled in university teaching and will try to fulfill her dream-to return to the mud school where she studied in Khan al-Ahmar, the first teacher from the community! Id, her father, is trying to get her into the best university on the West Bank. She will not be able to go back and forth and cannot live alone so Id will take a room for her and her mother.

 This is a particularly exciting event in light of the fact that many of the girls and boys in the Jahalin communities do not continue their studies in high school and only individuals of virtue are able to continue to university. Especially the women. Without the elementary school in Khan, it is likely that Nasreen would not have started high school at all.  This is one of the reasons why Id gave this enoromous party. To show other young girls what they could achieve. Unfortunately  we could  not photograph …the women and men celebrated separately and one is not allowed to photograph the women. Little children yes and what I found interested as how, out there in the desert, the city influence is felt.

 What seemed to worry the Israelis of the moshav more than anything else was the mudschool built with tyres. We, the people of the book, are doing everything we can to stop Palestinian children from getting an education.

 This little one I called the black widow,

  This is the food which was prepared

 Nasreen being given a laptop. She came out dancing with her hair uncovered and all the way down to her waist wearing a long cloak and carrying a basket with sweets….without the cloak it could have been a village maid in another country. I wish I could have photographed their dancing. So graceful and such beautiful hand movements.

     “Some Israelis have joined the struggle to prevent the demolition of the Sheikh Jarraqh , including some Jewish settlers who live in the vicinity.

Prof. Dan Turner is a doctor at Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Hospital. He is also a resident of the settlement of Kfar Adumim, next to Khan al-Ahmar. A year ago, after reading in the paper that his settlement was involved in efforts to remove the encampment, Turner decided to visit the site.

“I’ve been living in Kfar Adumim for 20 years and I’m embarrassed to say the local Bedouin were totally transparent to me – just people I’d seen driving on the road,” he explained”.

 He has been helping them for years and was also instrumental in having  the young man whom I accompanied to Sha’arei Zedek hospital admitted. My friend told me that when she met him with his kipa on his head he was very much on the right but what he  saw changed him completely. It turned out that Id, the girl’s father, had built his house for him. He only discovered this when he went down to the village. It just shows how transparent the workers were to the moshavnikiem, the workers who had lived in the area for 10s of years after being displaced. That he had no idea that this man was his neighbour. There is much pressure from the international community not to destroy the village. And also not to throw the Palestinians of Sheikh Jarrah from their homes.

 I think though that we are fighting a losing battle. I will not see a chance in my life time and nearly every day we read of a Palestinian who has been shot. This is what appeared in Haaretz and is so true. Even when it is obvious as in the case of a young boy who was shot in a car which was backing away from the soldiers, not only did the father lose a child but his work permit for Israel has been cancelled. And this happens always in the case, not only of terrorists, but when the army has shot an innocent Palestinian the family again are punished as they are then considered a danger to Israel because of what has happened to them. The opposite  of the man who shot his parent and then asked for mercy because he was an orphan.

 But it is not only Palestinians who are under attack. And this character whom I call Smokrich and is the leader of one of the religious  parties has come out with this statement about the gay community. When his wife gave birth, she refused to lie in a room with an Arab woman and, if I remember correctly, she did not want to give birth with an Arab doctor in attendance. Interesting to know if they know that without Arab doctors, nurses, pharmacists and cleaners the health system in Israel would probably collapse.  

MK Smotrich blasted for saying gay pride parade touched off virus wave

Health Ministry calls remark a 'dangerous combination of ignorance, populism, frustration and hatred'; Religious Zionism leader insists he was misquoted, video 'edited'

https://www.timesofisrael.com/mk-smotrich-blasted-for-saying-gay-pride-parade-touched-off-virus-wave/

Off to lunch with Gershon and Edna Baskin whom I invited out after a year of getting lifts from them to my Arabic classes.

Natanya

#Tag Maier Nasreen gays murders 7/8/2021

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How can women ‘wage peace’ without talking about occupation?

Last week’s rally organized by ‘Women Wage Peace,’ may have looked momentous, yet it ignored 50 years of military occupation, while recycling the same old tropes about the role of women in violent conflicts.

Women from the ‘Women Wage Peace’ movement take part at the final part of the peace journey in Jerusalem, October 8, 2017. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

I arrived early at the rally organized by “Women Wage Peace,” in Jerusalem’s Independence Park last week with many reservations. It was the culmination of a two-week “Journey to Peace,” in which thousands of Israeli and Palestinian women marched through Israel and the West Bank to demand a peaceful resolution to the conflict. I had been following the group since it was formed after the last Gaza war in the summer of 2014. On the one hand, a mass movement of women in support of peace is a welcome change. On the other hand, what are they actually saying? And even more importantly: what are they not saying? How can it be that the word occupation is entirely absent from a group that aims to end the conflict?

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I came early, deciding to sit in a cafe along the route of the march to the rally. After a few minutes, two women dressed in white and speaking in Arabic sat next to me. I asked if they were from the march, they said yes. After a brief conversation, I asked one of the women, a Palestinian-Israeli from Jaffa, if she isn’t bothered by the fact that Women Wage Peace never even hint at the word “occupation.”

“This was the decision that was made,” she responded evasively. When I asked once more whether or not it bothers her, she said, “Of course it bothers me. It bothers me as a woman, as a Palestinian, as an Israeli, but this is what they decided. That we must speak about the future, we’ve already spoken plenty about the past.” But the occupation is not the past, I insist. It is very much the present. “You’re right, but what can we do? Keep sitting at home? We need to do something to change reality.”

Our conversation was cut off by the march, which suddenly grew very close to us. We pay and hurry outside. The sight was enthralling: thousands of women, and men, dressed in all white, marching while singing songs of peace in central Jerusalem. This was, of course, not a common sight. There were so many people that passersby just gaped; the usual right-wing chants well known from other protests — generally far smaller, especially in Jerusalem, were hardly hear. As a Jerusalemite, it was strange and exciting to be part of it all.

Israeli and Palestinian women from ‘Women Wage Peace’ march near the Dead Sea in the West Bank to demand that their leaders do more for peace, October 8, 2017. (Flash90)

Wombs in the service of peace

With utmost ease, an estimated 30,000 women — the vast majority of them Jewish — into the park, waiting for the rally to begin. After the crowd amassed, the rally began with a trilingual (in English, Arabic, and Hebrew) singing of Leonard Cohen’s classic “Hallelujah,” led by Yael Deckelbaum and the Prayers of Mothers ensemble. Very quickly I learned that “mothers” is the key word here. Nearly every woman who spoke during the rally, aside from the younger ones, spoke about motherhood. Adi Altschuler, an educational entrepreneur, used the mantra “heart to heart, womb to womb,” causing me to break out into an uneasy sweat in the Jerusalem cold. We live in a country where women’s wombs are deployed by the regime as an incubator for future soldiers (Altschuler, who gave birth to her first child recently, also spoke about being a mother to a future soldier), while on the other hand our wombs are deployed for the sake of speaking about our place as mothers who want peace. This as opposed to, say, women who simply demand justice. Equating womanhood and motherhood was, to put it mildly, enraging.

Another motto that was bandied about was kulan, all women. The movement, it turns out, includes all women — Jews and Palestinians, religious and secular, Mizrahim and Ashkenazim, residents of central Israel and the periphery, LGBTQs, right wingers, left wingers, centrists, immigrants and veterans. All women including the settler who lives, according to her, in “beautiful and bleeding Samaria.” Yes, even she wants peace. But how does she see us achieving that peace? “When tens of thousands of women will be able to talk about the difficult things, our leadership won’t be able to ignore us.” But what are those difficult things we must talk about? Perhaps the defiant and growing presence of settlements, like the one she lives in, which prevent any chance of establishing a Palestinian state? No. So perhaps the occupation and the checkpoints she passes through on the way home? Human rights violations? War crimes? No. The settler from Samaria can so easily stand on stage and speak about the need “to talk about the difficult things,” because she knows they won’t actually be talked about. Otherwise, perhaps, she wouldn’t be able to take part in the movement from the get go.

That pesky word

In fact, the movement’s demands are so unclear that even Netanyahu could join it. Their demands can be summed up as such: peace negotiations that include women. And that’s it. But what will these women say when they sit around the negotiating table? What are their demands? Their red lines? It’s a mystery. Even the Palestinian speaker — the only one who came from the occupied territories, from Hebron, a city that lives under apartheid — did not mention the word occupation even once. She did not even speak in Arabic, for God’s sake, but rather in English. Not a word about the checkpoints or the hardship she endured just to get a permit form the Israeli army to enter Israel. Occupation? Forget it. We are talking about the conflict — a much nicer, more symmetrical word than occupation. Almost ironically, the only time the word occupation was used onstage was by the only man who spoke, former MK Shakib Shnaan, whose son Kamil was killed in the bloody attack on the Temple Mount three months ago. Perhaps the fact that he is a man allows him to speak this way. Us women need to speak about the womb, wear white, and hope for peace. How do we achieve peace? Ask the men.

Israeli soldiers arrest a Palestinian man during a raid on the West Bank city of Hebron, September 20, 2017. (Wisam Hashlamoun/Flash90)

I write these words with a great deal of sadness. In the political reality of the last few decades, there is nothing trivial about the fact that a few dozen of thousands women demand to change that reality and are willing to march in the streets of every town and city in order to gain more supporters. The fact that this is a women’s initiative gives it even greater potential. And yes, there is such a thing as women-led politics, and it can be revolutionary and powerful — a politics that first and foremost challenges existing hierarchies and social structures.

However, the women-led politics I saw in Jerusalem was the complete opposite of that — the kind that only strengthens those power structures. A politics in which being a woman means wearing white, singing and dancing. It means being a mother and a womb, to sit at home and take care of our soldier sons. It means gently asking men to make peace already. Instead of a woman’s revolution, we got women who are demanding change but cannot for the life of them decide what kind of change they want to see. Women who only entrench the view that politics is a dirty word that women shouldn’t bother with — that it’s reserved for men alone.

No symmetry

Israeli and Palestinian women from ‘Women Wage Peace’ march near the Dead Sea in the West Bank to demand that their leaders do more for peace, October 8, 2017. (Flash90)

There is something simplistic, even childish, about speaking of “negotiations” and demanding a “peace agreement” a quarter century after the failure of the Oslo Accords. Negotiations? On the contrary: Israel would love to enter into another endless round of talks that will stave off inter nation pressure and allow it to continue dispossessing, just as it did during all previous rounds of negotiations. The women seek to jump into this vacuum, filling it with lots of emotional words and a desperate attempt to create some semblance of symmetry between Israelis and Palestinians.

As thousands of women sang songs of peace and sisterhood in Jerusalem, a rocket was fired from Gaza at Israel, to which Israel responded by attacking the Strip. Can we even begin to grapple with this reality without, for example, speaking about the siege? Without using the word occupation?

Yes, speaking about the occupation is not popular, and it may even drastically decrease the number of participants in the next march. But perhaps this is when we should listen to the words of the settler from Samaria: until we are unable to speak about the difficult things, it is doubtful whether we will be able to change anything in the real world. Even if we all wear white and talk about our wombs — in Hebrew, Arabic, and English.

This post was first published in Hebrew on Local Call. Read it here.

#anti-war