Robert Shetterly has published a book titled Portraits of Peacemakers: Americans Who Tell the Truth, Oct 2024, and I am honored to have my portrait included and to have a featured essay. (see below)
In my forties, I felt a need to grapple with the topic of Israel/Palestine, to understand the fraught issues imbued with Holocaust trauma and Israel’s seductive origin story. Growing up during the Vietnam War and the birth of second-wave feminism, I needed to examine this struggle through the lens of my adult politics.
I delved into a listening tour of lefty Israelis, Palestinians, scholars, and rabbis, with a group of progressive Jews. We read the New Israeli Historians and Palestinian scholars and began traveling to the region on health and human rights delegations. In the early 1990s, the two-state solution was a radical idea, even the word Palestine was whispered cautiously, lest someone lose their composure along with their ability to listen and learn. Jimmy Carter had yet to utter the word apartheid. Once we had a grasp of the history of Jewish settlement in Palestine, the international laws flaunted in the face of occupation, and the painful personal narratives of Palestinians, we were ready to educate our communities.
I believed that if Jews really knew, their attitudes would change and the politics would follow. We understood victimization and suffering, the words Never Again seared into our psyches as the Good People with an intimate experience of genocide and years of sensitivity for the oppressed and downtrodden. In the United States, we marched for civil rights, women’s rights, supported labor unions and immigrants. We were not in the business of hating people.
Having long given up the mantle of chosenness, I supported the work of the Bereaved Parents Circle, where Israeli Jews and Palestinians who had suffered extraordinary losses came together to find a peaceful way forward. I was moved by Combatants for Peace, Israeli soldiers and former Palestinian prisoners who joined to mutually renounce violence and hatred. I was inspired by young Palestinians and Israeli Jews who attended the Seeds of Peace Camp in Maine and developed strong bonds as human beings, and by Israeli Jewish and Palestinian families who consciously chose to live together in the extraordinary Israeli community of Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam.
Dialogue and coexistence seemed to be the ticket to a peaceful future, but then the young Jewish Israelis grew up and joined the army, while their Palestinian buddies lived as second-class citizens in a country that was not designed for them, or as occupied people. The Israeli defense industry continued to find more lethal ways to kill and injure Palestinian people and to sell their “field-tested” products to repressive regimes across the world, supported by billions of dollars from the United States. Clearly, peaceful coexistence was not enough to create meaningful peace.
In 2005, Palestinian civil society called for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction of Israel, and the liberal Jewish community fractured. It became clear to me that it was important to say out loud what so many were unwilling to speak. This was not a “conflict” between two equal, traumatized peoples. The power differential, occupier to occupied, could not be rectified through a shared bowl of chicken soup and a plate of maqlubeh. Palestinian leadership had its share of troubles, but it was under extreme pressure to collaborate with the Israeli military. The Palestinian “street” was becoming less willing to wait for a better day.
Listening to the voices of people who bore the brunt of this ideology, I came to understand that Zionism was born not only as a response to European anti-Semitism but from the heart of British imperialism. Zionism developed as a national movement that privileged Jews over indigenous Palestinians actually living in Historic Palestine. Zionists sought to seize, one way or another, the maximum amount of Palestinian land with the minimal amount of Palestinians. At its core, much to my heartbreak, Zionism was a racist and reactionary ideology in service of a settler colonial enterprise, at a time when colonialism was waning all over the world. I could not support that.
Israel, with political and military support from the United States, flourished as the spunky, start-up nation, absorbing a million Russian immigrants, developing modern cities, universities, cultural centers, stealing land and water from Palestinians, and creating a captive market in the Occupied Territories. The Israel/Palestine story became a tale of Jewish trauma that led to Jewish exceptionalism, violent land seizures, massacres of unarmed civilians, the destruction of homes and villages.
The oppressed people were no longer my Yiddish-speaking grandparents, but Palestinians gunned down by Israeli snipers, held unjustly in Israeli jails, surveilled by a growing web of technology, unable to get permits to build their homes, repeatedly attacked by Israeli forces and Jewish settlers in more and more brutal and egregious ways.
It became clear to me that peace without justice is meaningless, that the root causes of conflicts must be named and addressed, that struggle and co-resistance led by Palestinians is the most effective way forward. I came to appreciate Palestinian “terrorism” in the context of Palestinian “resistance.” I noted that when Palestinians resist nonviolently, they are condemned with the same ferocity as when they resist with guns. At the same time, their violence is dwarfed by the Israeli military machine.
I came to understand Palestinian culture: the act of refusing to leave the land, to have and love children, write poetry and hip-hop music, embroider gorgeous dresses, tatreez. The tasks of getting up every morning, boiling eggs, offering olives, humus, and warm pita for breakfast, brewing bitter coffee, shepherding the kids to schools through repeated checkpoints, traveling to work without losing one’s temper or dignity, celebrating Eid, lovingly caring for ancient olive groves and elderly grandparents, are the most common forms of resistance, powerful, and often joyful.
Then came Gaza 2023 and my role as “peacemaker” rocketed into “troublemaker” of the “good trouble” variety, not only condemning the war crimes by Hamas militants but also documenting and protesting the actions of the Israeli military and government in the wholesale destruction of Gaza, the killing and injuring of tens of thousands of people, two-thirds of them women and children. Resistance to Israeli attacks rapidly reached international awareness, and the call to respect international law, create an immediate cease-fire and massive humanitarian relief, return hostages, end the siege and system of apartheid, and hold Israel and the United States accountable became deafening.
As a peacemaker, I hope we are seeing a massive challenge to a system that privileges Jewish Israelis and denigrates Palestinians, that it has been made clear that oppressed people will always ultimately resist, that an overwhelming military assault only creates more wounded, desperate people with nothing left to lose. Maybe Israel has reached a painful and necessary turning point. The end of uncritical U.S. support for Israeli policies and challenges to the all-powerful Israel lobby, combined with pressure from the international community and a new generation of Palestinian activists, may bring about the changes needed for a lasting peace based not only on international law and human rights but on respect for the worth and aspirations of every individual, the end of apartheid policies, and the need for regional stability. Failing to move forward in that direction, I fear, may prove catastrophic for all of us.
The book is available at https://nyupress.org/9781613322567/portraits-of-peacemakers/
Review of the book: https://worldbeyondwar.org/portraits-of-peacemakers/