With humor as a weapon, a clown dressed as a police officer who reminds us of Charles Chaplin in The great dictator, She is a regular at the demonstrations that are spread across Israel and occupied Palestine. She wears a red nose, big shoes, a wig, a helmet with plastic flowers and a somewhat sloppy uniform. Sometimes she marches martially, sticking out her chest in a feigned gesture next to the police officers, while handing out heart-shaped stickers as a symbol of love and peace. She does not get upset when there are riots or arrests. It is easy to find her around Gaza supporting the families of Israeli hostages, trying to prevent the eviction of Palestinians, in marches of ultra-Orthodox or in the protests that take place in Jerusalem in front of the house of the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, where more and more people are demanding his departure from power.
Idit (she does not give her last name or age) is just one of the women who, in their own way, are seeking peace in times of conflict and violence. They are women from both sides of the conflict who, on many occasions, join forces in a world where political decisions are made mostly by men. This was also the concern of Vivian Silver, a historic entrepreneur of initiatives with the Palestinians and the Israeli Arab population, who was murdered in her home in Kibbutz Beeri, near Gaza, on October 7 during the Hamas attack that killed some 1,200 people, opening the floodgates of the current war.
“My goal is to bring peace to the Middle East,” the clown-policewoman sighs hopefully during an interview at Hansen House, a former leper colony opened in the 19th century in Jerusalem that now functions as a cultural centre. She comes stripped of the attire of her character, which is called Hashoteret Az-Oolay in Hebrew. It is she who has to take the step and identify herself while sketching a smile. The first gesture is to extend a hug, like the ones she offers in the street to everyone who approaches her. Despite everything, she clarifies, the conversation is not with Idit, who does not like demonstrations and protests at all, but with the clown she has played since the character was born in August 2020 after returning from three years of training in dramatic arts in the United States.
In the face of those who accuse her of being superficial and view her with skepticism, she defends her role as a public servant and healer of broken hearts, no matter who they are. “I don’t give solutions, I don’t offer therapy. I understand that they consider me naive,” she admits while insisting that she fervently believes in the usefulness of a small gesture such as empathizing or sticking a small heart on the lapel of a police officer, a protester or someone who is suffering.
Under the current storm of war, Netanyahu is seen surrounded by men only to make decisions about the war. In December 2022, the president formed a Cabinet in which he included six women out of 32 members, compared to the nine who were part of the outgoing Executive, of 27 members. Meanwhile, in the Government of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), which officially holds the reins of the occupied West Bank, women occupy three of the 23 positions. In the Hamas Executive in Gaza, the female quota is zero and no one expects the fundamentalists to take another path. These are not data that excessively steal the dream of the protagonists of this report, aware that their activism takes place on the street rather than on the carpets of official offices.
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“Complex identity”
Sitting in the living room of her apartment in Acre, a city overlooking the Mediterranean in northwestern Israel, Kefaia Aiaite, who considers herself “a Muslim Arab born in Israel and with a complex identity,” reflects on the conflict in an unusual way. “The Muslims in Gaza are our brothers. We have connections with them. In my circle I have women with relatives in Jenin or Ramallah.” [en la Cisjordania ocupada]. We cannot cut ties with them. I discuss this with my Jewish friends here in my city, my country, Israel… that is my responsibility,” argues this member of Women Wage Peace (WWP, Women Fighting for Peace), an organization that advocates for an agreed solution in which, according to its website, some 44,000 people participate. Since 2021, they have had a sister association on the Palestinian side, Women of the Sun, which has lost several dozen of its members among the more than 40,000 dead in the war in Gaza.
One of the founders of WWP was Vivian Silver, who, three days before she was murdered, had marched with hundreds of other women, including Aiaite, through the streets of Jerusalem, without distinguishing between sides, creeds or nationalities in their demands for peace. Aiaite remembers her while offering the journalist fruit that, she points out, she bought a few days ago in Jenin, the West Bank city hardest hit by Israeli occupation troops during the current war. From time to time, she and other Arab Israeli women cross the wall built by Israel in a bus that they all charter and reach the West Bank, where, she explains, the fruit is better and services such as dentistry are much more accessible.
Aiaite, 54, insists that she fights for peace because she, divorced in 2018 after several episodes of violence, felt that she had no peace even within her own home. Proof of the importance she attaches to local activism, she recounts several projects she has developed in her neighbourhood. In the presence of her son Ahmed, a twenty-something compulsive smoker, she stresses that the world needs more women who think differently, who do so with “their heads, their hearts and their wombs”, she adds.
“We Arabs in Israel have an important role to play in leading a change in the resolution of conflicts between the two peoples, the two cultures, the positions, the languages and also the thoughts, to bring them closer to dialogue, to get to know each other in depth and to plan together what is good for everyone, to offer a life and a future to our children,” he argues. The enormous burden of the violence unleashed by the war in Gaza and irreparable losses such as that of Silver do not deter them from the rocky path they undertook before October 7 last year.
The bridges, although it may seem so, have not been completely blown up and there are many activists who are redoubling their efforts under the current war situation, which has in many cases undermined mutual trust, closed projects and buried relationships of years. The Palestinian Rana Salman, from Bethlehem (West Bank) and the Israeli Eszter Koranyi (from East Jerusalem) try to remain firm in their mission at the head of Combatants for Peace, an organization for which hand-to-hand cooperation between citizens from both sides of the conflict is essential. With them at the helm as co-directors, they agree, the profile of an entity that was born a couple of decades ago at the hands of ex-combatants, almost always men, both Israeli and Palestinian, has been corrected.
Both 40-year-olds explain during a video conference how they try to maintain hope and recover the dignity buried by the rubble of the attacks. “The movement is open to all who believe in the values of non-violence and in our shared humanity,” explains Salman. Every year they organize a large peace event that, in 2024, in the face of possible threats and the blockade imposed on the Palestinians, has had to be held online. They have saved it this way because they consider it more necessary than ever. In this sense, they optimistically point out that they have received more donations than in previous editions.
“We have the feeling that on October 7 everything collapsed and we have to build everything up again, closing the cracks and restoring mutual trust, something that requires a lot of effort and work,” says the Palestinian activist. But at the same time, she feels that: “The international community follows us and has placed hopes in our work, so we have the responsibility to remain firm and committed to the cause.”
On a personal level, says Koranyi, of Hungarian origin, they have to deal with the trickle of deaths on both sides. She does so on what she considers to be the most complicated days of the conflict after six of the hostages returned to Israel in shrouds a couple of weeks ago. “But we also mourn the deaths in Gaza, which are many more than six,” she emphasizes. “All this is much more tragic than knowing the numbers. There are times when we only manage to hug each other and cry together. And that also gives us hope,” she concludes. Her words coincide with the account given by Idit, the policewoman-clown, of how she experienced the beginning of the current war.
“I am not a politician, nor a judge. I do not act with my head, but from my heart,” Idit reflects. Determined, in those first hours after the Hamas massacre, she spurred herself on: “You cannot remain frozen, you are a servant, you have to act, you have to help.” And so, after offering her services on social media, she almost immediately began visiting the hotels that were hosting the families of those killed, the displaced families from the communities devastated around Gaza. She handed out hearts and hugs, blew soap bubbles for the children, exchanged tears… “They cried and I cried,” she concludes.
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