Israeli and Palestinian Women Gather to Talk About Oppression

“I visited the children in the camp’s nursery, and the first words of 2-year-olds were army, stones, afraid. They knew how to differentiate between soldier and policeman,” said Zahira Kamal, a Palestinian teacher from Ramallah.

Kamal was speaking Monday night at a program called “Women and Peace.” It followed a three-day conference, “The Road to Peace,” that brought together Israelis and members of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

The Monday meeting, held at B’nai Jeshurun synagogue in Manhattan, assembled Palestinian women from within Israel, as well as the Israeli administered territories, with Israeli women such as former Knesset member Chaika Grossman of Mapam and religious feminist Leah Shakdiel.

Their theme was a belief that women have learned from their own oppression to empathize with others’ suffering, and that women can, indeed, make a change.

Although the women’s words were strong, they were not caustic or threatening.

Indeed, some members of Rabbi Meir Kahane’s Kach movement, who admittedly had come with intentions of some sort of protest, made no disruptions, apparently finding little objectionable about the presentations.

The women told of women’s activities that have proliferated in the territories as benign necessities to improve the quality of life. They did not dwell on political antagonism.

Shakdiel, an Orthodox Jew who made headlines with her ultimately successful efforts to be elected to the municipal council and religious council of the Israeli town of Yeroham, said she “had the luxury to conduct my struggle to promote what I drastically believe in.”

The Palestinian women’s fight is no luxury, she underscored.

Grossman, a leader of the Bialystok ghetto revolt and a veteran of mainstream Israeli polities, said, “We fought a long time to have mutual recognition. The Arabs must recognize that there is a Palestinian nation, and we have not the right to deny this nation to be a nation.”