TIME magazine has named “Israeli and Palestinian women calling for peace” among its Women of the Year, which lists 12 “extraordinary leaders working toward a more equal world”.
Yasmeen Serhan, writing for the magazine, said that “on October 4, 2023, some 1,500 Israeli and Palestinian women descended on Jerusalem and the shores of the Dead Sea. Wielding blue and yellow flags representing two different grassroots peace organizations, they gathered to demand an end to the ‘cycle of bloodshed’ consuming their communities and for their respective leaders to return to the negotiating table to secure a nonviolent resolution to their decades-long conflict”.
The “historic partnership” is between the Palestinian organisation Women of the Sun and the Israeli movement Women Wage Peace, both “women’s movements” Yael Admi, the co-founder of Women Wage Peace stated.
The Palestinian organisation’s founder and director Reem Hajajreh added that they “started out as a movement with a few lone women and now we are thousands. We no longer take the back seat”.
After October 7, the brutalities in Gaza escalated as Israeli attacks intensified, and over 30,000 Palestinians were butchered. The situation remains dire as a United Nations team reported seeing a large number of gunshot wounds among Gazans after Israeli troops opened fire on Palestinian civilians scrambling for food supplies near an aid convoy, killing 115 people and wounding more than 750.
Violence also surged in the West Bank, which has been under Israeli military occupation since the 1967 Six-Day War, with over 300 Palestinians killed. At the start of Israel’s aggressions in Gaza, Women of the Sun had 2,500 members in the West Bank, where it is headquartered, and approximately 300 members in Gaza, “at least 27 of whom have now been killed”. Similarly, three members of Women Wage Peace of Women Wage Peace, including co-founder Vivian Silver, were killed on October 7.
While neither organisation supports a particular political solution, both believe that a “mutually agreed-upon, nonviolent resolution is vital” as the women and children of Palestine and Israel would be caught in the crossfire if there continued to be no solution.
“We said all the time that we have to solve this conflict as soon as possible because it’s a ticking bomb—it will kill all of us,” Admi, told TIME. “Now when you see the crisis, this terrible war, how can we suffer it and continue on this path?”
Expanding on both women’s journies to activism, the magazine said, “Hajajreh turned to activism out of fear that her children, growing up under the shadow of Israel’s punishing military occupation in the West Bank, could end up being imprisoned, wounded, or worse”.
Through founding Women of the Sun in 2021, Hajajreh hoped to “empower Palestinian women… to have greater political awareness” as they are “largely absent” from public arenas which remain dominated by men.
On the other hand, Admi’s peace activism began when she was 12 years old and her eldest brother, Ishai Ron, died during conflict between Egypt and Israel in 1969.
The incident moved her to co-found Women Wage Peace in 2014, following another “horrible cycle of war” in Gaza. The Israeli organisation maintains that it has 50,000 members across the country who are dedicated to a “nonpartisan call for peace”.
TIME highlighted that while both organisations focus on their own communities, they also work with each other and consider it a “prerequisite” for asking their leaders to do the same.
The organisations’ “principal achievement is the Mothers’ Call, a joint declaration in 2022 setting out their shared desire for a peaceful resolution… [and] a belief that women’s participation can only strengthen efforts”.
In December, the two organisations were jointly nominated for the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize by the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
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