Vivienne Porzoltz, a founding member of Jews Against the Occupation, and a member of the Australian Socialist Alliance, recently travelled to Palestine to take part in an international women's march for peace and justice. She spoke to Green Left Weekly's Austin Whitten about the experience.
What was the march like?
It took place between December 20 and January 12, and was initiated by women in Oslo who had done international peace marches before. They proposed there should be a march through Israel-Palestine. The international group was made up of women from Norway, Denmark, Sweden, to a lesser extent, France and one or two from Italy, Spain, Austria, the US and Canada. I was the one Australian. More than 100 women took part overall, 50-70 at any one time. At one stage, over a third of us were Jewish.
We spent one week in Israel and two weeks in Palestine. We demonstrated through the streets every day in various places.
The women from Oslo, and from northern Europe generally, had a strong pacifist mission. Some of us were more political and left-wing. All of us wanted a non-violent solution to the conflict, so were against war in that sense.
We connected with Israeli women and Palestinian women. The Israeli women were from the Coalition of Women for Peace that includes a broad range of women's groups — Women in Black, New Profile, Ta'ayush, Bat Shalom, Machsom Watch.
Machsom Watch are women who watch at the checkpoints, both to witness what happens, what is done by the Israeli forces there, and also to try and temper those activities and to protect the Palestinians by their physical presence. Bat Shalom has done dialogue work for many years with the Jerusalem Women's Centre for Peace, a Palestinian women's group. As partners, they have had from time to time, strained relationships, but they hung in there, linked by their shared commitment to a peaceful, just future.
Both the Israeli and Palestinian women have been doing this peace work for a very long time. They are very, very strong. They are incredible, very special women.
From the Palestinian side, the march was organised by the General Union of Palestinian Women, a broad mainstream Palestinian umbrella group of women's organisations. It was established as part of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and its general secretary works closely with Palestinian Authority president Yassar Arafat.
Where did you stay?
We stayed together at a hostel in Tel Aviv and at a hotel in East Jerusalem in Israel and on the West Bank, in Ramallah, Bethlehem, an agricultural college near Jenin, and in Tulkarem where we were distributed amongst Palestinian hosts, which was very special.
I didn't get to go to the Bedouin camp, one of the "unrecognised villages" in Israel. These villages are not recognised for the purposes of funding. The Bedouin are regularly threatened with the loss of their land. Taking land away isn't confined to the West Bank. Our group was hosted by the Bedouins there and it was a moving experience for them.
We visited a kibbutz, Metzer, next door to a Palestinian village, Meizer, in Israel. There had been an attack on the kibbutz in 2000 — 14 people were killed — next to the Green Line. This kibbutz was originally settled by Argentinean Jews who knew nothing about agriculture. Their Palestinian neighbours helped them and relationships were always cordial. While these have been restrained since the killings, they still want to work together and run peace workshops and so on. This kind of Palestinian-Israeli co-operation is not reported in our media.
When I was in Israel in 1992 there was only one kibbutz left with a collective childcare program. They have been completely overtaken by neoliberalism.
Were there any problems with the Israelis?
We had a meeting one evening with settler women because many women on the march wanted to hear the "other side". Everyone of our group was very good, doing conflict resolution, listening. In hindsight, it would have been better to set it up in a reciprocal way so they would have to hear us as well. We asked questions but that's not the same thing as their sitting quietly while we presented our perspective.
Have you heard David Hare's radio play, Via Dolorosa? He talks about going to a settlement on a magnificent four-lane highway.
Exactly! That's my experience, exactly! Now if you look at Ariel on the map, it's half way across the West Bank. We didn't visit people there but drove straight through from Israel on a four-lane highway — no border, no check-point, no nothing. Israel has annexed the whole area. Settlements is the wrong word. These are colonial towns, suburbs like Double Bay. Horrible.
What was it like in the West Bank?
We attended various demonstrations with our Palestinians hosts. In a village near Jenin, near the [Israeli built apartheid] wall, things were very, very tense. Palestinian kids were flinging stones at the fence and because of the sensors on the fence the army came straight away to the area where we were standing. Our Palestinian hosts were really concerned something nasty might happen and so they got us to very quietly and in a disciplined way walk backwards together slowly.
At a demonstration near the village of Deir Balud, there were a dozen of us from the march. A couple of weeks before, a woman pregnant with twins had been held up at a checkpoint. She had the twins there and they died. We wanted to go to meet with Palestinians from the village. The Israeli police stopped us so we sat down. They did not give a reason.
We also went to Qalqilya — it's surrounded by the wall — where we hoped to join the demonstration and they wouldn't let us near there. No reasons given. It's either the Israeli Defense Forces or the police who stop it.
There are demonstrations every day in Israel-Palestine against the wall. Israelis and internationals join Palestinians in their villages when they demonstrate against the wall.
Many in the international group were deeply shocked at the conditions in the West Bank. The contrast is hideous. It is particularly strong when you are coming back from Palestine to Israel. In the West Bank, we were in these rather rough buses going on rough roads, filled with craters, not pot-holes, continually stopped at checkpoints.
The checkpoints are the coal face of the occupation and it is there that the Palestinians have to endure and where people are killed. It is completely arbitrary. Sometimes the soldiers will be difficult, sometimes they will be tired and not worried. The Palestinians have absolutely no control. It's sheer humiliation.
There are different types of checkpoint — full on militarised checkpoints or just a tank by the side of the road and a few soldiers. Much, much more often, there are just heaps of dirt — no soldiers at all. And you can't get through. So we had to take our luggage out of the bus, clamber over the dirt — 100-odd metres of dirt and piles of rubble and stinking rubbish on the side — and board another bus on the other side. Now there are hundreds of these, absolutely hundreds.
Hebron is a hellhole. It's completely militarised. The old city is divided up. There are just 400 rabid, fundamentalist Jews camped there and they have a whole armed camp looking after them among about 20,000 Palestinians. They will take over the top floor of a Palestinian's house. We weren't allowed in the areas inhabited by the Jews. But in the other areas of the old city, 43% of the Palestinians have left. They are gone. There is netting over the streets to stop the settlers from chucking rubbish and missiles down on the Palestinians. It's just awful.
Did you meet any government officials?
We met one of the Arab members of the Knesset. We had an audience with Yasser Arafat in Ramallah in his compound, completely imprisoned in his bombsite of a place, totally destroyed. All he can do is sit there and receive delegations like us. He spent one and a half hours with us. We unsuccessfully sought to meet Sharon or one of his ministers.
So, you're not making the press, you're not getting public attention, so really ...
Some of the things get public attention. I left my details with the media here in Australia, but got no interest. The other women, in northern Europe, in the Netherlands, were getting quite a lot of media coverage in their home countries.
The main thing I came away with from the march was the feeling that it would really take some big international push to make a shift there in Israel. The Palestinians are too weak and the peaceniks are too weak.
What I call the principled peacenik peace movement is too isolated. They are growing — but it is such a tiny grouping all around. They are holding the flame, doing great things, but not as far as changing the situation, without international support. I think it has to happen along the same lines as the international anti-apartheid movement.
The task is much greater because we have all the Jewish communities with all that dreadful history, locked in by the Zionist movement. The state of Israel is seen as a guarantee of security. Israel is so strong but there is still that inner insecurity with so many Jews.
So if we are going to get a broad base movement against this occupation, we've got to have a movement that expresses both legitimate Jewish aspirations as well as Palestinian ones — very difficult to achieve. The national self-determination aspect of Zionism for Jews has to be separated from its racist colonialist history and actuality.
I think that in so much of the left — not all of it — there is the strong de-legitimisation of Jewish aspirations and Jewish concerns in this. The difficulty, of course, is that the Zionist movement has continually used the holocaust as the rationale and justification for what it is doing so that makes it difficult.
Has the peace movement in Israel been decimated?
The peace movement in Israel is such a problematic movement. It is very much pinpointed by Yitzhak Laor, writing on June 3, about the big demonstration in support of Israeli PM Ariel Sharon pulling out of Gaza. It was against the settlers but it was nothing about attacking the militarism of Israel. It was nothing about changing the occupation at all.
The more radical groups — Gush Shalom, Coalition of Women for Peace, New Profile, Ta'ayush, which works closely with Palestinians — are growing. This left has to be distinguished from the mainstream, represented by Peace Now — which argues that "there is no partner" for negotiating peace on the Palestinian side.
So what you are saying is, for left-wing peace groups in Israel to have any support, it has to come from outside Israel.
For any change to take place, to dislodge the occupation, to bring some kind of justice, an international effort like [that opposing apartheid] in South Africa has to take place. It's not a statement about the Palestinian movement or about the left Israeli peace activists, it's a statement about the nature of the power that's against them.
There are two things that make the situation in Israel different and more difficult than the anti-apartheid struggle. Number one, the United States has a strong strategic link and interest in this. In South Africa, there were US interests and US money involved but not the same strategic importance. It's way above that for the United States now. And number two, the Diaspora Jews and their whole history and how it has been enrolled by the Zionist movement in a very destructive way.
So for us, as Jews to try to talk with other Jews about it, too often it's a brick wall. To try to talk with them is a particular responsibility I believe we progressive Jews have.
How are we going to find a way to create a South African kind of movement given that the opposition is so strong?
We just have to talk together. Somehow we need to bring together the same kind of broad coalition. We need the unions, we need the churches, we need the Greens, we need the progressive Laborites right across the board as well as the activists who are working on the issue now, Palestinians, and Jews and others.
Hanan Ashwari, when she was here to receive the Sydney Peace Prize, said one cannot talk about hope, or there being light at the end of the tunnel, just a need to push forward.
There's a word for it in Arabic — sumud meaning steadfast [used most often in the Palestinian context of continued struggle in the face of Israeli Occupation].
So you saw something in Israel that most Israelis don't see?
Oh, absolutely. People say, "How can you feel that way, it's not like that."
I suppose you can say that about Australia as well. How many Australians have seen the refugee detention camps?
From Green Left Weekly, June 30, 2004.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.