“The Mother’s Call” from Jewish and Palestinian activists introduces a feminist, peace-oriented take on the current conflict
From Women Wage Peace website - the Mother’s Call, September 2023
First, a confession of failure. We have searched for commentary that might connect the Alternative Global’s cosmolocal, peace-oriented, feminine-centric, eco-civilisational worldview to the current tragedy in the middle-east… largely in vain.
Our editorial space provides a lengthier and complex considerations. But we’re searching for thinking that considers peace, not war, a default and desirable state. We’d really appreciate your help in sourcing (or even producing these) - please mail here.
In the meantime, here is an interesting, lateral piece from the Intercept, from a feminist perspective (extract below). We assume that men can be in solidarity with this position also.
The Intercept: It’s Feminist to Demand a Ceasefire in Israel–Palestine
Judith Levine
Three days before Hamas committed the bloodiest attack on Israeli civilians in that country’s history, four days before the Israel Defense Forces responded with the most devastating collective punishment of Palestinian civilians in a long history of collective punishment, Palestinian and Israeli feminists gathered to demand peace.
On October 4, hundreds of them, dressed in white and turquoise, in hijabs and sun hats, met at the wall between West Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank (many Palestinian women missed the event because they could not get authorization to cross).
Under a canopy of white umbrellas, they walked to the Tolerance Monument in Jerusalem for a rally, then rode to the Dead Sea. On the beach around a symbolic negotiating table, alongside diplomats and other public figures, they read a “mothers’ call” for a nonviolent resolution to the conflict.
Written jointly by the Israeli organization Women Wage Peace and the Palestinian Women of the Sun, the declaration begins: “We, Palestinian and Israeli mothers, are determined to stop the vicious cycle of bloodshed and to change the reality of the difficult conflict between both nations, for the benefit of our children.”
Or, as Huda Abu Arqoub, director of the Alliance for Middle East Peace, put it: “We want our kids to be alive rather than dead.”
Calling the document a “mothers’ call” is both heartfelt and strategic. “Women and children,” especially “mothers and children,” is both powerful and pernicious. For the press, it is convenient shorthand for “human.”
For propagandists, it raises any stakes. Hamas is “a murderous terror group, responsible for the murders and kidnappings of babies, women, children and the elderly,” declares the IDF. For some feminists, it signals that the biological capacity to give birth makes women naturally pacific and confers a unique responsibility to oppose violence.
At the same time, the trope “women and children” infantilizes women. It’s worse to kill a woman than a man because women, like children, are defenseless, passive, innocent. This is ironic in Israel, a nation that prides itself on gender equality as a founding principle and mandates military service for all adult Israeli citizens (except Arab Israelis and Orthodox Jews).
It is insulting in a conflict where women, both Israeli and Palestinian, are the boldest peacemakers.
Should women speak as women against war? It’s a point of perpetual feminist debate. But this much is indisputable: Feminists should, and must, speak as feminists against this war, against Israel’s occupation and its current pummeling of Gaza. Said the veteran Israeli feminist Hannah Safran: “How can you ask freedom for yourself if you don’t ask it for other people?”
[…]Religious fundamentalists on both sides accuse feminists of fomenting chaos by undermining gender and the patriarchal family. Ultranationalists condemn feminist human rights advocates for muddying the lines of battle by insisting on the equal value of every life. These accusers are right.
Feminism is, at heart, a movement against domination. It is feminist to demand an end to Israeli apartheid and occupation of Palestinian lands. Feminism is a movement against violence. It is feminist to denounce barbarity, no matter how enormous the crimes that motivate it.
To oppose domination and violence, feminists — not as women or mothers, Israelis or Palestinians — must demand an immediate ceasefire and end to the siege, an arms embargo from the Western powers, and the implementation of a massive humanitarian operation in Gaza.
Feminism is a movement built on the possibility of profound human transformation. That means sustaining a belief in the possibility of a negotiated solution in Israel–Palestine, whether one state or two, with freedom and democratic rights for all.