3 women bring views on Middle East
By Mel Huff Times Argus Staff

October 20, 2006 - (Barre Montpelier Times Argus) Three women peace activists – a Muslim Palestinian, a Christian Palestinian and a Jewish Israeli – will offer their strong – and bleak – views of the current conditions in Israel and Palestine in a talk in central Vermont Saturday.

The New England tour of "Jerusalem Women Speak: Three Women, Three Faiths, One Shared Vision" is organized by Partners for Peace, a nonprofit Washington, D.C., organization that has been sponsoring speaking tours since 1998.

The three women will talk about their daily experiences living in the midst of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Ghada Ageel was born and raised in a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. Her family, she said, was expelled without compensation from its land in 1948, when the state of Israel was created. In 1993, she studied Hebrew in Israel, and she has taught at the Palestinian Abraham Center for Language and Dialogue in Gaza. The mother of two now works for the Academy for Educational Development (a U.S. AID organization), and she is studying for her doctorate in Middle East politics at the University of Exeter in England.

Ageel, who grew up in a family of secular Muslims, said in a telephone interview that "religion has nothing to do with this violence. It's misused and manipulated to feed this conflict. It's a nationalist and political conflict for us." She said Palestinians want the United States "to be an honest broker and honest moderator," but that "so far they haven't been." She cited U.S. military aid to Israel and the closing of border crossings as examples of bias. U.S. policy is "not only destroying our society but Israeli and American and global security," she said.

She said she is one of tens of thousands of Palestinians who have been unable to return to their homes in Gaza since Israel closed the border in June: "I have a family in Gaza, but I am as a woman left homeless.

"Women pay the price," she declared, adding that some women now have started to beg for food for their children. "Gaza is paralyzed now because there are no salaries because of the boycott. Men can't look at their wives because they want money to cook," she said.

Shireen Khamis, a Palestinian Christian, was born in a village near Bethlehem. She has a degree in business administration and works as a project coordinator for an organization in Bethlehem that trains women to use the media.

She said her family's lands have been taken by the Israeli state. "We used to go to Jerusalem, which is 10 minutes away. Now we can't go. We used to have agricultural lands, olive groves, everything. Now there is this wall that denies us as citizens to reach our land. I have to go by back roads," she said. "As a citizen in the West Bank I'm denied using the streets because these streets are for the settlers now who are illegally living in the West Bank."

Noting that Palestine is where Christianity was born, she called what is happening there "a crime against Christianity. Bethlehem is under siege. It's becoming a prison where people can't go out or come in." Tourists can come to Bethlehem only on Israeli buses with Israeli tour guides, she said, and they can't eat or shop or sleep in Palestinian establishments.

What Americans see on television doesn't reflect reality, she maintained. "We need the help because we don't have much time. Each day we lose more people, more land – we lose hope in life. It's like living in a dark tunnel," she declared. "Everyone is just watching us and being silent."

Rela Mazali, a writer and translator, was conscripted in the Israeli military after graduating from high school in 1966 and worked in intelligence in the 1967 war. In 1998, she co-founded an organization to raise awareness of militarism in Israel and to support young Israeli draft resisters. She has also worked for The Association of Israeli Palestinian Physicians for Human Rights and as a consultant for the International Committee of the Red Cross.

"There's a broad misperception of this conflict in the sense that the power to end it is almost entirely in the hands of Israel," she said. "The balance of power is entirely asymmetrical, and Israel is continuing to hold on to all of the resources and confiscate and appropriate them, while it claims to be seeking peace."

One of the root causes of the continuing conflict has been the militarization of Israeli society, she said. "Most people see Israel as totally acting out of self-defense, whereas my view is that Israel is a captive of the military mindset, reactions and attitudes and in fact is in the hands of ex-military men who make up most of its leaders.

"I think that American Jews … often buy automatically and uncritically the Israeli government line and tend to feel that Israeli government policy is in support of Jewish people in Israel. They don't realize the extent to which the perpetuation of the conflict is creating havoc in Israeli Jewish society," she said.

Mazali observed that more than a third of Israeli children (she included Palestinian children) live beneath the poverty line and that 40 percent of elderly Holocaust survivors in Israel live in poverty. She called those facts a measure of the price Israeli society is paying for militarization and conflict.

She also noted that until the war in Lebanon, the leading cause of death in the Israeli army was suicide. "That's very telling in terms of what's happening to the young people who are involved in this conflict," she said. "American Jews don't realize any of this. They automatically assume that defending Israeli policy and the Israeli government is defending the people of Israel. I'm trying to say, 'No, it isn't.'"

She urges Americans to look beyond that mainstream media for information and challenge their country's foreign policy with facts.

Jerusalem Women Speak is sponsored by PeaceVermont, Central Vermont Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, the American Friends Service Committee-Vermont and Vermonters for Just Peace in Palestine/Israel.

The women will speak Oct. 21 at the Langdon Street Café, 4 Langdon St. in Montpelier from 11 a.m.-1 p.m. and at the Barre Labor Hall, 46 Granite St., from 7-9 p.m.

From: http://www.timesargus.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061020/NEWS/610200354/1003/NEWS02