ARE THE WRONG PEOPLE TRYING TO SOLVE THE MIDDLE EAST CRISIS?
By Esther Addley

Esther Addley meets a group of campaigners with a simple, radical idea - include women in the peace talks

September 15, 2003 – (The Guardian) Shortly before 10am, UK time, last Saturday, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian prime minister, resigned. In his four months in the job, Abbas had signed the roadmap document, the latest initiative in the attempt to bring peace to Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. But in the past month, like all of its predecessors, the plan had begun to fray and disintegrate in the face of violence, chaos and bitter recrimination. Abbas's despairing departure suggested that yet another Middle East "peace process" was about to trundle into the buffers.

Thirty-six hours later, a group of five women arrived in Britain on a peace delegation from the Middle East. As such, their timing could scarcely have been worse. Yet, as they see it, the very fact of their coming is in itself cause for optimism. Two of the women are Jewish Israelis, two are Palestinians from the West Bank and one is a Palestinian living inside Israel, and they have come together to argue for a new way of peacemaking in the region. "The very fact that we are here in a joint delegation advocating for justice and agreeing on most things, surely that in itself is a cause for hope," says Amneh Badran, a Palestinian from east Jerusalem. It is a sign of the paucity of good news from that part of the world that she is right.

It does not get any less depressing trying to understand, let alone dream up a way through, the complex, bloody and bitter conflict of the Middle East. And yet, argue the women, all of whom are experienced campaigners on peace issues, maybe that's because we've been trying to solve it in the wrong way. Or, more specifically, because the wrong people have been trying to solve it.

Four of the five women met the Guardian last week to outline a suggestion for a way forward that is simple and obvious, yet strangely radical. They argue that only by insisting on the formal inclusion of women in peace negotiations, reading framework documents from a feminist viewpoint and assessing how any proposals will impact on normal families, will there be any chance of peace in the Middle East. The men have shown themselves useless in reaching a settlement, in other words - time to give women a chance.

It's a nice idea - but what reason do they have to believe that they would have any more success than their male counterparts? Nava Eisen is an archivist from Tel Aviv, a Jewish Israeli who has been involved in the peace movement for many years. She argues that women and men simply speak different languages when it comes to resolving tricky situations. "Men are dealing with power, and it's all who has the better position. [I heard a discussion recently and] they were arguing over whether Israel would take from the 1967 border 3% or 7%; maybe we would take 9% here, and give the Palestinians 2% over there... For us it's not a question of percentage, it's what's on this land. Who lives there? Can we make a life there? Maybe, instead of counting the percentage of land, we should try to build there something that both sides will benefit from. So it's more constructive. It's not about people getting an advantage over you, you being at a disadvantage. I don't mind if she gets a little more this time, maybe I will benefit in another way. Men wouldn't stand for it. We don't mind."

The women represent two feminist peace centres, one Israeli, one Palestinian, which work together under one umbrella as the Jerusalem Link. They don't agree on everything - differing, in particular, on the critical issue of the right of Palestinian refugees displaced in 1948 to return to their homes - but they have not allowed this to stop them collaborating closely since 1992. The urgency of their mission on this occasion springs from two years of escalating violence since the outbreak of the second intifada, during which time they have witnessed in ever more devastating detail the catastrophic effect of war on women in particular.

"This is not a new story," says Molly Malekar, the director of Bat Shalom, the Israeli peace centre of which Eisen is also a board member. "We have been living with this story for years now. And it is not just Israelis and Palestinians - this is the story of women in general. But this situation has a mix of militarism, fundamentalism and ultranationalism, which, as we know, is a deadly combination for women."

"Martin Luther King said that poverty, war and racism are the worst things that can affect women's lives," adds Badran, who is director of the Jerusalem Centre for Women, and thus her Palestinian counterpart. "This is exactly the case in Palestine. You have a war waged against you, an apartheid system, and poverty. And the woman has to be the backbone of the family in this situation. Plus, there's the fact that her son or husband could be killed or in prison."

Domestic violence, social dislocation and honour killings have increased in Palestinian society, she says, a creeping brutalisation of society matched on the Israeli side of the divide, according to Eisen. "So many [Israeli men] are serving in the occupied territories, and they are learning that they can shoot very easily and they can demolish houses, and they can go to a house in the middle of the night; they have no respect for women and children. Then they go back home to Israel to their families, and a child or wife will say something, the food is not warm enough, and he will kill her. You send to the army a boy of 18, he comes back and you don't know him any more."

In some ways, war actually benefits men, she adds. "It is true that men are doing most of the fighting, but they are gaining from the situation. They get the excitement, become heroes, they are promoted and use it later on in civilian life. You see that in the Israeli political arena - most of our ministers and prime ministers used to be generals, and women are left behind with the orphans, the widowed, with the pain."

So why haven't women been involved in peace negotiations before now? Because, says Eisen, "the men won't let us." In Northern Ireland, Badran points out, negotiators were directly elected; the Women's Coalition, a party specially formed for the purpose, succeeded in getting to the table. In South Africa, similarly, women had a tradition of involvement in the ANC in a way that has never been replicated in the Palestinian movement. "In our case there is no possibility of having elections, and our situation is not the situation of South Africa." There are a few female ministers in the Israeli cabinet, but none involved in the peace negotiations.

So they have had to come up with another mechanism. That is the proposal for an international "women's commission", which would be formally attached as an advisory panel to any Middle East peace negotiations, not merely the "roadmap", should it survive the current crisis. The commission, made up of Palestinian, Israeli and international women peacemakers, would have a specific mandate to review all documents in the light of how they would impact on women, children and normal, non-military society. "If they won't let us sit at the table with the grownups," notes Eisen sardonically, "at least we want to sit in the kitchen and be part of the cooking and see that the ingredients are right."

The key plank to their arguments is a UN resolution, number 1325, which was passed in 2001 and which commits members to promote the "equal participation and full involvement" of women in peace processes, and "the need to increase their role in decision-making". It was the first UN resolution ever to address the specific impact of war on women, and was passed unanimously. The Italian government (the current president of the EU) has given its support to the women's proposal, as has a key adviser of Kofi Annan. And last week Baroness Symons, minister of state at the Foreign Office, pledged the support of the British government in seeking to bring the commission into effect.

All this may offer no more than the slimmest of chances, but it's a chance all the same. "The criticism is that [the plan] is too ambitious," says Badran. "And it is. It is too ambitious. But if we don't try to do it, how would we feel, for not taking the road that we had to do?" She smiles ruefully. "To try and fail is better than not to try. So we must try."

Eisen leans forward in something like exasperation. "Our former prime minister, General Barak, used to say that he would know how to negotiate with the Palestinians because he had seen the whites of their eyes when he was fighting them. He is seeking to negotiate with an enemy, with someone he tried to kill.

But Molly and I served in the army, we didn't kill anybody; [the others] haven't killed anyone.

"All the negotiators who sit at the table, they all have blood on their hands. Both sides. Our hands are clean, so it is easier for us to shake."

From: http://www.guardian.co.uk/women/story/0,3604,1042104,00.html