Fri May 18, 2012
© Anna Baltzer, www.AnnaInTheMiddleEast.com
Women and children protest the destruction of Wadi Qana.
Palestinian Women Fight for Peace
By Danielle Rioux, Florida – March 2010
They are not the faces of those who raise their fists, holding machine guns demanding national sovereignty. And they are not the ones who throw stones at Israeli soldiers. But they are fighters, nonetheless – their battle tactics rarely seen on conventional news.
They are the mothers of sons who have died – the mothers of sons and husbands who are in Israeli prisons. They are the women who are left to fend for their families because their husbands will never return. And even as they struggle to raise money for their young children they are fighting to achieve peace – but a peace that is won through non-violent resistance.
These are the courageous women that Jewish American activist Anna Baltzer never expected to meet, let alone work with. The granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, Baltzer was raised to believe that Israel represented the only hope for the Jewish people to survive in the future – a future where ethnic cleansing would never happen again.
Yet at the age of 23, on a backpacking trip after college Baltzer discovered that a different kind of human rights abuse was occurring in Israel. Traveling through Iran and Lebanon Baltzer met some Palestinians who told her stories of being forced out of their homes and off of their land after Israel became a state in 1948.
Their stories seemed unbelievable. “I was totally shocked [by what they said] and I was really angry,” Baltzer said. “I thought that they were liars perpetrating propaganda because I felt that I knew the real truth about Israel.”
But she decided to go to Palestine and see for herself. There she saw Israel as a segregated state where such things as two separate roads to the same destination – one paved for Israelis the other unpaved for Palestinians existed. Palestinian roads also had multiple checkpoints set up along them, where people stood in long lines that often took hours to get through. A 25 foot wall often separated Palestinians from their land, sometimes from their family.
“I had no idea about how Israel treated the indigenous population,” Baltzer said. She began to question whether daily struggles like these were merely a matter of security. Indeed, she wondered whether it was just a matter of security when Hessa, a young Palestinian woman pregnant with twins tried to pass through one of the many checkpoints to get to the hospital to deliver her babies. About to go into the labor, Israeli soldiers would not let her and her husband pass through. After waiting almost all night in the cold, Hessa was finally let through. An ambulance took her to the hospital. But it was too late. Hessa’s babies were born prematurely in the ambulance, and the babies died shortly after delivery because they didn’t have immediate hospital intervention.
“The most insidious part of this Occupation is the daily life – the daily suffering, immobility and racism that Palestinians experience,” Balzer said. “It’s not just every once in a while that Palestinian women encounter this treatment, these are things they go through every single day of their lives.”
Baltzer, who has since joined the International Women’s Peace Service, which documents human rights abuses and supports Palestinian led non-violent resistance to the Occupation said, “It’s extraordinarily difficult to lead a normal life there – one of complete segregation. I was outraged by this system of privilege and segregation similar to what we saw in this country before the Civil Rights movement and also of course in South Africa during Apartheid there.”
Yet, she argues the role of women is incredibly important and is contributing to achieving peace. “Palestinians are some of the very best educated people in the entire Middle East – their literacy is rate is around 90% for both men and women. Women serve as doctors and lawyers – of course it depends upon the background of the women.”
Palestinian women are engaged in such non-violent resistance activities as organizing boycott campaigns of Israeli products sold in the West Bank that support the Occupiers and diminish the strength of the Palestinian economy. Palestinian women are also engaged in creating films that present Israeli injustices against Palestinians. Baltzer also reported that Palestinian women were involved in protesting against an Israeli policy that directed sewage from a West Bank settlement to flow into a fresh water Wadi in the Palestinian village of Wadi al tana. The fresh water was turning into a valley of feces and urine and the women’s demonstration provoked a lot of support helped put an end to this action.
Baltzer believes that this kind of empowerment is so fundamental to the struggle for peace. Further, she said many Israeli women are prominent in these kinds of protests as well. “There is the Coalition of Women for Peace which is made up of lots of different Israeli organizations,” she said. “Checkpoint Watch is a group of Israeli women who try to deter violence and egregious abuse at the checkpoints with what they refer to as the grandmother effect. If there’s a young, 18 year old soldier being watched by an old Israeli woman he probably won’t do what he might do if she weren’t present. So in Israeli society there is a lot of support to help mobilize an international movement.
It’s actions like these that cause her to be optimistic about the future. Nonetheless, Baltzer argues that international support must also help pressure Israel to stop human rights abuses and to help eradicate oppressive policies against the Palestinians.
While Baltzer believes a lot of Jewish Israelis and a lot of Jews in general won’t be in favor of these tactics – believing that if Palestinians were given rights they would use those rights to completely abuse Israelis – they are the right thing to do.
By bringing groups of people to Palestine every year Baltzer hopes to help create awareness of the importance of securing universal human rights for both Palestinians and Israelis. “All people should have the right to have freedom and self-determination and security,” she said. “At the moment the greatest obstacle to that is the Israeli Occupation and the denial of fundamental human rights. Those same values my grandmother taught me about never harming other human beings must apply to all people, It doesn’t matter that it is Israel that is doing this because those values are important no matter who the victims are, no matter who the perpetrators are.”
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