Amid rising conflict, these people and organizations fought for peace and justice.
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- Dialogue for an End to Bloodshed
One day after Mohammadi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, terrorists affiliated with Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that rules the Gaza Strip, carried out a surprise attack within Israel, killing approximately 1,200 people and taking about 240 hostages. Vivian Silver, the 74-year-old co-founder of Women Wage Peace, Israel’s largest grassroots peace movement that was founded in the embers of the 2014 Gaza war, was originally believed to be among the hostages. On Nov. 13, her family learned that she was among the dead.
Silver, a Canadian Israeli feminist, had dedicated decades of her life to Israel-Palestine peace. She opposed the Israeli blockade of Gaza, in place since 2007, and regularly traveled to the border to pick up sick Palestinians and drive them to Israeli hospitals for treatment. She brought Israeli and Palestinian artisans together to collaborate.
Just three days before the Oct. 7 attack, Silver gathered in Jerusalem with hundreds of other activists from Women Wage Peace and its Palestinian partner group, Women of the Sun. They marched to a rally at the Tolerance Museum, then traveled to the shore of the Dead Sea, where they pulled up seats to a symbolic negotiating table. Together, they called for a peaceful, political agreement to the region’s longstanding conflict—a “Mothers’ Call” for an end to “the vicious cycle of bloodshed.”
“We are not pro-Israel or pro-Palestine,” Yael Braudo-Bahat, the co-director of Women Wage Peace, said to Foreign Policy. “We are pro-peace.”
Women of the Sun, founded by Reem Hajajreh, sent aid to women in Gaza until the banks closed. Even while its own movement in the West Bank is increasingly restricted due to rising settler violence, the group works for an inclusive and sustainable peace.
Marwa Hammad, Women of the Sun’s fundraising coordinator and one of the cofounders, works actively with Women Wage Peace to train women to run in local elections, and she plans to restart her group’s trauma healing program after the war. Before Oct. 7, she held Zoom workshops with women from the West Bank and Gaza. The war interrupted those conversations, but not the organization’s dedication to building peace.
“I think that the presence of the woman should be [in negotiations],” Hammad told Foreign Policy. “I think no woman would choose the war. It would be the last that they would choose.”
Women of the Sun and Women Waging Peace were recently nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize
