IN LATE SEPTEMBER, 30,000 women, wearing their trademark white shirts and turquoise scarfs, marched through the streets of Jerusalem, singing songs of peace and demanding that Palestinian and Israeli leaders return to the negotiating table.
The march, organised by Women Wage Peace (WWP), was the culmination of nearly three weeks of activities throughout Israel. In one of the activities, at the Dead Sea, they were joined by nearly 2,000 women from the West Bank. It also the only movement that could possibly mobilise tens of thousands of Arab and Jewish women for anything, and especially for peace in the current tense, hostile atmosphere prevailing in both Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
But that hasn’t kept some of the die-hard left-wing from putting them down. Women Wage Peace, they say, is little more than a warm and fuzzy kumbaya. Because Women Wage Peace doesn’t promote a specific solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and because it doesn’t even mention the occupation or the unequal power relations between Israelis and Palestinians, it is depoliticised and, therefore, irrelevant.
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So basically, we all more or less know what the light at the end of the tunnel looks like. But we can’t find the tunnel. In this situation, WWP has not depoliticised the struggle for peace – it has created a new form of politics specifically suited to that situation.
While ideologically-purist left-wing groups are intent on informing the Israeli and Palestinian publics which solution to the conflict is the best solution, WWP asks what different individuals and groups actually want and need. Instead of a politics of telling, theirs is a politics of listening.
Read more:
http://plus61j.net.au/plus61j-originals/every-peace-movement-address-occupation/
