EUROPEAN SOCIAL FORUM: Palestinian Sees Another Israeli Face

By Sanjay Suri Reprint | | Print |

Sanjay Suri

ATHENS, May 5 2006 (IPS) - Wissim-al-Haj did not quite know what to expect at a blind breakfast date of sorts as the European Social Forum opened in Athens Thursday morning.

It was to be his first meeting with an Israeli he could really talk to. He need not have worried. Adi Dagan from the Women’s Coalition for Peace in Israel has been talking to enough Palestinians for years. And she was more than happy to listen to what Wissim from the Political Studies Centre in Gaza had to say.

Wissim, who works on a range of social and political issues through the centre, says he was not able before to distinguish the Israeli government from Israeli people. “A Palestinian has contact only with Israeli tanks and Israelis in green (military uniforms),” he told IPS. “For us the Israeli is the tank, the missile. The Israelis I met before humiliated me, attacked my family. Adi is about the first Israeli I met I could talk to.”

Wissim is no Islamic fundamentalist; he describes himself as a communist. And it is as such that he speaks of the rights of Palestinians.

“We don’t want any more compromises, and most Palestinians voted against compromises,” he said. “They were compromises between a colonial power and those who wanted to profit from them. The last election was not a vote for Hamas, it was a vote against Fatah.”

Not for religion but for rights, he said, he would vote “for resistance, rather than to live with measures against Palestinians taken in Tel Aviv and in Gaza.” Wissim said he is not for war, “but if there can be no peace, we do not want to give legitimacy to occupation.”

His view seems representative of most Palestinians; Adi’s doesn’t of many Israelis. But as an almost lifelong campaigner against Israeli occupation of Israeli land, she was in natural sympathy with Wissim’s anger. Theirs was not a meeting of opposites, but a statement of an erasure of opposition – with a little help from the Israeli side.

The Women’s Coalition for Peace is a coalition of nine feminist groups in Israel. “We work on many issues, like action against occupation, for equality for women, for equality of citizens including Palestinian citizens, and for demilitarisation.”

Not the known Israeli thing to do. “No, people don’t think us crazy, but a lot of people do think we are naïve,” she said. “And the right-wing think we are traitors.”

But in opposing the occupation they are not such a small minority, she said. Many opinion polls show about half of Israelis opposed to continuing occupation of Palestinian territories. “There is now growing support for ending the occupation. Half the people do support withdrawal, they just don’t know how it can be done.”

A lot of Israelis are now just tired of the situation, she said. “And they are also confused, because on the other side they see Hamas, they see suicide bombers.”

The region has on its own “run out of creative political initiatives to change the situation.” A worrying development in the meantime is “a growing ideology for Israel to be completely separated from Arab neighbours into a sort of Jewish-Israeli ghetto in the Middle East,” Adi said. “That is not possible, and may be dangerous.”

Adi says she is campaigning not to take one side or the other but for justice to be done. And talking benefits, there would be many for Israel too through peace, she said.

“I have to think of my future and that of my children in Israel,” she said. “I don’t want to go on living in a circle of violence and hatred. It’s not normal, it’s not what I would like to be.”

Adi does not think the Hamas victory a setback to hopes for peace. “In the Arafat days they used to call Arafat a terrorist,” she said. “Now they say the same for Hamas.”

Adi and Wissim have common purpose to a large extent at the European Social Forum.

“International pressure is needed, and that cannot come from the United States,” Adi said. “It can only come from Europe. And maybe other countries like India can also pressure Israel to change its position. Because the situation at present is unbearable.”

In particular, she said, she is agreeing with other groups at the forum to pressure European Union governments not to stop aid for the Palestinian territories. She said she would also back a campaign for European governments to impose sanctions against Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.