Partnering for Peace in the Middle East, Part II

(Panelists of JWS12, Ghada Ageel, Shireen Khamis, and Rela Mazali.)

Part II: Meet Three of your Partners
By Reza Corinne Clifton

PROVIDENCE, RI - I met three incredible women recently: Ghada Ageel, a Muslim Palestinian who was born as a refugee whose current home is in Gaza; Rela Mazali, a Jewish Israeli who was born in 1948, the year the state of Israel was founded; and Shireen Khamis, a Christian Palestinian whose home and family near Bethlehem have been disrupted by a twenty-five foot wall that surrounds her town and segregates it from centuries old neighboring towns.
Ageel, Mazali, and Khamis are the featured speakers of the twelfth “Jerusalem Women Speak: Three Women, Three Faiths, One Shared Vision.” JWS is a national speaking tour organized by Partners for Peace, a Washington D.C.-based, United Nations-registered nongovernmental organization (NGO) with a 501(c)(3) tax status. Partners for Peace was founded in 1998 “to educate the American public about key issues in the effort to secure peace and justice among Palestinians and Israelis.”

A three week-long speaking tour, Partners for Peace Program Coordinator Jacob Pace also arranged a number of media stops along the way, all in the hopes of getting the message out; a message which conveys the difficulty of maintaining hope in a region that has been riddled with military conflict for the past half-century. The stories of Ageel, Mazali, and Khamis are as powerfully stirring as they are shockingly foreign to American ears. Here, in Partnering for Peace in the Middle East, Part II, I have provided a fragment of what each woman had to say, about her home; her everyday life; and her struggle to keep faith that the world will eventually intervene in a just and peace-seeking way.

Ghada Ageel, a Muslim Palestinian, age 35Ghada Ageel’s story “starts in 1948,” she will tell you, when her grandmother’s family was expelled from their home in Beit Daras; it was part of Palestine, but it became part of Israel. Like her parents, Ageel was born in a refugee camp—Khan Younis—in the southern Gaza Strip. Explains Ageel in her own words:
“The refugee-hood was passed through my grandmother, to my father, and my father passed it to me; and now I pass it on to the fourth generation—to my kids.

Usually you get punished because you did something. I was punished before I was born.”
Ageel’s childhood was full of reminders of her status, as a refugee with restrictions placed on her by Israel. “What is refugee camp? It’s a place with misery and poverty and nothing but despair. We’re very close to the beaches and the Mediterranean; it’s very beautiful. I was deprived of enjoying [it] because of these…Israeli illegal settlers who followed us in 1967.”
Ageel and her father shared aspirations of her becoming a doctor, but these were interrupted by the consequences of what is known as the first Intifada or Palestinian uprising. “I’m in high school. I’m waiting for University. Before reaching University…in 1987, 1988, the universities are declared closed by Israel.”

Nevertheless, Ageel was not deterred from individually working for peace. Upon the reopening of universities, she began studying the Hebrew language in Israel, to correspond with the peace process that emerged in the early 1990’s referred to as the Oslo Accords. Ageel explains:
“I go to Israel to study Hebrew language because it’s the peace process—a new era. We have to learn the language of dialogue because [19]48-94,” she approximates, is “around 50 years.”
But the process ultimately fell apart, and contrary to earlier peace accords and United Nations policy, Jewish settlers continued to move into areas denoted as Palestinian territories while the Israeli army continued militarizing Palestinian borders.

As a matter of fact, the borders of Gaza—Ageel’s current home—were so restricted by the Israeli military as of August, that trying to return back home after doing scholarly work in England for her Doctorate in Middle East Politics from the United Kingdom’s University of Exeter, she was denied from entering. “Lucky for Partners for Peace” she says ironically, for with the borders closed, she probably would not have been able to leave for the tour had she been in Gaza instead of England.

Ageel shared other information about how the current infrastructure supports—or really obstructs—the work of peace in Gaza:
“Ten years ago, there [were] demonstrations for peace; activism with Israelis; inviting Israeli delegations; [and] going to Israeli Universities. Now, because politics [have] put [up] these barriers, Rela cannot go to Gaza; I cannot go to Israel…There is no environment even to conduct these kinds of activities—peace activities that could bring people together or make the distance a little bit closer.”

It is information delivered like this, that considers and presents the implications of policy on civilians and families, that makes the Partners for Peace program, and the participation of Ageel and other women so important. “I speak up on behalf of ordinary Palestinians. Usually, the guns are speaking and the media is speaking and a foreigner or correspondent is covering my story or a politician is covering my story. Rarely there is opportunity for ordinary people to talk.”

Ghada makes it clear, though, that like a falling currency, the significance of her here in the US talking to American citizens and to the media may be losing its value with the people there where she lives.
“…for the people in my refugee camp…they view it with hope, though it’s very small hope. Other people and groups…joke about the tour or laugh about it because they’ve lost hope of USAid and their policies and the International Community, United Nations, International Law, Human Rights. “I could face this group if this tour had been before July 2006, but after the [Israel-] Lebanon War…”

Besides a student pursuing her doctorate, Ageel works as an academic counselor for a US Agency for International Development (USAID) organization called The Academy for Educational Development.

Rela Mazali, a Jewish Israeli, age 58Rela Mazali was born in 1948, “into the dream,” she explains, referring to the successful political movement that saw Jews “return” to their historic land. “My mom came from the U.S. She was an activist; was a Zionist-socialist activist, and she chose to leave Kansas City to go to Palestine and do what she thought was establishing a just, egalitarian national homeland.”

All of the women reveal information that is new; they also fearlessly broach topics that might be referred euphemistically as elephants in the room. Early in our conversation, in talking about her mother’s journey, Mazali reveals one:

“Going there, she thought like many of the people who chose to go there from the West, that it was more or less empty; more or less unsettled.” Mazali compares the magnitude of this assumption to the magnitude of assumptions that influenced the American doctrine, Manifest Destiny. She continues with what she calls “another familiar” or similar “narrative” to the American one, saying “And there was also a belief that the Westerners were going there among other things in order to bring process.”

Mazali herself now works with young people in Israel involved in varying degrees of draft resistance, a population Mazali indicates is “really substantial in Jewish-Israeli society.” For her, working with these youth is a great part of why she is still able to maintain “a real sense of energy and hope.” Underexposed, she insists, is “Intentional draft avoidance of the kind that was practiced here on a broader scale in [the war with] Vietnam.”

Her path toward working for anti-militarization and peace was not a direct one. “For many years, I was unable to see what was right before my eyes,” she explains, referring in part to her own military service in a non-combat unit in 1967.

At her post, she was exposed to communications sent from the Israeli military to UN forces that were monitoring the Israeli-Syrian border. “I knew very well that this story [that Israel was reporting] about tractors going out to plow the field and Syrians shelling them just because they were plowing their fields peacefully was not the real story, because the tractors went out to specific parts of what was called ‘No Man’s Land,’ in order to establish presence there—and it was disputed territory.”

Mazali was not yet moved, though. She explains: “So I realized that the narrative we were getting wasn’t what was happening but I still accepted that this was necessary probably; that somebody knew that they were doing.”

Like Ageel—and Khamis—Mazali is now much more critical of and concerned with the broadcasted narratives. She explained one area of her concern at a presentation at RI College, in response to an audience member’s censure of Ageel for using a map that does show changes to the area following the recent departure of Jewish settlers:
“I think that there is a lot of misperception around that, because it’s true that the illegal settlements have been evacuated. There were 7000 settlers in all of Gaza that were evacuated. But Israel controls the whole periphery.”

Mazali is able to cite more information, too. “The military, the Israeli military is all around the Gaza Strip, and pretty often…inside the strip. Incursions into the strip both with helicopters and tanks and foot soldiers and planes happen all the time.”

Referencing the same segregation that Ageel noted, Mazali continues revealing a deeper narrative: “Nobody can get into Gaza or go out of Gaza without Israeli permission. Nobody is registered in the census in Gaza. All of the control of information of who belongs in Gaza and who doesn’t belong in Gaza; who is allowed in and who isn’t is in the hands of the Israelis. It has not been passed to the Palestinians.”

Mazali has noticed a general misperception if not “bias” at how reports are disseminated about Jewish Settlers and Palestinian land. “There has been an enormous amount of building in the settlements in the West Bank. We are talking about the Palestinians living on twenty-percent of the land of historical Palestine, and on that land there is accelerated illegal settlement…and the wall which does not follow the border, but goes inside the West Bank, snaking back and forth in order to protect settlements by and large.”

She is also very preoccupied with the penetration of violence and militarization into every sector of Israeli society. Her organization, New Profile, has documented the use of imagery of young soldiers in conflict for all kinds of marketing—political slogans, beer advertisements, and boxer shorts commercials to name just a few. She also sees the exaltation of the military and war as factors that skew how Israeli society promotes the teaching of the Holocaust. In response to an audience member who criticizes the panelists for not mentioning the Holocaust, this is what Mazali had to say:

“I feel that it is very painful to me to see how in Israel the Holocaust is exploited; literally exploited in order to instill in generation after generation of young people a sense that if we do not use military force, we will be annihilated.

“The children that study the Holocaust in high school are often very directly connected to their very immediate inscription [into the army],” and, she goes on to say, “The Holocaust in many Israeli schools is taught as a national catastrophe, which it is, but not as a universal catastrophe which needs to be averted in any place that it may take place by means which do not include military action.”

Mazali is concerned that “turning the use of the military into the only answer to it”—the Holocaust—cheapens it; moreover, she is afraid that Israeli society and people are suffering by this militaristic sense of priority. She cites twenty-five percent as the number of people in Israel under the poverty line, and one-third as that number of children. She has a firm belief in the connection between the ongoing conflict and Israel’s—and America’s—roles in the aggressions:
“By resisting peace and investing increasing amounts of money—both Israeli and American money—in armament and war and reconstruction after self-destruction, [Israel] is widening the gaps between rich and poor really fast and really dangerously.”

Shireen Khamis (Age 23), a Christian PalestinianLike the other two panelists, Shireen Khamis is very concerned with the question of accuracy and depth in reporting about Israel/Palestine, and how these form the perceptions of the international community. As a matter of fact, one of the first comments she made upon starting her presentation at RIC was “We are the reality and nothing but the reality in Palestine. And if we are not credible enough, go and check the alternative media. Not the American media, but the alternative media…”

For Khamis, reality has been shaped by living in Beit Jala, a town close to one of the holiest areas in the world—“five minutes from Bethlehem,” she describes, and “ten minutes from Jerusalem.” Despite the sanctity of the place, according to Khamis, “This lovely city is nothing but a prison [now] where the population, the citizens, the Palestininian citizens—Christians and Muslims—live on thirteen percent of the original land because eighty-seven percent of the area of Bethlehem was confiscated.”

Despite the frustrations of Khamis and her neighbors and the objections of some members of the International Community, Israel does not seem to be done pursuing land. Khamis explains:
“…[A]lthough 87 percent was confiscated, the Israeli government just wanted more land! It confiscated the Northern part of Bethlehem because…it’s a religious place for Jews. So they made this military zone.” Khamis is very clear about the core of her frustrations as she continues. “No, it’s not important those families that lived there. So they put this great huge wall between the neighbors, between the man and his garden, between the woman and her son.”

Also like Ageel and Mazali, Khamis is hyperaware of and disheartened by the military zone she describes. Taking her role seriously as the youth in the group, she reflects on the effects of these zones and military checkpoints on young Palestinians. She talks about what it is like as a student, describing the journey to school as the first challenge a student faces, and citing statistics to support her claims:
“We have to stop by the checkpoints that the Israeli military created to wait for hours and hours under the heat of the sun, or [in] the rain, so as…to go to our schools [and] universities. More than 225,000 students have to pass through the checkpoints before going to school, and more than 9,300 teachers have to pass through these checkpoints.”

Besides statistics, Khamis relied on photos at her RIC presentation to convey the facts. In the case of the checkpoints, she shows the picture of a group of terrified students and a teacher surrounded by the drawn guns of young, Israeli soldiers. “This is how they are faced,” she recounts, “by the Israeli soldier; how they are humiliated and horrified.” Turning to another photo, she shows how “they couldn’t go to their school, so they had to take the lesson on the ground of the checkpoint.”

Khamis also has photos and stories about women who have given birth at checkpoints, an offense a member of the RIC audience insists, must be a human rights abuse. Pointing to the sheer number of checkpoints in the West Bank alone—500 she cites—Khamis shares that she believes they can be for no other purpose but to “harass and humiliate” Palestinians. She also challenges the Israeli explanation of security, and touches on the disdain for the illegal Jewish settlers mentioned by both Ageel and Mazali:

“But if you want to protect your people, why do you put them inside the Palestinian areas, between me and my neighbor; between me and my school? Why do you put them between us? No, they are just to…make their [Palestinians] days and nights dark, and not only their nights.”
Discussing the Israeli policies of closure and curfews, she continues to spend a majority of the time talking about the numerous effects on youth. “More than two-thirds of Palestinian children are under the poverty line, which is two dollars a day. They are forced to work, to get some money to survive,” she explains, drawing on her work interviewing women and youth for a documentary project with TAM, an organization seeking to empower Palestinian women through media and training.

She has more accounts, related specifically to the implications of the Israeli army’s activities on growing up Palestinian. “They can’t sleep at night,” she shares, and “they can’t study” because of the Israeli airplanes flying and “bombarding” over their school. She also recounts her own, not-too-distant experience as a high school student studying to “the sound of bombarding,” knowing she remembers, “that they are bombarding my grandmother’s house.”

Particularly in her ability to talk about the experiences of youth, Khamis—like Ageel and Mazali—are afraid of the apathy in the U.S. and world community, but secure all the same in the significance of their stories and in their ability to talk to the American citizenry. After numerous accounts dripping with desperation, she looks concertedly at the audience and speaks articulately and faultlessly: “I decided to come to raise my voice and to tell the American people that you are part of this war; you are part of this conflict.”
Persistent about the point, she rephrases it many times, finally capturing it as “When you hear our…presentation, you become responsible because now you know the truth.”
A statement that may just echo in your ears as it has in mine.

On a pamphlet created by Partners for Peace assembled to provide a “Web Resources Guide,” the organizations of Rela Mazali and Ghada Ageel have been listed. Mazali’s New Profile is at www.newprofile.org, and Ageel’s Academy for Educational Development is at www.aed.org.
For more information about Partners for Peace, visit www.partnersforpeace.org, or call 202-863-2951. Or read Partnering for Peace in the Middle East Part I for a list of other organizations or ways to become involved.

Reza Corinne Clifton is a community organizer for high school reform at RI Children’s Crusade for Higher Education. She is also a freelance writer who is regularly published in several RI-area publications. Her articles can be seen at www.RezaRitesRi.com and she can be reached by emailing rezaclif@aol.com.