The Contribution of Women to Peace and Reconciliation

Palestinian and Israeli women’s peace initiatives have differed from
those of their mixed-gender counterparts in several important respects.
They have been pioneering, clearly defining central political agenda
items a step ahead of the bulk of the peace camp: in May 1989 in Brussels,
Israeli and Palestinian women called for the mutual recognition be -
tween the State of Israel and the PLO, and the end of the occupation.
Second, women’s peace action has been extremely persistent in refus -
ing to give in, in the face of the deterioration of the situation on the
ground. And third, it has focused on a series of concrete actions: it is
the Jerusalem Link which took the initiative of organizing an international
political, academic and cultural event in June 1997, on the theme “Sharing
Jerusalem – Two Capitals for Two States”, at a time when this idea
was a taboo for the immense majority of the Israeli public opinion, even
within the peace camp. Women activists, however, have been consistently
excluded from official or semi-official initiatives, and their distinctive
perspectives have been largely ignored.
As time progressed, Israeli-Palestinian women’s peace movements increasingly
saw their impact within both Palestinian and Israeli public opinion
fade, parallel to the deterioration of the peace process. With
violence raging everywhere and with it the hope for a negotiated agreement
fading away, women’s peace organizations were engulfed by a
sense of failure, frustration, and fatigue. Mainstream peace movements
such as “Peace Now” no longer dared organize “mass demonstra -
tions”, knowing that they would have been unable to mobilize a popular
support.
It is within this context that a group of veteran Israeli and Palestinian
women activists decided to take a critical look at past efforts, with a
view to increasing their efficacy. Building on years of joint peace work
and the personal trust that had developed as a result, they looked at
ways of overcoming existing pitfalls, and designing a more efficient and
productive framework for action.
The conceptual starting point for what was eventually to become the International
Women’s Commission for a Just and Sustainable Palestinian-
Israeli Peace (the IWC) was the adoption of the landmark UN Security
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