The Contribution of Women to Peace and Reconciliation

INTERVIEW WITH
MOLLY MALEKAR, JERUSALEM
My childhood was very confused because my family migrated from India
to Israel in 1971 when I was nine years old; it was my parents’ decision;
they wanted us to grow up in a Jewish society. Although a Zionist, my
father was never an extremist. He grew up on the myth of Mahatma
Gandhi in India. It was a very soft, even naive Zionism. My childhood
was disrupted and had no clear continuity. When I look back, it was in a
way traumatic, disconnecting me from all I knew, setting me into a tot -
ally new environment. It was a big struggle for me to integrate in this
new society, and at a certain point, I had to understand that I would
never entirely assimilate. This is my existential feeling to this day: that
I’m always a little bit outside. It’s an advantage, too, having had the
chance to see things a little from the outside. Take for example the military
service and the myth around it. It was always strange to me and
to my family; we didn’t have grandparents who had fought in the 1948
war.
When Anwar el-Sadat came to Israel in 1977, it was my eleventh school
year and I remember there was an option at high school to choose
French or Arabic as a foreign language and I was sure, with the arrival
of Sadat, that things would change, and I was sure I would be part of
this new prospective – and, rather romantically, I chose Arabic as my
second language. And I also made another decision: we were given the
option either to go immediately to the army or to study first. I chose the
academic path and joined the army afterwards; I applied at the Hebrew
University in Jerusalem to take Arabic Studies. They have a distin -
guished Middle East studies department with very good experts. Many
Jewish students in this department, especially those who study modern
Arabic history, are military people, working for the army. You could see
in the same seminar Arab-Israeli students and army people, with and
without uniform. The military service was not so attractive for me, and
I became involved in political discussions with my Arab comrades – it
was at the same time a political and also a social cooperation. This was
the beginning of my political activism.
259