The Contribution of Women to Peace and Reconciliation

had to teach me the paragraph about “mir” (peace), and I gave a speech
in Russian in front of all public and official personalities, including Leonid
Brezhnev. I was wearing a beautiful Palestinian dress. This is how I pronounced
“peace” for the first time in my life. Peace for happiness, for
the liberation of Palestine, and for returning home.
During all my childhood, I never saw an Israeli civilian. But, as my parents
were part of the Left, I was raised to believe that there is no difference
between people with different religions, that Jews had suffered a lot
during the Nazi regime, that there are Palestinians who didn’t flee and
live in Israel, that there are good and bad Jews the same way as there
are good and bad people everywhere, and that there is no difference
between black and white.
Books and reading played an important role in our family, and the books
we had were mainly translations from Soviet and Russian literature. Before
going to the USSR, it was most interesting for me to read about
the Second World War. I read all the stories about heroes, about the
concentration camps, the stories of Jews, and the resistance in the villages
against the Nazi, and I was convinced that Nazi had been undemocratic
and if they had come to our area, they would have killed and
treated us the same way, because we too, were Semites.
So this was my experience of war and peace in my childhood. My choice
during the war in Lebanon was not to take a weapon and not to fight at
the front, like so many others of my age have done. I chose to work on
the inner front in hospitals and refugee camps. Nobody told me to do
so, it was my choice.
Back to 1982, the eighty days of destruction: We saw dead people,
people cut in pieces; we worked with traumatized and wounded people
every day, we heard the screams of people covered by rocks, but were
unable to help them, because the bombers came back. And normal life
went on. Today, having a child myself, I realize how generous my par -
ents were at that time, that they let us go to work, to experience ourselves
and therewith be part of our people.
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