The Contribution of Women to Peace and Reconciliation

INTERVIEW WITH
SIMONE SUSSKIND, BRUSSELS
My parents were Jewish immigrants from Poland and Transylvania. They
were survivors of the Shoah. After the war, my father rejected his Jew -
ish faith, arguing that no God could have allowed the massacre of mil -
lions of human beings. He believed that the best way to protect his
children was to reject Judaism and to assimilate. But his efforts were
not successful; the social environment of my parents was Jewish. They
tried to teach my younger brother and me that the world is dangerous
and that the only safe place you can trust is the family. As for many survivors,
the strength of my parents was to fight to build a new life. I developed
my personality in opposition to them; I wanted to prove that it
is possible to change the world and that you can do this as a Jew.
I have never been afraid of opening myself to other people. As a teenager
I joined a Zionist youth organization. We developed our Jewish identity
on our own. Soon I became one of the leaders of this organization.
At the university, I was active in a Jewish students’ organization with
close connections to the left, and there, for the first time after the War
of 1967, we got a sense of the Palestinian problem. We understood that
the only way to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was the creation of
two states for the two peoples. There were very few proponents of such
a vision at that time.
It was then that I met my husband David, who, as a leader in the Belgian
Communist Party, had founded the CCLJ (Centre Communautaire Laïc
Juif), a Jewish cultural centre based on the fact that Jewish identity is
not only a religious identity, but that you can have a strong Jewish identity
without being a religious person.
The visit of the Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat to Jerusalem in November
1977 was a historic event: it led to a peace agreement between
the two countries. For many Israelis, it meant that if peace was possible
with Egypt, there was a possibility to work toward peace with the Palestinian
people, too. The movement “Peace Now” was founded during
this period.
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