Palestinians and Israelis embracing peace

Tel Aviv, Israel – In January 2007, Israeli soldiers shot dead the 10-year-old daughter of Bassam Aramin. She had just gone candy shopping with her sister and two of her friends.

Aramin was devastated. Just two years earlier, he had begun working with Israeli peace activists to start Fighters for Peace, an organization that broadens understanding between Palestinians and Israelis and calls for an end to Israel’s second occupation of Palestinian land since 1967.

Faced with assumptions, even demands, that he would be consumed with rage and quit his job building bridges, Aramin told the website ynetnews at the time: “I can’t blame an 18-year-old for shooting an innocent 10-year-old. years. girl.”

At a press conference the same night as her daughter’s death, she recalls saying: “Especially now, we must redouble our efforts to achieve peace… I have five other children that I want to protect.”

Where to put the blame?

Aramin’s other children survived, as did his commitment to Combatants for Peace and the message that people can put hate aside and work together to end the occupation.

In late April, Aramin, now 55, helped organize the Joint Memorial Day in Tel Aviv’s Ganei Yehoshua Park, a commemoration of all the Palestinians and Israelis who have died since 1947, when Zionist militias began expelling at least 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. and lands and killed at least 15,000. This is commemorated as the Nakba (disaster in Arabic) by the Palestinians.

Organized by Combatants for Peace and Parents Circle Family Forum (PCFF), Joint Memorial Day is an alternative to Israel Memorial Day, held to commemorate all Israeli soldiers who have died since Israel’s founding.

Neither Combatants for Peace nor PCFF have a singular vision of what peace will look like, focusing instead on the first steps: dialogue, reconciliation and agreement on the need for a return to pre-1967 borders. Their annual commemoration of losses on both sides it has gone from 200 attendees in 2005 to 15,000 this year.

When pressed to identify the cause of the current conflict, Aramin weighs his words carefully. The problem, he tells Al Jazeera, “is not so much one side as the other, it’s the situation, what the occupation means.”

While he says it is “very clear” that the occupier is responsible for the occupation, he is reluctant to accuse Israel openly because his goal is for the Israelis to understand that they are to blame.

“It is possible to use our pain in a different way. Not only to continue preparing our children to kill and be killed,” says Aramin.

parallel but different

Memorial Day in Israel is a country-wide enforced martial event from sunset the day before, with a one-minute siren, until the end of the next day.

A longer siren sounds the next morning, and the day is filled with people visiting the graves of loved ones for prayers and memorial services attended by Israel’s top soldiers and politicians.

An equally somber but pacifist atmosphere permeates the Joint Service as people come together to mourn their loved ones and celebrate their decision to foster peace.

At this year’s Joint Memorial Service, Israelis and Palestinians who lost a family member in the conflict shared their story of loss, reconciliation and hope for the future on stage at the event.

Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant refused travel permission requested by Palestinian speakers and participants from the occupied West Bank, but his decision was overturned by Israel’s Supreme Court a day before the event.

However, two of the Palestinian speakers did not have time to organize their travel, so their recorded speeches were played for the audience.

Mohammed Abu Rnan, a 27-year-old Palestinian PCFF member from Ramallah who was able to attend, told Al Jazeera that he came because “peace between the Arabs (Palestinians) and the Jews is the most important thing in the world.”

Not many Palestinians or Israelis agree with Abu Rnan. For them, the idea of ​​acknowledging the suffering of both sides on the same stage is unacceptable, Aramin said.

During the event, right-wing Israeli protesters stood outside, chanting “shame” and “leftist traitors” into megaphones.

Screams were drowned out by loudspeakers but, in some cases, a loudspeaker had to pause, momentarily interrupted.

“The Palestinians,” says Aramin, “want to remember the Palestinians killed in the conflict without remembering the soldiers who killed them.

“Israelis want to remember their…soldiers without thinking about the ‘terrorists’ who killed them,” he adds, using a term widely used in Israel.

Uri, a 20-year-old Israeli from Tel Aviv, said the way the event continued despite the protesters gave him hope and deepened his “commitment to fight for justice and equality.”

The story of loss of a Palestinian

Today, Aramin is a major figure in Combatants for Peace and the PCFF and fully embraces their philosophy.

The young Aramin was a freedom fighter, resisting the occupation in a way that gave him a “feeling of dignity.”

At 17, he was arrested when the group of Palestinian fighters he associated with threw a grenade at Israeli soldiers.

In prison, he watched a film about the Holocaust, which began the soul-searching that ended with him rejecting violence in favor of peace.

The film, which Aramin learned years later to be Schindler’s List, was powerful because it encouraged him to start thinking about the Holocaust in a different light.

“At the time, I considered the Holocaust a big lie because (the Palestinians) didn’t know anything about it,” he said.

The film made him realize that the Palestinians “paid the price for this crime that we never committed and never knew about.”

Thus began what Aramin describes as “a long process of changing oneself.”

With the start of the Oslo Accords in 1993, Aramin “realized that we need to change the way we achieve our goal of freedom.”

“The Palestinians have the right to resist,” he said, but in the last 100 years, violence begot violence. In his eyes, he added, all efforts to resist the occupation only resulted in “more pain, more blood, more victims.”

Time and time again, Aramin has been asked to revisit the moment his daughter was killed and explain his feelings.

Is it really possible that he did not doubt his nonviolent convictions, even for a moment?

Your answer has remained unchanged. “I don’t even think about revenge because we need to coexist.”

The loss story of an Israeli

Yuval Sapir, a 53-year-old Israeli, spoke at the Joint Memorial Service about the loss of his sister Tamar in a suicide bus bombing in Tel Aviv in 1994.

He told Al Jazeera that it’s hard to remember exactly what he felt at that moment besides the pain and sadness. For him, he explains, “one of the best ways to deal with trauma is to shut down all emotions.”

In Sapir’s speech at the service, he likened this closure to a “black hole” that followed him ever since. A scientist and academic, he spent decades after Tamar’s death drowning his grief at work.

Recently, he was finally able to review his loss.

Although he knows that it is “easy and natural to hate, get angry and want revenge”, he said that he “never experienced anger or hatred because sadness covered everything”.

Several years ago, he heard that right-wing protesters prevented a grieving Israeli from speaking about his grief at a high school because he wanted to speak alongside a Palestinian. Sapir remembers being so angry about this that he felt he had to do something.

He decided to join PCFF because, as he tells Al Jazeera, “I was convinced that this is the best way to use my feelings and my loss for the good of my people and this country.”

At the Joint Memorial Service, he stressed his belief that through dialogue and recognition, “the flames of hate will be quenched and there will be room for reconciliation and life.”