Jerusalem Women Speak 12 Featured in The Newport Daily News

12 October 2006

Jerusalem Women Speak 12 Featured in The Newport Daily News

Women Discuss Challenges of Living in War-Torn Gaza

By Meaghan Wims
Daily News staff

NEWPORT – To Ghada Ageel and Shireen Khamis, Palestine is a prison.

Khamis, a Palestinian Christian, said she is trapped in her hometown, Beit Jala. She’s lived through two Palestinian intifadas, and watched in horror two years ago as Israel erected a separation wall, cutting off her community and much of the West Bank from Jerusalem and the rest of Israel proper.

Ageel, a Palestinian Muslim studying for her doctorate in Middle Eastern politics, spent most of her life as a Palestinian refugee. Since June, she and her family have been stuck in England, because Israeli officials will not let them return to Gaza. Her children’s teachers in Britain ask Ageel why they draw tanks and helicopters.

“I come from hell,” Ageel said, “from a big prison called Gaza Strip.”

And Rela Mazali, an Israeli Jew, is working to change what she calls the militarization of her country, where all 18-year-olds must join the military.

While their stories and faiths differ, the three women are united in their call for peace and better understanding of the continuing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The trio spoke Wednesday night at Newport Public Library as part of the women’s 18-day tour of New England in Partners for Peace’s “Jerusalem Women Speak” series.

They spoke of poverty, violence and discrimination, of lives torn apart by decades of violence, and of suffering exacerbated recently by Israel’s war with Hezbollah and the United Nations and United States-approved sanctions against the Hamas-led Palestinian government.

Ageel’s family was expelled from their home in 1948 and forced to live in a refugee camp. She remembers waiting for food rations and secondhand clothes as a child. Her college dreams were put on hold for six years as she waited for Israel to reopen universities.

Even today, she and her neighbors in Gaza only receive running water for 15 minutes each day. Electricity is spotty. Schools are shut down.

“You have nothing to provide your children but love,” Ageel said. “Love doesn’t work there when there’s tanks, F16s, Apache helicopters.”

Bethlehem is not the thriving tourist destination it once was, Khamis said.

“Bethlehem and the cities surrounding it are nothing but an enclave, a prison where citizens live on a third of their original land,” she said.

Khamis said her family once was ordered to stay inside their home for 40 days to observe an Israeli-ordered curfew. Going outside even for some fresh air meant risking your life, she said.

Since the start of the conflict, Khamis’ family has lost five acres of its land to Israeli settlers.

The separation wall, she said, wasn’t built for its stated security reasons, but to confiscate more Palestinian land. Traveling to Jerusalem, once a 10-minute trip, now is “impossible” because of the barriers, she said. Going through one of the 500 security checkpoints in the West Bank is so difficult, dangerous and time-consuming that many students and teachers aren’t going to school, she said.

Khamis didn’t attend her first-choice college because the thought of traveling through checkpoints to get to Jerusalem, about 20 miles away, was too disheartening. Instead, she earned a business degree at Bethlehem University. Today, she works for a non-governmental organization that strives to empower Palestinian women.

“These checkpoints are not just geographic barriers but barriers for one’s hopes, one’s dreams,” Khamis said. “They just ruin the daily life of Palestinians.”

Mazali, who was born in 1948, the year Israel was founded, is a prominent peace and feminism activist in Israel.

Israel’s mandatory military service takes a toll on the country’s society, she said. Children are raised to believe that becoming a soldier is a rite of passage. Violence, she said, is “normalized” and poverty is rampant. A third of the country’s children, she said, live below the poverty line. Forty percent of Holocaust survivors are poor.

“We are turning ourselves into our worst enemies,” Mazali said. “We are destroying ourselves.”

The United States, the women said, is partly responsible for the ongoing Middle Eastern conflict. They urged Americans to become better informed about the matter.

“There’s enormous misinformation in the media,” Mazali said. “You really need to work to know what’s going on. My country has been playing this game of peacemaking … with no real substance to it. It’s time to realize that.”

While the three hope for lasting peace, they said they are becoming increasingly frustrated.

Khamis said the “bloody summer” – the 34-day war between Lebanese Hezbollah forces and Israel last summer – made her question whether to come to the United States as part of the Partners for Peace’s program.

“I said, ‘Why come?’ I didn’t want to see any Americans or any Israeli citizens,” she said. “But I said, ‘If I don’t come, who will represent the Palestinians?’ My fear now is that if I’m asked to come next year and if things don’t change, I’m afraid I won’t come. I can’t keep giving. I’m 23 years old but I’m tired. We have no future. We have dark days and nights. It’s your turn to do something.”

Ageel said the more she learns, the more pessimistic she becomes about a peaceful future. Still, she said, she speaks out: “To burn a candle is better than cursing the dark.”

For more information on Partners for Peace, visit www.partnersforpeace.org.