Throughout Israel, there is an annoying hum that many prefer to ignore. That noise, penetrating, present, discreet, becomes stronger in some of its mixed citiesin those where Jews and Palestinians coexist who never left their land. Both are citizens of the State of Israel. They both know that whisper must become a scream soon. They see their most tragic test in the October 7, when Hamas swept into Israel’s southern border communities, killing 1,200 people, and the Hebrew Army responded with its fiercest war against Gaza, which has already claimed more than 20,000 lives. Also the darkest day in his country is the one in which their ties were strengthened. From now on, they are clear that there is no other alternative than peace, coexistence and a shared land. This is how they enhance it through different initiatives solidarity between Jews and Palestinians who are gaining new followers. The hum is becoming speech prepared for dialogue.
It has been more than a decade since the Israeli journalist Meron Rapaport created the political movement ‘An Earth for All’ based on a series of meetings with the Palestinian activist Awni al Mashni, from the Dheisheh refugee camp in Bethlehem. “Now our ideas are increasingly listened to,” he acknowledges to EL PERIÓDICO. “For both peoples, the Jewish and the Palestinian, all this land is your homeland“Therefore, it is not a conflict about borders, it is a conflict between two peoples who live on the same land,” explains Rapaport. In the last ten years, they have established a strong base of support that integrates both peoples, coming from all corners of Israel and even the Occupied West Bank although with special popularity in the mixed cities of Israel. All of them consider that “the basis of any solution should be the recognition of the right of each of these peoples to live on this land and their attachment to it,” he says.
Although in the spectacle of hatred, confrontation and revenge that unleashed on October 7 there is little room for discussion, from ‘An Earth for All’, they continue to defend the creation of “two states”but with a close connection between them in a confederacy “according to the 1967 borders,” defends Rapoport. In recent weeks, this uncomfortable political movement has had to limit your public actions and take refuge in privacy, giving talks on Zoom, promoting intimate meetings between its Palestinian and Israeli members and people from both societies, and taking their proposals to ambassadors and diplomats. “At the first meeting, three days after October 7, there was a strong feeling that there is no alternative but live together and that this violence is not an answer and no solution can be found by force”, recalls the Israeli journalist.
last bastion
They also saw it this way from the movement ‘Standing Together’ (Standing Together). During the protests against the right-wing government’s judicial reform, they were one of the few who took the opportunity to also denounce the military occupation of the West Bank. “What happened on October 7 exemplified in the cruelest and most terrible way possible what the price of the policy of managing conflict and ignore the Palestinian problem as a central problem,” he denounces Dani Filc, activist and professor at Ben Gurion University of the Negev. The Prime Minister of Israel, Binyamin Netanyahuhas already repeatedly staged its intention to prolong the war with the not-so-hidden interest of avoiding the purging of responsibilities that would come at its end.
Israeli society, still in shock, does not seem willing to exercise self-criticism. Therefore, these movements, born from the heart of coexistence in mixed Israeli cities, represent the last bastion of pacifism in this disputed land. “On a logistical level, it is almost impossible what Palestinians [de la Cisjordania ocupada] and Israelis meet, and both societies, especially the Israeli one, are full of hatred, of calls for revenge,” Rapaport acknowledges. “Without a doubt, he is a very dark and difficult time For anyone who believes in collaboration and peace, there is very little space and tolerance for this type of ideas,” adds the co-founder of ‘An Earth for All’.
“More necessary than ever”
This exceptional moment that is being experienced on both sides of the Green Line – although in the occupied West Bank there were already months of violence and dispossession before October 7 – has made each one more reaffirm their position. “A movement like ours, which unites Palestinians and Israelisit is more necessary than ever and now, it has given the possibility of reaching people that we had not yet been able to reach in the past, it has given the movement a repercussion “that I didn’t have,” Filc celebrates. Those people, who dare to come out of the fold and talk about coexistence with those who have killed their own, are still a minority. “For many years, most of Israeli Jewish society thought that it is possible to somehow manage the conflict, tame it, reduce it“Not solving it, just living with it,” says Rapoport.
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“What happened on October 7 was a serious blow to this conception that we can live next to the conflict and not solve it, but, unfortunately, many Israelis have gone to the other extreme and they affirm that if we cannot live with the conflict, we must resolve it in a radical and violent way,” explains the journalist, in reference to the multiple calls for the massacre and ethnic cleansing of Israeli citizens and politicians. During the first weeks of the war, there was a express prohibition to demonstrate against him in the State of Israel. Now, although not very crowded, there are already beginning to be protests asking for a definitive ceasefire among leftist (and brave) sectors of Israeli society. The one of Haifaa mixed city par excellence with a 20% Palestinian population, was the most massive.
For these murmurs to become screams, Filc emphasizes the need for “political change”, that the proposals of these solidarity movements “are translated into terms of internal policies.” Although they move forward convinced under the question of “if not now, when?”, the optimism He does not overflow his speeches. Rapaport clings to History. “The end of long-term conflicts like this have occurred in History, especially basing the solution not on the balance of power, but on the equal rights for all”, he concludes. Without a doubt, their voices are already the basis of a change that, without knowing it, both societies are crying out for. His own survival depends on him.