Daughter of the Olive Trees E-Book

Sumaya Farhat-Naser

• Herausgeber: Lenos
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Arabische Welten
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 296

Beschreibung

Sumaya Farhat-Naser is well known as an ambassadress of the Palestinian cause and a witness to the bitter reality of occupation in her country. "Daughter of the Olive Trees" was written in a context of escalating violence and an increasing lack of prospects. It portrays the crushing experiences of the Palestinians in the shadow of the so-called peace process and provides insight into Palestinian society, its political and social structures and the problems of its leadership. It gives an insider's account of the work for peace undertaken by Palestinian and Israeli women, documents ambitious dialogues and conflictual discussions, and analyses myths of history and the perception of them on both sides. The author has thus painted a unique picture of the every-day efforts to achieve peace and justice, which the media overlook. These efforts create the tissue of relations upon which political and social communication and rapprochement will one day depend.

Leseprobe

The author

Sumaya Farhat-Naser was born in 1948 in Birzeit, not far from Jerusalem. She attended the German boarding-school Talitha Kumi in Beit Jala near Bethlehem. She studied biology, geography and educational science in Hamburg and has a doctorate in applied botany. She taught botany and ecology at the Palestinian University of Birzeit from 1982 to 1997, and was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Münster in 1987. From 1997 to 2001 she was Director of the Palestinian Jerusalem Center for Women, and since 2000 she has been on the board of the Global Fund for Women in San Francisco. She resumed her teaching at Birzeit in 2002.

Her biography Thymian und Steine (Thyme and Stones) was published in 1995 by Lenos Verlag. Further publications: Disteln im Weinberg (Thistles in the Vineyard, 2007) and Im Schatten des Feigenbaums (In the Shade of the Fig Tree, 2013).

She has received many distinctions for her work for justice and peace: the Bruno Kreisky Award for Services to Human Rights (1995), the Protestant Book Prize of the German Association of Protestant Libraries (1997), the Mount Zion Award for Reconciliation (1997), the Augsburg Peace Prize (2000), the Hermann Kesten Medal of the German P.E.N. Center (2002), the Bremen Solidarity Prize (2003), the Profax Prize (2003) and the AMOS Prize for Civil Courage in Religion, Church and Society (2011).

Originally published in German in 2002 under the title:

Verwurzelt im Land der Olivenbäume

Copyright © 2002 by Lenos Verlag, Basel

E-book edition 2014

English translation copyright © 2003 by Lenos Verlag, Basel

All rights reserved

Cover design by Anne Hoffmann Graphic Design, Zürich

Cover photo by Resi Borgmeier

www.lenos.ch

ISBN EPUB-E-Book 978 3 85787 581 6

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Life in an occupied country

Women work for peace

‘Dear Daphna …’: a dialogue between unequal partners

Struggling over fundamentals

Conflict in public, coming closer in private

New dimensions of dialogue

Conflicting myths and realities

Forgotten by all: Palestinians in Israel

Struggling for political structures in Palestinian society

In a state of war

Mourning in Palestine

Refusing to be enemies

Ron Pundak – From Oslo to Taba: a process derailed

Marwan Bishara – Palestine/Israel: peace or apartheid

Appendix

The editors/the translator

Palestine is the country of olive trees. They have left their stamp on the landscape, and to us they symbolize home and our ties to the land. Olive trees grow very old. They live for centuries, have very modest requirements and yet give most generously. They bestow on us fruit, oil, soap and wood. Steadfastly and with pride they preserve their knowledge and wisdom. We feel safe in their shadow, we admire and love them, we tend them and make songs about them. Olive trees are blessed trees. They are part of our lives.

Foreword

‘The Middle East is in flames.’ ‘The spiral of violence goes on and on.’ ‘Hope for peaceful co-existence between the Palestinian and Israeli peoples has receded into the far distance.’ While we were working on this book, it was sentences like these, heard and read countless times, which determined the way we thought, since the situation was escalating all the time.

The continuous experiences of violence have fixed an image of the other side as enemies firmly in the minds of those involved, their relatives, friends and neighbours. The traumas suffered extend beyond individual lives or generations and create collective experiences. These experiences, which lead to a distorted image of ‘the enemy’ and his intentions, are an enduring obstacle to a neighbourly co-existence of the two peoples. They not only block peace negotiations, but also render daily rapprochement and understanding between individual Palestinians and Israelis more difficult.

Few have dared to break through the logic of the conflicting parties. Those who seek dialogue with the other side for the sake of peace must be prepared to question their own schemes of interpretation and their own understanding of history. Some Palestinian and Israeli women have tried to do so in the face of opposition from all sides, including that in their own minds. In her accounts of what she has gone through with the Israeli women peace activitists Daphna Golan, Gila Svirsky and Terry Greenblatt and the conflictual talks she has had with them, Sumaya Farhat-Naser shows what creative strength lies in the act of questioning one’s own authentic experience and its context. At the same time, her perception necessarily remains subjective, onesided and partial, despite her sympathetic understanding of the other side. She cannot claim to be neutral and objective – nor should she have to. For she describes from her own point of view an asymmetrical relationship, the one between the Israeli military occupation and the occupied Palestinian people. Sumaya Farhat-Naser is aware that she is walking a tightrope. But she knows that work for peace is based on accepting and bearing in mind not only the history of one’s own side’s suffering but also the suffering of the other side.

In the negotiations for peace in the Middle East, hardly any attention has been paid to the voices of women peace activists in Palestine and Israel. They offer no solutions in black and white, no instant peace. Their exchanges are grave and rich in conflict, onerous endeavours to create networks which render an end to violence conceivable and hold out a prospect of dealing with the traumas on both sides in a manner appropriate to peace.

Through our work we hope to have contributed to giving these voices a hearing. We would like to thank Chudi Bürgi for collaborating on this book, the late Rosmarie Kurz for contributing ideas when it was in the making, Willi Herzig for his advice, Matthias Hui for providing us with contacts and information, and Ron Pundak and Marwan Bishara for their afterwords.

February 2002

Manuela Reimann, Dorothee Wilhelm

Introduction

A year ago an Israeli called Udi Levy rang me up. He said he had read my article ‘Warum habt ihr zugewartet’ (Why did you wait and see) in a Swiss newspaper. He found it impressive and asked if he could publish it in Hebrew. Udi had heard about me from tourists and had contacted me then. Now that he had read what I had written, it had stimulated him to do something himself. And he did indeed translate the article and publish it in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

He has been asking about our situation regularly for more than two years and is always shocked at how different the worlds are in which we live, although his house in a kibbutz near Beersheba is only three hours’ distance from me. He rang up recently, appalled at what he had seen on TV; he wanted to know how I was. I began to explain and he invited me to visit him.

He said: ‘You just need to get a taxi to Beersheba and I’ll collect you there.’

‘I’m not allowed to move more than two kilometres from here,’ I answered. ‘And I’d have to get through at least fifteen checkpoints on the way to Beersheba. If I were to arrive there at all, I’d be committing a punishable offence. I’d even be putting my life at risk.’

He couldn’t believe it. He said that he could travel anywhere and didn’t have to stop at the checkpoints.

‘You belong to the group which I don’t belong to,’ I said to him. ‘You can drive along roads which I’m not allowed to use, you have a car with number plates which I’m not allowed to drive with.’

A friend gave him my book Thymian und Steine (Thyme and Stones). He wrote saying that he had read it in a single night and he was grateful to me for opening his eyes. He expressed his dismay at not having noticed so many things and also at the fact that it had been impossible to prevent them. He wanted to arrange for my book to be translated into Hebrew and then he would write a review of it. He wanted us to get to know each other and work together for justice and freedom. Udi has become a friend. He rings me up regularly and sends me emails. We both look forward to the time when we will be able to meet, perhaps in Jerusalem.

My family has been living in Palestine for centuries. I was born here in 1948 in the village of Birzeit near Jerusalem. The name Birzeit means ‘well of oliveoil’. I was born in the year the State of Israel was established, which is also the year of the Palestinian catastrophe (nakba), when 700,000 Palestinians, men and women, were forcibly expelled and made refugees and their villages destroyed. Large parts of my homeland, Palestine, were occupied by the Israeli army at that time. The West Bank of the Jordan, including my village, came under Jordanian rule, and many people, especially from the part of Palestine that was occupied, had to flee.

Life was hard for those who had to flee but also for those who remained. My childhood was marked by poverty and insecurity. We had to work hard to have enough to eat. It taught us children to share and be satisfied with little. As a child I received a lot of love. I learned to take responsibility and to be grateful. My mother always managed to make us forget our hunger by telling us stories, singing and playing games. When we went to bed hungry, we looked forward full of hope and excitement to the hen having laid an egg in the morning.

I grew up in a patriarchal society. My grandfather tried to marry the girls off as soon as possible to free his family from responsibility for its daughters. When I discovered that I was to be married off at fourteen, I put up a successful resistance. I stayed in the girls’ boarding school Talitha Kumi near Bethlehem and only returned when I had finished school and my plans to study in Germany were ripe. Life in the boarding school left a deep impression on me and made me realize what my vocation was – to stand up for people and humanity. With the help of my mother, my aunt and the school, I was able to study biology, geography and educational science in Germany. I worked at the same time and could help out my family in Palestine with what I earned. This showed my grandfather that a daughter, too, is capable of caring for the family and taking responsibility. I gained in selfassurance and my family began to respect women more. As a result, three of my sisters were able to go to Germany and complete a professional training.

As a Palestinian in Germany I was very quickly confronted with the history of Germany and the Jews, which I had not known of till then. The Germans’ grappling with the Holocaust and anti-Semitism left no place for Palestinian history. When I tried to talk about our experiences, I often had to listen to prejudices against Palestinians. This was very painful to me. But it also aroused my curiosity and encouraged me to interest myself in history. The more I read, the more I identified with the Jewish victims. I realized how much Palestinian history is a part of the history of Germany and its Jews. I was deeply moved by the testimony of Holocaust survivors and of victims like Anne Frank. Thanks to these accounts I learned much about how communicating one’s own feelings can impress and influence others. I learned increasingly how to recount my own history and speak of our oppression. I was able to demonstrate that we Palestinians are struggling for independence and freedom, for our own country and security, just as the Jews are.

When I returned to Palestine after finishing my studies, the West Bank had been occupied by the Israeli army following the 1967 war. I experienced all the injustice and reprisals of the occupation. It is often hard to see occupiers as human beings, when families, including one’s own, are mistreated, their land is confiscated, and children are exposed for years to the danger of being shot. It is not easy to distinguish between the occupation and individual members of the occupiers’ nation when everyday life is marked by oppression. One often feels great anger, and the transition to hatred happens imperceptibly. But in the meantime I had got to know Jews, both men and women. I had even made friends with some of them, and I had learned that we can on no account allow ourselves to give way to hatred and bitterness if we want to live together in peace one day.

Besides being a lecturer in botany at Birzeit University, I became involved in feminist and pacifist activities and working for human rights. I got in touch with many Jews in Europe and gradually came to know Israeli women peace campaigners. I began to undertake projects with them. This cooperation was anything but easy. Despite the political education and commitment on both sides, we had to learn to talk to each other and endure many insults. Sometimes it seemed almost hopeless. We had regarded each other as enemies for decades, we didn’t know each other, and for too long we had accepted the barriers which were intended to prevent us from becoming acquainted with each other. Mistrust and fear dominated our relationships. Yet we won through to each other nonetheless, because we believed that peace was possible and wanted to prepare the ground for reaching it. And so we have worked together since the mideighties, despite all the obstacles.

But the failure of the political peace process between our governments has put a stop to the whole work for peace and even called it into question. Since the beginning of the uprising, the so-called Second Intifada, in September 2000, the contact between us peace activists has been broken off. Today, a few days before the end of 2001 and the printing of this book – which has taken shape thanks to the inten sive cooperation of my Swiss friends Manuela Reimann, Dorothee Wilhelm, Chudi Bürgi, Rosmarie Kurz and Willi Herzig – the political situation seems hopeless. The dream of being able to travel unhindered in our own country has receded into the far distance, like the dream of Jerusalem and our own state. The spiral of violence goes on mercilessly. But violence cannot wipe us off the face of the earth. It cannot exterminate the olive trees either.

As I looked for new ways to put my commitment to peace into practice, I decided to write this book. I would like to put on record my experiences of recent years, since the Oslo Agreements between the Palestinian leadership and the Israeli government. I want to document all that I have gone through in working for peace, not only the many times when I felt fear, hurt and irritation, but also the many small successes towards a measure of understanding between our two peoples. This book is not meant to be a political analysis of the situation in Palestine. It is simply about my work as a peace activist, a woman in Palestine.

Life in an occupied country

It means much to me to begin with the recollection of a day of hope. We were delighted when the Israeli soldiers withdrew from Ramallah on 27December 1995. Tens of thousands stood in the streets to witness the historic event. Senior officers on both sides took their stand opposite each other and held out their hands to each other. Songs, music, whistles and honking horns drowned the sound of the car engines. ‘Go home! Go!’ people shouted at the Israeli soldiers. ‘Never set foot on our land again! Your hands are stained for ever with our children’s blood!’ And to the Palestinian policemen they called: ‘Welcome to Palestine!’