On combatants for peace - Sulaiman Khatib and Avner Wishnitzer in NYRB:

‘In 2005 a group of former Israeli soldiers who had refused to serve in the Occupied Territories came together with a group of Palestinians who had fought against Israeli occupation and served time in Israeli prisons. The meeting took place in a humble hotel in Beit Jala, near Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank. It was the end of the second intifada, which had claimed the lives of some three thousand Palestinians and a thousand Israelis. Many of the people in the group had taken active part in the violence.
I, Avner, was there. I was born in a kibbutz in the center of Israel and raised to believe that Israel was the safe haven of the Jewish people, our one sure place in the world, and that it was my duty to defend it. As I saw it, Israel was a liberal democracy. I had always known about “the occupation,” but its reality remained vague, distant. When my time to join the army came in 1994, I volunteered to serve in Sayeret Matkal, an elite commando unit. I was discharged in 1998, and soon after the second intifada broke out two years later, I joined an activist group called Taayush and for the first time went to the West Bank as a civilian. I saw houses demolished, communities displaced, wells sealed. My vague understanding of the occupation dissolved. It was my army, the army I was still serving in as a reserve soldier, that enforced all of this. This oppression was mine. When Sayeret Matkal reservists began carrying out missions in the West Bank, I decided to publicly refuse, alongside twelve other soldiers and officers. Days later a friend called and told me about a group of Palestinians who wanted to meet Israeli “refuseniks.”’

(…)

‘I, Sulaiman, was born in the village of Hizma, northeast of Jerusalem, to an indigenous Palestinian family. I grew up under Israeli military rule and experienced its brutality firsthand. I saw our land being taken to allow Israeli settlements to expand and felt my parents’ fury and helplessness. It was as if we were suffocating, losing our space, denied our place. As a teenager I could not formulate any of these feelings in words, but they drove me to join the armed struggle. I wanted to fight for my freedom. When I was fourteen, together with a friend whose house had been demolished by the army, I attacked two vacationing soldiers, hoping to take their weapons. We failed. We only managed to injure them lightly before running away.
I was arrested within days, underwent physical and psychological torture, and was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. While working in the prison library, I read everything I could find about the conflict and came to realize that military force could not determine whose narrative was right, whose land this was. I started to participate in hunger strikes and came to see nonviolence as an alternative to the armed struggle. When I was released after ten years, I began advocating nonviolent resistance to the occupation and sought partnership with Israelis who believed in similar values. When I heard about the group that had come together in Beit Jala, I joined them at their second meeting.’

(…)

‘We realized, through many such informal encounters, that by telling our personal stories we were telling one another, and ourselves, the stories of our societies and of the conflict between them. We began to feel that we had all been handed a script at birth, a script written by others, and we were expected to play our roles as antagonists. And we understood that by narrating our stories we were breaking character and assuming responsibility for our actions. We founded Combatants for Peace, as we came to call our group, to promote the belief that we can transform ourselves, turn violence into trust, pain into compassion, war into peace.’

(…)

‘The process of rehumanization that we promote is not a nicety. It means valuing all human lives as equally sacred and resisting all ideologies and mechanisms that subject one group of people to the violence and oppression of another. Our vision does not efface the asymmetry in power between Israelis and Palestinians. Rather, we challenge it. By working as equal partners in decision-making and formulating our message, we seek to embody, rather than talk about, the future that we want to create.
The occupation is the primary obstacle on the way to that future, and we spend much of our energy struggling against it. We have protested unequal access to water in the South Hebron Hills, demonstrated against the expansion of Israeli settlements throughout the West Bank, and organized against the displacement of Palestinian communities in the Jordan Valley. We have resisted limitations on Palestinians’ freedom of movement, demolitions of their houses by Israeli settlers, and the detainment of Palestinian children. Our activists, Palestinians and Israelis both, have led hundreds of direct actions, joint rallies, marches, public talks, and memorial ceremonies together. We have been ostracized, beaten, and sometimes arrested, ironically, for “disturbing the peace.”’

(…)

‘But even loss can be transformed into compassion. For eighteen years Combatants for Peace has held annual joint memorial ceremonies for those who have been killed in the conflict. This year’s ceremony drew 15,000 people. A few years ago, we also inaugurated a joint annual Nakba memorial ceremony to commemorate the displacement and erasure of hundreds of Palestinian communities in 1948, which any solution to the conflict must take into account.’

(…)

‘We hold on to our humanity. It is the value of each life that guides us through this storm.’

Read the article here.

In 2008 I spoke to Itamar, who was back then a member of Combatants for Peace. He told me that he wanted to concentrate on his music, he was also a tour guide at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem.

He said back then: ‘The problem is that a lot of money is available for organizations like ours, dozens of NGOs want to support organizations like Combatants for Peace. But some people are more interested in the power and money than the purpose of the organization.'

That might still be the case, but regardless, it’s an important organization that deserves support precisely because of this: ‘When so many people here and around the world overtly or covertly wish for one side to vanquish the other by force, we insist, as we have always done, that there is no military solution to this conflict.’

And also, the emphasis of the value of each life.