www.jpost.com (breaking news section)

June 8, 2001
(17:30) Jewish demonstrators clash in Jerusalem

Right-wing extremists this afternoon attacked a group of Jewish women belonging to the Women in Black movement who were demonstrating in the capital's France Square against the occupation of Palestinian territories, Israel Radio reported.

After taunting the women, one of the right-wingers threw a rock at the group, which struck one of them. Her condition was not immediately reported. Three of the assailants were arrested.

An Arab woman participates in a left-wing demonstration near Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's residence in Jerusalem June 8, 2001. Hundreds of left-wing Israelis, Israeli-Arabs, international students, and others demonstrated to demand an end to Israeli occupation of Palestinian areas and an end to the closure of the West Bank and Gaza. (Natalie Behring/Reuters)

Ann Arbor news
http://aa.mlive.com/news/index.ssf?/news/stories/20010609avigil09.frm

Vigils protest occupation of Palestine

Saturday, June 9, 2001

FROMNEWS STAFFREPORTS

About 35 people lined the sidewalk in front of the federal building in Ann Arbor Friday at mid-day as part of the Women-Men in Black vigil, one of 142 such vigils held around the world to mark the 34th anniversary of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories.

"This is an occupation that has gone on too long," said Karem Sakallah, a Palestinian and an engineering professor at the University of Michigan.

Holding signs that read, "Two states for two people," and "For a just peace in Israel/Palestine," the participants, also members of various peace organizations, held the vigil for an hour beginning at noon.

Vigil participants wore black to mourn the casualties of the violence, said Odile Hugonot Haber, who organized Friday's event. "We need to end the human sacrifices and create a culture of peace for our children and for this planet," Haber said.

The Associated Press reported Friday that CIA Chief George Tenet, Israeli and Palestinian security chiefs met for nearly three hours trying to re renew their cooperation and cement a week-long truce.

Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres told U.S. Mideast envoy William Burns there was no chance of a Palestinian state as long as Palestinian militias were active on the ground,
Israel's army radio reported.

Palestinian Cabinet Minister Saeb Erekat said Burns and the Palestinians would meet again today to work on a schedule for following through on a report by former Senator George Mitchell which calls for a cooling-off period, confidence-building measures and then a return to peace talks.

The Lancaster Women  In Black  Chapter is leading a vigil this evening on the steps of the Lancaster County Courthouse on East King Street to demand the end of Israeli occupation in Palestine. The vigil begins at 5:30 p.m.
The Women  In Black  movement involves men and women  who hold vigils around the world to protest violence everywhere.

By DEBORAH DAVIS/The New Mexican June 09, 2001

Four weeks after she moved to Santa Fe, Dalya Yohai participated in a solidarity vigil, an effort she had been meaning to join even before she left Israel 16 years ago.

"I am very touched by the concern so many people have for this difficult time in the Middle East," said Yohai. She left Israel because she did not want her two sons to go to war.
Yohai gathered together with about 25 women and a few men at the Sanbusco Center Friday morning for Santa Fe's International Day of Solidarity for peace in the Middle East. Santa Fe was one of 144 cities to participate in a silent vigil, according to Katya Miller, one of the vigil's organizers.

The vigil's official group, Women in Black, started with Palestinian and Israeli women refusing to be enemies in the late 1980s, according to Miller.

"Women around the world organize in cities to support an end to the occupation," Miller said. "I think it's the only thing in the end that can influence the government and the policies."

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan plans to visit the Middle East next week to press for an end to the violence and a resumption of peace talks, according to an Associated Press report. While fighting has diminished, Israel contends Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat is not doing enough to arrest militants and halt attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians,
according to the report.

The Santa Fe group held artistic, homemade signs reading, "Educate for a just peace" and "We mourn for the children" while walking in pairs from the Sanbusco Center on Montezuma Avenue to the downtown Plaza.

"I feel the one thing we haven't tried is politics of the heart," said Dominique Mazeaud, a Santa Fe woman who defined herself as a person of conscience. "I feel peace is the key to the survival of our planet, whether it's peace in the Middle East or everywhere."

Having cities across the world participate in the solidarity vigil made a difference to Mazeaud.

"Perhaps more and more people are waking up that we need to make a change in the way we're dealing with things," she said.

Dorit Batshallom, a part-time Taos and Israel resident, is working on a peace movement by bringing Taos and Israeli spiritual leaders together for rituals that empower them.

"Our attitude is no one is to blame," Batshallom said. "We're just in a big crisis. It's important to remind people that there are so many peace makers in Israel and Palestine."

Batshallom announced another event supporting peace this weekend. There will be a multi-media event, "I pray for you my country," held at 7 p.m. on Sunday at the Cafe Tazza in Taos.

It will include an art show, a time of sharing concerns, a prayer led in Hebrew, Arabic and English, a pipe ceremony and a peace dance.

Featured in Region
Going Quietly Amid The Noise And Hate:
Women in Black's vigils support Palestinians

By Bethe Dufresne - More Articles
Published on 6/9/2001

The daughter of a rabbi and the wife of a bishop were among the Women in Black who gathered in Hartford Friday for a secular protest against the treatment of Palestinians in the Mideast conflict.

It was a small gathering, just a handful of people, much as it probably was when Israeli and Palestinian women first came together, dressed all in black, to hold Friday vigils for peace in Jerusalem. But it was significant, in a quiet way, because it was the first time that Women in Black went international.

Word had gone out, chiefly via the Internet, of some 150 vigils planned in cities around the world, including Hartford and New Haven. The organizers, only loosely connected, knew better than to expect any massive demonstrations of solidarity.

Even within the ranks of the tiny group assembled outside the Federal Building on Main Street in Hartford, there were shades of disagreement. All seemed to agree, however, that the Palestinians haven't been given a fair hearing, and that the United States, for all its declarations of impartiality, discriminates in its foreign policies against people of darker color.

For Elizabeth Aaronsohn, a state university professor whose late father was a Cincinnati rabbi, the conflict in the Mideast is complicated but the solution is clear: Israel must withdraw from the territories it seized during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. "End the Occupation" read the sign she held aloft.

Her late father, she admitted, would not have approved, any more than he approved of her two-year stint working for civil rights in Mississippi during the 1960s.

Nor did Aaronsohn expect any overt support from other rabbis. "Characteristically," she said, "most synagogues - not all - seem to be taking the position that we support Israel no matter what."

Underneath the surface, Aaronsohn said, she believes many American Jews think the Palestinians have a historic right to the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. But they are afraid to speak out, she said, for fear of risking their position in the community.

Her own father, she recalled, "wanted very much to be accepted."

For Kate Smith, whose husband Andrew is bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Connecticut, a Mideast solution is not quite so clear as it is to Aaronsohn.

More attention must be paid, she said, to "Palestinian concerns." But it may not be feasible, she said, to persuade Israeli settlers who have already cultivated homes in the occupied territories to abandon them.

Were it not for the latest incident of horror in the Mideast - a suicide bombing by a Palestinian that killed 19 young Israelis in Tel Aviv last week - Smith would have been voicing her concerns Friday in Jerusalem. A group of wives of Episcopal bishops had planned a trip to Israel that was postponed because of the bombing.

Had they gone, said Smith, they hoped to meet with the original Women in Black.

According to literature distributed in Hartford, the Women in Black movement began in January 1988, specifically to protest Israeli occupation of formerly Palestinian territory. But some say mothers from both sides of the conflict have been holding vigils much longer than that, not always with a specific political aim.

The Women in Black aren't allied with any religious or government organization, passing the word through a network of allies for like causes. Synagogues in southeastern Connecticut didn't appear to have any advance information about Friday's vigils.

In Hartford, the Women in Black shared the Federal Building steps with a group that has been gathering there at midday on Fridays for several years to protest U.S. sanctions against Iraq.
Together, the two groups had about a dozen men and women.

"Actually, I was expecting this to be more of a vigil than a protest," said Smith.

There were several teachers in the group. Along with Aaronsohn, an associate professor of teacher education at Central Connecticut State University, they included Fatma Antar, an Egyptian-American who teaches economics at Manchester Community College, and Sadu Nanjundiah, who teaches physics at CCSU.

At 64, Aaronsohn is a veteran political activist. Her main focus is fighting racism and what she views as a history of arrogance by Europeans and their descendants, from the displacement of American Indians to the displacement of Palestinians to create the modern state of Israel.

"I consider myself a very religious person," said Aaronsohn. "Culturally, I identify completely as a Jew. But that doesn't mean I accept Israel's behavior in the occupied territories."

Much has been made of the Israeli settlers' transformation of dry land into green fields. There are even reports of a group called Women in Green that supports the settlers. But it's American greenbacks, in Aaronsohn's view, that have made it all possible.

Aaronsohn said she visited Israel only once, in 1960, at which time she expected to find a paradise of brotherhood and equal opportunity. But she found it no freer of racism, she said, than America.

She could still emigrate to Israel, she said, if she wished, which to her doesn't seem just when Palestinians can't return to land now occupied by Israel. "I would willingly give up my right of return," said Aaronsohn, "so that a Palestinian could have his."

Bethe Dufresne's e-mail address is: b.dufresne@theday.com.

 By Haywood Alexander
 Staff Writer

 June 12, 2001

A mixed group of Israeli, Palestinian and American men and women gathered in Chapel Hill Friday to protest continued U.S. financial support of Israeli occupation in Palestinian land.

A lone man waved a large Israeli flag and carried a homemade posterboard sign reading, "Nuke Arafat," while the crowd of 30 to 40 donned all black and held their own signs in relative silence.

Some protesters carried picket signs with slogans such as, "Jews to Israel: Human rights for Palestinians."

Others held pictures of Jewish settlements in the West Bank area they believe is being developed to put a stranglehold on the Palestinians still living in this volatile region.

Mary-Lou Leiser Smith, a member of a local organization called the Coalition for Peace With Justice, coordinated the local protest.

"This is a worldwide event taking place in more than 121 different cities," Smith said. "We are here to protest the illegal displacement of the Palestinian people by the Israeli
 government."

Smith worked with several groups, including Triangle Middle East Dialogue and various Christian church congregations to organize the event.

The event comes at a time of especially high Arab-Israeli tension.

On June 1, an Islamic extremist detonated a bomb strapped to his chest and murdered a crowd of teenagers at a popular Gaza disco. Israel responded with military strikes before a tenuous cease-fire was called.

The reality of tragedies occurring on both sides was not lost on the crowd of protesters. Many expressed their dismay over recent terrorist actions.

"The bombings are horrible, but they are small potatoes compared to the day-to-day atrocities of the Israeli government," said Henri Picciotto, 51, a Jew from Lebanon.

G.R. Quinn, 49, a member of a local conservative group, was the lone counter-protester.

Quinn argued vehemently with nearby protesters and often compared Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat to Adolf Hitler.
 

"Arafat wants nothing more than to exterminate the state of Israel," Quinn remarked.

Since its foundation in 1948, Israel has been in constant conflict with neighboring Arab countries.

In 1967, Israel fought a war against several Arab nations, touched off by Egyptian military activity along its southwestern border.

The territories Israel claimed after the 1967 conflict include the much-debated Gaza and West Bank areas.

Howard Machtinger, 55, director of UNC's Teaching Fellows Program, attended the protest in support of the Palestinian people.

"The War of 1967 was an illegal seizure of foreign territories," Machtinger said. "We now need to give Palestinians land not divided into 50 pieces."

Machtinger was also critical of the tactics of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. "I don't feel that Sharon believes at all in the rights of Palestinians," he said. Andrew Silver, a Jew who lived in Israel for 13 years, left in 1980 because he disagreed with the country's policies toward Palestinians.

"I felt Israel was on a course to national suicide," Silver said.

"They live in a sea of Arabs, but they insist on depriving them of fundamental freedoms."

The majority of protesters attending Friday's demonstration maintained only faint hopes of a U.S. foreign policy shift.

"It is simply too lucrative a process to ever end," Picciotto said. "The U.S. is like a 500-pound gorilla on the Israeli side."

Haywood Alexander can be reached at halexand@email.unc.edu.

               Women carry torch for
               peace in Middle East

               By Diane Huie Balay
               Associate Editor

                   A thousand black balloons soared into
               the brilliant blue Jerusalem sky June 8 as
               some 3,000 Israelis and Palestinians, clad
               mostly in black, rallied for peace led by a
               group of women.
                   The women's movement, known as
               Women in Black, was recently nominated
               for the Nobel Peace Prize. They were
               joined June 8 by supporting demonstrations
               in some 150 countries around the world,
               including the United States.
                   The black balloons represented the
               victims of the ongoing violence in Israel
               and the Palestinian territories.
                   Although now an international but
               loosely knit movement, Women in Black
               began in the Middle East in 1988 among
               Palestinian and Israeli women during the
               first intifada. These women "refused to be
               enemies."
                   Together they protested Israel's
               occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and
               demanded peace between Israel and
               Palestinians, an activity they have
               continued.
                   With the almost complete disappearance
               of voices for peace in Israel and the
               Palestinian territories since the September
               2000 beginning of the present Al Aqsa
               Intifada, or uprising, Women in Black have
               maintained their vigils at no small cost.
               They are often vilified and sometimes
               roughly arrested.
                   United Methodists who have been
               active in mission work in the Palestinian
               territories sometimes worked side by side
               with Women in Black and other peace
               groups as they tried to prevent Israeli
               bulldozing of Palestinian houses and the
               uprooting of Palestinian olive groves.
                   Ms. McCarty helped organize a
               supporting demonstration at the Northwest
               Texas Annual Conference meeting in
               Abilene, Texas.
                   The biggest event by far, however, was
               the Jerusalem rally.
                   One of the organizers, Gila Svirsky, a
               longtime Israeli peace activist, described
               the day.
                   At dusk on June 7 in Jerusalem, she
               said, "Dr. Sumaya Farhat-Naser, a
               Palestinian from Birzeit University, and I, a
               Jewish Israeli, stood in the center of the
               vigil plaza and held one torch aloft
               between us with two signs at our sides:
               "End the Occupation" and "We Refuse to
               be Enemies."
                   After about an hour, she said, members
               of the right-wing extremist group, Kach
               arrived. Some had loaded guns at their
               belts.
                   Soon Kach members began "to taunt us
               and jumped onto the raised area where
               Sumaya and I stood.
                   "Women in Black and some men
               supporters immediately surrounded Sumaya
               and me, holding their signs in front of
               them."
                   Despite pleas to police to disburse the
               Kach, the police refused.
                   Skirmishes broke out but the extremists
               stayed until about 2 a.m., Ms. Svirsky said.
               "They shouted racist slogans, attempted to
               set our banners on fire with cigarette
               lighters and to destroy our signs."
                   The women planned to read and discuss
               "some of the wonderful texts that had been
               sent from all over the world," she said, but
               when the Kach members finally left, "we
               were too exhausted to focus on any
               readings," she said.
                   "Most of us sat quietly together,
               huddled against the growing cold and
               talked. But through it all, right through the
               long night, two demonstrators stood in the
               center and held the torch aloft," Ms.
               Svirsky said.
                   At 5 a.m., seven women were left.
               They lit a second torch and held their signs
               to face the rising sun and early morning
               drivers. Some drivers cursed at them, she
               said, some were incredulous and some
               stopped to join them and brought them
               coffee.
                   The mass rally was held between noon
               and 3 p.m.
                   Among the speakers was Nurit
               Peled-Elhanan whose 13-year-old daughter
               was killed by a suicide bomber in
               Jerusalem in September 1997.
                   "For me," Dr. Peled-Elhanan said, "the
               struggle is not between Palestinians and
               Israelis, nor between Jews and Arabs. The
               fight is between those who seek peace and
               those who seek war. My people are those
               who seek peace. My sisters are the
               bereaved mothers, Israeli and Palestinian,
               who live in Israel and in Gaza and in the
               refugee camps.
                   "My brothers are the fathers who try to
               defend their children from cruel
               occupation, and are, as I was, unsuccessful
               in doing so. Although we were born into a
               different history and speak different
               tongues there is more that unites us than
               that which divides us."
                   By the last of the speeches, some Kach
               members managed to slip by police, Ms.
               Svirsky said, and approached the podium
               where they released a hailstorm of rocks.
               The rocks struck demonstrators standing
               near the podium.
                   Following the vigil, the women went to
               the home of the late-PLO leader, Faisal
               Husseini, to offer condolences on his recent
               death.
                   Women in Black are now found in
               England, Italy, Germany, Yugoslavia and
               France with supporters in other countries
               including the United States, Canada and
               Australia.
                   In Germany, they protested
               neo-Nazism, racism against migrant
               workers and nuclear arms.
                   Women in Black demonstrated in
               Beijing during the 1995 UN Conference on
               Women. In 1996, photos of Women in Black
               actions around the world were exhibited in
               New York City.
                   A Women in Black Web site describes
               the organization this way: "Women in
               Black has become a movement of women
               of conscience of all [religious]
               denominations and nationalities who hold
               vigils to protest violence in their part of
               the world."