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WIFP Voices from Israel-Palestine

Posted on June 25, 2015 by marthaleslieallen@gmail.com

Yaara and Abeer are currently participating in New Story Leadership program of 2015, which selects young emerging Israeli and Palestinian leaders and trains them into a team ready to help build a better future for their two communities. Ten students, five from Israel and five from Palestine, come to Washington DC every summer for an intensive program of workshops, conferences, seminars, professional work exposure, cultural immersion and team training. These two young ladies are interns in WIFP for the summer. They believe in the role of women to build a more stable and peaceful society. They also fight to be heard and to let women get the chance to express their inner voices without fear or any hesitation.

Listening to the Other Side

A Music Teacher’s perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Yaara Elazari, 26, is International Relations and Music Education student in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Yaara is a flutist at heart, music teacher and a researcher in Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

My story begins at a Kibbutz Eilon in northern Israel. My parents had a great love for hiking. I learned from them to appreciate nature and learned to love hiking. During those hikes, I came across recorders and flutes, which were played around campfires at night. I fell in love with the sound and started a lifelong affair with learning to play this beautiful instrument. For me, music has become a new language. I found out that the music is not only a language to express myself to my surroundings, but also a language that breaks barriers between people. Music is a deeper language than words, it speaks through the heart and to the soul, and allows me to express my feelings without words.

Let me give you an example of how I used the music when I became a young music teacher, just a year ago. I would go into a classroom and teach (Israeli) children a song, but not just any song, a song in Arabic. The children’s reactions were uncomfortable, they moved in their chairs a bit. These were the first Arabic words they had ever spoken in their life. But I repeated the song, and the melodies entered their ears, challenging their old assumptions, they would say: “I don’t like Arabs, but I like this song, can we sing it again?” or “Who is this singer, can we meet her?” Using the music as a method allowed a safe ground for conversations about Palestinians, Arabs, and different cultures. I allowed the kids to respond to the music, as well as express their feelings and thoughts while singing it.

After doing this for a year, I am convinced this is something amazing and very useful. The free world of music that contains no boundaries, no state, and no separation walls, introduced me to Arab music and Palestinian musicians. It was a bridge for me, and I built that bridge for others.

New Story Leadership brought me to Washington and allowed me to meet with Palestinians. Last week, one of the Palestinian members, Ehab, told me something that sent me back to those classrooms. He said that meeting Israelis for the first time made him feel differently about his way of thinking and generalizing, and that he feels that when he goes back to Palestine, he will prefer to refer to Israelis as individuals. Now that he knows us, we do not fit in the group he created in his mind for Israelis. I could not agree more with, and I struggle to express the strength of the hope that fills my heart when I think of the change that can be made in each one of us.

The Jewish prayer, Mishna, says “Whoever destroys a soul destroys an entire world. And whoever saves a life, saves an entire world.” We are ten members, ten different worlds, which came here with the decision to save our worlds. Save it from ignorance, save it from the stifling stereotypes that limit our minds, and build a new one together.

In order to achieve our goals for listening to the other side, we need to find the comfortable zone for each person to do so. Music is a great assistant to me, and I intend to pass it on to others.

Do you know who you are?!

Identity is regarded as one of the most pressing problems for Arab Israelis. Many writers have written poems, articles and books about it. Arab Israelis, especially women, do not find themselves belonging purely to any certain group. Their voice faded away long time ago. It did the time they were convinced that the only thing they need to care about is surviving and they have no chance of fighting to express their voices or be who they are. They were, and still are, taught to pursue careers that are not related to the Conflict or to politics at all. I can very much relate to this and the story I am telling you has led to understand how crucial the problem of identity is for us.

“My name is Abeer Shehadeh, and I come from a Christian Arab family in northern Israel. I am a graduate of the University of Haifa in politics and English Literature and I am passionate about creative writing, which is what my project for change that I am working on now as part of my participation in New Story Leadership is about.” This is how I would introduce myself if someone asked me now to tell them a little bit about myself. Who you are should be an easy question to answer. However, sometimes it is not.

In NSL, we believe in the power of our story to change the world and I will be writing briefly about my story.

My story is a bit different from other stories for the simple fact that it does not have a certain point where it started, and it definitely did not end yet. It is not located in a specific place or related to a specific time. In other words, it seems to be the story of a lifetime.

Growing up, I never questioned my identity. I know exactly who I am, even though I believe my interests or goals might change. But I have learned that most people do not care much about who I really am. Instead, they want to define me in terms of nationality and citizenship. My parents, being tolerant and liberal, have always taught me the value of love, forgiveness, understanding and respect. I grew up being totally naïve about the situation in my country. I believed that very soon, the conflict would be resolved. I believed that Israelis and Palestinians would understand that wars and violence are never the solution. I waited for this day like a kid waiting for Santa Claus on Christmas Eve.

At nineteen, I enrolled in the University of Haifa planning to get a degree in English literature and mathematics. I wanted to distance myself from politics because I believed that Israelis would never accept me. Then I met some Jewish students and really got to know them in my classes and extracurricular activities. My attitude changed. I decided to try taking an active part in social and political clubs at my university.

Then my moment of truth came at my first club meeting, where I was asked to define myself. I told them my story and they all stared at me. Then they asked: “But, wait a second, are you a Palestinian or an Israeli?” I froze. What should I say? Why do I have to choose? I never thought I would be labeled as a Palestinian or an Israeli. I have a national Israeli Identification and passport, but my family is Palestinian. I have just realized that I am in stuck in the middle of two opposing groups. After a long pause, I stammered: “I am both.” Then they froze. After some debate, I realized that in their minds, you cannot belong to both. I do not blame them, but now I understand that I should not wait for people to accept new possibilities. That day, my quest began to make this possibility come true.

Gandhi said: “Be the change that you wish to see in the world”, and this is what I decided to do. I might not be able to influence millions of people but I could definitely start with the people around me. That was a turning point in my life. I switched from mathematics to political science and philosophy. More importantly, I believed in myself and in what people my age can do to repair broken politics. I keep asking myself is this: Do we need a nation or a country to belong to? If yes, why don’t I, and many others, have this chance? If not, then why wouldn’t we all be considered as human beings, simply citizens of the world? Can we really consider ourselves as “citizens of the world”, or is it just a term used to avoid living with the complexity of our identity?

New Story Leadership (NSL): http://www.newstoryleadership.org

Working With Women’s Rights Activists in Beijing

Posted on June 10, 2015 by marthaleslieallen@gmail.com

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By Cherrie Yu, WIFP

In the summer of 2014, after my freshman year at William and Mary, I returned to China for the first time since I went to college. I spent two weeks at home and then I moved to Beijing, half for the music scene there, half for an organization I found called Women’s Voice. I sent them a personal introduction and my final paper from a gender study class, and ten days later they emailed me asking me to come into the office the following Monday.

Women’s Voice

The office of Women’s Voice is on the 23rd floor of an apartment building on the northeast side of Beijing’s central area. The first thing I saw when I walked in was a painting of a half naked woman hanging on the wall with the caption “big brother is watching you” (he was indeed as will be proved). There was a kitchen, a bathroom, a living room changed into an office area with four tables pushed against the walls, and two other rooms with a bunk bed, a futon, and more office tables and computers. There are drawings of cat all over the walls as well. Later I learned that this cat is the logo of Women’s Voice, and all the drawings were made by Xiao Meili, an activist and a friend of the organization.

Offices of various other nonprofit organizations were dispersed in the same apartment complex. On the same floor was an open space called Yiyuan that has yoga classes, book club meetings and movie screenings occasionally. On the 26th floor was Beijing LGBT Center that offers counseling service and free HIV testings. In the same building there was also Beijing Gender Health Education Institute.

My job as an intern was mostly updating the website of Women’s Voice, functioning as a media monitor, scouring through major publishers and looking for articles that pertain to gender equality. Two other staff, Xiong Jing and Zhao Sile, took turns to manage the Weibo account of Women’s Voice (equivalent of Twitter), whose followers have risen from twenty-five thousand to fifty-six thousand for the past one year. Ji Hang and Li Furui was working on a program protecting the rights of domestic workers, and Li was also in charge of the finance of the organization. And there was Lv Pin, one of the original founders of Women’s Voice and the editor of the Women’s Voice Newsletter. She usually only came into the office every Monday for a weekly meeting. She talks fast and gets right to the point and it took me a couple of days to learn how to talk to her.

Activists and Their Works

Closely related with Women’s Voice is also a group of women and queers, most of whom born in the late 80s, who are called Bcome. They were initially formed in 2012 for the play The Vagina Monologues. They are famous for combining activism with street performance art. On Valentine’s Day in 2012, Xiao Meili, the designer of the cat logo, Li Tinging and another college student marched down the crowded street of a commercial district in Beijing wearing bridal gowns splattered with fake blood and carrying slogans that called attention to domestic violence.

Their piece, dubbed “the Wounded Bride,” was followed by another one called “Occupy Men’s Room” led by Li Tingting. This piece addressed the unfair ratio of male to female toilet stalls in public. In August 2012, Xiao Meili, Li Tingting and two other activists gathered in Guangzhou and had their heads shaved clean in public while reading aloud a letter asking the department of education to explain the double standard in college admission. At the end of 2012, they turned their focus back to domestic violence: Xiao Meili, Li Tingting, Xiong Jing, Ji Hang and a number of other women activists posted semi-naked pictures of themselves covered in bloody handprints online to collect signatures for a petition against domestic violence.

I was and still am amazed by these activists’ awareness of the body. They brought a new layer of meaning to PARTICIPATION. When the activists’ bodies are brought under the limelight, inspected, judged, teased, and abused by the onlookers, the activists themselves embody the victims that they are trying to call attention to. The participation of the body leaves zero space between the activists themselves and the causes they are fighting for and I think that is real dedication.

Feminism School

The summer that I was working for Women’s Voice, Lv Pin was trying to put together eight weeks of classes that she called “Feminism School” including chapters like Feminist Theories, Gender and Bodies, Feminism and Media Communication, Chinese history of Women’s Rights Movement, Feminism and Culture and more. Lv Pin and Feng Yuan, another women’s rights activist who has been active since the 80s, were the co-principals of the school. Most classes were taught by scholars who were associates of the organization.

Surveillance and Police Warnings

On Sunday June 29th, before all the classes officially started, there was supposed to be a first meeting in the office of Women’s Voice, attended by all the enrolled students and the principals. On the morning of 29th, I was with Feng Yuan at a UN related conference about Beijing+20, and I got a message from Li Furui that there was a change of location and that it was not safe to communicate through WeChat (an app equivalent to iMessage) or texts anymore. While I was still confused, Feng Yuan took me away from the conference and hailed a taxi. We ended up on the empty second floor of a restaurant two blocks away from the office and Lv Pin was there. Then I learned that Women’s Voice had received several warnings from the police to not host the classes. Around noon on 29th the police occupied our office to “prevent unlawful social gatherings.” Lv Pin had to give me her laptop because she did not want the police to access her documents in case she got arrested. The rest of the classes of Feminism School were finished but with difficulty considering the pressure that the police exerted.

Arrests

In March when I heard that five women’s rights activists were arrested, I was surprised but I knew that it did not come out of nowhere. The five women arrested were Li Tinging, who is a member of Bcome and who participated in “the wounded bride” and “Occupy Men’s Room” mentioned above, Wei Tingting, who works for Beijing Gender Health Education Institute, Zheng Churan, who has been working against sexual assault on campus and employment discrimination against women, Wang Man, who works for Global Call to Action Against Poverty, and Wu Rongrong, who has worked on helping people with AIDs and hepatitis B.

They were planning on handing out flyers and stickers on International Women’s Day to call attention to sexual harassment on public transportation and they were arrested on 7th of March in Beijing, Guangzhou and Hangzhou on the grounds of “picking quarrels and creating disturbances”. Even though the women have been released, their legal statuses are still criminal suspects. The police detained them until the last day they could without charging them. Not to discredit the Chinese and international allies pressing for their release, but it seems to me that the police released them mostly because they failed to find concrete evidences of crime to charge these activists. According to their lawyers, they are still under police surveillance. They will have to notify the police wherever they go for the one year to come and the police have the right to arrest or question them anytime.

It pains me just reading about how they were treated in prison. Wang Man suffered from a heart attack when being grilled by the police. Wu Rongrong was initially denied medication to treat her hepatitis B. She was also verbally abused and locked up in a hotel room for eight hours.These women (I’m not only talking about the five arrested but a much larger group) still have a long way to go, and there are bigger prices to pay and more challenges to conquer, but I firmly believe in their strength to fight and their power of endurance.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz Book Talk & Award Presentation: Photos

Thanks to all the wonderful participants, to Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz for the stimulating presentation, to Alethea Russell for presenting WIFP’s “Women and Media Award” and to Delma M. Webb for these great photos!

An evening with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Posted on April 28, 2015 by marthaleslieallen@gmail.com

Friday, May 29 at 7:30 pm

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in rural Oklahoma, the daughter of a tenant farmer and part-Indian mother. She has been active in the international Indigenous movement for more than four decades and is known for her lifelong commitment to national and international social justice issues. After receiving her PhD in history at the University of California at Los Angeles, she taught in the newly established Native American Studies Program at California State University, Hayward, and helped found the Departments of Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies. Her 1977 book The Great Sioux Nation was the fundamental document at the first international conference on Indigenous peoples of the Americas, held at the United Nations’ headquarters in Geneva. Dunbar-Ortiz is the author or editor of seven other books, including Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico. She lives in San Francisco.

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Spanning more than four hundred years, this classic bottom-up peoples’ history radically reframes US history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative.