Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Peace Prize and Activism

David Grossman

I just read Writing against the Mechanism of Retaliation on the Arabic Qantara site. It literally moved me to tears. In it, Petra Lambeck writes about my friend David Grossmanin the casting a gaze in the direction of the others, remembering that the enemy one hates and sees as a threat is also human...”

Grossman shares my fear that the greatest danger to Israeli society is the wide scale emergence of Israeli fascism and the "dwindling of the Israeli will to survive", the fading away of hope that peace is genuinely possible. For many Israelis – and for many Palestinians as well – peace has become nothing more than a dream, or perhaps only a hallucination. But we must not stop talking about peace, says Grossman. Because anyone who "despairs about the possibility of peace has already been defeated, he has already submitted to the fate of never-ending war".

Join me in celebrating David’s award of the Peace Prize, the publication of his new book “To the End of the Land”, and his unwavering support for the fight against the judaisation of East Jerusalem.

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

A New Political Party

Peace
The time has come for an Israeli party, a Jewish-Arab party, that will carry the banner of total commitment to equality, without a trace of discrimination and racism…A party that will sail far beyond the paradigms of Zionism, which to this day ignores Arabs. A party that will demand full equality for all the Arabs citizens, the kind of equality we demand for the Jews in the Diaspora wherever they live.

This blog is dedicated to a new party, Israel Equality (Shivyon Yisrael ) – with the acronym Shai in Hebrew, gift – Join us in our fight for a state that will be a total democracy…The party will wrestle with the…internal contradiction of “a Jewish democratic state,” which means a great deal of democracy for the Jews and too much Jewish nationalism for the Arabs. It will be the party of those who are committed to the supreme universal cultural values of human dignity, the search for peace and a desire for freedom, justice and equality.