“Fasting is meaningful in every culture, and is specifically important to both Jews and Arabs. Fasting is a deep, emotional statement of self-restraint, determination and introspection. It is a sign of strength, a reminder of what is truly necessary,” says retired judge Saviona Rotlevi. Rotlevi, an expert on children’s and women’s rights, witnesses one of the strongest and historic moments in the pursuit of peace as a collective goal in Gaza.
The ‘Women Wage Peace’ initiative have led a peaceful protest outside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s official residence in Jerusalem, demanding the need to facilitate resumption of peace talks with Israel’s neighbors as the only way to ensure a safe and secure future for today and future generations. Through the symbolism attributed to the act of fasting, these Israeli and Arab women reiterate the significance of #50Days4Gaza, taking turns and wearing small turquoise cloth signs around their necks that state ani bi’tsom or ‘I am fasting’. Members and participants voluntarily contributing to this initiative have increased numerically since the initiation of the protest, developing a cohort of peace-building actors by extending the responsibility that comes with fasting.
The initiative has been sustained over the collective outcry against excessive destruction that has impacted innocent lives when thousands of Israeli women raised their voice to say ‘No more!’ Fasting has acquired a new meaning, in advocacy and means of uniting women with a message to assert a politically self-sustaining agreement transcending national interests; the message, as Rotlevi acknowledges, that ‘there exists no alternative to a peaceful agreement’.
Despite several municipal regulations and restrictions, several women have embraced their role to fast every day, for between 24 and 50 hours, drinking only water while sitting under an open tent and engaging passersby in discussions regarding their demand for peace initiatives. The vigil is set to continue until August 26, as Haaretz Israeli News Source reports.
Members of the Women Wage Peace initiative strongly remark: “We are demanding that our government enter immediately into renewed peace negotiations with the Palestinian Authority to precipitate a political resolution to this bloody conflict. We are protesting the terrible senselessness of last summer’s war, and our government’s refusal to do everything in its power to prevent the next war. We are protesting the profound failure of our politicians to provide us with a viable future in this land.”
The initiative featured by renowned Israeli poet, translator and literary researcher Rachel Tzvia Back reiterates a similar narrative as captured by Rotlevi – the strength in voices of Israeli women in a situation wherein even the basic inalienable rights are subjected to threat; and the self-realised responsibility of ordinary citizens to make adequate efforts in ensuring their children a place devoid of unnecessary wars and destruction.
Rotlevi herself acknowledges: “… I realized I cannot sit at home. For the sake of my children and grandchildren, I must do everything I can to prevent the next war. I will not accept that, as women, our sole role is to bring children into the world but then have nothing to say about their lives.”
As Rachel Tzvia Back listens to the powerful stories of loss in several accounts of violence – of women losing their brother in the Sinai Campaign or the loss of a grandfather in the War of Independence, her words shall echo the meaning of the initiative aforementioned. She says how decades of violence created by us beings have subverted the cycle of time, where endless killings have disrupted the natural order, where granddaughters are older than grandfathers killed 50 years before she was born, where a mother lives the son’s nightmare days each day, and where the father grieves the thought of his daughter in a tent of protesting women and ‘talks of empty chairs waiting to be filled’.
Somewhere, such initiatives symbolize hope as an outgrowth of hate and violence, of excesses that cannot be undone, of injustice that makes one sincerely wish that history may not be repeated. It is often in the absence of political power that one finds refuge in the power of morality and hope, waiting for the abstract principles of humanity to be realized more tangibly in a land scarred by innumerable losses and destruction that has exceeded beyond our statistical grasp.
But is it the norm for political power to stand independently of humanity? Is the collective advocacy accounting for the faint voices of justice, humanity and peace to arise only in contestation to the existing infrastructures of power? When would, after all, these prayers articulated through the act of fasting, be heard?
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