 It's time for normal life to return to our land. We all need to feel safe and to work together for a better future
 The olive harvest brings whole families and communities out onto the land
 Here I am at the Way of Sulha in 2005, talking to a Jew and a Christian monk
 With Susan Halliday at the Dead Sea Conference in 2004
 The Cloth of Many Colours - with Elana, Ibrahim and Eliyahu in Birmingham, England
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Ibtisam Mahameed
Current Peace Projects
In April 2002 a religious Jewish woman, Elana Rozenman, and I founded the northern chapter of Women's Interfaith Encounter, associated with the Interfaith Encounter Association (IEA), doing interfaith work among women. We meet every month in a different community, giving the participants of four faiths exposure to different lifestyles and cultures. We invite religious leaders from the four faiths to come and meet with us, and we learn from a wide variety of religious texts about women's position in society and their contribution to society. I was an executive committee member of the IEA but now I am involved in other projects and need more time. I'm still involved with them but not in management.
Before I started organizing interfaith gatherings I knew that there are Jews, Christians, Baha'is, and others, but I didn't have a connection with them. I have a Christian friend but I didn't know anything about her religion. I have a friend who is Jewish and I didn't know what 'kosher' means. I didn't know what a church is and what they do on Sunday. When Elana and I started the circles once a month, the coordinators brought a Muslim religious woman (sheikha), a Druze religious woman, a woman rabbi and a Christian sister to speak to us.
Through these meetings I learned what kosher is and now I can respect a person who tells me that he can't eat at my house. It's not because my food isn't tasty or that I don't know how to host, but because of religious customs. Just like I can't eat pork at a Christian's home, and I have to explain that it's forbidden for me and I can't eat meat at a Druze's home. Little by little we started to learn texts from the Q'uran, the Torah and the New Testament, and it's exactly the same words. But people don't live by the religion.
"Don't kill" is written in my scriptures, as well as Jewish, Christian, and Baha'i and every religion in the world. But people kill. It says not to steal. But there is a big gap between what is written and what we do. I learned about Jewish society and to respect it. I learned that deep down, we are all the same. I have also stayed over in a Jewish home and in both religious and secular homes. I have learned about different people and their customs. We are all the same. Black, white, yellow, we are all people.
For my work with interfaith encounters, I became an 'international' woman, invited to travel and speak at interfaith conferences. I am involved with PEACE X PEACE (www.peacexpeace.org) as one of the women in the network. With PEACE X PEACE Elana and I went to the Strength of Women Conference in Bangalore, India, in May 2005. It was held in the Art of Living Center and 2,000 women participated. We gave lectures there about our work and friendship and it was very special because many didn't believe that Jews and Muslims work together in Israel. All of the media asked us for interviews.
I am also involved with Women's Partnership for Peace in the Middle East, which the United Nations founded so that religious women should work for peace.
Recently, in March 2005, I received a letter from the office of Abu Mazen, the President of the Palestinian Authority, that is very valuable to me. It says that I am the contact person between them and the Israeli peace organizations (between Israel and Gaza). It's a big honor. It also says that I am the coordinator of all the women, all the women who want to go to Gaza, go through me.
I am a coordinator of Middleway (Shvil Zahav) where Arabs and Jews go on silent walks together and listen to themselves and nature. After the walks, I help facilitate listening circles. In the listening circles I hear other people's stories. I may have my own pain but other people also have the same pain. I have learned not to blame the other person. Both Israelis and Palestinians have pain. If we go the political route, it never ends, but it hopefully will end if we all meet as people. I have a lot of Jewish friends from this group (as with the other groups) and they stay at my house and all of my family knows them. If you send love, you receive love and I get that from Israeli Jews.
Middleway has different commitees and I am on the "Va'adat HaShtakhim" committee where I work with Palestinians in Ramallah, Jenin and Gaza. In April 2005, we spent three days planting olive trees in Gaza. Previously, in Ramallah we had planted 1,600 olive trees and this time we planted 500 trees. Trees had been uprooted by the Israeli army, and I am not blaming the Israeli army, but I planted the trees. The trees were contributed by a Jew but the army wouldn't let Jews in to plant them for security reasons so we Palestinians planted them.
With Middleway I also went to Gush Katif, one of the Jewish settlements in Gaza, to hear the settlers share their pain. It is very hard for them to be uprooted from their homes. I understand their pain and what is happening to them. As a Palestinian I think that it's not right that there are 8,000 Jewish settlers next to one and a half million Arabs and closing them in. But I see the Jews in Gush Katif as people, and not just as 'settlers'. I connect with my people but that doesn't mean that I can't understand the settlers' pain of being uprooted from their homes.
I'm also a coordinator with the Sulha Way Project, with the women's circle (see www.sulha.com for more details).
A few anecdotes...
I often get stopped by Israeli security because I wear traditional Arab clothing. Only after the security people talk to me do they see me as a pursuer of peace. I am a volunteer and often don't get paid for my peace work.
I'm right, you're right, but when will there be peace? Life is more important then land because one day we will all return to the earth and be under the ground. Why fight and die young? Arabs and Jews should get along with each other and spend time together.
Other Arabs used to say to me, "How could you talk to these Israelis?". I tell them that it's been a twenty year process. I was once in their shoes but my thinking has changed. I tell them this and they are surprised and then the next day they want to know who are my Israeli friends.
Once I hosted, in Fureidis, a Jewish-Arab workshop conducted along the principles of Process Oriented Psychology. A young religious Jewish woman wanted to participate but she had never spoken to Arabs before, nor had she been in an Arab village. She had heard that I am a woman of peace, so she wanted to sleep over in my house. But at the workshop she met my sister, who invited her to stay so she could overcome her fear. My sister promised her a room where she could keep the Sabbath - the Jewish woman had even brought her own food. In the end she stayed until late on the second day and was so happy that she had overcome her fear of Arabs.
When I attended a consciousness-raising workshop a few years ago, organized by the Landmark Forum, there was a lady dentist from Haifa who, when she saw my traditional Arab dress, said she didn't want to sit next to me or talk to me. After I spoke at the forum, she stood up to apologise for her prejudice and even offered me a lift home at the end of the workshop. That's the kind of change that personal contact can make.
Experiences like these help me remember that it is really worth working for peace and reconciliation in Israel and Palestine. It's a big job, with many setbacks. But seeing little breakthroughs like these, happening now, makes a more positive future come a little closer.