JVL Introduction
Here Felicity Laurence introduces this short but powerful piece from Michal Dunayevski who has been on the streets in Israel protesting the barbarism being meted out to the people and places of Gaza; she begs others to come out as there needs to be a million people on the streets and urges more people to join her. She is pictured below mid protest.
Felicity Laurence writes:
Protest against the war is ramping up in Israel, and this past ‘week of resistance’ has seen huge demonstrations in Jerusalem and across the country. As people from all kinds of backgrounds gather to express their anguish at the war, and fury at their Government’s ongoing iniquity in waging it, police violence, already brutal, is becoming increasingly unrestrained. Reports of vicious assaults not only on peaceful protestors but also on doctors treating those already hurt by police have caused further outrage. The Haaretz photographer Itay Ron was arrested and detained – in his case only briefly, but the chaos and violence of his arrest is caught in the video film in this report. Police are illegally – and again brutally – confiscating signs from protestors.
A few days ago, I spoke with Michal Dunayevski, mother of four young children, who is out there day after day, has been arrested and detained, but who continues to proclaim her resistance for the world to see. She told me that there is turmoil and despair, and that she is desperate, but that there is also “amazing solidarity”. While we were speaking across the WhatsApp ether, she broke into Hebrew to greet a young girl: then she explained that this child had lost both grandparents on October 7th. Michal’s words about them and their kibbutz: they were “vibrating with peace towards Gaza. They were the most pure people in Israel.”
Michal’s friend, their son Maoz Inon, continues his peace activism, and only yesterday (20th June) he spoke out on the astonishing demand from Campaign Against Antisemitism to remove fellow peace activists Charlotte Church and Palestinian Hamze Awawde from the podium he is sharing with them at Glastonbury. Their subject? “Hope is an action: Israelis and Palestinians unite”.
The ongoing attempt to silence voices of resistance to war and of working for justice and peace, in all of our public fora, our media, and our most beloved cultural institutions, reflects the parallel silencing of those voices shouting on the streets of Israel.
Michal is in anguish and she is calling urgently for help from beyond the inferno that is Gaza and Israel. She told me that everything is “trauma on trauma on trauma.” But that her most urgent aim now is “to raise the volume.”