A joint gathering by Women Wage Peace and Palestinian sister organization Women of the Sun last year.
This summer marks 10 years to Israel’s 2014 war in Gaza – a milestone that has been completely overshadowed by the carnage of October 7 and Israel’s subsequent incursion into the Strip. But it also marks another, more hopeful anniversary.
Women Wage Peace, an Israeli initiative calling for a diplomatic agreement to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, was founded on the heels of that 50-day war. Today, it counts thousands of activists in its ranks, working toward a nonviolent solution and a better future for Israeli and Palestinian children alike.
It plans to mark this hand-in-hand with other like-minded groups, including as a leading partner in The Time Has Come – a coalition of coexistence and peace organizations that held a mass rally in Tel Aviv earlier this month.
“Until now, we’ve worked by ourselves,” says the movement’s co-director, Orna Shragai. “But we’re reaching out to any organization that’s dealing with the same subject as us, so that we can join forces and expand our circles and progress toward our goal.
The organization first gained attention in Israel in 2016 with its “March of Hope,” a two-week cross-country trek demanding negotiations to end the conflict. Some 2,500 Jewish and Arab women from Israel, and about 1,000 Palestinian women from the West Bank, gathered for an event in Qasr al-Yahud on the Jordan River, and a mass rally was held in Jerusalem.
The group continued to hold rallies and protests, with members standing out in their uniform of white clothes and sky-blue scarves. In 2017, a peace rally in Jerusalem counted about 30,000 attendees after a march that had started in Sderot, near the Gaza border. Events were addressed by Nobel Peace Prize laureates, Israeli and Palestinian activists, and political figures from both Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
From the beginning, says Shragai, Women Wage Peace has had ties with Palestinian women who hold the same ideals.
“On both sides, there would be groups of women determined to take responsibility over the future to create a better future for our children,” she says. “The idea was that each group would do their best to influence their communities – us on the Israeli public and them on the Palestinian public – and mostly on as broad a swath of the public as possible.”
Shragai says her movement wasn’t working to advance one particular solution to the conflict. “The idea was that each group would demand that their leadership on that side get into a room together and not come out until they’d reached an agreement,” she explains, adding that both sides were doing their best to lay the groundwork for a future solution.
“The emphasis was on preparing these societies and getting rid of the roadblocks on both sides – work that would bring us closer to a diplomatic solution. The leaders were doing it through their own channels, and we wanted to influence and meet and speak to as many parts of society as we could to prepare them for this day.”
In 2021, Women of the Sun, a Palestinian group that serves as Women Wage Peace’s sister movement, was officially formed. The two groups signed the “Mother’s Call,” a document asking the leaders of both peoples, as well as the international community, to “promptly begin peace talks and negotiations, with a determined commitment to achieving a political solution to the long and painful conflict in a limited time frame.”
This partnership also includes women from Gaza. “Before October 7, we had Zoom meetings with them and we’d talked about doing events together,” recounts Shragai. “Since then, we don’t have direct contact, but do hear indirectly about how they’re faring through Women of the Sun,” she says. “We send them messages, as women and mothers, that we care about each other and want this nightmare to end. We bore children to live, not for war.”
Women Wage Peace estimates that 30 to 40 members of Women of the Sun have been killed in Gaza since the war began.
Neta Heiman Mina, who currently serves as Women Wage Peace’s social media coordinator, joined it in 2016. “I truly, truly believe that when women are involved, things look different – we see all the generals and army chiefs running the country for us for years upon years, and nothing has changed,” she says.
“I believe that the feminine outlook and feminine worldview can change something. Studies have proved this: When women are more involved, there’s a higher likelihood of reaching an agreement, and there’s a higher likelihood that the agreement will hold up for the long term.”
For Heiman Mina, Women Wage Peace “doesn’t talk about a ‘solution.’ We accept any solution that comes out of an agreement, and there are a lot of solutions on the table. We aren’t necessarily married to the two-state solution or anything like that. Through that, we’re managing to expand the circle of possibilities with the view that ‘peace’ doesn’t belong to the left – it belongs to everyone. Most people, most mothers, want to raise their children in peace.”
“My whole life, I’ve had the outlook that there actually needs to be peace, we need to solve the conflict here,” she says. “I don’t think it’s right to live by the sword forever, and I don’t think the reality is forcing us to either.”
Heiman Mina grew up in Kibbutz Nir Oz, a Gaza border community that she says is “crazy about peace.” On October 7, though, it was one of the hardest-hit places during the Hamas-led massacre: about one quarter of its residents were either killed or kidnapped.
On that morning, Heiman Mina and her family had been trying to reach her mother at the kibbutz, Ditza Heiman, but their calls had not been going through. Her sister tried her phone once again, only for a Hamas member to pick up. They later learned that their 84-year-old mother had been loaded onto a truck and taken to Gaza as a hostage.
“I don’t think you could call it ‘living,’ what we did,” the daughter says of the time waiting for word of her mother. “We managed to carry on, one day to the next, between hope and despair. I can say that, personally, the doing – going out, getting interviewed, protesting – is what strengthened me, because if I had been sitting at home, just thinking, I would have gone crazy.”
Ditza Heiman was eventually released on November 28, on the fifth day of the brief cease-fire that brought home 109 Israeli hostages – mostly women, children and migrant workers – in exchange for about 180 Palestinian prisoners.
“It was a nightmarish 53 days until she came back,” Heiman Mina says. “And the nightmare continues, because there are another 36 hostages from our kibbutz. Just this week, we got a message about two hostages who were killed – one was from my kibbutz, the other from a neighboring one,” she says, referring to Alex Dancyg from Nir Oz and Yagev Buchshtab from Nirim. The bodies of two more Nir Oz residents, Maya Goren and Ravid Arie Katz, were recovered by Israeli forces from Gaza on Wednesday.
Despite this, her faith in peace has not wavered. If anything, she says, “it strengthened my convictions.” A few days after October 7, “I got a hold of myself and I said, ‘How could they not listen to us?’ We’ve been screaming it, shouting to stop ‘managing the conflict’ and start trying to solve it. If they had been listening to us, maybe we wouldn’t have gotten to the point of October 7.”
Today, she says, her mother is doing okay and is “waiting for everyone to come back.” Heiman Mina regularly protests alongside the families of hostages outside Defense Ministry headquarters in Tel Aviv, demanding a deal to bring all the hostages home and an end to the war.
“This is abandonment,” she says of the government’s conduct. “It wasn’t just October 7 but continues each day, every hour, every minute. As I see it, it’s not some passive thing: Every day without a deal is an active act of abandonment.”
It was a tragedy on October 7 that brought Women Wage Peace to international prominence. One of its founders and most vocal members, Canadian-Israeli activist Vivian Silver, had been presumed abducted by Hamas from Kibbutz Be’eri, the Gaza border community where she lived. In November, it was announced that the 74-year-old had in fact been killed during the attack, and was laid to rest in Kibbutz Gezer, central Israel. Thousands attended her memorial ceremony.
“Not a day goes by where we don’t miss Vivian,” says Shragai. “Every day, someone says: ‘I wish I could know what Vivian would say or think about this.’ I think there’s a difference between how it affected the organization in the first few months and how it affected us afterward. In those first months, we were spiraling. It’s not just that Vivian was one of the founders; she was a pillar of the organization. She insisted and demanded – she went from stage to stage – and always said that we cannot go on without a political horizon.”
The group spent the first months in mourning, she says. “In the beginning, there was hope – like most people, we thought she was kidnapped. We imagined that she was holding her own negotiations or conversations with her captors to convince them, too, that the only way for them to achieve their liberation is a political solution. We stagnated for a bit, but after a few months we understood: If Vivian weren’t killed or if she were to have come back from captivity, she would continue to say that there’s no way forward without a political solution.”
Silver’s outlook was part of what spurred Women Wage Peace to join The Time Has Come and to unrelentingly advocate for the hostages, says Shragai. “We believe that’s what Vivian, as a resident of Be’eri, would have called for and led us to, and done everything she could with all of her connections to achieve.”
This article is reproduced in its entirety.