Brave women. Fasting for each day of the Gaza War

Only when there is a groundswell and stand of Israeli citizens against the abhorrent policies and conduct of the Israeli Government and its IDF, will there ever be a remote chance of peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis.

Here, in Jerusalem, not far from the PM's home, brave Israeli women protest the actions of the Israelis......

"At the protest tent, I am with three friends from my northern Galilean village. We are greeted warmly by the women already in the tent and about to end their fast. Each woman wears around her neck a sky-blue cloth sign that says ani bi’tsom (“I am fasting”). One by one the women ending their fast remove the cloth necklaces from around their necks and hang them around our necks, to pass the protest-gesture on to us. We each feel the ritual charge of the connections being established between us, strangers who are suddenly intimates in our shared refusal to accept the unacceptable: this ongoing violence and warfare.

We are in the Women Wage Peace protest tent, situated one block from the Israeli Prime Minister’s residence, where women are fasting in shifts for 50 days – the 50 days of last year’s horrific war in Gaza. Every day, new women join the protest, fasting in shifts of 25 or 50 hours. 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."
Continue reading this piece from The Forward here.

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