We already had a beautiful, shared and highly attended preview of what the now imminent People’s Peace Summit will be like last night with the twentieth edition of the Israeli-Palestinian Joint Memorial Ceremony, as always organized by Combatants for Peace in collaboration with the Parents Circle Families Forum: this year, the event was held in a theater in Jaffa, in streaming connection with a square in Beit Jala and with 160 other stations, scattered between Israel, the West Bank, the United States, and various cities in Europe: an unprecedented response
The date is important, as for all the other editions it coincided with the day of Yom Hazikarom, in which Israel remembers its dead since it exists as a State. Also, this year, almost coinciding with the start of the Memorial Ceremony, the sirens resounded throughout Israel, the entire nation stopped and everyone, everyone, everyone stopped whatever they were doing to stand still at attention for a minute. A minute that inaugurated the start of the most solemn celebration of the year, even more solemn than the Day of Remembrance, Yom Ha Shoah, which was celebrated a few days ago. In fact, from 1948 to today, tens of thousands of dead and wounded have been counted in the land of Israel, as quantified with meticulous precision a few days ago in an article in the Jerusalem Post that you can read here. A celebration that, like every year, continued more solemnly than ever the following day, with processions to the various military cemeteries, flags with black bands, and demonstrations of unanimous condolences. And tomorrow it will all culminate with Independence Day, a time of year particularly charged with military values
And so let’s imagine what it must have been like for an organization like the Combatants for Peace to decide to inaugurate their project of joint peace activism between former Israeli soldiers and former Palestinian detainees/militants twenty years ago, coinciding precisely with such a deadline: consciously challenging that unilateral narrative of pain that had always been the hallmark of Yom Hazikaron and even going so far as to propose solidarity or at least a mirroring of the pain of the enemy front, no less affected by the same spiral of violence
The first edition saw only a few of them, as one of the founders, Sulaiman Khatib, often likes to recall. The controversies and even protests have never been lacking as this Joint Ceremony gained support, until reaching 15 thousand people in a very central park in Tel Aviv, in the edition prior to October 7[2023], greatly disturbed by the opponents
The particularly tense situation this year, as it was last year, has again forced the organizers to choose a closed space, in a theater in Jaffa, and only by invitation but also accessible in streaming, by registering both individually and as “host locations” We still don’t know how many views there were in total, but there were 160 audiences in addition to the one in Jaffa: twenty locations in Israel thanks to the collaboration of the “sister” organization Standing Together,3 several also in the West Bank, most in the various temples of the Jewish-Palestinian diaspora scattered throughout Canada, the USA, Europe, with nine locations in Germany, and then in France, Spain, Belgium, where the screening was even organized at the European Parliament! For Italy, we cannot fail to mention the beautiful virtual connection organized by Ilaria Olimpico together with Uri Noy Meir for Imagination, and the small town of Chiavenna in Valtellina, with a strong tradition of pacifism
This year the theme was “Choosing Humanity, Choosing Hope” and the stage alternated the testimonies of the Palestinian Sayel Jabarin, from Beit Jala, followed by that of the young Israeli Liel Fishbein who survived the massacre in Kibbutz Be’eri, where he lost his beloved sister … and then that of the Palestinian Mousa Hetawi (in a video message due to a ban on entry into Israel) who lost 28 members of his family in the last year [2024] of war in Gaza. Once again the heartbreaking story of the Israeli Liat Atzili, among the first to be freed among the hostages, only to discover the death of her husband and daughters and finally the contribution of a Palestinian activist who preferred to remain anonymous, read by her partner Amani Hamdan: an impressive rosary of losses, pain, destruction, rubble, amputations, illuminated however by the “hope that something can always be reborn, even from the debris … ” The evening’s hosting, as always in Arabic and Hebrew with subtitles in both languages (as well as English), was shared between Fida Shehadeh and Shira Geffen, both well-known in the world of Israeli-Palestinian activism: the former is involved in the “Hutwa Group” movement which opposes the expropriation and demolition of homes, which are increasingly frequent in Israel too, the latter is an actress and writer who is avowedly a pacifist
There has been no shortage of boycott attempts this year, some of them quite violent. In this regard, here is the statement released in the evening by the It’s Time coalition that is organizing the People’s Peace Summit on May 8-9:
“This evening, various disruptive actions have attempted to hinder the holding of the Joint Memorial Ceremony organized as every year by the Combatants for Peace together with the Parents Circle Families Forum, both organizations that have always been committed to the end of the war, the return home of all hostages and for a lasting peace based on real justice for all. All of us who adhere to this ‘peace camp’ can no longer tolerate these intimidations. We invite everyone to participate in the largest peace event ever organized before in the Middle East, with the People’s Peace Summit that will take place on May 8 and 9 in Jerusalem. Add your voice to ours, so that our appeal for peace can become a chorus and once and for all impossible to silence”
