Gita Hazani
Director General of Mosaica Center for Inter-Religious Cooperation
When the fears are gone and both sides say what they really feel, they open their hearts and say very difficult things. Someone says, “When you talk about your ownership of the holy temple, I feel someone put a knife in my heart and turned it. It’s so difficult to hear you talking this way about my holy place.” [..]
Jihad Abu Zneid
Member of Palestinian Legislative Council (Fatah party), Jerusalem
My name means “holy war” or “struggle.” I was born in 1967 after Israel occupied the West Bank. My father named me Jihad because he felt I would be a jihad. To me, it means a struggle for a just peace, women’s issues, for all Jerusalem issues. [..]
Hadeel Rizq-Qazzaz
Program Coordinator for Heinrich Böll Foundation
The people in Gaza are human beings with families. They love, they hate, they want to get married, they want to go to hospitals, and they want food. You can’t ignore them, they are humans.
The international community thinks it’s boycotting Hamas—they’re boycotting 1.5 million human beings, more than 60 percent of them children below 18 years of age. It’s collective punishment in all senses, by all definitions.[..]
Rachel Aspir
Chair of NAAMAT for the Jerusalem area
I was born in Iraq, and arrived here at age four or five. It was traumatic, my parents fled from Iraq secretly. If I have a recollection of that aliyah, of that journey to Israel, it is of my father being separated from my mother. The men had to leave on their own, and my mother stayed behind with my brother and me. My brother was a baby in her arms. My parents never spoke badly of Arabs. Abdullah—I remember him as a nice uncle who brought us sweets—helped my mother cross the border to get my brother and me where we needed to go. [..]
