“Sometimes, resisting is a young girl playing the lute to distract Palestinian children from the sound of bombs. Resisting is transforming women’s associations in Gaza into centers to treat the wounded, who are many and serious. Resisting is a doctor continuing to provide care while the hospital is bombed”, Soraya Misleh, a Palestinian-Brazilian journalist, master and doctor in Arabic studies from USP, and coordinator of the Front in Defense of the Palestinian People SP, told me.
Soraya was in Palestine, in the West Bank, three times. Only in one of them, in 2010, did he see the place where his father was born, from where he was expelled with his family when he was 13 years old. “My father’s village was one of around 500 destroyed in 1948. When I went there, he asked me for two things: land and olive oil.”
In 2011 and 2015, Soraya tried to return to her father’s birthplace. “Israel banned my entry saying that I was a security threat because I was of Palestinian origin, I was a journalist and I exposed the crimes of colonization and denounced them.”
Despite intense press coverage in the region, Soraya says that the perspective of Palestinian women does not appear. The objective of Palestinians organized in Brazil, according to her, is to pressure Israel along the lines of the boycott campaign against South Africa in the 1990s. “All States have a responsibility to the convention for the prevention and repression of genocide. Brazil has been a signatory since 1952. So, it needs to break relations with Israel.”
I have had the opportunity to listen to Palestinian, Israeli and Brazilian women and men, with different points of view and political propositions. Defending the peaceful coexistence of two States, with respect to international conventions and agreements, is a common proposal among different groups. Just as there are those who defend a single state — Palestine or Israel — in the region. Complexity that we need to seek to understand without giving up the defense that all people, of any nationality and religion, can live with protection and freedom.
“My father, in 1948, was one of 800,000 Palestinians violently expelled from their lands, when Israel was created on Palestinian bodies and the rubble of villages in 78% of the historic territory of Palestine,” said Soraya.
“Since then, all families have been entirely fragmented, society has been entirely fragmented, and this continues in an institutionalized apartheid regime, with half of the Palestinian population of 13 million people outside their homelands in the diaspora or in refuge and half under apartheid , ethnic cleansing, genocide, colonization, occupation also divided within their own land.”
Violence prior to October 7, 2023, which has little visibility in the public debate and is fundamental to understanding the broader context of October 7 itself. Last year, 11,000 Palestinian mothers lost their children in Gaza. There is solidarity with each of them and an organized struggle for a ceasefire and peace, with different tactics, among Palestinians and also Israelis, among Islamic, Christian, Jewish, Candomblé and Buddhist. We need to listen to women.
LINK PRESENT: Did you like this text? Subscribers can access seven free accesses from any link per day. Just click the blue F below.
