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Translated by Gila Svirsky from Ha'aretz, 10 August 2006
Voine - Nyet! Kharb - La! ["War - No!" in Russian and Arabic]
By Lily Galili
The evening before we met, Khulood Badawi [photo, right] escaped the horrors of war to go to the al-Hakawati Theater in East Jerusalem. But even escapism is not what it used to be. She was watching the Lebanese movie "The Kite", directed by a friend's sister, in which a young Lebanese woman falls in love with a Druze soldier from Israel during the first Lebanon War. At the height of the story, her cell phones began to ring. The news that Katyusha rockets had fallen on Haifa quickly moved through the theater. Badawi, who had lived in Haifa for several years, fled the theater to watch the TV news, where she recognized the offices of al-Ittihad, the newspaper of Hadash, Badawi's political party. Among the ruins she saw many offices she knew, and began calling her friends. [photo from Ha'aretz by Guy Ravitz]
At that same moment, Yana Knopova [photo, left], who immigrated to Israel from the Ukraine 11 years ago as a young Zionist activist, was fielding phone calls to and from friends and colleagues. The rockets had fallen not far from the Haifa apartment she shares with Abir Kopty, the spokeswoman for the Mossawa Advocacy Center for Arab Citizens of Israel, and in the heart of the neighborhood of many Arabs and Jews who share her uncommon political path.
The two met the next day in what they call "the Tel Aviv bubble", where they have been orchestrating the key protests against the war on behalf of the Coalition of Women for Peace and Ta'ayush. An Arab and a Russian. Another of the strange phenomena to emerge from this war.
The 30-year-old Badawi has a long history of political activism: The former militant chair of the Association of Arab University Students in Israel, Badawi is today a field worker for the Association of Civil Rights in Israel. The 25-year-old Knopova, a student of psychology at Haifa University [and coordinator of the Coalition of Women for Peace], strayed far from the Zionist dream though she had worked five years for the Jewish Agency,
In those years, she believed that "the left was only the Meretz Party", as she put it, and then she discovered what she calls the lies and arrogance on which Israel is based, which not only create primitive men in Israel, but undermine the judgment of the entire country. Thus she found her way to a political and social home in the radical left.
The Bomb and the Hope
Clearly the sense of marginalization in Israeli society - which views Arabs as the enemy and ignores immigrants - strengthened the solidarity between them. "The police see Khulood as a natural enemy," says Knopova with a bitter smile; "while in the exact same situation, the police refuse to see me as an enemy. They also live with the stereotype that there are no Russians in the left. Khulood is always dangerous, I am never dangerous; Khulood is a demographic time-bomb, I am a demographic hope. This is an approach that regards the wombs of us both as in the service of the state, and we will not give them this pleasure." [photo left of Knopova by Yair Gil]
Over the past month, they have orchestrated all the demonstrations of the left, and held them in three languages - Hebrew, Arabic and Russian. Based on the number of calls coming in to Badawi's three cell phones, one would think that opposition to the war is the new consensus; based on the calls to Knopova in Russian throughout our conversation, one would think that a million Russian speakers in Israel changed their political views.
This is not true, of course, but there is no doubt that something different and new is happening. Much has already been said about the uniqueness of this war; the fact that at the vanguard of protest are two women - an Arab and an immigrant from the former Soviet Union - is without a doubt another unique element. Everything is new about this: Most of the protest in Israel, including that of the more left-wing activists, used to spring from the pool of Ashkenazi Jewish men. Not anymore. Today the protest of this war is being led to a large extent by women.
And that is not the only difference. In the past, Arab citizens of Israel refrained from going to demonstrations in Tel Aviv during a war. At most, they would make do with token representation in the later stages of protest. They would also generally hold their demonstrations in Arab towns. Not any more. From the very first week, the Arabs became equal partners to the demonstrations in Tel Aviv. Thousands of Katyusha rockets falling on them erased the reluctance of the past. In their eyes, this is no longer a Jewish war, but a civilian war in which they have an equal right to make themselves heard. Badawi says that they deliberately bring their voices to Tel Aviv, which is seen as the capital of Israel. [photo left of Badawi by GS]
Another kind of change is transpiring among Russian speakers, considered the hard core of the Israeli right. Once, bringing a few Russian speakers to demonstrations of the Zionist left was considered a big achievement. Today there is a small, but visible and consistent participation of Russian speakers in the protest movement of the radical left. Thus, the Arabs are learning to chant "Voine - Nyet!" (no war), while Russian and Hebrew speakers are chanting "Salaam - Na'am!, Kharb - La!" (peace yes! war no!). It looks like this connection will last long after the voices of war subside.
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