Turmoil, despair and amazing solidarity

1. JVL Introduction

Here Felicity Laurence introduces this short but powerful piece from Michal Dunayevski who has been on the streets in Israel protesting the barbarism being meted out to the people and places of Gaza; she begs others to come out as there needs to be a million people on the streets and urges more people to join her. She is pictured below mid protest.

Felicity Laurence writes:

Protest against the war is ramping up in Israel, and this past ‘week of resistance’ has seen huge demonstrations in Jerusalem and across the country. As people from all kinds of backgrounds gather to express their anguish at the war, and fury at their Government’s ongoing iniquity in waging it, police violence, already brutal, is becoming increasingly unrestrained. Reports of vicious assaults not only on peaceful protestors but also on doctors treating those already hurt by police have caused further outrage. The Haaretz photographer Itay Ron was arrested and detained – in his case only briefly, but the chaos and violence of his arrest is caught in the video film in this report. Police are illegally  – and again brutally – confiscating signs from protestors.

A few days ago, I spoke with Michal Dunayevski, mother of four young children, who is out there day after day, has been arrested and detained, but who continues to proclaim her resistance for the world to see. She told me that there is turmoil and despair, and that she is desperate, but that there is also  “amazing solidarity”. While we were speaking across the WhatsApp ether, she broke into Hebrew to greet a young girl: then she explained that this child had lost both grandparents on October 7^th. Michal’s words about them and their kibbutz: they were “vibrating with peace towards Gaza. They were the most pure people in Israel.”

Michal’s friend, their son Maoz Inon, continues his peace activism, and only yesterday (20^th June) he spoke out on the astonishing demand from Campaign Against Antisemitism to remove fellow peace activists Charlotte Church and Palestinian Hamze Awawde from the podium he is sharing with them at Glastonbury.  Their subject? “Hope is an action: Israelis and Palestinians unite”.

The ongoing attempt to silence voices of resistance to war and of working for justice and peace, in all of our public fora, our media, and our most beloved cultural institutions, reflects the parallel silencing of those voices shouting on the streets of Israel.

Michal is in anguish and she is calling urgently for help from beyond the inferno that is Gaza and Israel. She told me that everything is “trauma on trauma on trauma.” But that her most urgent aim now is “to raise the volume.”

Here is her view from the inside of Israeli protest.

Felicity Laurence, JVL member, visiting guest music teacher with The Villages Group, South Mt Hebron

Testimony from “the hottest place in hell”.

It is the hottest place in hell this place, totally. But we must resist, and we must make our voice heard here, and also around the world because I don’t think this can be stopped here from the inside. We have to have some help from outside, major help from the international community.

 It’s really the lowest, darkest point I’ve ever experienced as an Israeli. And all this blood on my hands of Gaza’s children and women. And also the trauma that we’ve been through on the 7^th.  We are still recovering from that. And it’s all such a big, big chaos and disaster. We need desperately to talk about it and to be heard and to share all of our voices that are for peace and for a deal, now, to stop the genocide, to bring back the hostages.  We are screaming; please hear our voices. Please help us.

It is so important for people in Europe and UK to hear the voices of resistance, from here, from Gaza where there are also voices in Gaza calling desperately for this to stop. “We didn’t want Hamas then, we don’t want them now.” It’s time to speak out, to scream. Perhaps we do need an anarchic approach to resist our Government’s crimes. You in the wider world surely see more of Gaza than I do – it is always hard for us in Israel to access the images and reports.

Protest here is so complex – more than one hundred different groups gathering in the same space – Women for Peace, Standing Together, B’Tselem, and so many more – and the people who lost family on October 7^th; yesterday, I stood next to one woman whose daughter is a hostage.

There is no doubt it’s genocide.  Israel has the most radical government in the Middle East.  They say: “No one can tell us no.” But we are telling them: No.

I was violently arrested in a nonviolent demonstration by an undercover policeman, who did not identify himself. The painful stab of reality was to see them… a battery of ugly Bibists (God forgive me) spit and curse at every protester who is put on the bus of detainees. And they rejoice in Eid, cursing curses that I would not have scattered, not even to my haters.

The police don’t push them away, they don’t ask them to stop this show of humiliation. They allow it to happen… And keep away those who, God forbid, document it.

There were 33 of us detainees. Among them a 25-year-old psychiatrist. A dancer. And a doctor. There was a shell-shocked man on the bus beside me.

I was handcuffed by the policewoman. She made sure to tighten the handcuffs well. I gently asked her if this was something she really agreed with. Whether she was happy that this situation would happen on her watch.

At the station I was separated from the group of detainees. By the time of the interrogation itself, I had been released from the handcuffs; the physical pain diminished, the pain in the heart remained.

Just before I was interrogated, Gamliel looks straight at me and asks: “So how much do you get paid per night?” I looked at him and asked: “Gamliel, did you really ask me that now?”

I talked to the officers to really understand what they know and whom they serve. They did listen, and I felt that their wounds and mine had met somewhere between the interrogation room and the waiting bench.

One said he felt he was serving the country, because he had lost four friends; another claimed that it is precisely because of us who protest the genocide that the hostages remain – because we are not calling for a rescue operation in Gaza.

But we talked.

For the police, I will find compassion, but not for what they are doing. Or for the mercenaries who are our government.

I am tired and mostly sad, about the rift, the gap, the ugliness and the darkness.

But today I will demonstrate, again.

We need a million on the streets.

Can you skip Netflix tonight? that drink? that party ? that date ?

Can you leave your couch and your screen where you are watching us, and come and join us?

Don’t you realise that some of the most horrific war crimes in the last hundred years are being committed by our hands?????

We must not continue to add our terrible cruelty to what happened on 7^th October. It all must stop. And this will only happen if we go outside, on to the streets.

Make your voice heard.

The cycle of bloodshed must be stopped!

And come! Just come !