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Uri Zackhem
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Yasmine Halevi Ta'ayush was established after October 2000 uprising, which started following the entry of the Ariel Sharon, then MK, to the Temple Mount, accompanied by 1,000 policemen. During demonstrations in Israel in the following days, 13 Palestinians (12 of them citizens) were killed by the police. Ta'ayush – coexistence in Arabic, started by meetings of long time Israeli activists of both peoples, living in Tel Aviv and Kufr Qassem. We work against the occupation and against the discrimination done by the state against it Palestinian Israelis, and fight against all kinds and forms of separation and segregation between Arabs and Jews and between Israelis and Palestinians, both in Israel and the Occupies Territories. Ta'ayush does not have an ideology that has to be followed and agreed upon by the activists; rather, it has a doctrine of a working modality. We are a direct action group, and everybody is invited to participate. Of course, all identify themselves as left but Zionists and non-Zionists alike can go out and help Palestinian peasants picking their olives because they are intimidated by the occupation forces or the settlers, for example. We are nonviolent, and we emphasize that whenever there is a chance of police provocation we should not fight back. We are
Palestinians
and Jews, and our actions and plenary meetings have to have good
representation
of both peoples. Ta'ayush' decisions are made in plenary meetings, in which people suggest actions and those are approved/ rejected or passed to a relevant committee, which is often created ad-hoc during the meeting to organize a specific activity. If necessary, its members come back to the plenary to get approvals/ rejections for their decisions. Decision making process is done in the consensus way, supposedly actions are rejected if someone objects strongly. All actions
are done
together with the community we are trying to work with, in order not to
patronize. This makes
the process much longer, however, the results
are more concrete as it makes people more committed. Our action is political. For example, we shall not pass food supplies to the West Bank by sending an anonymous lorry. Hundreds of us will accompany the lorry and join our partners in the West Bank in a demonstration. We do not
work for
empowerment but we saw people empowered by our actions, e.g. people who
never
demonstrated joined our
demonstrations. The main big project threatening the Occupied Territories now is the "Separation Wall", fence, barrier, which will separate hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their lands and livelihood. This including the other closures cause hunger and despair among the Palestinians while the main Jewish Israeli public is mostly unaware and indifferent. Within
Israel proper
the problems vis-à-vis the Palestinian citizens have always been
discrimination
in budget allocation, planning, land rights, racist police, every
aspect of
human life really. Now we have
problems
of energy – people are tired and have family/ work/ studies and we have
to
recruit more members. We have to
be creative
to try to get the media attention – and it has been behaving like the
IDF
spokesmen. One of the most important actions of Ta'ayush was helping the residents of a small village, Khirbet Yanun, come back. This villages is encircled by settlers' farms, and the worst kind of lunatic colonisers that harrased and even killed some villagers of Yanun or a nearby village. Finally the Yanun villagers fled. Similar and
even less
harsh cases happened in 1948. Ta'ayush activists, together with
Internationals,
lived with them for over a month, changing shifts, until some of them
came
back. This means stopping the 1948 Nakba, which continues ever since. |