Women Wage Peace / October 24, 2016 by Sophie Schor

It was 32° C (90°F), sweat dripped between my shoulder blades while I stood still. But the warmth I felt was not coming from the desert heat, rather from the company I was in. I was surrounded by thousands of women wearing white who were clapping their hands in unison and leaning forward to hear every word the speakers were saying. Hope rose in waves around us.

Women Wage Peace—the Israeli women’s peace movement that I researched for my masters degree—organized a massive event where for the last two weeks, women have been marching 250km from Rosh HaNikra, the northernmost point of the country next to the border with Lebanon, to Jerusalem. Along the way, they have stopped and met with different communities, and organized events and solidarity marches across the country. All along the way, people met the women and joined them. It culminated on Wednesday with thousands and thousands of people wearing white snaking their way through the streets of Jerusalem from the Supreme Court to the Prime Minister’s house. The organizers claim that it was a crowd of 20,000 people.

The march was a year in the making.

Between a Wall and a Hard Place / August 17, 2015 by Sophie Schor

We were walking in the corridors of no-man’s land in the Northern corner of Jerusalem municipality at the edge where the Neve Ya'akov settlement ends and the grey concrete wall that separates Jerusalem from where the West Bank begins. Our professor pointed towards a flat concrete court that was overgrown with brush and prickly plants and mentioned, “Arabs and Jews used to play football there. But that was before they built the wall…”

We were standing in the corner of Neve Ya’akov, a neighborhood that is often classified as just a suburb of Jerusalem, which lies across the green line and hugs the curve of the separation barrier. The distinguishing characteristic between the houses on the left and the houses on the right were striking. One side was clearly Jewish, Jerusalem stones turned yellow with time, white water-boilers speckling the rooftops. The apartments on the right were Arab, bright new stories built up to house more families, black water-boilers dotted their roofs.