Where Is the Peace Camp? They Are Marching for Gilad Shalit

Where Is the Peace Camp? They Are Marching for Gilad Shalit

Jo-Ann Mort: The Peace Camp and Gilad Shalit

While it is true that people from all political camps are wishing, praying, and even marching and demonstrating for Gilad Shalit’s release from Hamas’ stranglehold in Gaza, the moving concert and demonstration this past weekend near the Keren Shalom junction was also held for peace and a two-state solution. The winding march, which encompassed over 120,000 people, started in northern Israel near the Lebanese border, circled down to the Gaza border, and then came back through Jerusalem and the country’s center. It was organized mostly by the Kibbutz movement, the spiritual home of the Shalit family and the historical base of the Israeli peace camp.

Shalit, twenty-four years old, was abducted four years ago near Kibbutz Kfar Aza, just a breath away from the Gaza border. He was there on his required military duty to guard the border on the Israeli side. Hamas operatives snuck across the border and captured him, heightening tensions between Israel and Hamas, and eventually adding to the reasons for last year’s war in Gaza. Since Shalit’s capture, his parents have organized a nationwide–and global–campaign for his release. Israel has reportedly negotiated with Hamas, with the help of Egyptian and German and other intermediaries. But talks have broken down, apparently because of which prisoners Hamas wants freed in exchange for Shalit. Israeli polls show support for a negotiation at nearly any cost for Shalit’s return. It is part of the ethos of the Israeli Defense Forces that they will leave no soldier behind; this is important in a country where the majority of Israeli young people serve a mandatory two or three years in army service after high school. No one has seen him alive since his capture, though Hamas has supposedly assured the Egyptians that he is okay.

The concert was the brainchild of the Israeli Philharmonic, Israel’s national classical orchestra, which is completely independent of the government and run as a cooperative by the musicians. Zubin Mehta, the great Indian conductor, has been involved with the orchestra since 1969. The concert was inspired, according to Mehta, by women in the orchestra touched by Gila Shalit’s mother’s pain. In interviews, Mehta was very clear to state the concerts aim to the media: “to inspire people on the other side [Shalit’s Gaza captors] to give him humane treatment” by allowing the International Red Cross to visit him, which has yet to happen. Mehta hopes that Shalit “knows we are doing this concert,” but he said that the Philharmonic also played for the “hundreds of Palestinian mothers” whose sons were still in jail. “Although the sons are not in the same position, they are still in jail, (and their) mothers are still suffering and I have to think of them too.”

The not-so-silent mass of people at the concert and march share a hope–that peace will come, that Shalit will be freed, and that there will be a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They also share a fear, along with nearly all Israelis, that one of their own children could be Gilad Shalit. But Mehta did something important: he humanized both sides of this conflict, by speaking of the mothers and sons on both sides of the border. This is something done too rarely in today’s public discourse in Israel and never done, truth be told, on the Hamas side (which is not an argument against Israel negotiating with Hamas). We still don’t know what Bibi Netanyahu and President Obama truly discussed when they met in D.C., just as this concert was taking place, but for the sake of the mothers and children–Israeli and Palestinian–let us hope that they too heard the sounds from the Israeli Philharmonic and that they too will push for an end to this conflict.