Four hundred days into the war with Gaza, with more than 100 hostages still held in captivity, a group of 40 or so women gathered in Jerusalem earlier this month to call for an end to the fighting and a different future for the civilians of Israel and Gaza. Dressed in white, the women sit silently for one hour holding up signs written Hebrew, Arabic, English, Russian, or Ukrainian describing their dreams: Peace. Safety. Dignity. Female hygiene. Safe drinking water. Shelter. Humanity. Agreement. Life.
One of the group’s organizers, who asked to remain anonymous, told Davar that the collective’s first sit-in took place a year ago in Jaffa.
“It was born out of a need to find a space to bring a message of peace, and the need to express—enough,” the organizer said. “We need to stop the aggression and to express ourselves in a way that would be as safe as possible, to do nonviolent resistance, and to do it in a way that would allow women to feel safe while doing it. There are a lot of women that come that don’t really have a space to say what they feel about the war, and don’t feel comfortable to go alone to demonstrations. It was a way to offer a voice to those who needed to express solidarity.”
During the demonstration, the women are silent and motionless. Other women hand out explanatory flyers to passersby who wander upon them.
“We are a vessel for people who see us, to project onto us what they feel and hope for,” one of the participants expressed during the debrief after the protest. Indeed, the interaction between the women in the sit-in and the passerby is reminiscent of the dynamics experienced in an art gallery; between artwork and viewer. The viewer often approaches the artworks with a sense of agency and power; they choose how to engage and can reflect and project any meaning onto the work that they choose. The artwork, or in this case the women sitting silently in protest, becomes an object of passive observation, open to interpretation by those who pass by.
Under patriarchy, women are often placed into the position of “observed,” subjected to scrutiny in a way that reinforces a dynamic of passivity and objectification. This lack of agency is often accompanied by the silencing of women—either literally or through tactics like calling women naive. For women to place themselves in the position of being observed and to refrain from speech becomes a powerful and subversive act: a loud action out of quietness.
One organizer noted that the all-female nature of the protest made some women more comfortable coming out to express their opinions. “A lot of women only feel safe around other women, a sad fact,” the organizer said. “We want to try and give voice to people that don’t feel they have a surrounding that makes them feel safe to say that they are against what is happening, they are against the occupation, against the war, then we can offer them a space to do it with other women. Sisterhood is very important.”
Ella Lotan, one of the coordinators of the sit-in and an activist with the Arab-Jewish grassroots movement Standing Together, told Davar that public response to the protests has become more positive as the war drags on. “I feel like people around us, even people who used to believe in war, or think the war is necessary, think that there is no reason for this war to continue and that it only kills us and is bad for everyone who lives here,” she said.
The anonymous organizer said it can be hard to predict how the public will respond. “We had two protests in Tel Aviv at the same location, and one was amazing and positive and the other one received super violent reactions—we even had a guy trying to run everyone over with a motorbike,” she said.
She noted that negative responses can be more obvious than positive responses. “Angry people are loud, and people who agree are quiet,” she said. “They come by and they nod, they say thank you softly, and we do have a lot of them all the time. Even when we have a really nasty reaction, we still have people who come and say we agree with you, we appreciate your message, and thank you.”
“At the beginning, the reactions were usually people, mostly men, coming and saying that we are naive,” another organizer said. “As a group we have had a lot of discussions around this, how do we approach this conversation of wanting a different reality here. One woman today said peace is not naive, it is necessary, and it is an action. There is nothing naive about what we are doing today.”
Lotan said that she especially appreciates the diversity of the passersby during a sit-in in Jerusalem. “Sitting close to the Old City on a Friday afternoon, many people are going to pray from many different religions, many religious people from all the different religions are there, and you can’t predict what a person will think based on how they look,” she said. “Many people that we thought might attack us or not like what we do, when they approach us we hear good stuff. It’s really beautiful.”
She recounted an interaction with an ultra-Orthodox couple during a previous sit-in. “The man asked, ‘What are you doing? Is this for the hostages?’ And the woman replied, ‘No, it’s for everyone.’ It was amazing for me to see this woman, the power of being a woman being able to see people as mothers, daughters—you can see how it’s easier to call for humanity and to call for peace.”
Masha, a participant originally from Russia who has been in Israel for three years, said that she came to the protest in order to take nonviolent action toward peace. “It is impossible to do alone,” she said. “For me, it is hard to take action alone, but to do something together makes me not feel alone and crazy and that it's all in my head.”
Another participant named Hannah, originally from Australia, expressed a similar sentiment. “I need to do something and I don’t know what, and this is something,” she said. “People might say that it won't stop the war and that it's naive, but at least it’s something. It’s not causing any harm so why not?”
Angela, a Palestinian activist in Standing Together explained her decision to protest as part of an effort to provide role models for young girls. “My focus, as a Palestinian, is on the young leaders that I can affect in my society, and I understood that I can affect all young leaders across all societies because they always need someone to look up to,” she said. “So when I am in a group of strong women and little girls pass by, they can say that they look up to those strong women. You plant seeds today, we will see the results in 10 years.”
She said that women’s experience with mistreatment makes it easier for women to speak out against injustice. “We as women face the reality where we are silenced, and people are always telling us that we can’t do this or that,” she said. “We remember our childhoods and we choose to speak up for others.”
