As the intifada continues to spill blood every day, members of the ”Israeli and Palestinian Bereaved Families for Peace” movement donate theirs to build bridges between the two communities.
On Tuesday, Israelis gave their blood to Palestinian blood banks, while Palestinians simultaneously gave their blood to Israeli blood banks. ”We are here to give our blood to the Ramallah governmental hospital for bereaved Palestinian families following the events in Khan Yunis,” said Roni Gerston, an Israeli member of the movement.
Gerston, whose son was killed in a 1995 bus bombing claimed by the Islamic Jihad, was referring to Monday’s Israeli army raid into the southern Gaza Strip town, which killed 16 Palestinians, mainly civilians, and drew international condemnations.
Meanwhile in west Jerusalem, Palestinians whose relatives were killed by the Israeli army were also queuing up to donate their blood at the Magen David Adom centre, the Israeli equivalent of the Red Cross.
Palestinian neurologist Adel Misk was there. ”We want to show public opinion that the bloodspill has the same consequences for everybody and the pain is the same,” he said.
Misk’s father was shot dead by a Jewish settler in the east Jerusalem neighbourhood of Ras al-Amoud in 1993. ”Israeli and Palestinian Bereaved Families for Peace”, which includes victims’ families associations from both sides, was founded in 1994 by the Israeli Ashak Frankental.
The blood donor campaign is aimed at contributing to an end to the violence and bringing the political echelon back to the negotiating table. On March 19, the group travelled to New York and gathered around some 1 050 coffins and marched on to Washington and Boston under the slogan: ”Better have pains of peace than agonies of war.” 800 coffins were draped with Palestinian flags and the other 250 with Israeli flags, representing the ratio of deaths on both sides since the beginning of the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation two years ago.
It was a message ”to the world to help us find a solution and put an end to the Israeli-Arab conflict,” Misk said. According to him, some 200 families from the Gaza Strip belong to the cross-community reconciliation movement, a similar number of Israeli families, while bereaved residents of the West Bank are also joining the group.
”The Palestinian Authority supports this movement,” which calls for ”an end to the violence and the creation of a Palestinian state alongside the state of Israel as well as a halt of settlement activity,” said Misk, stressing that the movement is not political. ”The Israeli mother who loses her child feels exactly the same thing as the Palestinian mother who loses her child,” Palestinian Khaled al-Atari explained as he rolled up his sleeve to donate blood.
Frankental’s son Eric was kidnapped and killed by the radical Islamic Hamas movement in 1994. ”At the time, I remember thinking that the Muslims had kidnapped my son not because they hated him but because there was no peace” between Israel and the Palestinians, he explained.
”The Palestinian people are wonderful, just like the Israeli people. But the problem is with the leaders who don’t have the courage to make peace.” – Sapa-AFP