Middle East. From both sides of the war, women stand up together fighting for peace.
Reem Al-Hajajreh lost almost everything when she decided to commit to the fight for peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Four years after founding the peace organization Women of the Sun, this Palestinian and Muslim woman, who lives crammed into a 16,000-person refugee camp in the West Bank, no longer has her husband, many of her relatives, or several of her lifelong friends, who abandoned her because of her political commitment. Official bodies of the Palestinian Authority, which has administrative control over parts of the West Bank, accuse her organization of seeking to normalize the Israeli occupation and betray the Palestinian cause.
But she knows the most flagrant transgression lies elsewhere. “Deep down, the biggest crime I've committed is having, as a woman, a political discourse, and wanting to fight for peace and women's rights,” Reem says in an interview with this newspaper in Buenos Aires.
His choice for peace was not born out of an ideological shift regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict . He says the Israelis are fully responsible for the oppression his people are experiencing. He says that for the past 17 years, Gaza has been an open-air prison and points out that over the past 30 years, the Israelis have gradually distanced themselves from all the commitments made in the so-called Oslo Accords for peace in the region.
When asked about the Palestinian refusal to accept Israeli peace offers in 2000, within the framework of the Camp David accords, and in 2008, under the leadership of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert , he replies: "Each has his own narrative. Each believes he is free from sin and blames the other."
At the same time, he finds it unacceptable that in Palestine, children die and mothers receive a pat on the back with the promise that their children will go to heaven. “I had a complete hatred for Israelis because of what I experienced firsthand. But I started to think differently. Why do we have to be treated like useless offerings? We've had enough time to see where this is leading us .”
Reem maintains that the Oslo Accords were negotiated in the 1990s between the region's authorities, between "powerful people," and not between the people. Her path lies in building a path of peace between peoples, she adds.
Mujeres del Sol now has a sister organization in Israel, Women Wage Peace, which was founded in 2014 during the third war between Israel and Gaza. Both organizations signed a joint document called Mother's Call, which they agreed upon after a nine-month dialogue and which today defines their shared goals.
The Anne Frank Center Argentina invited Reem and two representatives of Women Powering for Peace (WWP), Angela Scharf and Hyam Tannous , to visit Argentina and Uruguay. Earlier this month, they met with politicians and human rights organizations there, and in Uruguay, they were received by President Yamandú Orsi .
WWP and Mujeres del Sol involve Palestinian and Israeli women, Jews and Arabs, Muslims and Christians. Their joint work has already garnered significant international recognition.
Reem Al-Hajajreh was chosen as Time magazine's Woman of the Year in 2024. Both organizations have been nominated by a Dutch university for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2024 and again in 2025. Both organizations received the Hillary Rodham Clinton Prize from Georgetown University in Washington, DC. Mujeres del Sol also received the Albies Justice for Survivors Award from the Clooney Foundation.
Angela Scharf , Jewish, was born in Vienna and is of Polish origin. She was married to a French diplomat, whose work took her to South Korea, Germany, and Belgium. She studied Political Science and specialized in the Middle East at the University of Jerusalem; today she leads WWP's foreign relations teams.
Hyam Tannous is Arab, Christian, and Israeli. She studied psychology and education to understand her own complexity as an Arab and Israeli woman. She began her career as an educational counselor and became a counselor supervisor. For 20 years, she was responsible for 400 professional counselors, both Jewish and Arab. The first non-Jewish woman to hold that position in Israel, she trained hundreds of counselors and led a nonviolence committee in Jewish and Arab schools in the north of the country.
Tannous recalls that, as a child, she helped with Shabbat services for a rabbi in Haifa, her hometown. Her father admired the Jewish people for their history tied to knowledge and culture. That admiration shifted after the Six-Day War in 1967, when Israel conquered large swathes of Arab territory, she says.
She speaks perfect Hebrew, Arabic, and English. Today, Tannous serves on the WWP board of directors and works full-time for the organization. “ Today, my country is at war with my people,” she says. “And I am torn apart every day. That is my daily life. I am here as a woman of a people who suffer and of a country that also suffers, and I can no longer remain silent. I chose to be a bridge. I chose not to run away from complexity. Without bridges, we will all sink. There is no other way. We are Jews and Arabs, and we share the same pain.”
In this war, which began on October 7, 2023, both organizations lost fellow travelers. One of WWP's founders, Vivian Silver, was murdered by Hamas on October 7 inside her kibbutz home. Nadia, a Palestinian member of Women of the Sun, was killed in the bombings in Gaza, along with dozens of other women who collaborated with the organization.
The Hamas massacre was a pivotal moment for these organizations. Long weeks passed in which the trauma was so great that it prevented them from returning to work. It was Reem who proposed renewing their commitment, despite the mounting death toll in Gaza and despite the fact that she, too, had lost Israeli friends on October 7. “At first, we couldn’t oppose the war,” Scharf tells this newspaper. “But when we saw the death toll rising and that the war seemed to be serving political ends for Netanyahu, we said enough was enough. And our activism, calling for an end to the war, began again.”
Renowned American-Israeli intellectual Yossi Klein Halevi , who has written prolifically on the Israeli-Palestinian relationship, says that these two organizations bring a distinctive and unique quality to the work for peace in the region. “These women's organizations bring a less strident voice to the discussion table than the one typically heard on the Israeli left. They emphasize person-to-person engagement; that is the foundation and heart of their peace work, ” says Klein Halevi in a telephone conversation.
This view is shared by other leaders of the peace movement, who emphasize the contribution of a different and more comprehensive perspective to the negotiating table. "They have a great capacity to resolve problems between people, and they address not only political issues but also issues of education, health, and coexistence," says Maoz Inon , an Israeli whose parents were murdered by Hamas on October 7 and who, along with Palestinian Aziz Abu Sarah , has become an international ambassador for the fight for peace in the region.
In short, they have everything that led the United Nations to adopt Resolution 1325 in 2000, which recommends women's participation in issues of security, peace, conflict prevention, resolution, and reconstruction. "It's proven that when women participate in negotiations, the chances of success increase enormously," says Maoz Inon. "I'm encouraged to know they're in Buenos Aires. We need the international community as an active player in supporting Israeli civil society in changing the discourse, to begin talking about reconciliation and leaving warmongering behind ."
Perhaps the biggest problem is credibly talking about peace when the war in Gaza has been going on for more than 650 days, already the longest in the contemporary history of the State of Israel. Not only does it not appear to be nearing an end, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently announced his intention to take Gaza City and intensify hostilities until the elusive goal of finishing off Hamas and freeing the Israeli hostages is achieved. To date, this war has already caused almost half of the total number of victims of the 100-year-long Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and the humanitarian situation in Gaza is increasingly fragile.
Angela Scharf, an Israeli and Jewish woman, is aware of this reality, but she reminds us that history teaches us that even the bloodiest and most unthinkable wars have also led to peace. She cites as an example the Yom Kippur War between Israel and a coalition of countries led by Egypt in 1973. Six years after that war, Israel and Egypt signed a peace treaty, and 46 years later, the agreement has been maintained uninterruptedly.
The Realign for Palestine project, spearheaded by Palestinian intellectuals at the Atlantic Council in Washington, recognizes that talking about peace in the current context can seem understandably naive . “It’s much easier to take sides in the conflict, repeat slogans and facts, and keep the dialogue at a standstill,” they say. “Too many leaders in the region are taking advantage of this situation, avoiding negotiations and prolonging the impasse.”
However, they believe that a majority of people in the region would currently choose peace if they believed it was possible. "They would support a credible agreement that offers the liberation of Palestine, real security for Israel, and concrete public policies that support these goals."
Angela Scharf believes the work they do is not merely symbolic or a means of pressuring the government through their marches and the voices of mothers who prioritize their children's lives over military strategies. Their meetings with world leaders, such as French President Emmanuel Macron, along with those of other activists—such as Maoz Inon's meeting with the Pope—help forge an international discourse that shifts perspectives and pressures the region's various actors toward a negotiated solution. " When Macron invited us to Paris and organized a summit to discuss the Middle East, he invited us because he wants to include the voices of civil society in the negotiations ," Angela explains.
Wearing her light blue scarf around her neck, a symbol of her organization and her struggle, she clarifies that, politically speaking, they remain neutral regarding the type of solution to the conflict. "Peace can come through the constitution of one state, or two, or a confederation," she says. "If it's accepted by both sides, that's fine by us."
But they are not neutral when it comes to some of the region's political actors . It's clear that Hamas is not part of any political settlement. But they also strongly reject Netanyahu, whom they accuse of not having fought for the return of the hostages and of not seeking an end to the war, presumably to save his political career.
There is suspicion that the prime minister is continuing hostilities to avoid a rift in his political coalition that would force elections. This, according to polls, would end his leadership, which has lost support in Israel. “More and more Israelis are ashamed of their government’s actions,” says Tannous, the Arab-Israeli woman. “A large part of Israeli society already favors ending the war in Gaza.”
A recent poll by Israel's Channel 12 revealed that 75% of Israelis would agree to end the war in Gaza in exchange for the return of the 50 hostages still held by Hamas.
Tannous closes the talk by recalling the reason for her struggle. “The solution will come from the fire we mothers carry. From our broken hearts. We are not willing to give up. We are not willing to continue going to examine the dead bodies of our children.”
lanacion
