NEW YORK, July 6, 2010 — The Institute of International Education (IIE) announced today that Bassam Aramin and Avner Wishnitzer, two of the founders of the group Combatants for Peace (CFP), have been selected to receive the 2010 Victor J. Goldberg IIE Prize for Peace in the Middle East. IIE Trustee Victor J. Goldberg created the prize to honor the outstanding contributions of two individuals, one Arab and one Israeli, working together to advance the cause of peace in the Middle East. The award, which includes a $10,000 prize, will be presented in October in Jerusalem at a ceremony hosted by the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv and the U.S. Consulate General in Jerusalem.

The winners will be honored for their joint leadership of Combatants for Peace. The organization was established in 2005 by Palestinians and Israelis who had played active roles in violence in the region and then committed themselves instead to non-violent activism. The objectives of CFP are to raise awareness and promote an understanding among Israelis and Palestinians regarding the hopes and suffering of the other side; create partners for dialogue; educate both sides towards reconciliation and non-violent struggle; and impose political pressure on both governments to stop the cycle of violence, end the occupation and resume a constructive dialogue.

Bassam Aramin, now 42, grew up in the Palestinian village of Sa’ir. As a youth Mr. Aramin spent almost ten years in Israeli jails for his involvement in a group that staged an attack on an Israeli military patrol. His time in prison led him to consider non-violent activism and upon his release in 1994, he participated in many peace-building initiatives. In 2005, Mr. Aramin helped to establish CFP and has been a movement leader ever since, even after his ten-year-old daughter was killed by the gunfire of Israeli soldiers as she was leaving school in 2007. His mission is to prevent the death of more children, both Palestinian and Israeli.

Avner Wishnitzer, now 33, grew up in Kibbutz Kvutsat Shiller and served as a combatant in Sayeret Matkal, an elite special forces unit of the Israel Defense Forces. As a reserve soldier in that same unit, he refused to serve in the occupied territories, and in 2005, Mr. Wishnitzer, along with other Israeli refusniks met with Mr. Aramin and other ex-combatants in Beit Jalah, an area where most Israelis would not consider traveling at the time. This meeting led to the formation of CFP and Mr. Wishnitzer continues to be a core group leader.

According to Mr. Goldberg, "The intent of this award is to recognize innovation and reward those who are courageous and committed enough to work together to overcome the religious, cultural, ethnic, and political issues which divide the Middle East. We hope that the courage and imagination shown by our prize winners will inspire others to join together across these divides to advance the cause of peace in the coming years."

To be eligible for the Goldberg IIE Prize, at least one of the nominated individuals must be an alumnus/a of a program administered by IIE. Mr. Wishnitzer is currently a Fulbright Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Washington where he is continuing his research in Middle Eastern history. Mr. Aramin participated in the International Visitors Leadership Program sponsored by the U.S. Department of State in 2009. He was part of an 18-member international group who visited Washington, DC; Chicago, IL; South Bend, IN; and Tucson, AZ to explore issues related to U.S. perspectives on the use of preventive diplomacy and conflict resolution in both domestic and international spheres.

IIE, a non-profit organization founded in 1919 and headquartered in New York City, created the Goldberg IIE Prize with an endowment from IIE’s Executive Committee member and former Vice Chairman, Victor J. Goldberg. The Selection Committee for the Prize includes leading experts from academia, the non-profit sector, and government.

Mr. Goldberg and IIE’s Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, Peggy Blumenthal, will present the 2010 winners with the $10,000 Prize at a ceremony in Jerusalem in October. According to Ms. Blumenthal, "The Goldberg IIE Prize honors outstanding collaboration by past winners and, we hope, will encourage other courageous professionals in the region to develop new initiatives which will advance the cause of peace in the Middle East. The winners we celebrate each year exemplify the kinds of joint action that are needed to resolve conflicts in this region and around the world. They embody Vic Goldberg’s long-time commitment to bettering the world through international cooperation."

Source:
IIE

More Information:
Combatants for Peace

Thank you for inviting me to this today. It is always an honour and a pleasure to be here, among you (at the European Parliament).

However, I must admit I believe you should have invited a Palestinian woman at my stead, because the women who suffer most from violence in my country are the Palestinian women. And I would like to dedicate my speech to Miriam R’aban and her husband Kamal, from Bet Lahiya in the Gaza strip, whose five small children were killed by Israeli soldiers while picking strawberries at the family`s strawberry field. No one will ever stand trial for this murder.

When I asked the people who invited me here why didn’t they invite a Palestinian woman, the answer was that it would make the discussion too localized.

I don’t know what is non-localized violence. Racism and discrimination may be theoretical concepts and universal phenomena but their impact is always local, and real. Pain is local, humiliation, sexual abuse, torture and death, are all very local, and so are the scars.

It is true, unfortunately, that the local violence inflicted on Palestinian women by the government of Israel and the Israeli army, has expanded around the globe, In fact, state violence and army violence, individual and collective violence, are the lot of Muslim women today, not only in Palestine but wherever the enlightened western world is setting its big imperialistic foot. It is violence which is hardly ever addressed and which is halfheartedly condoned by most people in Europe and in the USA.

This is because the so-called free world is afraid of the Muslim womb.

Great France of “la liberte égalite et la fraternite” is scared of little girls with head scarves. Great Jewish Israel is afraid of the Muslim womb which its ministers call a demographic threat.

Almighty America and Great Britain are infecting their respective citizens with blind fear of the Muslims, who are depicted as vile, primitive and blood-thirsty, apart from their being non-democratic, chauvinistic and mass producers of future terrorists. This in spite of the fact that the people who are destroying the world today are not Muslim. One of them is a devout Christian, one is Anglican and one is a non-devout Jew.

I have never experienced the suffering Palestinian women undergo every day, every hour, I don’t know the kind of violence that turns a woman’s life into constant hell. This daily physical and mental torture of women who are deprived of their basic human rights and needs of privacy and dignity, women whose homes are broken into at any moment of day and night, who are ordered at a gun-point to strip naked in front of strangers and their own children, whose houses are demolished , who are deprived of their livelihood and of any normal family life. This is not part of my personal ordeal.

But I am a victim of violence against women insofar as violence against children is actually violence against mothers. Palestinian, Iraqi, Afghan women are my sisters because we are all at the grip of the same unscrupulous criminals who call themselves leaders of the free enlightened world and in the name of this freedom and enlightenment rob us of our children.

Furthermore, Israeli, American, Italian and British mothers have been for the most part violently blinded and brainwashed to such a degree that they cannot realize their only sisters, their only allies in the world are the Muslim Palestinian, Iraqi or Afghani mothers, whose children are killed by our children or who blow themselves to pieces with our sons and daughters. They are all mind-infected by the same viruses engendered by politicians. And the viruses , though they may have various illustrious names –such as Democracy, Patriotism, God, Homeland– are all the same. They are all part of false and fake ideologies that are meant to enrich the rich and to empower the powerful.

We are all the victims of mental, psychological and cultural violence that turn us to one homogenic group of bereaved or potentially bereaved mothers. Western mothers who are taught to believe their uterus is a national asset just like they are taught to believe that the Muslim uterus is an international threat. They are educated not to cry out: `I gave him birth, I breast fed him, he is mine, and I will not let him be the one whose life is cheaper than oil, whose future is less worth than a piece of land.`

All of us are terrorized by mind-infecting education to believe all we can do is either pray for our sons to come back home or be proud of their dead bodies.

And all of us were brought up to bear all this silently, to contain our fear and frustration, to take Prozac for anxiety, but never hail Mama Courage in public. Never be real Jewish or Italian or Irish mothers.

I am a victim of state violence. My natural and civil rights as a mother have been violated and are violated because I have to fear the day my son would reach his 18th birthday and be taken away from me to be the game tool of criminals such as Sharon, Bush, Blair and their clan of blood-thirsty, oil-thirsty, land thirsty generals.

Living in the world I live in, in the state I live in, in the regime I live in, I don’t dare to offer Muslim women any ideas how to change their lives. I don’t want them to take off their scarves, or educate their children differently, and I will not urge them to constitute Democracies in the image of Western democracies that despise them and their kind. I just want to ask them humbly to be my sisters, to express my admiration for their perseverance and for their courage to carry on, to have children and to maintain a dignified family life in spite of the impossible conditions my world in putting them in. I want to tell them we are all bonded by the same pain, we all the victims of the same sort of violence even though they suffer much more, for they are the ones who are mistreated by my government and its army, sponsored by my taxes.

Islam in itself, like Judaism in itself and Christianity in itself, is not a threat to me or to anyone. American imperialism is, European indifference and co-operation is and Israeli racism and its cruel regime of occupation is. It is racism, educational propaganda and inculcated xenophobia that convince Israeli soldiers to order Palestinian women at gun-point, to strip in front of their children for security reasons, it is the deepest disrespect for the other that allow American soldiers to rape Iraqi women, that give license to Israeli jailers to keep young women in inhuman conditions, without necessary hygienic aids, without electricity in the winter, without clean water or clean mattresses and to separate them from their breast-fed babies and toddlers. To bar their way to hospitals, to block their way to education, to confiscate their lands, to uproot their trees and prevent them from cultivating their fields.

I cannot completely understand Palestinian women or their suffering. I don’t know how I would have survived such humiliation, such disrespect from the whole world. All I know is that the voice of mothers has been suffocated for too long in this war-stricken planet. Mothers’ cry is not heard because mothers are not invited to international forums such as this one. This I know and it is very little. But it is enough for me to remember these women are my sisters, and that they deserve that I should cry for them, and fight for them. And when they lose their children in strawberry fields or on filthy roads by the checkpoints, when their children are shot on their way to school by Israeli children who were educated to believe that love and compassion are race and religion dependent, the only thing I can do is stand by them and their betrayed babies, and ask what Anna Akhmatova –another mother who lived in a regime of violence against women and children– asked:

Why does that streak o blood, rip the petal of your cheek?

New York – Today, September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, a nationwide group founded by family members of those killed on 9/11 issued the following statement, which may be attributed to their spokesperson, Donna Marsh O’Connor:

To arrange an interview with a member of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, please contact David Lerner or Shonna Carter, Riptide Communications, 212-260-5000 (dlerner@riptideonline.com or shonnac@riptideonline.com).

September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows is an organization founded by family members of those killed on September 11, 2001. Currently comprised of over 200 families, the group advocates nonviolence and adherence to the rule of law in the pursuit of justice and accountability.

Source:
Website Peaceful Tomorrows