IN MY JEWISH STATE How I was trained in pro-Israel advocacy, and how I learned to talk back to my culture, find my own humanity, and fight for peace by Elana Sztokman

Author:Elana Sztokman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lioness Books
Published: 2024-12-26T00:00:00+00:00

Partnering With Eva

Eva Dalak is a Palestinian citizen of Israel born in Jaffa to a family that lived there for generations. In April 1948, after the Deir Yassin massacre in which Jewish forces killed over 100 Palestinian residents in cold blood in one of hundreds of “depopulated” villages,​[156] her family was terrified of being attacked as well. They got on a boat to escape — temporarily, they hoped — heading to Gaza and Nablus. All except her grandmother, who was nine months pregnant at the time. As her grandmother got onto the boat, she went into labor. She got off the boat, turned back to Jaffa, and gave birth to Eva’s mother on May 5, 1948. As luck would have it, that is how Eva, born 26 years later, came to be born in Jaffa as a citizen of Israel while most of her mother’s family were refugees living in Gaza.

Eva’s family is Muslim, but she attended a French Jesuit school in Israel, then studied political science at a university in Paris. She worked for the United Nations and lived around the world before settling in Costa Rica with her spouse and two children. Eva has been working in conflict transformation for twenty-five years, has been to twenty-two conflict zones, speaks many languages, and is a big believer in the importance of women’s leadership. She travels back and forth to Israel/Palestine to continue her work as a consultant and a proponent of peace activation.

I have heard Eva tell this story several times. She often shares it on the podcast we started together during this war. The podcast, called “Women Ending War”, is a determined effort to change our reality and end this violence.

Eva and I met on Zoom in February 2024. She was consulting for a women’s coalition I am active in called Forum 1325 for Political Agreement,​[157] a group working to advance systemic solutions to the ongoing conflict while advancing women’s leadership and perspectives. The group is built on the premise of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (UNSCR 1325) that calls for women’s leadership and involvement in all areas of peace and negotiation, as well as the insistence on gendered perspectives about issues such as definitions of security.​[158] Our group sought Eva’s guidance about getting women a seat at the table in decision-making about this war in an effort to create a different reality. I found Eva to be amazing, insightful, wise, articulate, and broad-minded.

For a long time, I wanted to host a podcast to share my ideas, mostly about gender but also about politics, culture, and language. My plans kept getting derailed by events around me. But as this war progressed, and all the “Together we will win” signs engulfed me and obfuscated the truth about the bloodshed and violence, I decided it was time for me to focus on the war. I asked Eva to partner with me, and she agreed. I also approached a donor who generously funded us, and off we went. We began recording Season 1 in June and July of 2024, and Season 2 in September and October.

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