“mad about this country”

I was afraid, like, I remember that my grandmother was holding my hand all the time. We were running and escaping and trying to avoid the tear gas. It was fear. It was really fear. Yeah, I remember the first, my real political awareness or real political activism was when I was 9, 10. It was in 1982. I don’t know if you heard about Sabra and Shatila Massacre in the Lebanon War, the First Lebanon Invasion[1]. Then I was 10, and there was a huge demonstration here in Nazareth against this massacre. And I joined my grandmother, she held my hand.

“On a woman-to-woman level”

The front page of the news in November 1992 was a story of a young girl who was either 12 or 13 or 14 years old, and lived in a kibbutz, in a settlement very much like our settlement. She had been gang-raped by 11 boys. And this was the first time that this kind of a story had ever hit the news. It was extremely sensational. The judge basically exonerated the 11 boys from having committed rape on the basis that the girl didn’t say no….And I heard the headlines in the morning, and somehow the news just sunk all the way down to my feet. My daughter at the time was 8 or 9, and I thought, I could absolutely see this happening anywhere in Israel. It was, it was so clear to me that women’s status and women’s bodies and women’s rights were…completely trampled on by a society which was extremely patriarchic, which was extremely geared towards male’s views, male’s needs, and um…men’s perceptions of women’s bodies and sexuality.

“It’s an inner pushiness.”

Nobody said anything, but you just grew up and you knew: Don’t ask your parents questions. Because those people went through such hardship in life. My parents were refugees of the war in Germany. I only heard their story not that long ago, only ten years ago or less. Because when I grew up, children knew not to ask. It was like the whole house was a black cloud hanging in the sky constantly. But it didn’t have a name. But it was heavy, you could feel the heaviness. It had a lot of weight. Nobody talked. We didn’t know what it was. No stories were told. But it was heavy, physically. I remember it as a physical heaviness.