Ahoti Movement was approached by the Coalition of Women for Peace with a proposal to participate in a national project related to peace. In this proposal, peace-related activities would take place in the south of Israel and address [*] Mizrahi women, who are Achoti’s target population. Four women’s organizations are already participating in this project in different regions of Israel.

A proposal of this kind requires deliberation in the ideological bodies of the Movement, which we did, and both the Achoti Board and Council gave their approval. Ilana Sugbaker, an Ahoti member and veteran peace activist, agreed to head the project, and she was joined by other peace activists – Esther Eilam, Ronit Timsit Dagan, Yonit Mansour Shahar, and Ketzia Alon. After several meetings, the group created a basic program, which was carefully deliberated on both the ideological and practical levels.

Many issues came up during these meetings about peace in the context of being Mizrahi. Achoti was founded just when the second Intifadah broke out and led to an economic and political crisis. Until now, Ahoti’s mandate was the economic situation of Mizrahi women, an area that is key to their lives. However, the current economic problems are integrally related to the political situation, and therefore political involvement by Achoti is the inevitable next stage in activity by the movement.

Women play an active role in the peace movement in Israel. The image of these women is that they are well educated, bourgeois, and Ashkenazi, but this stereotype is not accurate, as many Mizrahi women are active in the peace movement. Indeed, recent years have seen the emergence of two significant trends in peace activism: the unique woman’s voice and the Mizrahi voice.

The Ahoti Movement is positioned at this very intersection, as peace is essential for women – their welfare and their economic and personal well being.

Thus, the proposal of the Coalition of Women for Peace came at exactly the right time, since many women do not understand the link between the economic difficulties, from which many women suffer, and the ongoing conflict. This link is complex, since the leftist version of peace during the 1990s held aloft the vision of a “New Middle East” in which capitalist interests were promoted at the expense of workers, leading to increased economic gaps. For example, relocating textile plants to neighboring Arab countries often led to layoffs of women workers in areas of high unemployment in Israel, where factory work was the only source of income. Furthermore, peace initiatives often begin with a perspective that separation – territorial, cultural, and national – must be the basis for peace. But there is an alternative to this approach. In this project, members of Ahoti and Mizrahi women from the south think together about how to foster peace from a feminist-Mizrahi perspective and what are its practical implications. The Middle East conflict will be resolved only after the true needs of all the citizens are taken into consideration, and therefore we all need a “society of peace”.

This program will include formulation of Ahoti’s platform on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its implications for Israeli society; empowering local leadership in the south for ongoing work locally; and integrating local with national leadership on this issue.

Ahoti’s peace work as a feminist organization will be fully complete only when our friends from the Coalition organizations resolve to clarify for themselves why they are identified with the Ashkenazi hegemony, and clarify their own attitudes toward Mizrahi men and women with respect to peace activism.

This important project is already underway, and Ahoti calls upon its members to join our effort at any stage so that together we can launch a new discourse, create alternative solutions, and forge a new path to peace.