Neta Golan on the beginning of the ISM

Neta Golan, a Jewish Canadian-Israeli activist, talks about how the International Solidarity Movement started.


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It's My Story: From Rosedale to Ramallah
BBC Radio, Thursday 2 October 2003 : Listen HERE
Neta Golan is a young Canadian Jewish woman who has crossed over to the other side of the Middle East conflict. Neta's family emigrated to Israel from a predominantly Jewish neighbourhood of Rosedale in Toronto when she was nine. Her father told her "Israel is our only country now". She once shared her family's attitudes towards Arabs as obstacles to a greater Israel.

Then Neta Golan began to change her way of seeing the Palestinians. She helped launch the International Solidarity Movement, an organisation that uses peaceful means to protect Arab rights and protest against the occupation of Palestine. Neta now lives permanently in the West Bank. She's married a Palestinian and in the spring of this year she gave birth to her first child. Neta Golan is blunt in her appraisal: Israel has never come to terms with the Holocaust and the failure to do so means that history repeats itself save it is the Palestinians who are oppressed and murdered.

Under the guise of the Oslo accords, Israel has been building dozens of new settlements in the West Bank, all of them mini-recreations of European ghettos: walled communities surrounded by hostile territory. But the difference, she says, is that it is the Jews who are choosing to create these 'new ghettos,' rather than being forced into them by European anti-Semitism. Her views and the frankness with which she delivers them have made Neta a target of hate among right wing Israelis.

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The long journey from Nablus to Tel Aviv
Neta Golan writing from Nablus, occupied Palestine, Live from Palestine, Jun 25, 2003
My father passed away last week.

I took Nawal, my two month old daughter, and attempted to go to Tel Aviv to attend the funeral and grieve with my family. Nablus, the city I live in, was besieged and completely sealed off.

This has been the case for most of the last two years. Israeli soldiers threatened to shoot anyone approaching the checkpoint.

On the day of my father's funeral we were "only" delayed for an hour. It was the third time Nawal made this journey since her birth.

Despite the risk involved in getting in and out I came often because I knew my father was dying. I needed him to see his first grandchild, to tell him I loved him, to say goodbye. After the funeral we spent a week with our Israeli family.

My husband, who is Palestinian, is forbidden to enter the part of Israel/Palestine that was occupied in 1948. It was hard that he could not be with me. But I knew that I was privileged to be able to grieve with my family.

I kept thinking of my friend Amal, one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen, with huge hazel eyes and dark black hair. Her family was forced to leave Palestine for Jordan before she was born. Her husband, Abed, is from the West Bank. They have two beautiful children. If she leaves the West Bank, to see her family in Jordan, she will not be allowed back. Her parents have only seen their grandchildren in pictures. Her father was old and ill and she could not see him. He died and she could not be at his burial or comfort her mother.

Today, she refuses to accept that her father is dead. It is not death that she can't deal with, for people living under occupation must live with death every day. It is that fact that she was forced to choose her husband and children over her parents that she can not live with. Her hair has suddenly began going white.

The policy of denying spouses of Palestinians residency is one of the many forms that ethnic cleansing takes here. It is a policy as old as the state of Israel but Sharon takes special pride in it. In his election campaign he boasted that he had stopped Palestinians from entering Israel (greater) by stopping family reunification completely. Amal will never see her father again. Many thousands of Palestinians share her fate.