By: Fida Zeidan
Combatants for Peace
Speech at Alternative Remembrance Day Ceremony, Tel Aviv
8 May 2011
My name is Fida Zeidan, from the village of Beit Jann, a Palestinian village in the Upper Galilee.
Until about 60 years ago the village was best known for its grapes and its springs.
I am the youngest in my family. My father is Kamal and my mother is Salma. My brothers are Fuad, Saleh and Yamin and my sister’s name is Najwa.
I was born in 1989 and so I was unable to see Fuad, because he went into the army, and since 20 March 1996 I have seen Saleh only four times in my dreams.
And now years have passed and our high village, which is located on one of the summits between the mountains of Zabud and Jarmaq, Haidar, Jabalat al-Arus and Dedabe, is known today as the “the Druze village with more war victims than all the others,” and as the number of war victims grows, the village becomes more famous, secure, beautiful and thriving.
Not long ago I perceived contradictions in our life.
Beit Jann is a village which, if you visit it, you will see everything that you can see in any other Palestinian Arab village. But the victims from Beit Jann were killed while serving in the Israel Defence Force. For some reason these things don’t fit together. At least, not in my eyes.
At first I thought that it was only internal conflict and that I had to choose who I am and where I belong, to which nationality, to which language or which side I’m on, because that’s how I remember things were, whether at school or in the neighbourhood: one defines himself as a Druze, the other as an Arab, or as an Arab Druze, or the other way round. Or Israeli Druze … and so on.
Fortunately, one thing was clear to me and that was my name: Fida – Fuad.
Today I know that it is a name that represents loyalty to the homeland but certainly that is not what my parents intended when they gave it to me.
Our family is a member of the Bereaved Families’ Forum for Peace, an organization of Israeli and Palestinian families who have lost loved ones as a result of the conflict. This organization acts to end the killing on both sides, for reconciliation, discussion and dialogue.
My parents joined the Forum in the first years of its existence and I am the second generation of the Forum.
In 2007 I travelled to Berlin on behalf of the Families’ Forum, in a delegation in which we met with young people from Germany, Poland, Ramallah and Jenin. I did not think that the answer or the question that would lead me to reflection and to search for myself would be waiting for me in that distant place. But that is what happened. Somebody said to me: “I do not understand how your brother, who is an Arab, could raise a gun against his Arab brothers and shoot them.”
I know my brothers, both of them, and I have confidence in the upbringing we received by my parents. My brothers were brought up to love life and respect others, they were raised on the values of honour and faith, fate and acceptance. They loyally served the State of Israel, so much so that when Saleh died the news of his death caused a commotion in the media and Israeli journalists ran to our home in search of the saddest and most poignant headline.
I remember one of the questions my father was asked: “What do you want to say to the Lebanese family whose son blew himself up and killed Saleh?”
And my father’s answer was: “I want to offer my condolences. Their son did not know Saleh personally and did not intend to kill Saleh in particular. This is war and we are paying the price.”
I think that is not what the journalists expected to hear, and I hope that on their way home they at least enjoyed the scenery and the other things that Beit Jann and the Galilee in general have to offer to visitors.
As for me, when I heard the remark, “I do not understand how your brother, who is an Arab, could raise a gun against his Arab brothers and kill them,” I felt sadness fill me, I felt pressure, I choked up and I could not answer, I cried, I was offended, nervous and angry. In the end I answered that I was sure my brothers never did such a thing in their lives.
But quite soon I asked myself the same question … how, really?
I returned from Berlin, and of course it is impossible not to mention the delays at the airports that were caused by my beautiful name. Despite the hardship, for the most part those who delayed me pronounced my name exactly as I pronounce it.
I understood that in order to know, I have to rely only on myself, not on what they taught me in school; that I cannot rely on content and messages that stem from political interests, or on what I heard in my society that let its eyes be closed in comfortable conditions, or who knows, maybe it is my society that chooses to close its own eyes?
After going from book to book, reading newspapers and archives of documents from 1948 to the present, I managed, at least in my own eyes, to get out of the abyss.
I am a Palestinian Arab, my brothers are victims of the realization of the Zionist dream.
I did not come here to express a political opinion. Politics do not preoccupy me or interest me.
I am talking about the truth that people do not see or want to see, the truth that we are not allowed to see. I am talking about reality.
The right of every soul to a sense of belonging and even to choose its belonging, and along with that to receive the values of its culture and its history as they are and not to be fed teachings that are aimed at creating a new generation of ignorant people, who do not recognize their reality or their history, and are subject to the perceptions of reality as it is seen by those who rule over them.
For years now I have not participated in the Memorial Days that are conducted in the village. The ceremonies are so nicely planned, there is time to talk, then to shoot, then time for prayer, then more shooting, and time is also allocated for crying. In recent years I would only go to visit the graves of my brothers so that my parents would not think that another child was missing (by the way, among the Druze it is forbidden to visit graves, but on Israeli Memorial Day we do visit them!!!).
And so I vacillated whether to come or not this evening and I was also hesitating, what language I should speak: Arabic? Hebrew?!
In the end, despite the intense pain and the anger that is hard to deal with, I did not let those factors or any external factors influence my faith and my love of life and peace between human beings.
I am here to strengthen the human objective of this evening.
To remember every soul that has passed from this world as a victim of violence in all its varieties.
To recall that there are people who love life and want to live in a peaceful world, who do not want to see and hear about more victims and violence, about the conquest of more lands or about the subjugation of the human spirit.
Translated from Hebrew for Occupation Magazine by George Malent
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