“This Arab Activist in Israel Isn’t Afraid to Criticize Both Netanyahu and Hamas”

Yuval Noah Harari recently pressed journalists to get representative voices from Israel’s Arab citizenry into mainstream discourse. There may be risks in promoting the notion that Israel is a relatively open society since the country has two tiers of citizenship. Yet it’s also true that 20 percent of Israel’s population is Arab. They may be the minority that can save Israel from itself, as Black people redeemed American democracy in the 50s and 60s by forcing the country to end segregation.

Your editor means to keep responding to Harari’s Call to center Palestinian voices, with a little help this time around from “Haaretz,” where the following piece was published earlier this month …

Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Leadership in Turbulent Times sits on a bookshelf in Sokina Taoon’s home in northern Israel. The book tells of four U.S. presidents who were able to overcome seemingly hopeless situations in life and go on to achieve their goals. “I started reading it two months ago,” says Taoon as she leafs through it. “I find comfort in books and answers to my questions.”

For the past five years, Taoon has been a social activist promoting Jewish-Arab partnership across Israel and also a community organizer at Hand in Hand: Center for Jewish-Arab Education in Israel and its bilingual Galilee school.

After the October 7 massacre, she also found herself facing a new reality. “My job now is far more significant – to sow seeds of humanity and to present myself as a person beyond being an Arab or Palestinian woman.”

She recalls the moment in November 2023 when she read a Facebook post about the shivah (Jewish mourning period) for Arik Peretz and his wheelchair-using daughter Ruth, who were both murdered at the Nova Music Festival on October 7.

“I was really sad when I read about the father who only wanted to make his daughter happy,” she says in tears. “The post said there were very few people at the shivah. I contacted a friend and asked him to explain to me what to do at a Jewish shivah. I wanted to go and console them.

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Sokina Taoon. “My father always whispered to me: ‘You’re a strong woman.” Credit: Rami Shllush

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“I went and prepared myself for the possibility that they might tell me ‘Go home’ or yell at me. There were about 10 people there. I asked to meet with the mother. I told her: ‘I didn’t choose to be an Arab, a Bedouin or a woman, but I do choose to be a human being. I’m very proud of my roots, but I’m prouder to be a person and to be with you at this difficult time.’ We hugged and cried a lot. It was a very powerful encounter.”

Taoon highlights the story in order to illustrate what Jewish-Arab partnership means to her after October 7, and how she herself is trying to carve out a new path. In the first episode of documentary series “Her War,” which is airing now on Israel’s Arabic-language Makan channel, the program charts her ways of coping during the current war.

A unique voice

The series, directed by Ronen Zaretsky and Yael Kipper, includes another two episodes that also amplify the voices of women from the Arab community. Taoon’s story is unique, though, because she represents both ends – the Israeli and the Palestinian.

She’s a 41-year-old mother of three, divorced, living in the village of Kaukab Abu al-Hija. “It wasn’t easy for me to shoot the episode because of the exposure,” she admits. “I carry the pain of others, am out in the field, accompanying and listening, and that’s not an easy thing. My voice in the episode reflects that of an Arab woman who is crying about her own society and is afraid to express herself – yet at the same time I visit the families of hostages” being held in Gaza.

In the first scene, Taoon meets with Idit Ohel, the mother of Alon Ohel. He was abducted from the Nova Music Festival at Re’im and is still being held hostage in Gaza.

Idit Ohel, center, the mother of Israeli-Serbian citizen Alon Ohel, holding a portrait of her captive son during a press conference by Israel and Serbia's presidents in Belgrade last month.
Idit Ohel, center, the mother of Israeli-Serbian citizen Alon Ohel, holding a portrait of her captive son during a press conference by Israel and Serbia’s presidents in Belgrade last month. Credit: Oliver Bunic/AFP

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The two women’s conversation feels like a tightrope being delicately traversed. They touch on the wounds left by the war while, in the background, you hear the sounds of a piano being played by Alon in a video clip. The pain is ever-present, but mixed with great compassion between two mothers who understand each other.

“After the meeting, I didn’t sleep that night. I cried,” Taoon recounts. “But I also learned a lesson from her and her belief that her son will return. I was surprised by her strength as a mother. On the other hand, it’s hard to see just how much uncertainty she contends with. As a Palestinian Arab, my pain is dual. But it’s impossible to divide humanness into parts. It’s impossible to identify with the pain of your own people and not to identify with the other side over what happened on October 7. You cannot express identification with one side and hesitate when it happens on the other. That’s not being human.”

What’s changed most about you since October 7?

“I’d never attended a shivah with Jews I didn’t know. I didn’t think that would ever happen. After October 7, as someone who favors change and partnership, I feel I have a responsibility. You can’t say ‘I want change,’ but then just sip coffee at home, or not to go to demonstrations and only write a social media post. We have a responsibility as human beings.”

And what do you feel as an Arab woman?

“There were moments when I was furious, and I can understand the anger that exists in Arab society due to the injustice. Is one person’s life more precious than another’s? A [Jewish] friend told me: ‘I want us to destroy Gaza.’ By what right? There’s a huge trust issue between people after October 7 – especially when they don’t understand that there are also innocent people. There are people for whom, as far as they’re concerned, all of Gaza is Hamas – but that’s not true. There are women, children and older people who want to live and want peace.

“I can understand that this is a serious trauma. But don’t we as an Arab society have our own traumas? We went through the Nakba and we’ve experienced difficult events like October 2000 [when the Israeli police shot dead 13 unarmed Arabs], and our traumas have never been in the spotlight. I can understand the collective pain after October 7, but it’s impossible to compete over who suffers more pain or who is more of a victim. If we remain with this ‘eye for an eye’ mind-set, we’ll all remain blind. And who will fix it?”

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A scene from “Her Wars.” Credit: Ronen Zaretsky

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One can see the sadness in your eyes. You’re crying even now.

“Many times there is physical and emotional exhaustion. There are moments when I say I can’t take it anymore, but that only lasts for three or four hours. And then I ask myself: If I don’t do it, who will? Thirty years from now, my children will ask what I did for our community – and the community also means home, the small community. You see that things are headed in a bad direction.”

“You stop being afraid”

The more one delves into Taoon’s life story, the more her personal complexity is revealed. She grew up in the village of Al-Dahara, in a Bedouin tribe called Hujeirat in the Galilee area, the 16th of 17 children. Most of the tribe eventual settled in the villages of Bir al-Maksur and Shefa-Amr, but a few, like her family, passed up the comfortable communities and continued to live among the cliffs of the Yodfat range.

“I was a curious child and asked lots of questions: Why are we living here? Why do they have electricity and we don’t? Why do I study by the light of an oil lamp? Why are the roads over there lit up?” she recalls. “We didn’t have a bathroom. As a child, I said at night before going to sleep: ‘I hope I don’t need the bathroom at night,’ in order not to go outside because there was nowhere to go. We had a tent made of cloth where my father hosted guests. In the winter he covered it with tarpaulins so water wouldn’t leak in. We slept in a shed made of sheets of aluminum.”

At the age of 18, she married and went on to have three children, but got divorced after 13 years. When she talks about the violence she experienced in her marriage, she pauses for a moment, asks “to take a deep breath” and wells up.

“I lived with an abusive and toxic man who cut me off from the outside world,” she says. “When someone sees death before their eyes more than once, I think they stop being afraid. I’m connected to God, and I have deep faith that everything that happens is makhtub [divinely ordained].”

“I left a large house for a rented house with no job, no education, three children, nothing. Until the age of 30, I didn’t know a word of Hebrew – but I managed to overcome everything,” she adds. After her divorce, she studied for a bachelor’s degree in political science, going on to obtain a master’s degree in public policy at the University of Haifa.

When Taoon is asked why partnership with Jews is so important to her, she returns to her childhood and her father, Mahmoud.

“I learned the most important thing from him – to treat everyone as a human being,” she says. “I didn’t grow up in a home where people were categorized. ‘That’s a Jew, that’s an Arab’ wasn’t part of our language. There was no anger toward Jews. My grandmother worked in Yodfat in agriculture, and they considered her an independent woman and treated her with respect.

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Sokina Taoon in the documentary series “Her War.”Credit: Ronen Zaretsky

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“My father always told me: ‘It’s not the Jews’ problem that we don’t have electricity – it’s politics. If we have regular electricity, that would mean we’re staying. As far as they [the political leaders] are concerned, it’s like being a thorn in their side. They made us many offers to leave, but my father refused and said: ‘I’m only leaving the village in a coffin.’ He held on to his place until he passed away two years ago, aged 80.”

It’s impossible not to notice the admiration and special bond between the daughter and her father, whom she mentions several times during the interview. “He supported me a lot, even when I got divorced,” Taoon says. “My mother didn’t speak to me for three and a half years because of that, but he always whispered to me: ‘You’re a strong woman.'”

From a tender age, she experienced firsthand what it means to be invisible and the need to fight for her rights. It’s no surprise, then, that she’s determined to give a voice to Arab women, especially after October 7. In the episode, she meets women who have suffered political persecution: some were unfairly arrested due to social media posts they made, while others were fired from their place of work without being able to express their own views.

Over the past year, it’s been claimed that Arabs are remaining silent and aren’t condemning the events of October 7.

“I take issue with that statement. Who are you to doubt my humanity? I don’t agree with the murder of innocent people, whether they’re Jews or any other person. But no one sees our pain, the things we experience. The Arabs live in duality and in ongoing traumas – the tragedy of the population in Gaza, the memory of the Nakba that still echoes to the present period. Fears overcome us. We have no support. If I lose my job, who will take care of me?

“It’s important to remember that Arab society is in a battle of survival to continue to live, to make a living. The Arab citizen lives day to day. Many people are asking: What will happen to us now? Will they expel us? When there’s no recognition, justice and healing, how can two peoples live together?”

In the episode, you say into the megaphone at one of the demonstrations: “Not Bibi, not Hamas, we’re sick of the extremists.” You need courage as an Arab woman to say that in public.

“If I had a husband, he wouldn’t accept my activism – because an Arab woman is expected to be committed to the home, the family and work. I’m opposed to extremism, to murder, to all these things that don’t bring solutions. Look where the fascist politics have brought us. And Hamas does extreme, unacceptable things against the civilian population in Gaza, which is suffering. I say that out loud, and some people try to silence me because they aren’t interested in partnership. I always hear statements like ‘Aren’t you tired of it?’ ‘Don’t you want to give up?'”

And what’s your response?

“What’s the solution if not to promote a shared dialogue? The aim is to express my position together with my Jewish partners. This wouldn’t happen without them: we see what happens at Arab-only protests. When there are Jewish partners, that enables me to bring my true self and my pain, and also to shape an equitable and just reality for everyone.

“This very encounter between Arabs and Jews is building a language that is almost extinct. If we don’t maintain the building of trust between us, of a safe and open space – what’s left?”