Josefa Pick: Israeli Peace Activist

By Richard H. Curtiss

At first glance, Josefa Pick seems to be the kind of visiting Israeli one might expect to encounter at a Hadassah local chapter meeting. In North America to attend a meeting of fellow librarians from around the world, she has accepted an additional invitation to speak to a group interested in her country.

The meeting at which she spoke was the eighth United Nations North American Regional Non-Governmental Organizations Symposium on the Question of Palestine, held in Montreal in late June. Participants were highly critical of Yitzhak Shamir's unwillingness to trade land for peace.

Ms. Pick pleased the audience by listing a large number of Israeli peace organizations also critical of Shamir's Likud government. She belongs to four of them.

She speaks, nevertheless, only for herself and a minority of Israelis like her. Not even her family agrees with her. Once divorced and once widowed, she lives now with her mother, who does not share her peace activism. Her only sister supports a right-wing party in Israel. Her only brother, with whom she stayed in Montreal, asked specifically that his name not be used, since his fellow Israeli Canadians might describe Josefa Pick as a " self-hating Jew."

She shrugs off the term. Just as it is used to silence Jewish critics of Israeli policies in North America, it is used in Israel to silence critics of Zionism.

If "non-Zionist Israeli" seems a contradiction in terms to non-Israelis, it is not to this 57-year-old daughter of a Russian immigrant lawyer. It was not she, but her parents, young Russian socialists, who chose to immigrate to Palestine.

At the time, Jews were a minority among the Palestinian Arabs. Her mother arrived speaking Yiddish, and soon spoke Arabic just as easily. Her uncle was a guard throughout his life over moshav fields and orchards. (Moshav farmers cultivate their individually owned lands cooperatively. Members of a kibbutz own and cultivate their lands collectively.) To show that life in Israel was never ideal, Pick quotes her uncle's unusual boast that, in a lifetime as a guard, he "never killed an Arab."

Josefa Pick's own introduction to politics as a young student was via the "Canaanite" movement, which accepted the presence of both Arabs and Jews in Palestine and sought "one state" in which all would enjoy the same rights. She has never abandoned the belief that Jews and Arabs can live peacefully, as equals, in Palestine.

"We waste too much energy on borders, she complains. "In the meantime, both the Arabs and the Israelis suffer too much. We could live a very nice life together. We have so much to give each other. Instead of modernizing, however, we are going backward. We feel that socialism has failed. What remains is only nationalism.

"Now the new Jewish nation is based on the evil of confiscating Arab land, a big army, atomic research, militarism and fascism. A lot of people are leaving Israel. We see little chance for change.

"It is not the sort of thing you expect to hear from visiting Israelis, yet there is little in Josefa Pick's background to distinguish her from other Israeli-born "Sabras" of European ethnicity and socialist orientation.

When she finished secondary school, she studied law. At age 22 she went with her husband (the son of immigrants to the US from Poland) to a kibbutz, where she spent the next 16 years. Increasingly, however, she found that the orientation of the kibbutz movement was at odds with her own belief in Jewish and Arab egalitarianism.

She named her first daughter, now 32 years old and a mother herself, Sarah. It is the name of the wife of the patriarch Abraham through whom Jews trace their descent from Abraham. She named her second daughter, now 30 years old and a Jewish fundamentalist mother of three, Hagar, after the woman through whom Arabs trace their own Abrahamic descent.

Kibbutzim on Confiscated Land

Josefa Pick concluded that "the socialism of the kibbutz was hypocrisy" because "we were sitting on confiscated land. " It was, she maintains, "a trick" of David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, to involve the kibbutzniks in the contradictions of Zionism as it evolved under his leadership.

Frustrated also at the fact that "although I was a lawyer, my kibbutz didn't let me work in my profession, " she left the kibbutz at age 38. While taking a course in librarianship at Tel Aviv University, she accepted a "temporary position" in the university's law library, which she has held ever since.

Divorced by this time, she found that the position left her more time for her children and, as they grew up, to pursue her political interests. Her work with the "Canaanite" and similar movements had enabled her, she said, to stop seeing Arabs as "laborers, gardeners, handymen and janitors" and instead see them as "poets, journalists and teachers. " She decided, however, that it was not enough to build friendly personal relations because "there is no ideology behind it that says we are all equal."

"I began to see the international context, Pick explains. "Until 1966 the Arab population [of Israel within the Green Line] was under [an Israeli] military regime. Their land was confiscated, but they were not given permission to travel to seek work.

"If our government has good intentions, she reasoned, "why doesn't it give the Arabs permission to have factories?"

Josefa Pick remarried and, although her German-born husband shared many of her leftist ideas, "he asked me not to be so active politically. " He feared her peace activism might jeopardize his position with Israeli air force intelligence.

"So I wasn't so active politically," she says. "This illustrates how a lot of people are bought. You can be fired, or denied what you want, because of your views."

Instead she studied art history and also the Talmud. However, when her husband died, five years after their marriage, she resumed her political interests.

She had been much attracted to the "Semitic movement" of Uri Avneri, which involved many of the "Canaanite" and the socialistic ideas she found attractive. Now she became involved in Women for Political Prisoners, an Israeli organization dedicated to helping activists in Israeli jails.

"I've always felt I wasn't doing enough," she explains. "Now I can bring a doctor for a political prisoner. We go to court for diem. We collect money for them. When they see us at the prison, some of the Israeli guards are ashamed and they become nicer to the prisoners. I don't believe in miracles, but this kind of work gives me hope."

The work is not popular, however, with some Israeli prison guards. Once she was searched by guards who had let her pass unmolested on previous occasions. Finding a penknife in her purse, they charged her with "smuggling weapons " into the prison. She was freed when fellow members of her organization went to the press.

Perhaps reflecting the deep ambivalance in her less outspoken countrymen, Josefa Pick is alternately optimistic and pessimistic about the future of Israel.

"There are a lot more people who are sympathetic to the peace movement than those, like me, who can be active in it," she maintains. "It is not logical that we shall always fight wars. The government is building all of our future on a state of permanent war. But there are some people who like it—the tension, the macho spirit. When there is always tension, everyone is united."

Escaping the Cycle of Wars

There are other Israelis, however, who are leaving to escape the cycle of wars. Many of Ashkanazi (European) descent like herself, have connections in the West that make it easy for them to emigrate. This is particularly true, she says, of the children of American immigrants to Israel. A close friend of hers, whose parents are British, has decided to leave because she has concluded that "now this is a racist state."

The desire to leave also includes Sephardic Jews from Middle Eastern countries, Pick notes, many of whom were reluctant immigrants to Israel in the first place. She expects many of the newly-arrived Soviet Jews also will wish to leave. It will be difficult for them to get permission to do so, however, without paying back the Israeli government subsidies that enable them during their first year in Israel to learn Hebrew and obtain housing before looking for a job.

Asked her opinion of generous American aid, which enables the Shamir government to continue in the occupied territories the policies she criticizes, Pick seems uncertain.

"I don't want my lifestyle to change," She confesses. As she continues, however, the frankness about what is needed for peace between Israel and its neighbors returns.

"The aid makes life very easy for us. But I know it's unfair. One day, however, then the US does not give us so much, we will be forced to make a change."

Richard Curtiss, a retired US foreign service officer, is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.