SIX DAYS WAR (1967)
SIX DAYS WAR (1967) by Esther Eiliam
On the 8th of March that year, my husband had a regular reserve service in the army for three weeks. Again he was taken on the 17th of May (I remember these dates – it must have been an important year for me). In his location from Sinai he asks me to move to his parents in Magdiel (near Kfar-Saba), because Tel-Aviv is not safe. His parents live very close to the eastern border, and his father makes a trench in the courtyard all day. At night we hear the siren and go into the trench. My year old child is in my arms. We hear bombs that fall not far away and see lights.
It is the battle on Kalkilia, in the West Bank (till then under Jordanian occupation; Jordan attacked Israel then). Thirty years after that, I come to Kalkilia as a part of the Israeli community of Re-Evaluation Co-Counseling, to celebrate the accomplishment of one year of a Palestinian group in Kalkilia. In the workshop, Jewish and Palestinian women and men are listening to each other’s stories, holding hands and letting feelings out by crying, shaking, etc.
Since the second Intifada, eight years ago, I have no connection with Kalkilia’s people.
Esther Eiliam one of the founding mothers of the feminist movement in Israel in the early 70’s
