Combatants for Peace to Receive Peace Abbey's Courage of Conscience Award
September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows Nominated Palestinian and Israeli Former Fighters Who Set Aside Revenge
San Francisco, CA, January 31, 2008 - Combatants for Peace (C4P) is being awarded the Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Award, in response to nomination by Andrea LeBlanc of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows. Founding members of C4P, Bassam Aramin and Elik Elhanan, are speaking throughout the San Francisco Bay Area to ask U.S. citizens help to press the Israeli government to reopen the case of Mr. Aramin's daughter and build a playground at her school in her memory.
The Courage of Conscience Award is given to groups and individuals who have made an outstanding commitment to peace and social justice in the world. Past recipients include Mother Theresa, the Dalai Llama, Thich Nhat Hanh, Maya Angelou, Muhammad Ali, Rosa Parks, Howard Zinn, and peace groups, including Military Families Speak Out, September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, and Codepink.
"There are many in the world who have suffered unbearable loss and injustice and who, believing only in us vs. them, have therefore sought redress and revenge," said Andrea LeBlanc, whose husband, Robert LeBlanc was killed on the second plane flown into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. "But others have looked squarely at the consequences of their own participation in this ongoing tragedy and have come to abhor violence, putting down their weapons to meet their enemy with a willingness to listen and to begin to understand the other. It is a painful and terrifying journey that requires amazing courage and strength, patience and trust. This is the journey Combatants for Peace has made. Their voices are powerful and sane, and full of hope and wisdom."
Combatants for Peace is an organization of more than 550 former Israeli and Palestinian fighters who no longer see each other as enemies, struggle together to end to the Israeli Occupation, and seek justice and reconciliation through dialogue. Mr. Aramin's 10-year old daughter Abir was shot in the head by Israeli border police as she left school in Anata, near East Jerusalem just one year ago. Mr. Elhanan lost his young sister, Smadar, in a suicide bombing in Jerusalem in 1997. Despite their profound losses and history of violence, these men were part of a group who met in secret for a year to form C4P in 2005.
"Revenge would have been the easy choice when I lost my heart, my child," said Bassam Aramin, father of Abir and co-founder of Combatants for Peace. "Instead we are here to tell Abir's story, ask help to build Abir's Garden for her classmates at her school to give them a safe place to play and to heal, and prove to our societies and the world that it is possible to break the cycle of violence through justice."
According to the Israeli Human Rights group B'Tselem, 864 Palestinian children have been killed since 2000 and not one case has been brought to justice. Abir's case was dismissed by the Israeli Courts supposedly for lack of evidence despite numerous eye witnesses and an independent autopsy. An appeal is pending, with the court obligated to reply in March.