Were you part of that movement originally?

The whole idea was to teach the Jewish people that there is more than one way of interpreting the Holy text and that it is wrong to say that we are commanded to just inherit the land, and that's it. I went to the meetings [....] but I also wanted to do something with my life, not just talk. You see, when you're brought up in a Zionist community, there is a term called hagshama [fulfillment]: the realization of your ideals, the application of your ideals, you have to do something on the ground. So I thought that the thing to do was to develop a different line in Zionist practice, praxis Leah Shakdiel 2 Zionism Religion Civil Society Personal Story

Were you part of that movement originally?

I don't think I was really part of the movement, but I did participate in the first [settler] march to Sebastia. It was sort of a popular march and I was very impressed with the idealism. It was certainly better than the middle class idea that you have to get married and have a nice home. I was very impressed, but it bothered me that they were sort of putting aside all the other ideals, and it also bothered me that they were talking about God and the Land as if there were no other people there, as if the Arab issue, the Palestinian issue, did not exist. Those people did not exist; rather, they existed but they didn't matter. The landscape was biblical, the land was ours, and everything was very romantic. That bothered me. In Jerusalem in the mid-70s I started going to meetings of religious intellectuals who were talking about peace. Later I realized that it was the very beginning of the coagulation of that group, which was called Oz V'Shalom, the Religious Peace Movement. The whole idea was to teach the Jewish people that there is more than one way of interpreting the Holy text and that it is wrong to say that we are commanded to just inherit the land, and that's it. I went to the meetings. It was very stimulating, literature was disseminated, important people were speaking, and there were petitions and demonstrations and things like that but I also wanted to do something with my life, not just talk. You see, when you're brought up in a Zionist community, there is a term called hagshama [fulfillment]: the realization of your ideals, the application of your ideals, you have to do something on the ground. So I thought that the thing to do was to develop a different line in Zionist practice, praxis, which was going to development towns, because of the social gaps. I didn't want to go alone; through the religious peace movement I found a very small group of people who were interested in settling in the Negev, inside the Green Line. We ended up going to a development town of Yerucham. The decision to go and live there was the most important statement I ever made with my life. Everything else developed from there. My involvement in politics, in social action, in social justice issues, in peace, human rights, in feminism, everything developed from that.