Samah Salaime was recently interviewed (in Hebrew) for the Shatil podcast SHIFT. The full podcast is on the SHIFT site.
The following is a quote from the podcast:
I think all these gender-based murders get tossed into cultural garbage cans...So they can say Russian women get murdered because of the alcohol, Mizrachi Jewish ones because of crime and drugs...When and where are we going to finish doing this? This catalog of backgrounds for murdering women needs to stop...
(Why are more women murdered in the Arab sector?) There is negligence, and there is indifference, and there is willful neglect and there is a large trade in illegal weapons. And we see an increase in the murder of both Arab women and Arab men in places where there is also organized crime and illegal weapons. Confiscating those weapons and battling the trade in illegal weapons is the job of the police...
We saw that 23 female Knesset members from the coalition voted against the committee recommendations on the subject of femicide in Israel -- not about Arab women, about killing Israeli women in general. The reality that brought us in 2018 to demonstrate in Kikar Rabin was the murder of 26 women, half of them Arab, half Jewish; a 13-year-old girl was murdered after her mother's ex tried to rape her. You hold a dialog about cooperation (to find common ground with Jewish feminists) when the body of a 16-year-old girl is found interred in a trash can in the village of Jos, in the North. You protest. You hold your breath and put aside your differences. Halas! This is SOS!..
They need to understand ... culturally that it is not that Arabs murder because there are men who own weapons. that they organized it to a hire a hit man who does it. The source of the murder and the source of the arms in Arab society is Israeli society. We don't have gun factories; we barely make hummus, so you can't blame us for making the weapons. The weapons are made in Israel and smuggled back in, while the police look the other way...
Five years from now, I want us to march in protest and I want to see dozens and hundreds of Palestinian men and women protesting what happens in Israeli society, and the opposite, I want to see a decrease in the murder rate and in violence against women, and I want to see everyone who murders a women in Israel brought to justice. That we will take care, ourselves, of the victims who are still living, mothers and sisters, and fathers of murdered women who do not know who murdered them. This coping with grief... we forget those who are left behind.... I want to see all women, Arab, Jewish, refugee -- all of us living in a place in which we can take on responsibility and have full freedom of choice... That is my struggle...
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