Ruchama Marton. “If I were a man they wouldn’t describe me as ’difficult’ – only a woman can be difficult.”Credit: Avishag Shaar-Yashuv

Ruchama Marton was 19 years old, doing her compulsory army service in the 54^th Battalion of the Givati Brigade, when she saw Israeli soldiers murdering Egyptian prisoners of war. It was 1956, the Sinai War was raging between Israel and Egypt, and Marton – at that time, still Ruchama Shmuelevitch – was deployed along the Ismailia route, on the way to Suez.

The Egyptians, who had descended from the dunes barefoot and thirsty, she recounts, were killed by reservists from the battalion. Marton was struck dumb by the horror of the act. She fell ill and was unable to eat or sleep. Finally she was sent home on “sick leave,” hitchhiking to the center of the country. Back home, no one wanted to hear what she wanted to describe; she was left to cope with a mental crisis on her own. In the end, the world she had believed in had collapsed, and the Zionism she had been raised on lost its meaning. She never believed in it again. Since then she has also spoken out angrily about some of the ideals underlying the creation of the Jewish state, such as “the justness” of its path or the boast about having “the most moral army in the world.”

“For the Zionist left, the path followed by the State of Israel from its inception is just – but not in my opinion,” she asserts. "It is not just, and that is why they don’t like me. I don’t like them, either; it’s mutual. It’s essential to see how this path started, where it has led and where it is taking us.

“The hard core of Zionism, as I understand it,” she continues, during a recent interview in her Tel Aviv home, “is a land without Arabs, and that is what is in the offing now. To call that ’justness of the path’? Please, just say that this is your path – but they can’t, because this is ’the most moral army in the world’ and other clichés, which for them are not clichés. I know good people who believe this. ’The most moral army’ is another concept popular among ’good Israelis.’ You don’t know whether to cry or to laugh when you hear it.”

When you say, “I do not believe in the justness of our path,” for many Israelis you are destroying the basic tenet of their existence and everything they see as good about that existence.

"I’ve met soldiers who served around the same time I did, and younger ones as well. To confront the truth was heartbreaking for them. They could not abide the fact that there are abusive officers. I don’t want to break their heart, but I don’t want to and cannot agree with them. What do we do? I don’t know. I am doomed to anger and isolation.

"In the past two-three years, even before the war [in Gaza], I broke off relations with a great many people – and some broke off them off with me. We could not in any way reach a political understanding, because I knew that there were officers in the Israel Defense Forces who were monsters. Years ago, too, no one talked to us. People were maybe more polite and didn’t tell us that we were ’crazy,’ ’dumb’ or ’traitors,’ but they saw to it that we were shunted aside, silenced, and that’s true to this moment.

“The word ’peace’ no longer exists. ’Peace’ is not something to aspire to anymore. We only want total victory, which is tantamount to total defeat.”

Egyptian POWs in Sinai, in the 1950s. Marton was struck dumb when she saw some of her IDF comrades-in-arms at the time murdering such prisoners.Credit: Yad Ben Zvi/Mordecai Bar-On collection/National Library of Israel

Winning is impossible?

“You can’t truly win, because that means that you are truly a murderer, and then what happens to you? What do you want to leave behind? What sort of society? And this is on top of the practical aspect – that in 2025 it’s impossible to murder more than two million people. Where will what we are doing lead to? Total victory it certainly won’t be.”

When we spoke a second time, toward the end of the Israel-Iran war, and before the cease-fire was declared, Marton was even more worried. “This is Israel’s colossal stupidity: to quarrel, to bomb, to try to annihilate Iran ... What did we achieve? Maybe what the Israeli government wants: continuation of the sort of inter-state violence that serves it. And then it will be possible to do with Gaza and the West Bank what they want, and to ignore the hostages. And our prime minister – his voters will look on him as a savior.”

After decades of confrontations, struggles and achievements, while now soul-searching at the respectable age of 88, Dr. Marton – a psychiatrist and peace activist – has very few reasons to feel satisfied. In an increasingly extremist right-wing country, her views, which were always considered radical, have become anathema to some. The disaster she has warned about for decades has come to pass, and she has lost the wars she waged most of her life. The extremist reality and its purveyors have been victorious, and what remains is a feeling helplessness.

The upshot is that Marton, who founded the Israeli branch of the Physicians for Human Rights organization, remains, “at the age of almost 90, incomparably isolated as I have never been before.”

The hard core of Zionism, as I understand it, is a land without Arabs. To call that ’justness of the path’? Please, just say that this is your path – but they can’t, because this is ’the most moral army in the world’ and other clichés.

Ruchama Marton

She has channeled her frustration into a new autobiography titled “A Difficult Woman” (in Hebrew), a title that is a sort of private joke and an attempt at appropriating the term that has been hurled at her over the years. In the book Marton recounts her childhood and adolescence, her battles in the realm of higher education and how she raised two children on her own – but mostly she talks about social initiatives she has participated in or spearheaded.

A case in point is the PHR nonprofit and her insistence on preserving its ideological underpinnings, and in particular the campaign she has led against the use of torture in Israel. She also describes internal wars within the left, in which men tried to leverage her accomplishments and erase her efforts. Throughout the passionately written book, the feeling arises that despite her age and the years that have passed, she has not found closure.

“The account hasn’t been settled from my point of view, and there’s still anger,” she says. “It’s not as hot as it was back then and it’s no longer so fresh.”

Maybe we can take comfort in the fact that more and more people agree that this is an especially terrible time for Israel?

“Yes, but they don’t really grasp it. People feel that things are bad – I agree, but they aren’t used to thinking deeply, and who knows how long it will take until they do that?”

As the title of her book suggests, Marton usually does not do things in a particularly agreeable manner. Both in her writing and in life in general, she expresses herself clearly and sometimes sharply, hating the people she hates with passion and lacking patience for those who don’t readily understand what she is trying to say. As she mentions in the book, she has been told by friends and activists on the left: “You don’t have compassion and you are not sharing in the pain and sorrow of many in the nation.”

But what has always motivated her to act, and later to pursue certain avenues of research in her field, is a deep feeling of shame when confronting the misery of others. Indeed, in the context of studies she has conducted on health issues affecting Palestinians under occupation and other subjects, she has cited the ancient Greek term aidos, which constitutes a sort of confluence between shame, reverence and modesty. “Anyone who feels that searing, painful emotion while facing the suffering and misery of the Other (even it one has is no actual connection to it), will do and act as much as they are able to, to reduce, if not to eliminate, the cause/reason for that suffering and misery,” she writes.

Along with a like-minded group of Israeli and Palestinian colleagues, she founded PHR in the winter of 1988, shortly after the start of the first intifada and following a visit to Gaza, which was then “a city dominated by children whose lips were blue with cold,” as she writes in her book.

Marton, now the organization’s honorary president, has insisted that the thrust of the group’s activities must always be to preserve human rights – not to make do solely with providing medical care in troubled areas. There must be, in her view, a clear political identity at play, which sees the Israeli occupation in the territories as a violation of human rights and accordingly works against it – by collecting information and publishing reports, petitioning the courts, holding demonstrations and so on.

She has received many awards for her work at PHR, including the Emil Grunzweig Human Rights Award, presented by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, in 1999; the Jonathan Mann Award for Global Health and Human Rights, from the Gates Foundation, in 2002; the Right Livelihood Award (also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize), in 2010; and the Yeshayahu Leibowitz Award, from the Yesh Gvul organization, which supports conscientious objectors, in 2019.

During the current war, the plight of the health system has become more sensitive than ever: Israel is attacking hospitals and sometimes presenting evidence that they were used as a cover for Hamas command posts underneath them.

“The deliberate and evil attack on the Palestinian health system in Gaza and in the West Bank goes back a very long way. I’ve been dealing with it for 40 years. It is a tried-and-true, routine method that Israelis have used a great deal. During the first intifada, and also the second, Palestinian ambulances were not allowed to use their radio networks. Trucks were allowed, but not ambulances. In Shujaiyeh [a Gaza City neighborhood] and other places, someone would say that an ambulance was needed but it was impossible to get there.”

Dr. Hassan Matani of PHR, caring for a patient in the West Bank village of Burin, in 2010.Credit: RIGHT LIVELIHOOD / AFP

There are testimonies that the hospitals were shields for Hamas activity.

"I don’t know if that is true, but let’s say it is – that there were tunnels under hospitals. So what? A hospital has to be a sacred place, of protection from military attack everywhere in the world, including Gaza. Hospitals cannot be bombed, but not only did they bomb them, but soldiers entered the hospitals, the operating rooms, removing people they suspected in order to interrogate them – in other words for torture by the Shin Bet [security service]. Including delivery rooms and infants’ wards.

A hospital has to be sacred, protected from attacks. Not only did [Israel] bomb them, but soldiers entered Gaza hospitals, the operating rooms, removing people they suspected in order to interrogate them. What is that if not a deliberate, anti-human attack?

Ruchama Marton

“What is that if not a deliberate, anti-human attack – an unlawful act? I take as a given that different Palestinian ’means’ [of warfare] exist under the hospitals. That is not a reason to bomb a hospital and to penetrate it with tear gas and weapons.”

Mainstream Israeli medical personnel aren’t speaking out against this.

“There’s nothing surprising in that. The Israel Medical Association never spoke out against crude, blatant violations of human and civil rights in the realm of medicine involving Israel and the Palestinians. During the years I fought against torture, the association didn’t issue a single tiny tweet against it – on the contrary.”

Indeed, Marton asserts, many physicians in Israel “lack critical thinking, and the moment they hear the word ’security’ they all salute. Yes-men, all of them alike.”

The site of an Israeli army air strike on the European hospital in Khan Younis in Gaza in May.Credit: Mariam Dagga,AP

 Oslo excised

Marton’s ex-husband, Michael Marton, was in the same grade in high school with her in Tel Aviv. They separated when their children were very young. Afterward she was in a lengthy relationship with a film director, Prof. Yehuda (Judd) Ne’eman, and co-produced his 1983 movie, “Magash Hakesef” (“Fellow Travelers”), about the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

Asked how she’s feeling at her age, Marton usually replies with an evasive “wonderful” (“That heads off health-related questions, which I really don’t like”), but her views about the country’s present situation become clear immediately during our first interview, even before the attack on Iran, when she said, “Everything is shit now, what is there to say? Absolutely awful – but I would like to amend that by saying that everything was always awful. I decided to leave out of the book everything I once wrote about Oslo, in order not to make it too long. But I read the 400 pages of the Oslo Accords; it was a document that was full of lies. I thought it was a divorce agreement and not [a reflection of] an alliance, and that it wouldn’t stand up.”

Everything was always awful. I read the 400 pages of the Oslo Accords; it was a document that was full of lies. I thought it was a divorce agreement and not [a reflection of] an alliance, and that it wouldn’t stand up.

Ruchama Marton

Why not?

"It was based on Jewish-Israeli supremacy and on twisting the Palestinians’ arm. That’s what happened. The national mood was euphoric, and the Zionist left really loved the Oslo Accords because of its lies. Completely by chance, on September 13, 1993 [when the initial agreement was signed on the White House Lawn], I was in Gaza. The streets went wild with joy.

"All the vehicles were overflowing with people, olive branches and candies. People went up to Israeli soldiers and hugged and kissed them. They danced in the streets; the joy was insane. They were certain that peace would come the next day. I don’t have to tell you how wrong they were.

"The blindness existed on both sides, except for one person: Dr. Haidar Abdel-Shafi, who was a physician and an intelligent, educated and pleasant person [a founder of the PLO, he became one of Yasser Arafat’s severest critics, and also established the Palestinian Red Crescent Society]. He said: ’They’re lying to us, it’s a trap.’

“He was a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council at the time and told people not to sign [the accords]. They replied: ’You are a party pooper’ – so he resigned and went home. I didn’t have the sense to retire from public activity.”

How has it come about that both societies have moved in such an extreme direction, toward messianism?

"If people had listened to Haidar or to me, it wouldn’t have happened, but no one listened; on the contrary, they shooed us away. When [Israeli soldier] Gilad Shalit had been in captivity for five years, I suggested, both in writing and in speeches, to take all the [Palestinian] political prisoners – they called them ’terrorists’ and all kinds of names – to give them all a hot shower, new clothes and a bag of candies for the children, to put them on decent buses and to send the Gazans to Gaza and the people from the West Bank to the West Bank, without asking for anything in exchange. ’Do that and it will be a game changer.’

“They looked at me like I was crazy, like I was some sentimental woman. The approach of force and more force and more force has led us to where we are today. Instead of trying a different direction, one that is not forceful, not militant. That applies to them and to us, but they are reacting to us. The real force is being wielded by Israel, with its Zionist Jews.”

On October 7, 1,200 people were murdered in one day. Who is using force on whom?

“That wasn’t the day history started, and if anyone makes that argument, I have simply nothing to say to them. Anyone who says that has no sociological or other understanding. There is no such thing. What preceded that day is an entire history, and it’s not by chance that what happened, happened.”

The whole history is complex, among other reasons, because of the dynamics of refusal [i.e., when Palestinians have rejected various proposed scenarios relating to statehood] – from 1948 onward, at every juncture.

"Only they refused – we never refused? If you divide the world into two parts and see only one part, it’s impossible to understand. Understanding from that perspective has to be wrong.

"In 1947-1948 the Palestinians refused to agree to partition [as stipulated by the UN resolution], but what form did that partition take? They received 22 percent of the totality they had. The British were against them and so was the rest of the world. They were never smart, but were we smart? What actually ’helped’ us, but ultimately impeded us, was a great deal of money and foreign arms, mainly American but not only, that gave us the possibility of wielding force and more force.

“Had it not been for the United States with its diplomatic, financial and arms aid, I don’t know what would have happened. So it’s impossible to say: They refused. They refused and we refused. We refused to talk to them because we didn’t want to demarcate borders, while unofficially we wanted to expand them.”

The approach of force and more force and more force has led us to where we are today. Instead of trying a different direction, one that is not forceful, not militant. That applies to them and to us, but they are reacting to us. The real force is being wielded by Israel.

Ruchama Marton

People will say the opposite: that they never gave up the idea of the right of full return, to all of Israel. The conflict can’t be solved because there is no possibility of a compromise.

"I was born in 1937, in Palestine, in Jerusalem. I was barely 10 years old when my family moved to Tel Aviv. Jerusalem consisted then of Arab sections and Jewish sections. People lived very well together. They didn’t hug and kiss each other, but there was no burning hatred. My grandmother, from Poland, was able to walk twice a week from the Geula neighborhood to the Western Wall, pray and return home. She went through many Palestinian neighborhoods, said hello to them politely, went back and forth.

"The late Avraham Shapira, the elder of the Shomrim [a veteran watchmen’s organization], said on his 80^th birthday, ’All my life I didn’t kill and I wasn’t killed,’ and that’s how the way to the Wall was. We didn’t kill and we weren’t killed. The whole of Jerusalem was like that. It was the same in Haifa, Safed and Acre. Not in Hebron, but people did live together and not so badly, because the worldview was different: It wasn’t one of force, but rather of an attempt to live together.

“That’s all over. Today we are racists when it comes to the Palestinian side and we have no interest in living with them. We are haters and are driven by the need to be strong; we aren’t willing to think that things could be different. Today, after so many years, almost 100 years drenched in blood, entrenched and filled with hate, I have no idea how to change things. I wish I had an answer, but I don’t.”

 Credit where it is due

Marton’s face is expressionless as she utters these trenchant words, almost without emotion. She is sunk into an armchair in her den, at home in the northern Tel Aviv neighborhood she has lived in for decades, which is now a major real estate magnet. Marton – a slightly built woman whose age doesn’t prevent her from hopping up the stairs in the house with two cups of coffee – is what’s typically referred to as “a character.”

In the rather jumbled den, with its loaded bookshelves, she smokes thin cigarettes that she rolls with French Gauloises tobacco. She blows the smoke out into the pretty garden, surrounded by fruit trees and raspberry bushes, of a house that looks like it was built in an Italian or Greek village and transported to Israel. The tranquility of the setting seems at odds with her temperament.

Asked whether she smokes a lot, she replies, “I don’t do anything a lot, besides being angry, maybe. I eat very little and when alcohol and I cross paths, it’s also just a little; cigarettes and me is lots of years but also a little. Everything is a little – only anger, a lot.”

That emotion also spurred her to write her book, even though she hadn’t envisioned it as an autobiography. A decade ago she felt that she and PHR were being harassed “from inside and outside.” Her colleagues at PHR at the time refused to create an archive, but Marton, who had been volunteering there since the very beginning, collected documents and papers describing its activities, and decided to commit them to writing in order to record her experiences there and vis-a-vis other left-wing Israeli figures.

“As such, after writing a lot about insults, anger, they did this and that to me, which is what came out even though that wasn’t my intention – I understood that I had good material here. I started to write from other perspectives as well, not just from anger. That’s how the book came to be.”

Marton’s long and acerbic settling of accounts with those around her is an important part of “A Difficult Woman,” and is largely connected with her self-definition as a feminist. She is a stickler for getting credit and castigates those who tried to downplay her role or to claim that she is driven by ego and is self-defeating when it comes to her goals.

“If I were a man they wouldn’t describe me as ’difficult’ – only a woman can be difficult,” she says. “A man is determined and knows what he wants.”

On the other hand, you quote people who said to you, in effect: What difference does it make if the goal is achieved, and why is the credit so important? I wonder if this isn’t an example of what’s often referred to as “the problem of the left” – the inability to unite for the sake of the big picture, to close ranks even if the person at the top isn’t to your liking.

“They kept hurling the ’Ruchama’s ego’ thing at me, but who is this someone to unite behind? Dedi Zucker definitely took my work and did something with it – [made] his reputation. [She writes that the former Meretz MK presented some of her work as his own.] Did he care about the Palestinians? He was for Dedi Zucker and nothing else.” (Zucker’s response: “All I can say is that Ruchama deserves a great deal of credit for what she has done. I don’t remember anything concrete like what she’s mentioned, but we’re talking about 35 years ago and I don’t remember. In any event, her credit is very significant.”)

Ruchama Marton. “Why should I cooperate in my own erasure?”Credit: Avishag Shaar-Yashuv

Why didn’t you go into politics yourself?

"I was busy. I worked for my living, I raised two children and I established the nonprofit as a volunteer. A woman of 40 or 50 needs to invest a lot in order to enter the Knesset. Hadash [Democratic Front for Peace and Equality, an Arab-Jewish party] suggested that I become an MK, and that was quite tempting. I was stupid and thought that they didn’t know how to wage real battles.

"There was no serving as ’a light unto the nations’ [in politics], no leader to follow. Give me the name of one person who’s we can look up to. There isn’t and there wasn’t. [Yitzhak] Rabin could have been that person, if he hadn’t been murdered. He was too dangerous and he was murdered because people discerned that very clearly. The person who saw that best was Bibi, and he’s also the one who murdered him – not the stupid boy who actually shot him. And Netanyahu raised a whole milieu of people who think like him.

“Maybe [head of the Democrats party] Yair Golan is someone people can unite behind. In any event, I don’t see anyone better than him. Rabin had both status and a position of power. He could have done things – and that’s what sealed his fate. Golan doesn’t have power and it’s doubtful he ever will.”

There was no leader to follow. Rabin could have been that person, if he hadn’t been murdered. He was too dangerous and he was murdered because people discerned that very clearly. The person who saw that best was Bibi.

You insisted that it be clear who did things and who should be credited.

"If someone appropriates my work as if it is their own, without my permission or agreement, I experience that as being harmful, a brutal form [of behavior] against me. It is theft or plunder and even more than that – it’s an erasure of me. It ignores, nullifies my existence. And then usually comes, albeit not always, the offensive statement that intends to offend: ’It’s your ego war.’ And the hurtful continuation: ’The main thing is that the work was done.’

“In other words, you’re not in the least important. They don’t take you into account. Why should I accept a remark like that? Why should I cooperate in my own erasure? Legitimize the underlying approach of domineering masculinity, which teaches me to nullify myself? You know, that is the most fundamental contradiction of my feminist worldview. My refusal to be erased, to have my name cancelled, to allow my thinking and activity to be ignored – all this will receive its punishment in additional insults like ’a difficult woman.’”

You write about that, and it’s clear that even from an early age you had an unsubdued sort of power, and were not interested in making a compromise just to avoid an argument.

"I love to argue. I mean, I suffer from it, I don’t like it, but I know it’s worth it. From my life experience I learned that if you don’t quarrel, brawl, do battle – you will not get anywhere. As a young woman, every achievement of yours is a result of a battle. Nothing is handed to you on a silver platter. You have to fight, so if possible it’s worth enjoying the war.

“I could easily have been this nice kid – that’s what was expected of me – but then I wouldn’t have been me. I would have surrendered to my mother and studied to be a nurse and not a doctor. I didn’t want that, and so the question was whether to give up on yourself or to fight. But there’s no question for me – obviously I fought. Women were raised to be timid. That is the leading approach. As Simone de Beauvoir wrote, you are not born a woman, you become a woman. I’ve fought sub-wars all my life, from primary school on.”

 ’Empty hands’

One of the battles most identified with Marton is the campaign against the use of torture, which she waged for years. Marton, one of the founders of the Public Committee against Torture in Israel, in 1990, writes about the public struggle for recognition of the fact that the Shin Bet used torture in its interrogations.

The battle she and her associates waged did not lead to concrete restrictions on the use of torture in various critical situations (such as those involving individuals deemed to be a “ticking bomb”), but rather led to its acceptance by society.

The committee organized a large conference, and based on the material and the research discussed there, a detailed report was published, co-edited by Marton and Prof. Neve Gordon, a legal scholar. The height of the struggle was a petition submitted to the High Court of Justice, in 1999, which actually combined seven petitions, including that of the committee against torture, against the Shin Bet. The court ruled that some of the security service’s practices were illegal and should thus be prohibited. But that only marked the end of the process, which Marton describes with behind-the-scenes details in her book.

In it, she describes Jabar Lamia, a young Palestinian she met at the request of a Palestinian colleague, at an East Jerusalem hospital. Lamia was a weak young man, paralyzed on one side and using a wheelchair, although there were no underlying physiological reasons for his condition. At a certain point, Marton grasped that he had been tortured under interrogation by the Shin Bet in Jenin, in the West Bank, and that his paralysis was a traumatic, psychological reaction to that.

The shock of what she learned prompted her to research the history of torture in the Shin Bet and the ostensibly legal justifications for it, and led her to probe types of torture, including sexual and physical acts. One can read and be appalled, not only by what she describes – but also because the battle she and her associates waged apparently did not lead to concrete restrictions on the use of torture in various critical situations (such as those involving individuals deemed to be a “ticking bomb”), but rather led to its acceptance by society. What was denied and induced the general public to see Marton and like-minded people as delusional, has become almost normalized today. Indeed it has become a subject that even justifies the invasion by MKs and a mob of an army base where offenses like these were being investigated, as in the case of the Sde Teiman base, where Palestinian prisoners, primarily members of Hamas’ elite Nukhba force who perpetrated heinous crimes on October 7, are being kept under brutal, inhumane conditions.

Riots outside the Sde Teiman base, where Palestinian security prisoners are incarcerated under inhumane conditions. After Marton’s tough campaign against the use of torture, “maybe people didn’t deny it anymore, but in practice it became normalized.”Credit: Eliyahu Hershkovitz

Marton: “The conference and the book, the indescribable efforts to become part of Israeli discourse and explain that torture is being used. That it’s not a marginal phenomenon but a real method, which we have been employing ever more brutally, right up until the High Court ruling in 1999 – in no small measure, I attribute these things to myself. The fight to make the concept of torture part of the discourse. I thought it would make a difference. But did it help? No. Maybe people didn’t deny it anymore, but in practice it became normalized.”

In the book’s epilogue, written after October 7, you write that without a shadow of doubt genocide is being perpetrated in Gaza.

“Of course – war crimes and genocide. Those are words, but it’s also true. At my nonprofit I waged a long battle over whether to use the word ’occupation’ or not. Today it’s amusing, but back then it was critical.”

And today it’s even more horrible, because no one cares. People are fine with [the word] “occupation.” And David Zini, the army general whom Netanyahu has tapped as the next head of the Shin Bet, said in his farewell speech from the IDF that we need to stop being deterred by the word “messianism.”

“The false [17^th-century] messiah Sabbatai Sevi – he too was sure [of his path], and swept up masses of followers. And he failed. If there is no place in the Israeli discourse for the words ’occupation,’ ’apartheid,’ ’genocide’ and ’war crimes,’ we will get more of the same. More and more force and more messianism.”

I think about this a lot in the context of politics and going into public activity: why secular people, left-wingers, seem averse to getting involved and to entering leadership roles. Who will succeed you and your colleagues?

“My son Yuval is in high-tech and has lived in the United States for decades. My daughter Orna is in Jaffa, she doesn’t take an interest, and neither does her daughter, my granddaughter. My granddaughter’s friends are also not interested in politics, it disgusts them, and because of that they are [the face of] politics. Once you don’t want to know, or do, or react, you’re the most political there is, even if you won’t admit it. If I make the comparison that is or course forbidden to make – it’s being the ’good Germans’ of the past.”

Are we living in 1939 Germany?

"And even before that, from 1933. There were many good Germans who looked the other way. It wasn’t for them. It’s terribly similar. This sends me back to the vicious battles – to point of bloodletting – that we had at PHR. Some said: ’We are physicians, we are not political.’ Excuse me? What does that mean, ’not political’? The moment you say ’nonpolitical,’ you are the most political there is.

“They wanted to do good: to treat patients in Gaza without saying why they had come to do it. Although we remained ’physicians for human rights’ – i.e., political – in practice the nonpolitical people in the organization won. It’s terribly frustrating and led me to step aside.”

Still, Marton is the organization’s honorary president today – “but no one in the world, myself included, knows what that means,” she says.

Demonstration by Physicians for Human Rights against the Israeli attacks on Palestinian ambulances, 2002.Credit: SVEN NACKSTRAND / AFP

On the other hand, as you yourself say, we’re at an impasse. There is no solution for the Gordian knot of the conflict.

"Today I have no answer. Years ago I was sure the solution was one state for two peoples, like I saw in my childhood. I saw that it could work. Maybe without great love, but you could manage somehow. Afterward, I thought that the trampled honor of the Palestinians could be addressed by creation of their own state alongside Israel. Today I don’t know. One person, one vote is a very fine idea. But with all the blood and the hatred and the messianism, I don’t know if it could work today.

“To agree to two states? To a certain extent that is to agree to the continuation of the conflict, to a solution imposed by force. If I were in a position to decide, I wouldn’t know what I’d answer. The beauty of the one-state vision seems impractical, and I want to be practical. It’s impossible to unravel this conundrum. Will anyone in Israel accept the right of return? No way.”

Is there a Palestinian who will accept Israel’s existence and sovereignty?

"A small fraction returned, but that’s an excellent question. In fact, it is the question: Will the Palestinians accept reality? I have no answer. The Palestinians I knew in Gaza are gone. I have no one to visit there or anyone to ask. Some of them died, those with means fled, others were killed. I imagine that behind my ’I don’t know,’ the same amount of hatred and anger is filling the souls of the Palestinians, so I’m not sure I have anyone to talk to.

"Maybe like in other places, which set up reconciliation and truth commissions, if there were someone to talk to – that might really be a solution. This isn’t the only place where there have been murders and plunder. Much blood has been shed in many places, and they succeeded in reaching some sort of solution.

“Maybe here that could happen, too, if such commissions are created. But I’m afraid that it won’t happen on my watch. Without a practical answer to that most central question – where are we going – our hands are empty. There will be more of what there is now, and much worse it can’t be.”

Gili Izikovich

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