February 28, 2016

Leibowitz Prize winners 2016: Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan and Yaakov Manor

Street dialogue; Peace Tent banner signs
(Arabic, Hebrew):"It Won't End Till WeTalk"
The Leibowitz Prize award ceremony in Tel Aviv last month felt like two minutes and an eternity. The auditorium packed with honoree's families, supporters, and colleagues, and the messages (Hebrew, Arabic) powerful, significant, moving, heartbreaking, and uplifting. An antidote to the negativity and craziness.

The annual Leibowitz Prize, a Yesh Gvul initiative for public activism in the spirit of the political and philosophical teaching of Yeshayahu Leibowitz, was awarded to Yaakov Manor of the Alternative Information Center internationally oriented, progressive, joint Palestinian-Israeli activist organization, and to Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan, spokespersons for the Bereaved Families Forum (members are Israelis and Palestinians who lost a family member to the conflict).

Before the ceremony, the Forum organized a street dialogue among Forum members, friends, and guests, and passersby.

Forum members Robi Damelin, Rami, and Bassam

The next generation: sons of Bassam and Rami

Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903, Riga, Latvia – 1994, Jerusalem) was a religious thinker and biochemist with doctorates in philosophy and medicine who kept up a relentless critique of Israel's policies in the occupied territories and of its political and religious culture. He supported Israeli Army resisters who refused to serve in the territories, and warned that soldiers in the occupied areas risked becoming "Judeo-Nazis."

Yesh Gvul ("there is a limit", "there is a border", or "enough is enough") was founded in 1982 at the outbreak of the Lebanon War by Israeli combat veterans who refused to serve in Lebanon and has expanded its opposition to service in the occupied territories.

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