Bainbridge Island Women in Black- A good Idea

Bainbridge Island Women in Black is part of an international network of women calling for peace and justice. Beginning in 1988, vigils in Jerusalem were organized by Palestinian and Jewish Israeli women to protest Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. The network has spread to countries all over the world. Each group is autonomous, related to the others by the desire to end violence and by the way women stand, often in silent vigil, wearing black.

Women in Black Belgrade received the Millennium Peace Prize for Women, March 8, 1991, offered by International Alert, a global women’s awareness program, and the United Nations. Women in Black has been nominated twice for the Nobel Peace Prize, first by the Danish and Norwegian Parliamentarians and most recently, in 2003, by the American Friends Service Committee.

Women in Dialogue, and Commitment to Nonviolence: “You need us because we women are willing to sit together on the same side of the table and together look at our complex joint history, with the commitment and intention of not getting up until, in respect and reciprocity—we can get up together and begin our new history and fulfill our joint destiny” —Terry Greenblatt, Director of Bat Shalom (an Israeli women’s peace organization) and Maya Abu Daya, one of the founders of the Jerusalem Center for Women (a Palestinian peace organization which is formally linked with Bat Shalom), in an invitation that addressed a session of the United Nations Security Council.