The following article is taken from the website https://www.pressenza.com, with the kind permission of the author Evelyn Rottengatter. You can find the original here.

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“Prayer of the Mothers” is a song by singer and songwriter Yael Deckelbaum. It was created together with women from the “Women Wage Peace” movement, who are campaigning for a peaceful and non-violent solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Since its inception in the summer of 2014 during the escalation of the conflict in Gaza, in which over 2,200 people died, the movement has brought together women of all religions and from all nations to initiate a true dialog to end war and violence and to awaken a new spirit for hope and fundamental change that can only be created with the all-encompassing power of women, the maternal, the sustaining and nurturing.

They were also the ones who developed the “March of hope” together with a broad alliance of women’s organizations, in which thousands of Israeli and Palestinian women walked across Israel to Jerusalem for two weeks in October this year to demand a non-violent and mutually acceptable end to the conflict. The march ended on October 19 with a joint Jewish-Muslim prayer for peace by 4,000 women in Qasr el Yahud at the northern end of the Dead Sea and a call for action to end the conflict by 15,000 demonstrators in front of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s residence in Jerusalem.

In addition to Yael Deckelbaum, the artists Lubna Salame, Anat Malamud, Maysa Daw, Daniel Rubin, Miriam Toukan and the Rana Choir also took part in the song. The video shows impressive footage of the March for Hope as well as a message from Leymah Gboweewho received the Nobel Peace Prize for her contribution to ending the civil war in her home country of Liberia in 2003, to the participants of the march, in which she expressed her blessing for a peaceful solution to the conflict and at the same time encouraged them to continue fighting for this peace: “Peace is possible when women stand up for the future of their children with integrity and an unshakeable belief in the good”.