The weigh to peace?

Women's desire to be thin is universal. That, at least, is the premise behind "A Slim Peace," a documentary bringing together Palestinian and Israeli women for a six-week weight-loss session of counting calories, measuring their waistlines and reflecting on issues of body image.

The 14 women - Jewish settlers, Bedouin from the Negev, secular Jerusalemites and Muslim women from Ramallah who travel through checkpoints to attend the group - met last year over the course of two months in Jerusalem, a city where everything is political and even losing weight can be cause for conflict.

Together, they commiserated over a love of fatty foods and the difficulties of balancing work and family. But when the group disbanded, more than 120 kilograms lighter, promises to meet again lapsed and were forgotten.

The film, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and was screened this week in Jerusalem, brought many of the women back together - some looking much the same as when they last saw each other. One woman, however, was 50 kilograms lighter.

The unofficial reunion also served as the launch of a new series of Slim Peace groups, set to begin next week also in the capital.

"Even though we were all so different, we had the same issues: we're fat, we work too hard, we're raising kids and we don't pay attention to our bodies," said Aviva Meirom, who lives in Jerusalem and was a member of the group. "We put our families and work first and then ourselves last. That was our common problem."

From the outset, the women invited to participate in the group were told that the weight-loss program would be apolitical. But in a place where everything has political dimensions, weight loss - like other issues in the conflict - quickly became a matter for rivalry.

"I will lose more weight than they will," Ichsan Turkich, a Palestinian producer living in Ramallah, remembers thinking to herself when she heard that settlers would be in the group. "I will make it into a competition and show the occupier that I am more talented than they are. I will show the occupier that I am also a person with dreams and ambitions."

Long struggle

The idea for the joint nutrition and weight-loss project - the first of its kind - was the brainchild Yael Luttwak, an American-Israeli filmmaker based in London who said she had long struggled with her own weight. In 2000, with the intifada raging, she was living in Israel and was part of a Weight Watchers group in Tel Aviv when the idea for the project clicked. She saw women - complete strangers for the most part - share the euphoria of success and the pain and sadness of failure, as they joined weekly to bond over a single goal. "I thought at the time, maybe we can take this emotion and connect it with the peace process," Luttwak, 35, said.

The coexistence genre of documentaries is nothing new. Projects with Palestinians and Israelis together doing everything from sailing and playing soccer to cooking and rapping have been going on for years. But Luttwak says she has attempted something else - and in many ways, she has succeeded.

"I was sick of bringing rich liberal Jews and Arabs just to talk about peace in a very overt way. I wanted to try to go deeper in a seemingly surface way. People say that dieting is superficial, but what you eat, what you put in your kitchen and how you relate to your body is very loaded," she said.

Getting the women to agree was not easy; many of the women approached rejected the idea out of hand. Other took considerable convincing. Amal Elsana-Elhjooj, a Bedouin, thought that sitting with settlers and talking about anything other than the occupation was nearly traitorous; Turkich, the producer from Ramallah, said she initially refused to sit down with women she regards as "thieves, people who take what isn't theirs"; and Letty Zander, a U.S.-born settler who lives in Ma'aleh Hever, south of Hebron, said she who didn't feel comfortable even using the word Palestinian.

"When I think of Ramallah, I think of the soldier who was torn apart with people's bare hands," Zander said. "As far as I know, those are the kinds of people that live in Ramallah."

The weekly sessions were held at the Jerusalem Cinematheque and were conducted in English, considered by all the participants to be a neutral language. Two dieticians - one Israeli and another Palestinian - led the group, teaching healthy lifestyle techniques, portion control and how to read a nutrition label, while urging the women to lead more active lifestyles. The women were regularly weighed and their waists were measured for progress.

But politics, of course, was never far behind. Rivkah Adinah Dror, another participant, lives on the settlement of Bat Ayin, which doesn't even allow Arabs past its gate. And when Turkich dons a pedometer and it accidentally resets, she jokes it's because she's Palestinian. "If an Israeli was wearing it, it would work," she tells the camera.

During one of the first sessions, Turkich, an outspoken widow, meets Dasi Stern, a secular yoga teacher from Jerusalem who joined the group to lose what she describes as a very stubborn two kilos. "Stern? Like the Stern gang?," Turkich asks. "Yes," Dasi replies. "That was my husband's father."

And later, three weeks into the filming, Hamas sweeps the Palestinian elections in a victory that stunned the Israeli women in the group and fuels new level of tension into the group's already charged atmosphere. As one Israeli woman admitted this week, "it was hard to believe that none of the women in the group voted for Hamas."

Divided by politics

For the participants in the group, the societal pressure to stay thin was largely unifying, despite the politics that continues to divide them. Many of the women expressed a desire to "look beautiful" and said that impossible body standards have infused even the most traditional of communities. In some ways, they say, that may have helped them find the much-elusive "common ground" that coexistence groups seem to always seek.

"The pressure to be thin and the culture of dieting is the same in the Muslim community as in the Jewish community," Elsana-Elhjooj, the Bedouin activist, said. "My grandmother was considered a very beautiful woman and she was very heavy. But to be fat then was beautiful and desirable; it showed that you are healthy and not starving. Now, my mother goes walking and does other sports. When I see my sisters, we talk about weight, what to cook, and how to fit into our dresses for our brother's wedding."

When the seminar ended, successfully for some more than others, the women pledged to continue their meetings, even if only sporadically. But the promises lapsed and a different reality set in.

"I will not call Rivkah and say 'How are things in Gush Etzion? Did beat any Arabs today? Did you throw stones at Arabs?,'" Turkich said. "I will not visit her because they will kick my ass if they do not shoot me first. We had a lot in common, but in the long run, she cannot be my friend. But I will still be happy for her if she loses weight."

Additional Slim Peace groups, sponsored by the U.K.-based Charities Advisory Trust, are now forming and will be held at the Anglican International School in Jerusalem. For more information, contact odelya.slimpeace@gmail.com or call 077-217 7300.