Michal Peleg is now gone. Another enormous loss, just two weeks after Muhammad died.

For many years she was an activist with Ta’ayush. I think Ezra Nawi recruited her in the Sheikh Jarrah demonstrations. At first she was afraid, or so she said; but she mastered that fear. That is the definition of courage.

How many days together in the South Hebron hills, and more recently in Ras al-‘Ain and ‘Auja and Mu‘arrajat. She had this beautiful insouciance with the soldiers who would usually try to chase us, with the Palestinians, off the land. They were never a match for her. She had words. She was a novelist, one of the best, with exquisite Hebrew and a superhuman skill for finding the words and rhythms for whatever she saw or knew or imagined.

We were talking, I think, about Kafka just before the settlers attacked us, one Saturday afternoon in South Hebron. Michal had just published a book of fine essays about the great modern writers. I’d read it. South Hebron is the perfect setting for Kafka.¹ We were walking to the isolated, vulnerable village of Tuba, a group of maybe twelve or more activists, when three particularly ugly settlers turned up, maybe 20 yards away from us, a little higher up this rocky hill. They started throwing rocks, big heavy ones. We were trapped on the hill, and the only way to dodge the shower of rocks was to face them directly; if you turned your back and tried somehow to move farther downhill over the thorns and boulders, you were very likely to be hit. Michal stood her ground. I was beside her. The rocks kept coming at us for a long twenty minutes or so. Miraculously, no one was seriously hurt, though one woman took a hit on her leg. Then the settlers left. We resumed our conversation about Kafka. Perhaps it seems unlikely, but it’s the whole crazy, violent reality there that is unlikely yet entirely real.

I remember those discussions, philosophical or literary, held in the quiet moments between visits by police or soldiers, before or after attacks on sheep or raids by settlers, or while we waited for our ride to another village, where another crisis waited. On some of those days, while standing on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere in the sight of nothing, I sometimes thought of Socrates leaving the city with Phaedrus to discuss love. That day, Michal brought up the subject of Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and exiled Czech authors generally. Such an intense, almost heated discussion developed between Danny and Michal that when someone finally came to take us to the site of the next crisis, we nearly forgot about the occupation and activism and we had to take a moment to regroup. – Margaret Olin

She grew up for some years in Ethiopia; her father was sent there on a mission. She wrote about those early years in Addis Ababa.  Maybe it was Ethiopia that formed her, drove her away from the standard Israeli CV, to faraway places, and to Palestine. She lived for some years in Italy, spoke fluent Italian and French and Spanish and probably German and Amharic. She traveled the world, crisscrossing her footprints from the Silk Road to Sicily.

She was, I guess, a loner. Or maybe a deep, benign solitude was her solution. Just a year ago she was living alone in a small house on the outskirts of Kathmandu, with magnificent views of the Himalayas. She died in Crete. It seems she fell from a cliff into the sea. She was 65.

 I think of her, I can see her, playing with the Palestinian kids from Sa‘id’s large family at Umm al-Ara’is, week after week. We would go with Sa‘id into his land in the fertile wadi the settlers had stolen, and we would inevitably, all too soon, be driven off it by the clumsy soldiers. That’s when the kids needed some attention (also when tea would be boiled over a fire of twigs in the field and served as we stood with the family, like Moses on Mount Nevo, looking at their land that they were not allowed to enter). One of those Shabbat mornings she was arrested along with nine or ten other activists and at least one Palestinian mother, still nursing her baby, who was also arrested. I remember an image of her walking upright, confident, scornful, to the hideous army vehicles that would take her to the police station in Kiryat Arba. She was so far beyond them and their impoverished minds.

I never had the opportunity to see her play with the many children at Umm al-Ara’is, but more than once I saw her, on the hour-long trip back from Umm al-Ara’is to Jerusalem, change seats to chat admiringly with a respected elderly volunteer who had spent her day playing with the children. – Margaret Olin

There was another time, at the illegal outpost the settlers had built close to Susya. We went there to photograph them and to protest. After an hour or two the soldiers came and started arresting the activists, of course, not the criminal settlers, though we were already leaving. They pounced on Michal and dragged her off the bus, her wrists in the plastic handcuffs that can cut into your skin. They were far too tight, and she nearly passed out from the pain. Even at a moment like that, she had the natural dignity that sometimes comes with goodness.

One of the first things I notice about people is the way they stand. Michal’s striking pose caught my attention immediately. Her graceful presence, her unshakable poise, seemed to confound any ragtag band of soldiers who might suddenly come upon her. – Margaret Olin

Michal had a rare talent for friendship. She was close to the families in Sheikh Jarrah whose homes were taken over by the settlers, almost an adopted sister or daughter.          

Before she moved to Nepal, and I left for the United States, she suggested we meet for a glass of wine at the YMCA in Jerusalem. At some point, she explained that because she was moving and needed to clear out some of her things, she wanted to distribute them to her friends to remember her by. She pulled from her bag a few small garments for me. I was surprised and touched that she included me among the people with whom she wished to leave a momento. Only much later did I realize that she had given me the green Kaffiyeh that she had worn in many photographs I had taken, including three in this post. – Margaret Olin

You can see from Peg’s photos what Indians call mahatmya, a great generosity of the soul. No trace of pride or pretense. Truth mattered to her, and clarity in words and deeds; and she couldn’t bear injustice. There was a soft musical rhythm to her voice, I can hear it now; it is no wonder that the children loved her. With them she was infinitely patient. We loved her too.

I could feel a whiff of inner freedom in the way she walked and thought or simply stood and looked at the world, in its shocking beauty and also in its dependable human ugliness.  A taste for adventure. A restlessness. A sadness, not always apparent. Sometimes, a lightness. A writer’s gift. Look at the picture of her desk. I wonder if she finished the novel she’d been writing for the last two or three years.

I knew her in sun and wind and rain on those rocky hills. She belonged there, and they were hers, as if they had chosen her because they needed her kindness and wit. So did I, like all of us.

Text: David Shulman (or as credited) © 2025. Photographs: Margaret Olin, © 2025. Thanks to Ahmed Hmeedat for permission to produce his painting.

1. see also Yigal Bronner, “Kafka in Area C” Mondoweiss, 3 October 2016. ↩︎