Israeli Mother Addresses European

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Subject: ISRAELI MOTHER ADDRESSES THE
EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT

 

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Israeli mother Addresses European
Parliament.

Dear Friends,

Dr. Nurit Peled-Elhanan
is the mother of Smadar Elhanan, 13 years old
when killed by a suicide bomber
in Jerusalem in September 1997. Below
is Nurit's speech made on International
Women's Day in Strasbourg
earlier this month. Please listen to the words of a
bereaved mother,
whose daughter fell victim to a vicious, indiscriminating
terrorist
attack. I wish her words will enter the hearts of all peace seekers
in
our troubled and divided world.

For better days,   Professor   Avraham  Oz 

Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature   

University  of    Haifa

 

WOMEN

by Nurit Peled-Elhanan

Thank
you for inviting me to this today. It is always an honour and a
pleasure to
be here, among you (at the European Parliament).

However, I must admit I
believe you should have invited a Palestinian
woman at my stead, because the
women who suffer most from violence in
my county are the Palestinian women.
And I would like to dedicate my
speech to Miriam R`aban and her husband
Kamal, from Bet Lahiya in the
Gaza strip, whose five small children were
killed by Israeli soldiers
while picking strawberries at the family`s
strawberry field. No one
will ever stand trial for this murder.

When I
asked the people who invited me here why didn't they invite a
Palestinian
woman, the answer was that it would make the discussion
too
localized.

I don't know what is non-localized violence. Racism and
discrimination
may be theoretical concepts and universal phenomena but their
impact
is always local, and real. Pain is local, humiliation, sexual
abuse,
torture and death, are all very local, and so are the scars.

It
is true, unfortunately, that the local violence inflicted on
Palestinian
women by the government of Israel and the Israeli army,
has expanded around
the globe, In fact, state violence and army
violence, individual and
collective violence, are the lot of Muslim
women today, not only in Palestine
but wherever the enlightened
western world is setting its big imperialistic
foot. It is violence
which is hardly ever addressed and which is
halfheartedly condoned by
most people in Europe and in the USA .

This
is because the so-called free world is afraid of the Muslim womb.

Great
France of "la liberte égalite et la fraternite" is scared of
little girls
with head scarves. Great Jewish Israel is afraid of the
Muslim womb which its
ministers call a demographic threat.

Almighty America and Great Britain
are infecting their respective
citizens with blind fear of the Muslims, who
are depicted as vile,
primitive and blood-thirsty, apart from their being
non-democratic,
chauvinistic and mass producers of future terrorists. This in
spite of
the fact that the people who are destroying the world today are
not
Muslim. One of them is a devout Christian, one is Anglican and one
is
a non-devout Jew.

I have never experienced the suffering
Palestinian women undergo every
day, every hour, I don't know the kind of
violence that turns a
woman's life into constant hell. This daily physical
and mental
torture of women who are deprived of their basic human rights
and
needs of privacy and dignity, women whose homes are broken into at
any
moment of day and night, who are ordered at a gun-point to strip
naked
in front of strangers and their own children, whose houses
are
demolished , who are deprived of their livelihood and of any
normal
family life. This is not part of my personal ordeal.

But I am
a victim of violence against women insofar as violence
against children is
actually violence against mothers. Palestinian,
Iraqi, Afghan women are my
sisters because we are all at the grip of
the same unscrupulous criminals who
call themselves leaders of the
free enlightened world and in the name of this
freedom and
enlightenment rob us of our children.

Furthermore,
Israeli, American, Italian and British mothers have been
for the most part
violently blinded and brainwashed to such a degree
that they cannot realize
their only sisters, their only allies in the
world are the Muslim
Palestinian, Iraqi or Afghani mothers, whose
children are killed by our
children or who blow themselves to pieces
with our sons and daughters. They
are all mind-infected by the same
viruses engendered by politicians. And the
viruses , though they may
have various illustrious names--such as Democracy,
Patriotism, God,
Homeland--are all the same. They are all part of false and
fake
ideologies that are meant to enrich the rich and to empower the
powerful.

We are all the victims of mental, psychological and cultural
violence
that turn us to one homogenic group of bereaved or
potentially
bereaved mothers. Western mothers who are taught to believe
their
uterus is a national asset just like they are taught to believe
that
the Muslim uterus is an international threat. They are educated not
to
cry out: `I gave him birth, I breast fed him, he is mine, and I
will
not let him be the one whose life is cheaper than oil, whose future
is
less worth than a piece of land.`

All of us are terrorized by
mind-infecting education to believe all we
can do is either pray for our sons
to come back home or be proud of
their dead bodies.

And all of us were
brought up to bear all this silently, to contain
our fear and frustration, to
take Prozac for anxiety, but never hail
Mama Courage in public. Never be real
Jewish or Italian or Irish mothers.

I am a victim of state violence. My
natural and civil rights as a
mother have been violated and are violated
because I have to fear the
day my son would reach his 18th birthday and be
taken away from me to
be the game tool of criminals such as Sharon, Bush,
Blair and their
clan of blood-thirsty, oil-thirsty, land thirsty
generals..

Living in the world I live in, in the state I live in, in the
regime I
live in, I don't dare to offer Muslim women any ideas how to
change
their lives. I don't want them to take off their scarves, or
educate
their children differently, and I will not urge them to
constitute
Democracies in the image of Western democracies that despise them
and
their kind. I just want to ask them humbly to be my sisters,
to
express my admiration for their perseverance and for their courage
to
carry on, to have children and to maintain a dignified family life
in
spite of the impossible conditions my world in putting them in. I
want
to tell them we are all bonded by the same pain, we all the victims
of
the same sort of violence even though they suffer much more, for
they
are the ones who are mistreated by my government and its
army,
sponsored by my taxes.

Islam in itself, like Judaism in itself
and Christianity in itself, is
not a threat to me or to anyone. American
imperialism is, European
indifference and co-operation is and Israeli racism
and its cruel
regime of occupation is. It is racism, educational propaganda
and
inculcated xenophobia that convince Israeli soldiers to
order
Palestinian women at gun-point, to strip in front of their
children
for security reasons, it is the deepest disrespect for the other
that
allow American soldiers to rape Iraqi women, that give license
to
Israeli jailers to keep young women in inhuman conditions,
without
necessary hygienic aids, without electricity in the winter,
without
clean water or clean mattresses and to separate them from
their
breast-fed babies and toddlers. To bar their way to hospitals,
to
block their way to education, to confiscate their lands, to
uproot
their trees and prevent them from cultivating their fields.

I
cannot completely understand Palestinian women or their suffering. I
don't
know how I would have survived such humiliation, such disrespect
from the
whole world. All I know is that the voice of mothers has been
suffocated for
too long in this war-stricken planet. Mothers` cry is
not heard because
mothers are not invited to international forums such
as this one. This I know
and it is very little. But it is enough for
me to remember these women are my
sisters, and that they deserve that
I should cry for them, and fight for
them. And when they lose their
children in strawberry fields or on filthy
roads by the checkpoints,
when their children are shot on their way to school
by Israeli
children who were educated to believe that love and compassion
are
race and religion dependent, the only thing I can do is stand by
them
and their betrayed babies, and ask what Anna Akhmatova--another
mother
who lived in a regime of violence against women and
children--asked:

Why does that streak o blood, rip the petal of your
cheek?