AN ISRAELI WOMAN SPEAKS TO ALL WOMEN

This comes from The Progressive Review (http//prorev.com).............Scott

[We have just come across this stunning speech by Dr Paledd-Elhanan is
an Israeli mother of a 13-year-old suicide bombing victim who spoke to
European Parliament last year on International Women's Day]

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 egalite 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. . .

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 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. . . 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 of blood, rip the petal
of your cheek?